Is there a spy thriller in the concept of someone's backflowing lethal chemicals and biological agents into a large metropolitan area's drinking water?

The novel could be titled "Backflow!" and set in fictitious Hillsburg County.

In the movie version, the opening credits could be superimposed over a montage of happy scenes - like kids playing in a park and senior citizens playing shuffle board. As part of the montage, cut in a few scenes of the kids drinking Kool-aid that mom mixed up at home for a picnic and the senior citizens cooling-off and drinking from a fountain - and a dog lapping up water from his bowl that mom brought along on the picnic and filled with water.

Suddenly, the dog goes into convulsions and dies. A crowd gathers round made up mainly of the children and senior citizens. As one of the senior citizens faints, she mutters "Oh God, I hurt all over!" and is caught in the arms of her husband. Cut to a close-up of a quizzical look on the face of one of the kids just before the kid passes out. Pandemonium breaks out. A mother screams in anguish: "What's happening?"

As the camera slowly lifts out from the noise and havoc of the park, dissolve to a quiet boardroom (painted in shades of dark blue with stark lighting) where the camera continues its matching backward motion away from a man pointing out the outbreak areas on a projected map. The map has a logo of the Hillsburg Public Health Services. Young interns and aides sit in the dim back row. Someone in the audience interrupts the speaker to ask if whatever is killing the people might be in the drinking water supply.

A middle-aged man stands and puts down the doughnut he's eating. He is obviously a bureaucrat, warming his chair until he can retire. He's fat, balding with a comb-over of the few hairs he has left, white shirt with food stains on it, a shirt size too small for his fat neck and a tie that is off-center and tied with an atrocious half-Windsor knot. He wipes the sweat from his face with a dirty wadded-up handkerchief. In his arrogant and pompous voice, punctuated by snore-like gasps for air, he sermonizes that the Hillsburg Water Resources Services has taken every possible precaution to insure the integrity and safety of the water supply. There is silence.

Then a young woman's voice is heard out of the darkness at the back of the room, "But Sir, you have required the installation of thousands of backflow valves in Hillsburg County. Every one of them provides a direct path into the drinking water supply." Everyone in the room slowly turns to look at her as though this had never occurred to them. She shrugs her shoulders with a look that says "Well, it's the truth!"

I see this opening as brilliant Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award type writing. My wife isn't so sure.

A detective named Burt is assigned to find out the source of the toxins. He is hampered by various government employees trying to cover their asses. So he goes out into the neighborhoods. It quickly becomes obvious to him that each home's backflow valve does indeed provide direct access to the County's drinking water supply - and the valves are easy to spot because they're out next to the road.

Burt and his girlfriend, who is a nurse, go out to his parent's diary farm for Sunday dinner. His brother and family live on the farm and run it now. After dinner, Burt goes for a walk with his brother and father, who still limps from the chicken incident. Burt's brother shows him how farmers move chemicals around with compressed air and gives him a short-course on hydraulics. His father points out that if the injections were done in the early part of the night and an over-pressure maintained throughout the night, the lethal chemicals would ebb and flow throughout the County's water system as people flushed their toilets and washed their hands. And he suggests the probable modus operandi - drive around and look for the valves along the curbs - clamp on the hose - a hiss of air as the lethal liquid is forced into the system - and move on to the next valve in another neighborhood.

Burt's girl friend figures out the amount and distribution of the toxins that were injected.

Armed with all these facts, Burt sets out to find the culprit. Along the way, he gets into a gunfight with the notorious Refluya Válvula gang that steals backflow valves and melts them down for the brass and copper. He almost gets run down by a white pickup truck with mud smeared over the logo on the door. It looks a lot like a Hillsburg County logo. And he has a lot of suspects to choose from: a terrorist, a high-school geek seeking attention, a college student whose paper on security laxness got an "F", the wife of the CEO of a valve manufacturing company who wants a divorce so she can marry a jockey, a county commissioner, a disgruntled employee at the Florida Dep't of Environmental Protection who got passed over for a promotion, the head of Homeland Security, an old fart that's pissed off at being forced to pay $600 for a valve.

Whom does Burt arrest? You'll have to wait for the book or movie!

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