Rafe's end — the man who murdered the warden and sold Sam back to the cartel and pursued the treasure past every point where a person with something to lose would have stopped — left with the two people he used, in the vault, as the clock runs. Nadine's betrayal is the mercenary's honest accounting: Rafe was a client who is now a liability. The business relationship ends when the business turns bad.

The epilogue is the series at its most generous — Nate and Elena and the daughter, the adventure in the DNA rather than the necessity, the treasure hunting as play rather than obsession. The thief's end is not the end. It is the beginning of the normal life that the whole series was the prologue to.