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Takes a lot of the old snake oil to pack the house night after night."
    "On the subject of Grayle, 'fess up, Pinky. You were just a little smitten with the guy." Frank held a thumb and forefinger half an inch apart, prompting his highly colored wife to blush a shade of red that almost erased her freckles. "Don't fret, pet. I'm not jealous."
    "Oh, Frank." She looked at Betts. "Did I mention that we had a chance to meet him after the show?"
    "Lucky Ticket holders," Frank said, now rubbing that thumb and forefinger together. "Which entitled us to a grand tour backstage after the show, by the man himself."
    "He's nothing like his stage persona. Very handsome, of course; but so down-to-earth."
    "A more affable guy I never hope to meet" Frank agreed. "And you can imagine, the demands of doing a couple of shows a night, probably didn't feel all that much like entertaining a couple of nobodies from Santa Rosa. But you'd never have known it. He showed us his gym where he works out, all the ways he has of rejuvenating himself between shows."
    "Colored light therapy" Pinky said.
    "How's that?" Betts asked.
    "The technical name is spectrochrome therapy," Frank explained. "'SCT' for short. But it's really very low-tech. How it works, Grayle stretches out on an ordinary massage table and for fifteen minutes he projects full-spectrum light through a set of about a dozen colored filters onto various parts of his body. The pineal gland, for instance. Or the navel or, um, his testicles. What he told me, the lights restore the proper balance in the body's complex electrical field. I tried it myself. I was feeling a little frazzled, fighting off a head cold. See, you have to be completely naked to realize the full benefit of the therapy. But doggone if I didn't feel great after my session. Rarin' to go."
    "You sure were," Pinky said, giving Frank a sly satisfied look that implied a hot-wired libido had been one of those benefits. Frank sat back with a smug expression.
    "Then I got up at five-thirty and played eighteen holes of golf. Fact is, since that little session in Grayle's gym I've had more energy than a pack of foxhounds on the scent." He gave Pinky a nudge. "By the way, you never have told me what you and Grayle talked about while I was getting my batteries recharged."
    "Scuba diving, I think. He's an accomplished diver, and he's been everywhere. The Great Barrier Reef, the Caymans, Corsica. That's right. We talked about scuba diving." But Pinky appeared to be a little perplexed. Her gaze made a slow tour of the lounge. Her lips were apart, as if she'd fallen into a mild trance. But faces were vivid to her—the private detectives who apparently were there as protection for Betts (why she needed bodyguards at all was an unanswerable question); the airline captain, graying and with a brushy mustache, standing against one wall while drinking his coffee and idly playing with a gold cigarette lighter in his other hand; a Pakistani businessman and his wife; a Japanese couple, quietly but expensively dressed; and—Pinky felt no surprise, only a strange sense of melancholy and, perhaps, dread—Lincoln Grayle himself, sitting in a corner with a tropical fish tank behind him. He was looking right at her, smiling. It was true; she had developed a bit of a crush during their time alone in his quarters at the crystal palace, reflecting the lights of the universe in its dark mountain setting.
    Pinky smiled shyly at what her rational mind quickly told her must be a hallucination. As was the artifact Grayle held, uncovered during one of his diving expeditions in the warm seas of Bimini. A small skull of blood-red crystal. Unique in all the world, as old as the earth itself.
    This artifact was the last thing Pinky recalled thinking about, before the sky outside the terminal exploded brilliantly once again. A one-hundred-million-volt discharge that dazzled and made her jump and bite her tongue, just as the window wall behind them collapsed in a