‘What are you doing?’ Simon cried. ‘Are you crazy?’ He pressed the button for the floor they’d just left. ‘Fuck. How could you do something like that? You can’t suspect everyone in this way.’ He was completely beside himself.
‘Shut up, Simon,’ Sarah ordered firmly. ‘This bottle.’ She shook the neck that remained in her hand, as a defensive weapon, lacking something better. ‘When this was a bottle, it was in my house. Do you remember where I told you to look for the file?’
Simon managed to think with difficulty. He remembered her instructions. To get a file that was behind a bottle of vintage port.
‘And?’ he questioned. ‘Is it the only one? Aren’t there more in the store?’
‘The box was intact in what remained of my house. The bottle was not inside it. Can I make things any clearer?’
Tears returned to Simon’s eyes.
‘It can’t be. It can’t be. He must have an explanation.’ He saw his life falling apart in front of him. ‘It must be a coincidence.’ He grasped at this hope. There were other bottles of vintage ’76 port. It was a present from Hugh, nothing else, without all these complications. He remembered Hugh’s shape at precisely the moment he lost consciousness in Redcliff Gardens. It could be a confused vision, a hallucination, a trick of the mind that made him see his lover just then.
‘I’m sorry, Simon. He’s probably not even named Hugh. I’m very sorry.’
The elevator reached the floor, and the doors opened. Waiting for them was Simon Templar.
‘I’m glad I found you,’ Sarah said, panting. ‘They’ve killed your partner and they’re after us.’
Sarah helped Simon leave the elevator, and they walked toward the exit, sixty feet away. Except for Templar, no one was in sight.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Templar asked in a roguish way.
Sarah kept dragging Simon Lloyd toward the doors to the outside. They heard an electronic sound similar to a walkie-talkie. Sarah quickened their pace, pulling a groggy Simon.
‘James, you are truly stupid,’ they heard Simon Templar say over the radio.
A hiss passed the ears of Simon and Sarah and shattered the marble floor, raising dust and stone. A shot with a silencer. Sarah looked back and saw Templar, gun in hand, aiming at them. Simon seemed not to care, but Sarah felt panic and frustration. A gun pointed at her again a year afterward.
‘The next one’s in the head,’ Templar warned, putting the radio to his mouth again. ‘James, come down. I’ve got them.’
33
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Are you telling me that we’re running around pursuing a dead man?’ Father Phelps expressed disbelief. ‘I went to His Holiness’s funeral two years ago.’
‘Me too, along with more than four million other mourners.’
‘Less than a month ago I visited the Crypt of the Popes and prayed in front of his tomb. Peace for his holy soul.’ He ignored Rafael’s observation.
‘Some people don’t die.’
‘Sure, historically, intellectually, culturally. Caesar, Emperor of Rome, will never die, Henry the Eighth, Christopher Columbus…’
‘John Paul the Second,’ Rafael completed the list. He concentrated on the few miles remaining on the M20 to the outskirts of London.
‘John Paul the Second,’ Phelps admitted. ‘Then we’re on the trail of his legacy.’
Rafael turned toward Phelps and looked at him gravely before immediately returning his eyes to the motorway and the red lights from the vehicles in front of them heading for the frenzy of the capital, neither confirming nor denying Phelps’s conjecture. All in due course.
Although Phelps was driven by morbid curiosity about Rafael’s orders from Benedict XVI, sleep began to overcome him. He’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and the movement of the van and engine noise began to sound like a cat purring. He closed his eyelids against his will.
When he noticed Rafael change direction, he opened his eyes.
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Rafael answered. He was looking at the side mirror. ‘Someone’s following us.’
‘Seriously?’ A lump formed in Phelps’s throat, dispersing sleep completely. ‘We’re being followed by someone?’
Rafael accelerated the van in the direction of a secondary road. Phelps bent his head to look in the side mirror at the white lights shining at the van. His heart pumped blood faster through his body. His breathing tightened.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked fearfully, without taking his eyes from the mirror.
‘Absolutely.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Rafael said. ‘Keep going.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘A little farther and we’ll know.’
Phelps undid the top button of his shirt, suspicious, distressed.
‘I’m not feeling well,’ he announced. ‘Rapid heartbeat.’
‘It’s nerves,’ Rafael said. His attention was on the road and the car following them, without any sign of worry.
‘You… you’re not scared?’ Phelps asked with his mouth crying out for something wet to placate his thirst.
‘Afraid of what?’
Rafael insisted on not looking at him and assumed an insensitive tone highly discomforting to Phelps.
‘Of them.’ He pointed behind them.
‘No,’ Rafael replied dryly.
Phelps looked at the side mirror again, estimating the distance that seemed to have shortened more each time he looked, according to his eyes, not very trustworthy at this hour.
He wanted to ask more questions, but Rafael’s expression wasn’t encouraging. Best to wait to see if this passed; let’s hope it did with God’s help.
These doubts disappeared when Phelps saw the lights of the pursuing car almost bumping the van, leaving him worried and full of panic. The speed of the two vehicles wasn’t fast, less than fifty miles an hour, and every time he looked at Rafael, he didn’t seem willing to go faster.
‘Don’t you think we should speed up?’ he asked at last in a voice heavy with fear.
‘There’s no danger.’
‘No?’
‘No. Whoever’s watching isn’t going to let us see him.’
‘Are you saying they aren’t following us?’
The vehicle behind signaled the van with its lights. Phelps understood less and less what was happening. And still less when Rafael came to a complete stop.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Stopping.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘No.’ Rafael unfastened his seat belt and opened the door. ‘Stay here.’
Phelps wanted to protest, but Rafael closed the door, leaving him stamping his foot. He used the side mirrors to try to see what was happening. The lights of the other car were turned off, and he saw two men getting out and approaching Rafael, who waited for them calmly, leaning on the back of the Mercedes. They shook hands, which was a relief. Bad guys didn’t greet their future victims. If it wasn’t a trick. Rafael talked to the two men for a few moments. A little later one of them gave him an object Phelps couldn’t identify. Rafael turned to come back, and the Englishman managed to hear the men saying good-bye with an ‘ A bientot. ’ Strange.
Rafael climbed into his seat, started the engine, and took to the road again without offering one word of explanation.
The silence was deafening, which infuriated Phelps. Who did Rafael think he was? Someone incapable of showing the least sign of confidence in him. He was a worthy inheritor of the tricks and intrigues of the Vatican. He would make an excellent member of the Curia and had everything necessary to become one. He always kept the best to himself and deliberately weighed his words. He created an advantage over others that confounded allies and enemies, like a puzzle in which he alone knew the position of each piece in the total shape.
‘So it turns out no one was following us,’ Phelps said, keeping his eyes on the road. An insult to his dignity as a man and a prelate that he didn’t care to call attention to.
‘I never said they were following us,’ Rafael explained. ‘I said that someone was coming behind us.’