Marc Sully had been a member of the police aux frontières for four years, and sat through hundreds of briefings just like this one. Every year Pagnol’s face got a little redder, his collar a little tighter. Not that Sully was anyone to talk. He himself had always a little weight on him, wasn’t ashamed of it. Bit his nails to the quick, too, had given up trying to stop. The boss once told him he looked “sloppy,” but when Marc asked him how, he just shrugged. So nobody was going to put him on a recruitment poster.

  Marc knew he wasn’t popular with some of his younger colleagues, the ones who bathed every single day, afraid of smelling like a human being instead of a walking bar of deodorant soap. They’d walk around with their quiffs of freshly shampooed hair, smiling nicely at the prettier female passengers, as if they were going to find dates on the job. Marc thought they were fools. It was a dead-end job. Giving strip searches might be a way to get a sniff, especially if you were into third-world cul, but you weren’t going to bring anybody home that way.

  “Now two advisories fresh from la DCPAF.” The Direction centrale de la police aux frontière was the national bureau that gave them their orders. Pagnol pressed a few switches, and was able to project photographs directly from a computer. “Highest priority. This one’s an American. Mexican ancestry. She’s a professional. You find her, you be very careful. Treat her like a scorpion, right?”

  Grunts of assent.

  Sully squinted at the images. He wouldn’t mind giving her a taste of his baguette.

  “And here’s another one,” the security director said. “White male in his mid-thirties. Curly brown hair, green or hazel eyes, approximately one and three-quarters meters in height. Possible serial killer. Another American, they think. Very dangerous. There’s reason to believe he’s been in the country today, and that he’ll be trying to make his way out. We’ll be posting photographs at your stations, but I want you to take a careful look right now. If it turns out that they left through Lille-Lesquin and that the people here let them slip through, it won’t just be my job on the line. Everybody understand?”

  Sully nodded with everyone else. It annoyed Sully that Roux, that apple-cheeked hard-on, was still riding high for having lucked out with that Gastarbeiter whore. But who knew? Maybe it was Sully’s day to get lucky. He took another look at the photographs.

  Ben dropped off Anna by an airport shuttle bus stop, and deposited the blue Renault at the long-term parking lot at the aéroport Lille-Lesquin. They’d enter the airport separately, and take different flights.

  They agreed to meet in Buenos Aires within ten hours.

  Assuming nothing went wrong.

  Anna looked at the blond, crew-cut American officer, and felt confident that he’d elude detection. But despite her brave words to Ben, she felt no such confidence herself. Her hair was neither cut nor colored. It was combed out, and she had changed her garb, but otherwise she was entrusting her camouflage to something very small indeed. She felt a knot of fear in the pit of her stomach, and the fear fed on itself, for she knew nothing would betray her faster than the appearance of fear. She had to focus. Her usual hyperattentiveness to her surroundings could now be her undoing. Before she stepped into the terminal, she had to let every bit of fear and anxiety wash from her. She imagined herself traipsing through meadows filled with Bermuda grass and dandelions. She imagined holding hands with somebody constant and strong. It could be anybody—it was simply a mental exercise, as she was perfectly aware—but the person she kept imagining was Ben.

  Sully kept a sharp eye out at the incoming passengers by his station, alert for signs of anxiety or agitation, for customers traveling with too few bags or too many, for customers who fit the description they’d received from DCPAF.

  The man, third from the front of the line, caught his attention. He was the approximate height of the man they were looking for, had curly brown hair, and kept jingling the change in his pocket, a nervous tic. From his dress, he was almost certainly an American. Perhaps he had reason to be nervous.

  He waited until the man showed his ticket and passport to the airline security officer, and then stepped forward.

  “Just a few questions, sir,” Sully said, his eyes boring in on him.

  “Yeah, all right,” the man said.

  “Come with me,” Sully said, and drew him to a station post near the ticket counter. “So what took you to France?”

