I never thought I’d know a member of the Holy Alliance.”

“The Holy Alliance doesn’t exist,” Rafael answered abruptly.

“It doesn’t exist?”

“No, it’s a myth.”

“Then, what organization do you belong to?” Father James Phelps asked, settling into his seat aboard the Airbus A320.

Rafael turned to look out the small window. From 32,000 feet one could make out the blue of the sky, but everything else was unconnected, blurry, like the doubts of the priest with him. Other times, even with a colleague, especially one in particular, Rafael would have responded with a categorical I am what I am, changing the subject. In this case, with someone on a mission whose outcome was still unknown, he shouldn’t create resentment.

“I’m something else,” he concluded evasively.

The cabin was carrying 139 souls, business class included. They had taken off a little more than an hour ago, which meant they still had ninety more minutes of flight. Food was being served for those who wanted it.

Rafael wasn’t wearing anything that identified him as a member of the Church, while James Phelps was dressed in a sober gray suit with a telltale clerical collar. There’s no shame in wearing clothes that express your belief, whether a cassock or collar, a turban, a chador, a burka, a niqab, a long beard or hat, a star or tattoo, but there are a small number of situations that call for forgoing those elements that might attract undesirable attention. This was one of them.

“As soon as we land it’d be better for you to take off the clerical collar,” Rafael advised. It went without saying the tone of recommendation was no more than that, a tone. James Phelps was intelligent enough to pick that up.

“And later?”

“Later is simple. Follow my instructions.”

“Naturally,” the older man agreed. “I’m not at the age to step into quicksand.”

“You’re already in it, Father. Now it’s necessary not to sink to the bottom.”

“I trust you.” He smiled.

“Better to trust in your God. More certain.”

The Englishman looked distrustfully at him. “Our God, dear friend. And don’t make me more anxious than I already am.”

Phelps remembered the encounter with Rafael in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. He’d come in alone and left twenty minutes later without even stopping long enough to wait for the emissary of the Church of Saint Gregory of Divine Mercy to get up from his red velvet chair. He was still in the process of doing so when he heard a Let’s go coming from the hall Rafael had gone down. Where to? he murmured to himself.

Rafael hadn’t said a word about what went on in those twenty minutes in which he’d disappeared through the enormous door that separates the papal apartments from the rest of the palace. Nor whom he had spoken with. Could it have been the pope himself? Secretary Bertone? Or some other person less mentioned and revered? Rafael was not the kind of person you could ask about something like that, just as Phelps was not the man to ask, for all that he felt tempted and even had the right to, once he had to go along with him. Everyone has his business and his weaknesses, and, if the stories he had heard about Rafael’s past were true, as he believed, he knew what Rafael was capable of doing. Phelps was sure that if Rafael considered it important for him to know the tenor of the conversation or the instructions, he would tell him. Until then he would live in ignorance, following the journey to the unknown through the air at four hundred miles an hour.

“Would you like something to eat?” the flight attendant asked, offering something edible wrapped in plastic, probably a sandwich with some kind of processed meat.

“Yes, thanks,” Rafael answered, letting down the tray on the back of the seat in front of him, one of the ergonomic marvels of aviation, finding space where there was none.

“And you?” the attendant automatically asked James Phelps.

“No thanks. I’m not hungry.” The pleasant man passed his fingers under his clerical collar, with a sensation of discomfort, a sudden pressure, lack of air, his face turning livid. What have I gotten myself into? he thought. “But I’d like a glass of water, please.”

“Of course.” The attendant picked up the bottle and poured it into a glass. “Here you are, sir.”

The priest took the glass and awkwardly set it on the tray, grabbing at his left leg. A pain like a knife stab pierced through his thigh. He controlled himself as much as possible to avoid crying out, suffering, breathing deeply and swallowing his groans, turning them into painful pants of breath.

“Are you all right?” the attendant asked, her hands full of aluminum covers and a glass of orange juice.

“Yes. It’s nothing. It’ll go away, thanks,” he answered, leaning his head back on the seat and shutting his eyes for a few minutes. Small drops of perspiration covered his face.

Rafael, unaffected by his companion’s discomfort, attacked his sandwich, ham with something unidentifiable that didn’t much go with it, not that that was important to him. He bent over his orange juice to drink. Perhaps he was one of those rare human beings who liked airline food.

The menu ended with coffee for Rafael. Phelps, recovered from the sharp pain, asked for another glass of water, which he drank in one gulp.

“You’re making a mistake not eating,” Rafael warned.

“I’m really not hungry,” the Englishman excused himself. “And airline food isn’t very good for you. You really like that?” He pointed at the crumpled-up plastic that a few minutes ago wrapped the sandwich.

“When you have gone days without eating and without knowing when you will eat another decent meal, this will seem like the best food in your life.”

Phelps swallowed saliva. Not so much for the hellish scene suggested, but the coldness of the voice.

“What are we doing?” he asked curiously, nervously. The anguished feeling returned to his lungs. What have I gotten myself into? he thought once again, while he took out the white fastener from the collar of his shirt and opened the first button.

Rafael took his time answering. His thoughtful expression showed he was choosing his words and, at the same time, adding to the English priest’s tension second by second.

“It depends,” he answered at last, opting for subterfuge, but forcing another unequivocal question.

One could see more and more alarm in Phelps’s eyes. Seventy years, adding one or subtracting a couple, spent almost completely in devotion to Christ in study, with everything carefully planned, from a to c, passing over b, with the most detailed schedule possible, no adventures or hungry days. And now this. A trip, the unknown, dark and dangerous, and what most dismayed him, the calm of his companion in the seat beside him, looking out the window into the empty air, after calmly eating. But it was best not to think of that, since everything had started with a visit to the papal apartments and whatever they are going to do had the endorsement of the Vatican, perhaps of the Supreme Pontiff, the great Joseph Ratzinger. At the moment what most tormented him was the sparse reply to his last simple question.

“On what?” he insisted. It was logical that something that depends is subject to variables that can be explained.

“If we arrive on time… or not.”