The story behind the story.

In 1972, Guatemala was twelve years into a war that would last thirty-six. On most mornings you couldn't tell. The volcanoes rose over the capital without asking permission; coffee came down from the highlands; the markets opened; the buses ran. But men had begun to vanish from their homes at night, newspapers were learning which stories not to print, and a name on the wrong list had become the most dangerous thing a person could own.

Ghost Code lives inside that double exposure — a country of staggering beauty conducting, in its shadows, a quiet war against its own people — and inside the cold arithmetic of the era that surrounded it: Washington's fear of a second Cuba, and the money, machines, and men it sent south to make sure there never was one.

The Navarros are not the Urrutias, and Ghost Code is not a memoir. The hidden program, the list of names, the men from Langley — those are fiction, built to ask a question the history books leave open: what were the machines of that era really built to do?

But the world around the fiction is remembered, not invented. The chilled machine room and the smell of hot circuits; the immigrant years in Los Angeles and the phone call that ends them; the volcanoes, the markets, the thirty-nine cousins; the earthquake that struck at 3:01 in the morning. In the author's words, the novel is "a work of fiction that blends imagination with echoes of real-world history."