  “Medical conference.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  A sigh. “I work in sales for a pharmaceutical company.”

  “You’re a drug dealer!” Sully smiled, though his eyes remained wary.

  “In a matter of speaking,” the man replied wanly. He had a look on his face like he’d smelled something bad.

  Americans and their obsession with hygiene. Sully scrutinized his face for a moment longer. The man had the same angular cast to his face, square chin, curly hair. But the features didn’t look quite right—they were too small. And Sully didn’t hear real stress in the man’s voice when he answered questions. Sully was wasting his time.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

  Sully went back to scrutinizing the check-in line. A blond-haired woman with swarthy skin caught his eye. The suspect could have dyed her hair; the other specifics matched. He drifted toward her.

  “Could I see your passport, madame,” he said.

  The woman looked at him blankly.

  “Votre passeport, s’il vous plait, madame.”

  “Bien sûr. Vous me croyez etre anglaise? Je suis italienne, mais tous mes amis pensent que je suis allemande ou anglaise ou n’importe quoi.”

  According to her passport, she resided in Milan, and Sully thought it unlikely that an American could speak French with such an egregious Italian accent.

  No one else on line just then looked terribly promising. A dot-head with two bawling children was ahead of the blond Italian. As far as Sully was concerned, her kind couldn’t leave the country fast enough. Chicken vindaloo was going to end up being the national dish at the rate the goddamn dot-heads were immigrating. The Muslims were worse, of course, but the dot-heads with their unpronounceable names were pretty awful. Last year, when he’d dislocated his arm, the Indian doctor at the clinic had flatly refused to give him a real painkiller. Like maybe he was supposed to do some fakir-style mind control. If his arm wasn’t half out of its socket, he would have punched the guy.

  Sully glanced at the woman’s passport without interest and waved her and her sniveling brood through. The dot-head whore even smelled like saffron.

  A young Russian with acne. Last name was German, so probably a Jew. Mafiya? Not his problem just now.

  An honest-to-goodness Frenchman and his wife, off to a vacation.

  Another goddamn dot-head in a sari. Gayatri was the name, and then something unpronounceable. Curry cul.

  None of the other men fit the profile: too old, too fat, too young, too short.

  Too bad. Maybe it wasn’t going to be his lucky day after all.

  Anna settled into her coach-class seat, adjusting her sari and mentally repeating her name: Gayatri Chandragupta. It wouldn’t do to stumble over it if anyone were to ask. She was wearing her long black hair straight back, and when she’d caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window, she hardly recognized herself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Buenos Aires

  Anna looked anxiously through the plate glass of the American Express office at sedate, tree-lined Plaza Libertador General San Martin. The park, once a bull ring, once a slave market, was now dominated by the great bronze statue of General José de San Martin astride his horse. The sun blazed fiercely. Inside it was air-conditioned, ice-cold, and quiet.

  “Señorita Acampo?”

  She turned to see a slender man in a close-fitting blue blazer, stylish heavy black-framed glasses. “I am very sorry, señorita, but we cannot locate this package.”

  “I don’t understand.” She switched to Spanish so there would be no mistake: “Está registrado que lo recibió?”

  “We received it, yes, madam, but it cannot be found.”

  Maddening, but this at least was progress. The last employee had adamantly denied a package had ever been received in her name.

  “Are you saying it’s lost?”

  A quick reflexive shrug like a nervous tic. “Our computers show it was sent from Washington, D.C., and received here yesterday, but after that, I cannot say. If you’ll fill out this form, we’ll begin a search throughout our system. If it’s not located, you’re entitled to full replacement value.”

  Damn it! It seemed unlikely to her that the envelope had been lost. More likely it had been stolen. But by whom? And why? Who knew what was inside? Who knew to look? Had Denneen given her up? She could scarcely credit it. Possibly his phone was tapped, unknown to him. In truth, there were too many potential explanations, and none of them changed the basic fact: if it had been stolen, whoever had done it now knew who she was—and why she was here.

