LAN Airlines flight 4286 sank slowly from the cloudless Argentine sky toward Mendoza city and the distant saw-toothed peaks of the Andes. Even from twenty thousand feet, Gabriel could see the vineyards stretching in an endless green sash along the far edge of the high desert valley. He looked at Chiara. She was reclined in her first-class seat, her beautiful face in repose. She had been in the same position, with only slight variations, throughout most of the thirty-hour journey from Amsterdam. Gabriel was envious. Like most Office agents, his career had been marked by near-constant travel, yet he had never mastered the ability to sleep on airplanes. He had passed the long transatlantic flight reading about Kurt Voss in a dossier hastily prepared by Eli Lavon. It included the only known photograph of Voss in his SS uniform—a snapshot taken not long after his arrival in Vienna—along with a posed portrait that appeared in Der Spiegel not long before his death. If Voss had been troubled by a guilty conscience late in life, he had managed to conceal it from the camera lens. He appeared to be a man at peace with his past. A man who slept well at night.

A flight attendant woke Chiara and instructed her to raise her seat back. Within a few seconds, she was once again sleeping soundly and remained so even after the aircraft thudded onto the runway of Mendoza’s airport. Ten minutes later, as they entered the terminal, she was brimming with energy. Gabriel walked next to her, legs heavy, ears ringing from lack of sleep.

They had cleared passport control earlier that morning upon their arrival in Buenos Aires, and there were no formalities to see to other than the acquisition of a rental car. In Europe, such indignities were usually handled by couriers and other Office field operatives. But here in distant Mendoza, Gabriel had no choice but to join the long queue at the counter. Despite his printed confirmation, his request for a car seemed to come as something of a surprise to the clerk, for try as she might she could find no record of Gabriel’s reservation in the computer. Locating something suitable turned into a thirty-minute Sisyphean ordeal requiring multiple phone calls and much scowling at the computer screen. A car finally materialized, a Subaru Outback that had been involved in an unfortunate mishap during a recent trip into the mountains. Without apology, the clerk handed over the paperwork, then delivered a stern lecture about what the insurance did and did not cover. Gabriel signed the contract, all the while wondering what sort of unfortunate mishap he could inflict on the car before returning it.