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for directions. Something to drink would be nice, anyway, so he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store.

Dustin was in town on business. Sort of. He worked in the entomology department of Texas A&M University with a specialty in _Solenopsis invicta_, the red imported fire ant, or RIFA. The stings of these insects created a very painful burning sensation, thus the name fire ants, but they were rarely fatal to humans. There were fewer than one hundred recorded deaths in the United States. People who died from fire ant bites were usually severely allergic to the venom, had been bitten hundreds or even thousands of times, and were elderly or invalid and unable to escape. An allergic 90-year-old woman confined to her bed might be swarmed by the insects and eventually die from their stings, but a healthy woman in her thirties was unlikely to suffer anything more than some pain, some swelling, and a nasty white pustule.

Except that in the past three months, at least four Tampa residents had died from fire ant stings. Healthy people. One of them, Charles Windfall, had slipped in the shower and broken his neck as result of being swarmed by the ants. That case was certainly out of the ordinary, but understandable. But a man named Jason Eckor had been swarmed while he was on his couch taking a nap. Alerted by his screams, his wife had rushed into the living room to find him crawling on the floor, clawing at the ants that were all over his body. He died on the way to the hospital. He was thirty-one years old and a personal trainer.

The other two victims had been Denise Crossley, 18, and Margaret Draper, 40. Margaret had mild asthma, but neither of them fit into the category of people who should have had any chance of being killed by fire ants. Fire ants were aggressive, no doubt about it, but not _that_ aggressive. How were they protecting their nest by attacking somebody sleeping on his living room couch?

Last week he'd received a bizarre letter from Tyler Enzian, one of his old college professors, asking him to fly to Tampa for some extremely important _Solenopsis invicta_ research. Top-secret research. And Mr. Enzian was offering him more money for two weeks' work than he normally made in a year. They'd spoken on the phone a couple of times since then, but the only information Dustin could get out of the old man was that it would be well worth his while to show up in Tampa. Dustin was somewhat suspicious, of course, but his fifteen years as a workaholic at the university had left him with a nice big stack of vacation days, and it was certainly worth checking out.

Not worth flying for, though. Dustin's research took him all over the southern United States (the red imported fire ant was currently found in nine states from California to Florida, infesting over 275 million acres) but he'd never boarded an airplane in his life. There was no real reason for his fear, since he'd never lost any relatives to plane crashes or had any kind of traumatic experiences involving air travel, but he had the phobia, accepted it, and drove everywhere. Besides, this way he got to listen to a lot of books-on-tape.

He got out of the car, yawned, and stretched. He'd slept poorly in the hotel last night, since a couple of kids thought it would be desirable if they ran up and down the hallway until three in the morning, shrieking and giggling. If something like that happened at the hotel he stayed at tonight, he was going to call the front desk and complain.

Dustin was forty-one years old, six feet tall, and fairly lean. At his high school reunion three years ago, he'd promised himself that when his hair loss reached the point that a comb-over seemed like a fine idea, he'd shave it. Last year, he'd kept that promise, so now his black hair was in a nice buzz cut.

He'd kept himself in pretty good shape all these years, save for a brief eating binge in his mid-thirties after Betty dumped him for the taxidermist she'd paid to stuff her