  The office of Interpol Argentina is located within the headquarters of the Policía Federal Argentina on Suipacha. Interpol’s man in Buenos Aires was Miguel Antonio Peralta, the Jefe Seccion Operaciónes. A plaque on his door read SUBCOMISARIO DEPARTAMENTO INTERPOL. He was a round-shouldered, bulky man with a large, round head. Strands of black hair matted across the top of his pate advertised his baldness instead of disguising it.

  His wood-veneered office was jammed with tributes to Interpol’s work. Plaques and commemorative plates from grateful police forces around the world crowded the walls, along with crucifixes and diplomas and images of saints and a framed apostolic benediction on his family from the Pope himself. An antique silver-framed sepia photograph of his policeman father was almost as prominent.

  Peralta’s lizard eyes were sleepy behind his perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses. A holstered pistol sat atop his gleaming bare desk, the leather holster old but lovingly cared for. He was genial and flawlessly courteous. “You know we are always eager to help in the cause of justice,” he said.

  “And as my assistant explained, we at CBS find ourselves in a rather competitive situation right now,” Anna said. “The people at Dateline are apparently on the verge of locating and exposing this man. If they reach him first, so be it. But I didn’t get where I am today by being a pushover. I’m working with an Argentine field producer who thinks we can get the story, with a little assistance from you.”

  “In Argentina, football—soccer, I think you say—is our national sport. I gather network TV plays that role in the States.”

  “You could say that.” Anna rewarded him with a wide smile, and crossed her legs. “And I’m not at all putting down my colleagues at Dateline. But we both know what sort of story they’ll do, because it’ll be the same old tune. Argentina as a backward country that harbors these bad, bad people. They’ll do something very exploitative, very cheap. We’re not like that. What we have in mind is much more sophisticated and I think much more accurate. We want to capture the new Argentina. A place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy”—she wiggled a hand vaguely—“and like that.” Another wide smile. “And certainly your efforts would be handsomely compensated with a consultant’s fee. So, Mr. Peralta. Can we work together?”

  Peralta’s smile was thin. “Certainly if you have proof that Josef Strasser is living in Buenos Aires, you must only to tell me. Produce the evidence.” He jabbed the air with a silver Cross pen to emphasize how simple it all was. “That is all.”

  “Mr. Peralta. Someone is going to do this story, whether it’s my team or the competition.” Anna’s smile faded. “The only question is how the story will be done. Whether it’s a story of one of your successes, or one of your failures. Come on, you must have a file of leads on Strasser—some sort of indication that he’s here,” Anna said. “I mean, you don’t doubt he’s living in Buenos Aires, do you?”

  Peralta leaned back in his chair, which squeaked. “Ms. Reyes,” he said, his tone that of a man with a delicious piece of gossip to impart, “a few years ago my office received a credible tip from a woman living in Belgrano, one of our wealthiest suburbs. She had seen Alois Brunner, the SS Hauptsturmführer, on the street, coming out of a neighboring house. Immediately we have a round-the-clock surveillance on this man’s house. Indeed she was correct, the old man’s face matched our file photos of Brunner. We moved in on the gentleman. Indignant, he produced his old German passport, you know, imprinted with the eagles of the Third Reich—and a big J, for Jew. The man’s name was Katz.” Peralta came forward in his chair until he was upright again. “So how do you apologize to a man like this, who had been in the camps?”

  “Yes,” Anna agreed equably, “that must have been terribly embarrassing. But our intelligence on Strasser is solid. Dateline is filming their second-unit footage—background shots—even as we speak. They must be very confident.”

  “Dateline, 60 Minutes, 20/20—I am familiar with these investigative programs. If you people were so very sure Josef Strasser was, as you Americans like to say, alive and living in Argentina, you would have found him long ago, no?” His lizard eyes were fixed on her.

