Gabriel drew his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and sent a message to the Travel department at King Saul Boulevard requesting two first-class tickets on BA Flight 501—one ticket for Johannes Klemp, the other for Adrien LeBlanc. Travel quickly confirmed receipt of the message and asked Gabriel to stand by. Two minutes later the reservation numbers appeared. Only one first-class seat was available; Travel, in its infinite wisdom, reserved it for Gabriel. Monsieur LeBlanc was booked into one of the few remaining seats in economy. It was in the rear of the aircraft, in the zone of wailing children and toilet odors.

Gabriel sent another message to King Saul Boulevard, requesting a car on a hot standby at Heathrow. Then he returned the BlackBerry to his pocket and watched the woman heading ticket in hand toward security. Keller waited until she was gone before walking over to Gabriel’s side.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Gabriel smiled and said, “Home.”

They checked in separately: no luggage, no carry-ons of any kind. A Portuguese border policeman stamped their false passports; an airport security officer waved them through the screeners. They had forty-five minutes to kill before the flight, so they dawdled in the perfumed halls of duty-free and snagged some reading material from a newsstand so they wouldn’t board the plane empty-handed. The woman was at the gate when they arrived, her sky-blue eyes fixed on the screen of her mobile. Gabriel sat behind her and waited for the flight to be called. The first announcement was in Portuguese, the second in English. The woman waited for the second before rising. She dropped the mobile into her handbag and cruised onto the Jetway through the first-class lane. Gabriel did the same a moment later. While holding his ticket out to the gate attendant, he glanced at Keller, who was standing miserably among the overpacked huddled masses. Keller scratched his nose with his middle finger and frowned at the swaddled infant who would soon be his tormentor.

By the time Gabriel entered the aircraft, the woman had settled into her seat and been handed a glass of complimentary champagne. She was next to the window in the second row, on the left side of the fuselage. Her bag was at her feet, not quite properly stowed. An in-flight magazine lay on her thighs. She had yet to open it.

She paid Gabriel no heed as he squeezed past an overweight pensioner and dropped into his seat: fourth row, aisle, right side of the aircraft. An overly made-up flight attendant pressed a glass of champagne into Gabriel’s hand. There was a reason it was complimentary; it tasted like sparkling turpentine. He placed the glass carefully on the center console and nodded to his seatmate, a British businessman with a Yorkshire accent who was shouting something about a missing shipment into his mobile phone.