"You know as well as I do it's a valid operational system."

"I don't want to hear this, O'Leary," Murrillo growled.

"Then I must prepare myself." She turned to go.

* * * Former Virtual World Bank President Loris Rainer turned up in Day-OH. No one could figure out how she got so far so fast without ID cards or personal transportation. She was found wandering the campus of the University of Dayton by campus security police, and placed under protective custody for being an unregistered Alpha Person.

SAC Murrillo made the jump to Day-OH in twenty minutes flat.

"Has she talked?" he asked the special agent in charge.

"Actually, she's singing."

If it was singing, it was aphonetic. Loris was emitting a high, keening sound that made Murrillo's feet lift off the floor as if walking over vibrating gla.s.s. The cell doors split open. He stepped in--quickly retreating with his hands pressuring his ears.

He returned to the cell wearing a white-noise headset.

Loris Rainer sang on without acknowledging his presence. This was not the same woman whose face Gil had seen at televised news conferences.

Her coiled black hair hung in wispy ringlets, lips a shocking natural pink. But her eyes sparkled. Gone was that Beta steel that could wither investment bankers with a glance.

There was something wrong. Her left temple was .. .

"Christ," Murrillo muttered. He reached out to touch her left temple.

Quieting, Loris brushed back the loose tendrils for him.

The area over her ear was a long bulging ridge.

Murrillo shifted her chin to expose the opposite temple.

It, too, looked as if her brain had swelled to force the bony skull outward in two matched ridges that precisely corresponded to the psychically-sensitive temporal lobes of the brain. A vein pulsed visibly.

"What happened to you, Ms. Rainer?"

Her smile was radiant.

"Something wonderful."

"Who did you meet last night in your office?"

"G.o.d."

"Was it an illegal confidential consultant? What was his name? What did he do to you?"

She raised a hand and Gil withdrew from the powerful energy field.

"Don't you know that you are part of something greater? We all are..

There was no getting through to her. A neuro biologist examined her with a portaPETscanner and reported:

"Both lobes look like they've doubled in size.

But they're undamaged."

"She's operating?"

"She lives in Alpha now. And that singing? It's not her. It's coming through her from the Other Side."

"What is it?"

"Angels. Demons pretending to be angels. No way to know. I don't like to think about the Other Side.

I'm a lapsed Catholic. It never made sense to me when they called it the Afterlife, and it makes even less sense now that we've established contact."

Murrillo looked at Loris Rainer and shook his brushcut head.

"Why people with everything going for them dabble in this stuff never fails to baffle me."

Director Silverglate listened to Murrillo's report and hesitated only a moment.

"I'm declaring a Blue Moon Situational Condition," he said.

"That means anything goes."

Murrillo swallowed.

"Anything?"

"Just don't put it in your report."

Dawn O'Leary had some good news when Gil paged her.

"I have the name of the probable next victim. I couldn't get it in Alpha, so I dropped into a Theta trance and threw my consciousness forward to--" "Just give me the name, O'Leary."

"Carla Braun. Another banking official. I picked up a sunburst pattern around her. That's the corporate logo of--" "--Astoria Ban Corp Murrillo finished.

"And you picked up the previous victim. Been missing since the middle of August."

"Oh."

"This is why I hate Alpha .. ."

"I was in Theta, sir."

"For your information, O'Leary, Braun was the second of what are now three violently spiritually transfigured victims."

"Should I be privy to that information?"

"No choice now. I've been sanctioned to resort to any means necessary to find this perpetrator. What was that astrologer's name?"

"He's known as Smith."

"Can you find him for me?"

"He's a Capricorn Sun by reputation. That means he's always at work.

Since we know exactly what his work is, it's just a matter of--" "Just do it."

It looked like any number of licensed s.e.x parlors catering to the clients with a more Kundalini bent than normally found in the Chelsea District of lower Manhattan.