Daniel Silva · 2004 · thriller
Daniel Silva's 2004 novel. When a bombing at a Vienna Holocaust-claims office nearly kills his old friend Eli Lavon, Gabriel Allon leaves his Bellini in Venice to investigate - and finds the trail leads to Erich Radek, an SS monster who scarred his own family. From Vienna to the Nazi bolt-holes of Argentina, Allon hunts the old war criminal to drag him at last to justice in Israel.
- 1Venice
Restoring a Bellini altarpiece in Venice, Gabriel Allon is called away when a bomb at Vienna's Wartime Claims and Inquiries office leaves his old friend Eli Lavon near death, and Ari Shamron asks him to find who did it.
- 2Vienna
In Vienna, the poisoned city where his own family was destroyed, Allon uncovers the SS officer Erich Radek - now a wealthy industrialist named Ludwig Vogel - the sadist who had sent Allon's mother on a death march decades before.
- 3Bariloche
To prove Vogel is Radek, Allon follows the old ratline to Argentina, into the mountain refuges of Bariloche where fugitive Nazis vanished after the war under new names and papers bought with looted gold.
- 4Israel
His identity established, Radek is seized in Vienna and spirited across Europe to Israel to stand trial at last - one more old monster dragged out of comfortable shadows to answer for the dead.