“I feel awful not believing Fee,” Nigel said, running nervous fingers through his thinning hair. “It’s just not the sort of thing you run into every day.”
“You were right to be skeptical,” Boo-Boo said, in his easy way. “It’s not an everyday thing. But once the attacks started comin’ in public, he didn’t have much of a chance of escapin’ notice.”
“Lewis was trying things out, working toward the grand climax of this concert, when the main attack would come,” Liz said, seriously. “I believe he really meant to kill Fionna. Robbie was unaware of his true intentions, or she wouldn’t have gone along with it. She’s not evil, she’s just . . .”
“In love,” Nigel said, sighing deeply. “I know. It’s totally hopeless. Everyone can see it, poor kid, but Lloyd’s got enough sense to stay where his bread’s buttered.”
“It’s none of my business,” Liz interrupted, “but there are real feelings between them. I was . . . rather in a position to know, last evening.”
“I guess you were,” Nigel said, a little uncomfortably. “Er, how long did Ken have Robbie, er . . .”
“Under his spell?” Boo asked, with a smile. “Most likely’s been movin’ in on her since he started workin’ for you. Lots of your people thought he had it bad for the young lady. His interests in her were purely unaltruistic.”
“How do we . . . uh,” Nigel’s voice dropped to a confidential undertone as he drew the agents aside for a moment, “how do we keep this from happening again? I gave Robbie her job back, but what you were nattering on about this Law of Contagion . . . She hasn’t got anything that’s catching, has she?”
Liz and Boo exchanged glances.
“Not precisely,” Liz said. “But it won’t happen again. We’ve seen to that.”
And so they had. Boo-Boo had dragged an exhausted Liz to a little store in a dark street to get the materials they needed for a protective amulet to prevent her from being taken over by malign influences ever again. Both agents were impressed and worried by the different levels of spells they had to delve through when clearing her aura. Robbie was fairly well disenchanted herself, with Ken Lewis, Lloyd Preston, and men in general. For the time being. She might not be vulnerable to love for a while, but she was a vulnerable young woman.
“We have amulets for the entire company,” Liz said, indicating a pile of Carnival bead necklaces. “Just to make certain such attacks cannot come through another conduit.”
“Here,” Boo-Boo said, handing Nigel a string of garish, metallic blue beads, which the manager accepted with a nervous laugh. “This one’s for you.”
“A little bright, isn’t it?”
“The more garish the better,” Boo-Boo pointed out, “to scare away bad spirits, y’know.”
As the members of the company filed sleepily into the bar on the way to the dining room, Boo-Boo stepped forward to loop a necklace over each of their heads. Liz handed him fresh ones as each new person arrived.
“Souvenir of N’Awlins,” he said, pleasantly. “What we call a lagniappe, a little somethin’ extra. Enjoy.”
“Hey, thanks, man,” most of them said.
“Is this extra special?” Laura Manning asked, with a wicked glint at Boo-Boo as he placed a bright gold necklace around her neck that went well with her dark skin.
He grinned at her. “Y’all might say so.” She leaned over and kissed him.
Liz had an armload of protective necklaces in every color imaginable for Fionna to wear with every outfit. When the star finally arrived, Boo-Boo lavished amulets on her until the exhausted star looked like a carnival float. Liz held back a couple of the leftovers to take home to HQ for analysis. It never hurt to have more examples of protective magic in the grimoire.
“You’re all safe now,” Liz assured Nigel.
“At least from an attack like that one,” Boo-Boo said, genially. Nigel didn’t look reassured by Boo-Boo’s qualified promise.
“But how did Lewis get a nice girl like Robbie to work for him?” he asked.
Liz looked grim. “She believed that Ken was doing magical work on her behalf, ostensibly to help her gain Lloyd’s love. She didn’t catch on as to why she wasn’t winning her man. She put it down to Fionna’s stronger magic. Frustration was why her power levels could build so high.”
“That wasn’t all her, y’know,” Boo-Boo pointed out. “She was gettin’ a power feed from somewhere else. An untrained practitioner like herself couldn’t generate that much without bein’ detected. That was why it took us so long to figure out it was her. Now, she’ll just have to work out her love troubles in some other way. She might still be jealous of Ms. Fionna, but she won’t be wired into a negative-energy pool any more by an unscrupulous bastard like him, y’all will excuse the language.”
“Poor kid,” Nigel said. “But what was it all for?”
“Power,” Liz said. “Eighty thousand bodies’ worth. When you have that many like-minded people in a room, they generate psychic energy that can be tapped by someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“Like radiation?”
“Sort of,” said Boo-Boo. “Ken had a hookup to a satellite receiver feedin’ into the control room, wired to Robbie’s chair. Since the energy had touched her once, it would continue to have an effect on her. It was attached to the transmission lines in the press room, right next to the control room. We were in there, and never connected what was happenin’ to what we were lookin’ at.”
“This is still too fantastic for me,” Nigel said, shaking his head. “Dark sorcery, beamed here via modern technology. And we’ll never know who was behind all this, huh?”
Liz held her tongue. Boo-Boo had kindly shared with her the early-morning report of the very bizarre destruction of a television station in the northwestern United States. The agent, a stringer named Ed Cielinski, reported that some new equipment installed at SATN-TV that gave off evil vibrations had been acting oddly over the last few days. Some time after he’d gone off duty the night before, the whole place was trashed, like a rock group’s hotel room. His employer was discovered sitting on the floor in the middle of the ruins muttering to himself. So far as he knew no one had been hurt, but the place was a mess. The department was investigating, and would share its results with OOPSI.
“I’m afraid not,” Liz said at last.
“I had no idea we were harboring a dangerous criminal,” Nigel Peters said, shaking his head. “We were lucky he didn’t turn up for the concert itself.”
“He did almost as much damage by remote control as he would have if he was right there,” Boo-Boo said.
“You can say that again!” said Gary Lowe, coming over to hand Nigel a drink. “We had everything planned to work without Robbie’s effects, and he went and bollixed it all up by vanishing. It’s a good thing I know how to run a light board, or the whole thing would have come off in darkness.”
“In more ways than one,” Boo-Boo said.
Gary Lowe gave him a puzzled frown. “Well, it made my job twice as hard, doing that along with overseeing everything else.”
“The concert was wonderful,” Liz assured him.
“Thanks. One vote of confidence, anyhow.”
“Well, I’ve fired Lewis in absentia,” Nigel Peters said. “He’ll never work in the industry again.”
“You can’t really tell future employers why,” Liz said. “This matter is now covered by the Official Secrets Act.”
Nigel gave her his nervous smile. “In this biz, honey, all I have to do is say he’s too weird. I don’t have to explain myself.”
“That’s mighty convenient,” Boo-Boo said. “Weirdness covers a wide range of sins, don’t it?” He felt through his pockets and came up with a grubby square of pasteboard. “If he does turn up at all while you’re in the United States, call my department.”
Nigel took it with gingerly fingers. Liz produced a card of her own, pristine white and snapped it into the manager’s palm. “The same goes for our territories and the EU,” she said. “He’s a wanted man, now. On both sides of the ocean.”
The others in the bar were discussing the concert, sharing their impressions of how things had gone. Instead of being frightened from having been in the presence of incomprehensible magic, the roadies and members of the band had taken it all in their stride. Some of them seemed honored that it had happened to them, their band. Liz marveled at the elasticity of human nature. Of course, Boo-Boo had had a lot to do with it. He’d jumped right into the thick of the conversation, making jokes.
“I wish it would happen all over again,” one of the stagehands exclaimed.
He was shouted down by his fellows. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Robbie Unterburger insisted.