  She could not tell him the truth—that her interest was not in his Nazi past, but in what he may have been involved in when he parted company with his Führer, and joined forces with the invisible architects of the postwar era. “Then where would you suggest I begin looking?”

  “Impossible to answer! If we knew there was a war criminal living here, we would arrest him. But I must tell you, there are no more.” He dropped his pen onto his desk definitively.

  “Really.” She made some meaningless marks on her yellow pad.

  “Times have changed in Argentina. The bad old days, when a Josef Mengele could live openly here, under his own name, they are gone. The days of the Perón dictatorship are over. Now Argentina is a democracy. Josef Schwammberger was extradited. Erich Priebke was extradited. I cannot even recall the last time we arrested a Nazi here.”

  She crossed out her doodle with a slash of her pen. “What about immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the forties and fifties?”

  He frowned. “Maybe there are records of entries, arrivals. The National Registry, the Migrations Department—it is index cards, everything entered by hand. But our coastline is thousands of kilometers long. Who knows how many tugboats and rowboats and fishing trawlers landed decades ago at one of the hundreds of estancias—the ranches—and were never detected? Hundreds of kilometers of coastline in Patagonia, no one is there to see.”

  He again jabbed the air. “And then in 1949, Perón issued a blanket amnesty for anyone who had entered the country under a false name. So it is unlikely there will be any immigration record of Josef Strasser even if he really is here. Maybe you can go down to Bariloche, the ski resort, and ask around. The Germans love Bariloche. It reminds them of their beloved Bavaria. But I would not hold out much hope. I am terribly sorry to disappoint you.”

  Anna Navarro was not gone from Miguel Antonio Peralta’s office two minutes before the Interpol man picked up his telephone. “Mauricio,” he said. “I’ve just had a most interesting visitor.”

  In a modern office building in Vienna, a bland-looking middle-aged man watched without interest as the plasterboard walls that had enclosed a carpeted “reception area” and “conference room” were dismantled and wheeled away toward a freight elevator by a team of construction workers. Next came a Formica conference table, a plain metal desk, and assorted office equipment including a dummy telephone system and a working computer.

  The bespectacled man was an American who for the last decade or so had been engaged to perform a variety of services around the world, the significance of which was invariably obscure to him. He had never even met the company’s chief, had no idea who he was. All he knew was that the mysterious head of the firm was a business associate of this building’s owner, who’d been happy to lend use of the eleventh floor.

  It was like watching a stage set being struck. “Hey,” called out the bespectacled American, “someone’s gotta take down the sign in the lobby. And leave that U.S. seal with me, will ya? We might need it again.”

  New York

  Dr. Walter Reisinger, the former Secretary of State, took the call in the back of his limousine as it inched through morning rush-hour traffic on Manhattan’s East Side.

  Dr. Reisinger disliked the telephone, which was unfortunate, since these days he spent virtually every waking moment on the phone. His international consulting firm, Reisinger Associates, was keeping him even busier than his days at State.

  Secretly he had been afraid that, after retiring from the government and writing his memoirs, he’d be gradually marginalized, treated as an eminence grise, invited to appear on Nightline once in a while, and to write the occasional thumb-sucker for the New York Times Op-Ed page.

  Instead, he had become more famous, and certainly far richer. He found himself globe-hopping more now than during his shuttle-diplomacy days in the Middle East.

  He pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

  “Dr. Reisinger,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “this is Mr. Holland.”

  “Ah, good morning, Mr. Holland,” Reisinger said jovially. The two men chatted for a minute or so, and then Reisinger said, “This shouldn’t be a problem. I have good friends in just about every government in the world—but I think the most direct route would be to go right to Interpol. Do you know its Secretary-General? A most interesting man. Let me give him a call.”

  Patient Eighteen lay on a hospital bed with his eyes closed, an IV feeding tube in his left arm. He was shaking, as he had done constantly since the treatments began. He was also nauseated, and periodically retched into a bedpan placed beside the bed. A nurse and a technician stood watch nearby.