Vargas was turning to leave when he spotted the broken mobile on the dining table. Torres handed him a pair of transparent latex gloves to slip on before picking it up.

“Must be Ramos’s phone, sir. I’ll get the boys to bag it up and bring it back to the station.”

Vargas didn’t reply. He continued to stare at the horrific image frozen underneath the broken glass of the mobile. Despite the cracks on the screen, he could clearly make out the corpse of Ricardo Gonzales. He angled the screen for Torres to see.

“No, Juan. This phone doesn’t belong to Sebastian Ramos. It belongs to his murderer.”

Chapter Fifteen

September 1946

El Calafate

In September 1946, three highly significant events took place within two weeks of each other. Ronald Franklin, aka Martin Bormann, founded a new business based in Buenos Aires. Emilia Franklin, aka Eva Braun, gave birth to a son, and the Nuremberg trials issued their verdicts on 199 high-ranking Nazis, who were being tried for war crimes.

Bormann was a genius of finance and administration and, in the fifteen months following his arrival in Argentina, had deployed some of the massive sums he had secretly invested in South American banks to create a brand-new enterprise: the Franklin Pharmaceutical Corporation. He recognised that, in the post-war era, the pharma industry would flourish and that drug manufacturers would be intrinsically linked to the economic well-being of developing nations. His long-term plan was to migrate the company to the United States and build it into the biggest pharmaceutical corporation in the world.

He greatly admired American giants such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer, viewing them as a template for his new enterprise. Bormann diverted over fifty million dollars into setting it up from scratch, recruiting the very best talent. He sought out research scientists, biotech specialists, industrial pharmacists and experienced senior management. He also funded the purchase of a major new office development in a prime location and kitted out three floors of the building with purpose-built labs, stacked full of state-of-the-art equipment.

There was a significant German population living in Argentina, with over forty thousand based in the capital alone. Many of them wielded great economic influence inside the country and controlled a considerable part of the nation’s industrial, chemical and electrical goods production. A number of them were Nazi sympathisers who revered Ronald Franklin as, despite his altered physical features, they were aware of his true identity and were in total awe of him.