The air-conditioning was either broken or off-more benefits of government cutbacks, Martin Grady thought, and pulled at his damp collar in frustration. He stalked to the door, yanked it open, and yelled down the hall for a portable fan. There was a scurry of movement in the Secure File area. Beth stuck her head around the corner and nodded, too quickly. Her broad pleasant face had a stunned frightened look. He wondered what she’d been doing. Too much to believe she’d actually been filing.

Martin closed the door just as one of the geeks sitting at the conference table behind him finished up with, “And the frogs are dying all along the river.”

“Who the hell gives a shit about frogs?” Martin asked. He couldn’t even summon up the energy for a good snarl. The frog deaths were number seventeen on today’s agenda, and one through sixteen hadn’t been particularly riveting, either. In a Pavlovian response, the geek cringed anyway. “Okay, point taken. We have frogs dying. What’s killing them?”

“But—the problems may be—”

“What my colleague is trying to say is that two events may be related.” That was Jill Westfield, certainly no geek. She sat like a knockoff of Marlene Dietrich, legs crossed, skirt tightly wrapped around her tanned legs, showing enough thigh to invite dreams but no touches. Blond waved hair, perfect skin, round red lips. The only thing she was missing was a cigarette holder. Martin sat down in his chair and stared at her gloomily.

“Which two?”

“Numbers seventeen and eighteen. What we’re talking about here is not just pollution, but chemical reactions among various pollutants. The frogs especially are vulnerable to high chemical concentrations. There are also indications that fish are becoming scarce, too, especially bottom-feeders like catfish. I think we’re talking about a widespread infiltration.”

Martin opened his file and flipped past red-stamped pages. He pulled his coffee toward him and sipped; it tasted gritty, rather oily. Government coffee.

“A water problem.”

“Potentially. You’ll notice that the men who’ve been affected—”

“Christ, what a term,” one of the geeks muttered. The geek nest at that end of the table leaned away from him; one of them even shrugged in Martin’s direction, meaning, geeks. What can you do?

“The men who’ve been affected—” Jill leaned on the word, a hard set to those ruby lips. Her blouse gaped to show a blush of lace-topped bra. “—have all been middle-aged, overweight, borderline alcoholic. Liver biopsies have all turned up traces of dioxin and dichlorhyradine. Dichlorhyradine has also turned up in the analysis of tap water in these cities, in microscopic amounts.”

“You’re saying you think it’s the tap water,” Martin said. His gaze strayed toward his coffee cup, and he shoved it an inch of two farther away with an outstretched fingertip. She shrugged. “Jesus Christ, Jill, do you understand what you’re saying?”