Carlisle quickly let out his breath. "Goddamn it to hell."

A couple of nearby people looked at him in amazement. He glared back at them, and they looked away. The good feeling had abruptly fallen off. Proverb was using some sort of highspeed visual hypnotic, an industrial version of the Jesus Wave. With this crowd, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Over half of them were jelloed on the pocket-size A-wave already. Carlisle resented the indiscriminate use of mass mood movers. People were crazy enough as it was. For his own part, he objected to the intrusion on his privacy. He did not like anyone modifying his mind without his express permission. Ironically, the hypnotic was probably now heightening his irritation. Once one had fought the initial euphoria, the tendency was to plummet to the basement of ill temper.

A telescopic catwalk was extending down the central aisle, and Proverb was moving onto it. He was actually going out into the crowd. If a hitter was waiting there, Proverb's move was an open invitation. Every couple of paces he would pause and acknowledge some individual or group in the audience. He began handing out silk scarves. He seemed to be Dulling scarves out of the high collar of his spangled costume as if it were a magic act. It was practically an Elvi ceremony. Between scarves, he would reach out and grasp the hands that were stretched up to him. He dropped to one knee and prayed to selected knots of people.

When he came to the end of the catwalk, he surveyed the crowd and slowly raised his hands. "Oh, my friends, I do bring you tidings of great joy and they shall be to all people. Very, very great joy."

Kline

Deacon Booth gripped a large glass of cognac and regarded the small, spotlit figure of Arlen Proverb with a bleak expression. "I think tonight he may finally go too far."

Longstreet, who was standing next to him, raised a questioning eyebrow. "It depends what you mean by too far."

"Far enough so we can finally wrap him with a full-scale, watertight heresy indictment."

"Is there such a thing as a watertight heresy indictment? Isn't it all a matter of theological interpretation?"

"There's a line beyond which interpretation no longer applies. That's why we've given this one so much rope."

Booth gave Longstreet a look that seemed to indicate he was another one who had had more than enough rope.

The smart cynical elite in the VIP lounge watched the performance with as much rapt attention as any of the common believers on the floor of the Garden, but their motivations were very different. The celebrities, the tycoons, and the city officials, who were staring through the panoramatic glass that looked out over the whole arena or else watching the banks of monitors that were mounted at strategic points all around the room, had come to see what amounted to an advanced freakshow. They accepted champagne from the circulating waiters and laughed at the excesses of both performer and audience.

"He is good. He really does have them in the palm of his hand."

"It's not hard to have morons in the palm of his hand. I mean, just look at them. They'd believe anything."

"He's also spending a fortune on special effects."

"He is good, though. He must be good to do what he does and have stayed out of a camp for this long."

"I don't think Proverb has anything to worry about. Faithful's afraid of him and his following."

"For God's sake, keep your voice down."

The last speaker, a well-fed, agribusiness executive in a quilted burgundy tuxedo, looked around nervously. There were also a great many senior deacons in the VIP lounge. They were not there to see a freakshow – they were looking for an excuse. They made absolutely no secret that they were there to see Proverb publicly nail his own coffin. The way things stood in the aftermath of the mess on Fifteenth Street and the continuing embarrassment of the Lefthand Path running loose, the deacons obviously needed the kind of spectacular arrest and show trial that the taking down of Proverb would provide. It went deeper than that, however. The agribusiness executive's companion was right. Faithful was afraid of Arlen Proverb, as were all of the hierarchy. He was an unpredictable maverick, and there was no place for mavericks in their brave new world. That, on the other hand, did not stop them looking around at the other guests as if speculating what their long-term fate might be. It was an old deacon trick, but that did not stop it from striking cold fear into anyone who faced one of those cold stares.

Cynthia Kline herself was close to cold fear. She had arrived, once again, as Longstreet's protegee and had been very much treated as such – she had been largely ignored. He had introduced her to a couple of people, but they had been singularly uninterested in her claim to fame. There was no way that she could compete with what was going on on the stage. If she had had less brain and more ego, she might have put it down to the much more conservative uniform that Longstreet had chosen for the night's outing. Cynthia, though, was smart enough to realize that she was already becoming yesterday's news, and that her moment of phony glory was into its final flare. The realization produced mixed feelings. There was a certain relief that she would soon be allowed to sink back into her previous covert anonymity, but it was tempered by a regret that she would no longer be in the public eye. There had been a certain exhilaration to being the center of attention.

In the VIP lounge at Madison Square Garden, Cynthia rapidly became aware that not to be the center of attention might actually constitute a blessing. The mild pique that came from hardly being noticed quickly subsided as she saw the nature of the crowd. The deacons, all high-ranking officers, some of whom she had seen around the corridors or in the elevators at the Astor Place complex, made up at least a third of those present. They looked like a pack of vultures waiting for a kill. The other two-thirds were the kind of successful self-satisfied sleaze who circled any concentration of power – not the leftover jetsetters of the previous night, but the predators, parasites, and scavengers who had actually prospered under the Faithful regime. The only one of them she recognized was Raoul, the Chilean software runner. She had felt a moment of panic when she had thought that Webster was with him and might accidentally let drop some incriminating remark. To her relief, she saw that his companion was some other willowy and anemic blonde.

The way in which she had been summoned to the event had made mingling with that kind of crowd even more difficult. A high level of paranoia had been established from the start. Long-street had called only a matter of minutes after she had garbaged the mysterious instructions that had told her to go to the Proverb show.

"I think you should come with me to the Arlen Proverb extravaganza at the Garden. I've got passes for the VIP lounge."

As if she was not spooked already, that was more than enough to make her sit quickly down on the bed. The incidence of coincidence was well into the red. For a couple of seconds, she was unable to speak.

At the other end of the phone, Longstreet had sounded irritable. "You're that hung over?"

Finally she had found her voice. "I guess so. It was a long night."

"So drink some coffee and pull yourself together. I want you in my office here at five, and we'll go on from there."

"How should I dress?"

"That'll all be taken care of."

She sat on the bed for some minutes wondering if she should just cut and run. She had been told to go to the Garden and wait to be contacted. Was she going to be contacted in the VIP lounge? If that was the case, did it mean that Longstreet was somehow linked to the organization? Or did it mean that the whole thing was a setup? That was the very basic and absolute root of her fear. It was bad enough to feel that she was little more than a puppet with faceless people pulling invisible strings. The idea that these strings could be walking her to her death made her feel sick.