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central server. Carolyn Joan Reilly, female, twenty-two, short-term grunt on Rory Godchaux’s cleanup gang. Perfect cover for a terrorist.
    â€œThat’s weird.”
    Her agitated voice tripped Gene’s internal alarms. Even Mr. Meir bent closer to watch. Mr. Meir had a good sense about people. Gene acknowledged that much.
    The female suspect poured some of the clear liquid into her cupped hand and let out a giggle. Gene used hiscamera zoom so they could see the little glassy blob rolling around her palm like a bead of mercury. “Amazing surface tension,” she said. When she poked it with her fingernail, it glued itself to her finger.
    She played with it for a while, shaking and blowing at it, making it wobble on her fingertip like a ball of clear Jell-O. With her free hand, she pecked a few notes into her laptop. But when she used the beaker’s rim to scrape the little glob off, it smeared all over her finger. A second later, she started shaking her hand really hard and squealing, “Ow, ow, ow!” She rushed to the sink and held her fingers under the gushing tap. Then she dried her hand on a paper towel and examined her skin.
    Gene couldn’t see anything wrong with her hand. Her finger wasn’t even red. After that, she drifted off into lala land, as Gene would later tell his mother. She peered down the sink drain for ten solid minutes.
    When she started gathering her things to leave, Gene swiveled in his chair to face the higher-ups. “Want us to apprehend her, Mr. Meir?”
    Dan Meir rolled an unlit cigar around in his mouth. He was a short, compact gray-headed man of sixty-two with kind green eyes and a permanent squint from decades in the sun. He wore a military buzz cut that he religiously trimmed and sprayed each morning so it glittered like tin foil. Everybody liked Dan Meir, even Gene, who was hard to please.
    Meir spoke to the Miami stranger. “Do you think she’s dangerous?”
    The brown-skinned foreigner glanced up from something he was reading on his Palm. He needed a haircut, Gene thought. His hair hung down over his collar.
    â€œI know who she is,” the foreigner said. Sure enough, he had an un-American accent. “Let her go, but keep tabs on her. Meir, we’re due at a meeting.”
    After they left, Gene chomped a savage bite of chocolate. “Stand down. Let her pass,” he commanded his menover the radio. Yankee leftist. Sure, let her go. “Moselle, hang back and follow, but don’t let her see you. Report to me every five minutes.”
    â€œRoger that,” said Ron Moselle.
Rill
    Â 
    Wednesday, March 9
    4:49 PM
    Â 
    CJ didn’t see the red Toyota pickup follow her out of the Quimicron parking lot. One idea fixed her attention as she drove over the ring levee and waved good-bye to Johnny Poydras at the gate: she had to get a chunk of that ice. After darting into the traffic on Highway 61, she raced the short distance to the Devil’s Swamp access road and veered into its rutted lane, trying again to imagine what chemical interactions could have formed that astonishing substance.
    Mentally she ticked off its properties: powerful surface tension; rapid phase shift from solid to liquid; a magnetic field that responded to sound; possibly a flashing light; and it could
purify water.
    Questions rilled through her mind. Could the chemical-freezing reaction have fused all the pond’s impurities, leaving behind the pristine meltwater that saturated her clothing and hair? And what could explain its strong surface tension? Or the peculiar prickling sensation in her finger, as if the substance had suddenly dropped sub zero? The way her finger still tingled, she wasn’t positive she’d washed it all off.
    She studied her fingertip. The skin appeared smooth and healthy—though she’d chewed the nail to the quick. The ice’s riddle fascinated her. All her instruments showed the substance was chemically