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They have radio scanners and some equipment that can intercept both hard-line and cellular calls. The same goes for e-mail once we get the computers set up. No one will leave the property without checking with me first. Please don’t use any lights at night other than in this cabin. We’re to be invisible here. No one’s to know this camp is occupied, especially not by us.”
    Her white blouse was streaked with dirt and her hair was half in her face. I liked her better this way, dirty rather than clean. I noticed that she didn’t wear a wedding ring or jewelry of any kind. She looked too young, too small, to be giving orders to the three of us—she couldn’t be more than thirty years old and she couldn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Yet her voice was confident, and she was acting as if she were speaking to a packed room of eager agents rather than just her resentful partner, a semi-disgraced state cop, and a drug-addicted felon.
    “Am I forgetting anything, gentlemen?”
    “Keep your badges shined up and the toilet seat down?” Roberto suggested.
    Mary’s lips twitched into a tolerant smile. Tom remained stone-faced.
    “Where’s the rest of your team?” I asked.
    She looked at Tom, then at me.
    “This is it, Agent Burns. The four of us. If we had any more people here, we would be too conspicuous. That’s where we’ve failed in the past.”
    I knew something about the failures, despite not knowing much more than the legends about Jesús Hidalgo. For ten years he’d been responsible for a good portion of the almost thirty billion dollars in narcotics coming into the States across the Mexican border each year. For ten years the Feds had failed to get an indictment against him, much less an arrest or conviction. There were Mexican folk songs about Hidalgo,
narcocorridos
of polkas or waltzes, that lionized his ability to make fools of the American authorities.
    “So exactly what is it we’re doing here that would be too conspicuous with more people?”
    I’d assumed, ever since the FBI requested my assistance a week earlier, that my brother would simply be giving up information about Hidalgo in return for the dismissal of the escape charges in Colorado. And some time in a locked rehab facility, of course. My job would be to help pull the information out of him and keep him under control. My office and I hadn’t known that Jesús Hidalgo was even in my state, much less that the Feds would be taking my brother and me to the vicinity. And I was surprised by the equipment I’d helped lug into the main cabin—it was surveillance stuff, not just tape recorders and video cameras. Some weapons, too, I guessed, were in those locked steel suitcases.
    “I’ll get to that. But in short, we’re going to arrest Hidalgo. Right here in Wyoming.”
    “Well, you’d better have some more guys when it comes to that,” I laughed, not thinking she was serious. But she looked serious. “He’s bound to have bodyguards, right? A lot of them, I bet.”
    Sicarios,
they were called. A respectable drug lord never went anywhere without at least a handful.
    Mary nodded. “He does. And we will. But first let’s get some things out of the way.”
    She had planned this lecture out carefully, I realized, and knew exactly how she wanted it done. She might as well have had cheat notes in her hand.
    “First, because for the next few weeks we’ll be living in close proximity, I want to tell you a little bit about me and Tom and what our roles are here.”
    She told us that she had a law degree from American University and a master’s in criminal justice from John Jay. She went on to say that she’d been with the Bureau for five years, and I figured that they must have been prodigious ones, because she was really young to be in charge of a case like this. Two years ago she had been assigned to the Bureau’s San Diego office for the purpose of investigating the Baja cartels in conjunction with the DEA and the Mexican