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windows.”
    There was a retching sound from the kitchen wall. Tom had turned on the tap and brown water was beginning to cough out of it.
    “Water works,” he reported. “At least I think it’s water. Good thing we brought our own to drink, but I’m not looking forward to showering with this mud.”
    Roberto alone remained outside. After two weeks locked indoors I understood that he had no desire for walls. Not that he ever really did. I was like him in that way, more comfortable in a tent than in a house. It probably had something to do with growing up as a military brat, with a different house on a different base each year. For him it was worse, the result of too many additional years in prison. The closest thing to a permanent home either of us had known was our grandfather’s ranch on the Argentine altiplano.
    After examining the lodge, I walked back out onto the porch and found him sitting on a step. He was putting the finishing touches on a hand-rolled cigarette, licking an edge of the paper. At least I hoped it was a cigarette. He struck a match against the sole of a motorcycle boot, and I was relieved a moment later when I smelled some kind of scented tobacco. But I wasn’t at all relieved by the way his hands seemed to be shaking.
    “You okay?” I asked him, not really sure what, if anything, was the matter.
    He smirked at me and blew smoke out of his nose.
    After a minute, he asked, “Your girlfriend, that Rebecca, she still packin’?” Meaning, I assumed, had she gotten the abortion that had been an unspoken possibility for a while.
    “Yeah. She’s due in February, Tío ’Berto.”
    The smirk was now a genuine grin and I returned it. I knew he didn’t like Rebecca, or at least he knew she didn’t like him, but he seemed pleased. He looked down at his boots but didn’t say anything else.
    A little later Mary removed the padlocks from the doors of the three smaller cabins. They were identical, empty but for metal cots and bare, dusty mattresses. Roberto and I were told to share one, which fit with my understanding of my role here—to serve as my brother’s babysitter. Mary and Tom would each have their own.
    I assisted the two federal agents in humping duffel bags, metal suitcases, ice chests, and heavy rolls of black construction paper from the Suburban into the main cabin. It wasn’t because I was all that eager to help, but because I was anxious to know just how their task force planned to use my brother’s information to take down Jesús Hidalgo.
    Mary armed herself with a bucket of bleach, took a deep breath, and headed for the bathroom. Using rubber mallets, Tom and I hammered sheets of tar paper over the windows and the places where we could feel the wind blowing through the log walls. We worked in silence, the two of us wordlessly agreeing that silence was probably the only way not to antagonize each other. When we were done Mary turned on the lights—three bare bulbs hung from rafters—and revealed a room that looked a little cozier, if dirtier, than it had in the dark. We swept the room and wiped the surfaces. As a final touch a heavy blanket was hung over the front door.
    Now, even at night, there would be no sign that anybody was using the old hunting camp. We were going to be like ghosts.

THREE
    T hese are our operational rules, gentlemen,” Mary announced.
    She’d asked my brother to come in from the porch and then assembled us around one of the picnic tables. The table’s rough surface was already cluttered with expanding files and a pair of laptop computers. She was standing at the end as if to deliver a lecture.
    “We aren’t going to take any unnecessary chances here. Stay off the ridges around the camp, and out of sight during the day if you hear a plane overhead. We’ll use only our encrypted satellite phone, and you’ll use it only with Tom or me monitoring. We don’t want to risk being overheard—the bad guys have started using some pretty advanced technology.