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drivers honked, she fought a rising irritation. Why did these citizen vigilantes try to enforce stupid traffic rules? She wasn’t hurting them. Traffic should flow like the Internet, with every data packet finding its own quickest path. Cars should come equipped with artificial intelligence—to make up for all the brainless drivers. When her right turn came, she had to cut off a red Honda and swerve through a hail of horn blasts.
    Quimicron’s main plant lay within a private ring levee, a thirty-foot-high earthen fortress designed to hold off the Mississippi floods. Only Building No. 2 protruded above the ring levee. Fronting the canal, its upper windows kept watch over the comings and goings at the Quimicron barge dock. Quimicron’s property encircled the blunt northern end of the canal and took in much of the swamp where CJ had been working. A gated entrance, motion sensors, and electrified chain-link fences kept intruders away from the plant, and video cameras monitored every building and parking lot. But CJ carried an employee badge, and she’d made friends with the gatehouse guard, a sweet pimply kid named Johnny Poydras.
    At the Quimicron entrance on Highway 61, she pulled to the shoulder, checked her mirror, and wiped a red lineof lipstick off her teeth. She was wearing serious slacks, a linen blazer, and a white button-down blouse. She was trying for an “authorized” look, as in “authorized entrance.”
    Johnny Poydras grinned and waved her through the gate with the
Godzilla
comic book he was reading. She drove up over the ring levee, passed through the chain-link fence gate, and dropped into the gritty brown basin of the Quimicron plant. On the front steps of Building No. 2, she adjusted the badge clipped to her lapel and whistled a saucy tune to buck up her confidence—Max’s tune again. He was out there in the swamp, shoveling poisoned mud and worrying about her. “Oh Max, I don’t deserve you,” she whispered.
    The new plastic cooler she’d bought at Wal-Mart resembled the type chemists used to transport field samples. It contained one clear plastic Baggie of liquid, labeled with a set of official-looking made-up numbers in black felt-tip. She gripped the cooler handle, stuck out her chin, and ran up the steps to the front door.
    Several people milled in the beige lobby, but no one took notice of CJ and her cooler. The guard in the booth glanced at her badge, then wordlessly buzzed her through the turnstile. Quimicron SA employed several thousand people at its Baton Rouge plant, and many, like her, wore the blue badges of temporary contract workers. She paused at the drinking fountain to calm down, then hurried upstairs to the fifth floor. Sure enough, the lab was empty and dark. But the door was locked.
    CJ waved her badge across the card-reader mounted beside the door, but its light-emitting diode stayed red. She should have known her temporary badge wouldn’t grant access. Several people passed up and down the hall, so she couldn’t stand there shaking the door lever. She picked out an attractive well-dressed man who looked like a manager.
    â€œExcuse me, this lab is locked, and I’ve got a horrendous deadline. Will your badge open it?”
    The man glanced at her, then at the lab door. She must have interrupted him deep in thought, because he seemed a bit unfocused. He was middle-aged, slim, and fit-looking, with a nut-brown tan and fine dark Mediterranean eyes. His chin was a smidge too long, but she liked his full head of blue-black hair, just silvering at the temples. He wore it longish, combed back behind his ears like a poet.
    â€œThis door was supposed to be open,” she lied. “There’s an EPA guy waiting on the phone for my data. He’s threatening to fine us.”
    The man read her badge aloud. “Carolyn Joan Reilly.”
    She hated that name and had to bite her lip to keep from saying so. It was her