Forty minutes after the shuttle landed, a black government vehicle pulled up outside a house in Colonia Del Valle.
The driver stayed behind the wheel. The liaison — a man from the Foreign Affairs Ministry named Castillo, whose briefing notes described his secondary function in careful bureaucratic language — walked to the front door and knocked.
A woman in her late fifties answered. Behind her, an adult son stood with two packed bags at his feet. Further inside, visible through the hallway, a man was seated in a chair near the window. He was looking toward the door but his head had the stillness of someone whose body no longer moved the way it once had.
Castillo introduced himself. The woman looked at him, then past him at the vehicle outside.
"They sent a car," she said.
"Yes," Castillo said.
She looked back at her husband, then at her son, then at the bags.
"We have been ready since yesterday," she said.
Castillo nodded. "Then we can go now, if you'd like."
