He parked near a shallow crater midway through the damage.

“Ground zero,” he said. “You can get out and sweat for a while if you like, but you can probably see all you need to see from here.”

Laramie said, “I’ll go take a look,” unlatched the door, and stepped into the soupy heat.

She was hit by a scent she couldn’t place, something between fern and marijuana, and wondered whether it was the fragrance of the swamp on which they’d built the neighborhood, steaming its way to the surface through the crater now that the buildings on its surface had been blown away-or just some cleaning agent they’d used on the blast site.

She poked around the edge of the crater. Among other revelations, the exposed strata of the six-foot cliff edge of the crater’s interior outed the development’s contractor as a cheapskate-there was no more than an inch of asphalt forming the roadbed, without a single chunk of gravel to facilitate drainage. She wondered idly whether sinkholes the size of garbage trucks might eventually have appeared, with or without explosion.

There was little else of note to observe, though Laramie had long since discovered it was difficult to determine what would turn out to be of interest in such situations-especially if nobody was telling you much about any of it to begin with. Something she could tell was that the blast had unleashed its wrath mostly horizontally. The crater that marked ground zero from the explosion was relatively shallow, only a little deeper than Laramie was tall, occupying a space that would logically seem to have been the garage of one of the homes along the street. Other than to carve out a crater of this depth, the explosion’s effects had refused to go deep, instead taking out a football field’s worth of homes in all directions. Not a single wall remained standing for the length of the street.

She walked around the edge of the crater and examined the remnants of the foundation of the “ground zero” house. Chunks of the structure still stood, reaching somewhere around mid-basement before the cheap cinder blocks had been torn from their spadework, sheared like wool from the sheep of the first layer of foundation. It was oddly quiet. Laramie heard only the sounds of her muffled footsteps in the rubble and the distant roar of the air conditioner at work beneath the hood of the Jeep.

She saw shards of burnt metal, orbs of rock and cinder block, and reddish dust strewn everywhere. The dust seemed to be shifting, maybe blowing in the breeze, only there wasn’t really a breeze, just the thick, still, ugly heat. She felt a sharp, stinging pain on her leg, looked down, and frantically whacked away at her ankles-realizing it wasn’t dust, but ants. Millions of them. Fire ants, or red ants, or whatever kind of ant was red and bit you. The bites hurt like hell, Laramie suddenly feeling as though she’d joined the cast of a straight-to-video horror flick-a helpless femme fatale stranded in a Martian landscape populated by deadly, if unrealistic creatures. She had the overwhelming sense of nature commencing the process of taking back the land.

Turning back toward the street, she felt a twinge of embarrassment-the rookie, having a look at the site, getting chomped by the resident critters in front of her new boss. By the time she came around the crater, though, the shame had moved out of the way to make room for the shot of anger that took its place.

She opened the door of the Grand Cherokee, planted herself within the chilled confines of the car’s interior, and jutted her chin in the direction of her taupe-skinned host.

“You could have told me about the ants,” she said.

A smirk creased the lines of his face beneath the baseball cap.

“They get you?”

“They got me.”

He shrugged.

“Sorry about that. Ready for tour stop number two?”

“Depends,” she said.

“The ants haven’t taken over task force headquarters, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “At least not yet.”

13

Fourteen agents-special, investigative, and otherwise-sat around eight rectangular tables somebody had arranged in a square. The makeshift war room occupied a gym-size space that until a month ago had composed the cocktail lounge of the Motor 8 Luxury Motel, a one-story lodge nestled between mobile home parks along one of the endless supply of seemingly identical two-lane highways Laramie now understood to crisscross the state. The $38-a-night establishment had been adopted as the operational headquarters for the multijurisdictional pig fuck to which Ebbers had alerted her-and her guide had then delivered her.

As they’d pulled into the motel lot, Laramie wondered how the country’s law enforcement community had managed to survive before the creation of SUVs, since it was evident that the Emerald Lakes incident had resulted in, among other things, an invasion of black-on-black Suburbans, Envoys, and Expeditions, with no window left untinted.

Inside the former cocktail lounge, the task force’s biweekly powwow came to order. A man stood near the L formed by a pair of the tables and cleared his throat. He looked about fifty, and projected a demeanor befitting a Fortune 500 exec more so than a G-man; the charcoal suit he wore caused Laramie to realize there wasn’t anybody in here outside of her guide who wasn’t suited up. This made her note further that there appeared to be no representative of the local constabulary present, not unless some sheriff’s deputy or other had elected to abide by the feds’ dress code in order to gain an invite.

“Let’s get it rolling,” Head Fed said. The murmur of conversation and shuffling of paper relented. “Bill, you want to start? One second-” He extended an arm in Laramie’s direction. Laramie noticed that his eyes shifted, a bit uncomfortably, to take in her guide, who leaned against the bar along the side of the room, well back from the proceedings. “Give a warm welcome to the newest member of the task force.”

He did not give her name. Laramie’s guide had recommended she not identify herself personally to any of the task force members; perhaps the Head Fed had been given similar instructions.

“Our new friend is here on behalf of the president. Special investigator.” Laramie blinked and tried to avoid stealing a glance in the direction of her guide. Neither he-nor Ebbers before him-had described her assignment the way the Head Fed just had. “She’ll be debriefing some of you over the next forty-eight hours. Make yourself available. Bill.”

A man who Laramie presumed to be Bill jammed a pen behind an ear and stood a few seats to her right. He carried fifteen or twenty pounds more than the anonymous Head Fed and stood about three inches shorter, but he was suited up and clean-cut just like everybody else in the room.

“Couple of you haven’t been here for a while-welcome back to the Motor 8.” From behind his ear he drew, then uncapped his pen, which looked to be a dry-erase marker. “With some of the task force out of the loop of late and due to the presence of our new friend, Sid asked that I take it from the top.” He extricated himself from the table-and-chairs setup and approached the white board hanging on the wall behind his seat.

“We pretty much all know what we’ve got,” he said, “and what happened, but I like using this goddamn board, so nobody fuck with me while I do it.” He uncapped the dry-erase marker to a muted chuckle or two. In the upper-left corner of the board, he drew a circle, then wrote Emerald Lakes in the middle of the circle. Underneath the circle, he wrote, Achar. He then drew a series of outward-fanning lines that made the circle look like a child’s depiction of the sun.

“So the perp,” Bill said, “‘Benny’ Achar, as his wife calls him, blows his Chevy Blazer sky high with a fertilizer bomb he put together in his garage, living, as he was, in the formerly bankrupt though lovely community of Emerald Lakes. Still haven’t found the lakes-any of you spot one, let me know and I’ll draw it on the board here.” Bill composed a trio of arrows running from his sunshine illustration toward the middle of the board, where he drew a box. He filled the interior of the box with the words LaBelle (125). “Turns out Achar,” he said, “in detonating himself and the neighborhood, has earned the honor of being the first terrorist to detonate a ‘bio-dirty bomb’ within the borders of the United States. Benny’s dispersal of our mystery pathogen”-he wrote Pathogen X across the three arrows-“results, as you know, in the publicly referenced outbreak of a wicked flu, killing a hundred and twenty-five residents of Hendry County before our quarantine puts on the brakes.”