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warning this time?”
     
    “How can you say that?” Holly’s eyes widened. “Do you really think anyone in our government would look the other way?”
     
    A battery of derisive looks crisscrossed the table, but no one ventured to challenge her naiveté. How much embassy personnel had known of what Guatemala’s military regime was doing with its American-supplied arms, training, and support during the last few decades of  civil war was anyone’s guess. That they’d been totally ignorant of the rampant human rights abuses was a fiction few were credulous enough to buy any longer, thanks to recently declassified CIA briefings.
     
    “Speaking of your embassy—” Dieter injected derision into his mimicry of Lynn, sangria slopping onto the tablecloth as he used the glass to gesture. “—did you see who’s in town? Think it’s connected?”
     
    “Who are you talking about?” Holly turned her head. “Oh, you mean the big guy with the gray suit and beard next to the ambassador. He looks familiar. Where have I seen him?”
     
    “Probably CNN,” Lynn enlightened her dryly. “That’s the administration’s new drug czar. He was here for some big counter-narcotics exercise our guys were running with the locals. They managed to snag half a dozen poppy fields and opium labs up in the mountains, and our drug czar has been patting the Guatemalans on the back, handing out medals left and right.”
     
    Roger shook his head. “How do you do it, Lynn? If that isn’t classified, surely they don’t go broadcasting it to the press.”
     
    She grinned at him. “I’m dating a guy in the air wing. He was out of commission all week while they were out playing with their toys up there.”
     
    “Yeah, well, they can pat themselves on the back all they want,” Dieter snapped. “But for every lab they grab, there’re a dozen others, and the growers just move on to a new patch of jungle. I don’t know where we’re losing more rain forest—the drug cartels or land-grabbing peasants.”
     
    “And going back to that, did you see where the massacre took place?” Lynn put in. “Right in your neck of the woods, Holly. Straight up past the center into the Sierra de las Minas.”
     
    Holly sat up straight. “The biosphere?”
     
    Once again, it was due to all those country-to-country calls that Vicki knew what they were talking about. The Sierra de las Minas Biosphere was the highland nature reserve that opened up just beyond the Wildlife Rescue Center to preserve 150,000 acres of Guatemala’s remaining cloud forest habitat.
     
    “I thought the Ministry of Environment had cleared out that area.” Holly spun around in her seat. “Bill, you know that area up there. There can’t still be villages inside the biosphere, can there? I mean, we raised millions of dollars when we negotiated the reserve to pay for that land and recompense anyone already living inside the perimeter.”
     
     Bill hunched his shoulders. “From the coordinates they were giving, it looks as though it might have been within the perimeter. Bottom line, your environmental groups can pay off the government to sign over the land. But as long as people are hungry, they’re going to keep finding soil to grow corn. And as long as they stay off the beaten track, it would take a better law enforcement than you’ve got to police a territory that size.”
     
    “Then maybe that makes one silver lining in all this, as you Americans would say.” Dieter shot Vicki a malicious look. “After yesterday, the next bunch of indios looking to move in on the reserve will think twice.”
     
    “Isn’t that a little harsh?” Lynn demanded. “After all, they’re just trying to feed their families.”
     
    “Oh, come on,” said Dieter. “Let’s not be hypocrites. Aren’t these Mayan peasants supposed to worship Mother Earth? Well, let them respect her before there are no cloud forests—or any other rain forest—left for the next generation. I’m