“Are you only going to be traveling through Europe, sister?”

“Good question. We might need to go to the States,” Rafael intervened thoughtfully.

Sarah looked at him, intrigued.

“The United States?”

“All right, old chap. Then I’m going to make one French and the other American. The French one to use in Europe, and the other for across the pond, okay?”

“Great.”

Sarah watched while Hans took two blank passports from the cabinet, one American and the other French.

“Are those real?”

“Why do you think they’re never detected?” Hans replied, as if offended by such an idiotic question.

“Coming here is almost like going to the embassy, with the advantage that you can choose your country and invent a name,” Rafael said. “That, of course, costs more.”

“Quality, my dear fellow,” Hans emphasizd. “You have to pay for quality.”

Rafael’s cell phone rang.

“Hello?… All’s going well… No problem… Where?… We’ve still got to go to one other place, and then we’ll be over there.”

“Who was that?” Sarah asked.

“Now, why is it I’m always explaining everything to you?”

“You’re my hero, old chap,” Hans broke in, admiring Rafael’s response. He used this opportunity to bring the passports over to a special printer. Placing them in what looked to Sarah like a scanner, he closed the top. “Ten seconds, and they’ll be ready, partners.”

Geoffrey Barnes continued talking on the phone. This time, his commanding tone, in English, made it clear he was not talking to a superior. Not on the red phone, with the president of the United States, or on the one he used to talk to the Italian man, but rather on the one reserved for giving orders and controlling his operations. Twenty-seven years of service and a spotless record gained him certain privileges. His work was still his primary passion. Beyond a doubt, one of the great advantages of his position was not having to be out in the field, but to manipulate the pieces as he pleased from an air-conditioned location, without major risks.

He was talking with his chief of operations about the progress and set-backs of the ongoing operation.

“He disappeared?” Barnes couldn’t reveal his jitters to his agents, but this entire operation now seemed like a useless endeavor. The woman vanished while his agents were pursuing her in one of the most frequented squares in London -very surprising. The old man had ordered him to hold back his men while the special cadre neutralized the target. Certainly the failure to do this would have its consequences, and even worse, cast doubt on the surefire reputation of his agents.

“An infiltrator? A double agent?” Holy shit, he thought. “Right, keep on searching. They couldn’t have become invisible.”

He hung up and leaned back in his chair, fingers interlaced behind his head. If they aren’t found, we’re screwed, he thought.

“Sir?” said Staughton, rushing into the office.

“Yes, Staughton.”

“Sir, are we still on hold, or do we have authority to act?”

Barnes considered this briefly, just for a moment, not wanting to appear indecisive. Here, nothing escaped interpretation, even silence.

“At this point we both hold the rod. Let the first one to spot the fish do the fishing.”

“Understood,” Staughton answered. “We intercepted an interesting phone call from the British Museum to the local police.”

With the Jaguar going at a good speed on the way back from the British Museum, Sarah was staring straight ahead, thinking, somewhat annoyed.

“I hope you’re not waiting for me to apologize,” Rafael said, perhaps regretting his offhand comment at Hans’s place. If he was now attempting to soothe her spirits, he hadn’t chosen the best way, since that wasn’t what Sarah wanted to hear.

“You’re wrong,” the young woman responded, glaring at him so intensely that he turned his head back to the road.

“Wrong?”

“I’m not expecting any apology.”

“You’re not?”

“No. What I want is an explanation.”

“I’m already aware of that.”

“You are?”

“Yes. But a forger’s den is not the place to be making plans or revelations.”

“Then you’ll tell me who called?”

“Your father.”

“My father? What did he want?” Her need to know was so intense that it made her angry with herself.

“He wanted to know how things were going.”

“And how are they going?”

“As well as can be expected,” Rafael answered, not taking his eyes off the road.

Sarah, too, was staring silently at the ribbon of asphalt. How could a life get torn to shreds in a matter of hours, or seconds? Yesterday she had a normal existence, and today she didn’t even know if she would live to see tomorrow.

“If the CIA is financing the P2, one could suppose it knew about the plan to kill the pope. Or is that just a reporter’s intuition?”

“It’s a good guess.”

“And why would the CIA want to eliminate the pope?”

“That calls for a very complicated answer.”

“I already see how complicated this is. Give it a try.”

Rafael looked at her for a few seconds, sighed, and went back to focusing on his driving. After a while he spoke.

“If you analyzed the geopolitical map of the world over the past sixty years, you wouldn’t be able to find a single major change that didn’t involve the CIA, and therefore the United States. In all this time there hasn’t been a revolution, a coup d’état, or a massacre in which the CIA didn’t play a part.”

“Give me an example.”

“Take your pick. Salvador Allende in Chile. Killed in a coup d’état directed by Pinochet, who in turn was totally financed by the CIA. Sukarno in Indonesia, unseated because of his relationship with the Communists. The Americans helped the military bring him down, through Suharto. More than a million supposed Communists were killed in a mop-up operation financed by them. In Zaire they put Mobutu in power. In Iran, Operation Ajax brought down the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and returned the shah to the throne. In Saudi Arabia, they rearranged the map according to their whim.”

“And there’s Iraq,” Sarah concluded.

“Yes, but that’s too obvious. The CIA confirmed the existence of weapons of mass destruction. At least they could have put them there, and later pretended to find them. That’s what I would have done.”

“Now they’re getting what they deserve.”

“No. Now innocent people are paying for the colossal errors of organizations that act only for themselves, without the backing of the country’s people. They represent only themselves.”

“We’re all potential victims of terrorism.”

“Terrorism was invented by them. Now they are-and we are-victims of the weapons that they themselves created.”

Sarah was fidgeting in her seat. “So the pope was one more victim.”

“Yes. The P2 needed it and the CIA didn’t care. The same thing happened with Aldo Moro.”

“There’s only one person in the world who the CIA has never managed to neutralize, despite numerous attempts.”

Sarah pricked up her ears.

“His name is Fidel Castro.”