‘Wait. Are you going to be so long?’ James Phelps asked, but Rafael didn’t hear him, losing himself among the crowd of just-arrived passengers and reunited families in the arrival area.
Phelps strolled through the terminal for several minutes with a worried look on his face. He didn’t want to eat anything, despite the advice, and, after an hour, bought The Times at a news kiosk. He looked it over carefully since he had nowhere to go in the next hour and nothing else to do. Night had fallen and the display screens spread through the terminal showed eight o’clock at night. He tried but couldn’t concentrate on reading. To think that in the morning everything had been fine, calm, organized, and a few hours later… If he at least knew what had been said in the papal apartment… it would probably lessen his anxiety. He’s very intelligent, he thought. With so many vultures surrounding him, this was the only way to manage all this without going crazy. Meetings behind closed doors, secret encounters. He is a brave man, a brave man, he reflected while trying to read the paper. Assuming it was he Rafael had talked with, of course, he continued speculating. That has to be it.
He pursued these frenzied thoughts to fill up the wasted time without paying much attention to what he was reading. He glanced at the page, reading the headlines, until stopping on a story that caught his attention, for whatever reason something grabs our attention or doesn’t.
An English couple murdered in Amsterdam.
An English couple had been found dead in one of the bathrooms at the central station in Amsterdam. According to the few details given by the authorities, it seemed to involve some sort of execution, since both had been killed with a single shot to the head. Their identities had not yet been released by the Dutch authorities, who had joined forces with Scotland Yard to investigate the causes.
Lives mown down without pity. Someone had to gain from this, certainly, but was it worth the price? What would something taste like bought with human lives? Probably it would be tasted without caring, without considering the method used; otherwise no one would do it.
Two hours had passed, and James Phelps, always keeping his commitments, even those he had not made himself, showed up outside the terminal arrival doors to wait for the strange-acting Rafael. Five minutes passed before a black Mercedes van honked at him. At first he didn’t pay attention, but when the automatic window on the passenger side rolled down and he saw Rafael in the driver’s seat, he realized the beep was for him.
‘What’s this?’ was his first reaction.
‘A van,’ Rafael replied.
It took them around an hour and about sixty miles from the airport to the E19/A1 expressway. They had, as Rafael informed him, two hundred miles to get to a destination only Rafael knew.
‘I don’t like traveling at night,’ Phelps complained petulantly.
‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.’
A little quick braking, harder than normal, but not too hard, caused a bang against the separator between the trunk and passenger compartment. Something had bumped against the metal divider.
‘Are we carrying something in back?’ Phelps asked curiously. He looked through the small window of the divider, but could see only darkness in the back of the van.
‘It must be the jack or spare tire rattling around back there,’ Rafael answered, watching the road.
But Phelps wasn’t convinced. What had struck back there was something larger and more solid than a jack or a spare tire. There was something mysterious back there… or maybe not.
A few miles farther on Rafael interrupted the silence to let Phelps know he was going to stop at the next service area. Looking closely at the exit signs before Rafael made the signal to turn right into the rest area, Phelps saw a sign that said eight miles to Antwerp. What were they doing in Belgium? And where were they going? He must find that out as quickly as possible. He couldn’t continue being a puppet. Besides, he had his whole life on hold. He was no secret agent, no spy in the service of the pope. That was Rafael’s role. He was assigned to the Holy See to serve, he believed, the faithful as best he could as a pastor and guide, not an active agent of the Holy Alliance, or whatever the Vatican secret services were called. Active in the sense of being there because, if anyone asked him what he was doing, he would not know how to answer, since he didn’t have the slightest idea. He was discombobulated, out of place, and hated not being in control of things. They could take everything from him, except that. He needed to have the idea that everything was going as planned and organized, without danger and the unknown. Not like this.
As soon as they came to a stop, Rafael got out of the car and started filling the tank. A few moments later he knocked on the window of Phelps’s door. Phelps lowered it.
‘It’s filling. I’m going to the men’s room.’
‘All right,’ Phelps replied.
One, two, three, four, five seconds, the time he estimated for Rafael to take going into the station and disappearing into the restroom. Phelps left the van and went to the driver’s side to reach the switch to open the trunk. It confirmed his suspicions. It was not a spare tire, much less a jack.
‘Damn,’ he cursed furiously. ‘It can’t be. It can’t be,’ he kept repeating. ‘This is-’
‘Father, control yourself.’ He heard Rafael’s voice from behind him.
‘What is this?’ Phelps asked, startled and indignant. ‘Is it what I think it is?’
‘It can’t be anything else, can it?’
‘Enough secrets. I want to know everything.’ His voice changed. Phelps was truly angry. ‘First you leave me waiting two hours in Schiphol, then you appear in this van with no explanation. Now we are in the middle of Belgium, and I see this. Two coffins?’
‘Correct, my friend,’ Rafael admitted impassively.
‘What’s going on?’ He was furious. ‘Are there people inside?’
‘Of course,’ the other answered. He climbed into the van and opened the two caskets. A woman was laid in the one on the right, a man on the left.
Phelps remembered the story he had read in the paper a few hours earlier. ‘English Couple Murdered in Amsterdam.’ This was no coincidence. He couldn’t say for sure this was the same couple, but it was highly probable, confirmed by the holes in their foreheads. This is not okay, he thought. He noticed the agonizing pain in his left leg had returned. He touched the spot in the middle of his thigh. These were the signs of age in his body, attacking by chance without compassion or pity. In health and sickness we are all the same; no matter what treatments we receive, no matter how healthy we are, time and chance will put an end to everything and everyone. The pain made him almost double over and moan, but he managed to control himself. A few more moments and the pain went away completely.
‘You ought to go and have that leg looked at,’ Rafael advised without displaying any kind of compassion. A neutral tone completely out of place in someone watching someone suffer like Phelps.
‘It’s nothing,’ the other replied. ‘Who are they?’ he asked in a weak voice, looking at the cadavers. The pallor of the corpses extended to his own face. He used a handkerchief to wipe away the drops of cold sweat that pearled his face.
‘They are the bait,’ Rafael answered, looking at him seriously.
22
Nights were the worst part of the day, when he was on a high state of alert, like today. The sky was filled with stars, though, a scene he had rarely enjoyed, having been born and raised in a big city, with high buildings, many cars, people, competition, and little time to admire the sky day or night. This would be a magnificent view if he were susceptible to the majesty of the universe. He was preoccupied with the pain in his left leg that acted up on dry nights. The pain didn’t bring climatological or esoteric foresight, it just hurt… nothing more. But someone had to make the rounds, watch over the property, although it was highly improbable their enemies knew where they were, and, even if they knew, it wouldn’t be easy to find them on that mountain in the middle of nowhere. Beja in Alentejo, the heart of the Portuguese plains, a little more than forty miles from the Spanish border. His Prada shoes were full of dust. Not the right shoes for this terrain. His Armani suit wasn’t right, either, but if it had been raining, it would be much worse. The sound of rain would make it impossible to hear someone approaching, to say nothing of mud getting in his shoes. The dust was better.