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neck. “Well, let’s see if we can pay off some local to sneak us past the militia. And for Christ’s sake, don’t drop that case.”

G-7 SPECIALIZED IN PROMOTIONAL STUNTS, SINCE they never bothered to sell their music. Six hundred people were attending G-7’s Cyprus farewell bash. The casino mogul Turgut Altimbasak was a lavish host. Tonight Altimbasak was laying it on with a wheelbarrow and trowel. Most of the guests were young, and new to the ancient temptations of casinos. Leggy had seen to it that the band received a tidy cut of the night’s slot and roulette action.
    Altimbasak’s favorite high rollers all had gilded invitations to the bash. These cheerful losers were mostly Lebanese and Gulf Arabs. At any public appearance by a glitzy Western girl-group, these playboys could be counted on to hoot and chew the carpet, with all the eye-popping gawk of Tex Avery cartoon wolves.
    At the carpeted edge of the glittering ballroom lurked a damp cluster of Turkish Cypriot party apparatchiks. They were all political clients of Ozbey’s uncle, Lefkosa ward heelers in glasses, mustaches, polished shoes, and cheap suits, attempting with mixed success to get down and boogie. The Turkish Cypriot press had also turned out in force. Like journalists anywhere, they were cordially ignoring the main attraction and methodically filling their pockets with hors d’oeuvres.
    Kiddie toy store people wandered along the flocked velvet walls, enchanted by the splendid ranks of beeping, blinking poker slots. Clothing retailers from the local bazaars had also succumbed to the G-7 lure. A couple ofTurkish radio DJs had flown over from Istanbul to cover the scene, live.
    The neon bar was heavily clustered with hard-drinking Finns and Danes from the UN peacekeeping contingent. Amid the crowd of muftied blue-berets, teenage contest-winners were sneaking free brandy sours. These underage girls were the core G-7 demographic. It was the pink pocketbook of their generation that was basically supporting all this hustle. The girls looked suitably impressed and disoriented.
    A cluster of Eurotrash rave kids had sneaked past the casino security. These tattered, sunburnt youngsters were dominating the dance floor, since they had all the best Ibiza party moves. They gorged themselves on Lucozade and chopped squid, between bouts of energetic writhing.
    The legendary G-7 girls were, of course, attending the event by stark necessity. The American, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Canadian Ones were painstakingly tarted up in their trademark spandex-and-cleavage national costumes. As they’d done in a hundred towns before, the G-7 girls were gamely mugging, vamping, and pawing one another, their antics drenched by flashbulbs.
    The girls were the formal focus of attention, but they were just the buxom front-women, a kind of glitter-clad visible iceberg for the dark looming bulk of the G-7 enterprise. The act’s hard-bitten working staff included a dozen G-7 roadies, a sound man, a voice coach, two choreographers, the makeup crew, and a gaggle of lighting guys. The seven girls themselves further supported a hopping flea circus of personal assistants, suck-up cronies, stage moms, and boyfriends.
    The true linchpin of the G-7 crew, however, was Nick the G-7 Accountant.
    Nick the G-7 Accountant commanded the full personal attention of Starlitz, because Nick was signing the checks. The girls and the road crew were expendable commodities, but Nick possessed a core skill-set and was hard to replace. Nick was a thirty-two-year-old London bankingwhiz who had run into a dire spot of trouble in the Bangkok derivatives market. Nick was very gifted financially. He was seriously overqualified for the cheesy business affairs of a dodgy midlist girl-group. But G-7 was favored with Nick’s exclusive services anyway, because Nick faced swift arrest for embezzlement if he ever set foot in any locale with a hotline to Scotland Yard.
    Starlitz was holding court