Marcinkus looked at him incredulously.

“You honor me greatly, Holy Father. I’m speechless.”

“You’ll have more responsibilities, but I’m sure you’ll manage them.”

“Thank you, Your Holiness.” Marcinkus was truly surprised.

Minutes later, alone, Wojtyla sat down in his chair again and signed the sheet of paper with the seal.

The dark Mercedes van traveled down the E19/A1 expressway at great speed. Greater than the maximum of sixty miles an hour. Few drivers complied with the speed limit, and this Mercedes was no exception. It was traveling at ninety miles an hour, passing the rest of the vehicles using less gas.

“Do we need to go so fast?” James Phelps asked with a pale, uncomfortable look from the passenger seat.

“Time’s a-wasting, my friend,” Rafael answered without taking his eyes off the road. “We have two hundred miles to go and four hours to do it in.”

“Where are we going now?”

“You’ll soon see.”

It’d been like this since they left Rome by plane, and now this black Mercedes van.

The sparse information provided by Rafael in only small, ambiguous portions, without going into detail deeply, or at all, affected the mood of James Phelps, always so calm and circumspect. His displeasure seemed out of place.

As soon as they’d landed, Rafael ordered him to wait for him right there in the airport terminal.

“Don’t contact anyone, don’t talk to anyone, unless someone talks to you. If they ask, say you’re waiting for a family member to pick you up.”

“Who’s going to talk to me?” Phelps asked, astonished.

“I don’t know. I’m only giving you these instructions as a precaution. You never know,” Rafael explained calmly. “Take the opportunity to get something to eat. Two hours from now go to the door for arrivals and wait for me,” he concluded, walking away through the crowd.

“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.