The Holy Assassin

by Luís Miguel Rocha

  ‘You don’t trust anyone, Joseph.’

  ‘I do. I just think we’re being manipulated.’

  ‘That’s what brought us here,’ the Pole added.

  The German cardinal looked at his friend and superior condescendingly. He was right, as usual.

  ‘I understand, Karol,’ Joseph agreed. ‘But it troubles me to see him with more power. It seems we’re giving him full powers. I’m sure with a little more time …’

  ‘I made a promise when I was elected, Joseph. To protect our family,’ he said emphatically. ‘I’m not going to wander from that road,’ he asserted firmly.

  Joseph knew it wasn’t worth contradicting him. Nothing was going to prevent him from keeping the promise. He’d made a commitment to God, and no one in his right mind reneged on an agreement with the Creator.

  ‘Many people write about my actions, as you well know. I cannot take a step without being judged by someone, archived for posterity. When I announced I had pardoned the boy his act, everyone criticized it. “It’s hypocrisy. He’s only saying it to look good. He’s trying to be a saint.” Not for a moment did they think, “Who am I to judge the actions of others?” Not for a moment did they say, “Look, there’s a sincere gesture … As we forgive those who trespass against us.” ’

  Silence spread through the immense papal office. The major decisions of the Catholic world were made here. A simple signature on a sheet of paper with the papal seal had the power to change consciences, begin revolutions or inspire them, alleviate in a small way hunger in the world, poverty, provide shelter for those without homes, protect those whose forefathers rejected them. Here were created priests, bishops, archbishops, monsignors, cardinals, missionaries who carried the name of Christ to every corner of the world, a friendly word, a piece of bread, a glass of drinkable water, a smile accompanied by a kiss of peace. Here what couldn’t be said was omitted, and truth embellished. Only in this way, complex, accustomed to concessions, negotiations, strategic accords, could the Church exist. The pure simplicity associated with the image of Jesus Christ was not possible to implement in the world of men, unless by a superior man, like Christ himself.

  ‘After all they managed to blame on the Turk …’ the German cardinal defended him.

  ‘That’s precisely why I’m doing this. If in fact he was implicated, he won’t suspect our distrust. Later we can investigate at our leisure.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Joseph conceded.

  ‘When possible, I want to talk to the Turk personally.’

  Wojtyla took the pen at the exact moment the door opened and the secretary announced the arrival of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.

  ‘Tell him to come in.’ He turned to the German cardinal. ‘Give me a minute, Joseph, please.’

  Thwarted, Joseph got up from the chair and left the office through a side door, at the same time the American bishop entered.

  ‘Holy Father,’ he greeted him, making a motion to kiss the ring of the Fisherman on Wojtyla’s finger, but the latter didn’t extend his hand.

  ‘Sit down, please.’ He received him seriously. ‘Would you like something?’

  ‘I don’t need anything, thanks,’ he answered with a smile.

  ‘Have you had news from Nestor?’ the Supreme Pontiff asked.

  ‘No. Anyway, we still haven’t finished what he required, Your Holiness.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed misleadingly. ‘Remind me what he asked of us.’

  ‘They’re interested in increasing the investment of IOR in South America and Switzerland,’ Marcinkus explained. He adopted a confidential tone. ‘In reality he’s pressuring me. But I didn’t want to trouble the Holy Father. I’ve made excuses for the preparation of the trip to the United Kingdom, and, at the moment, I’ve managed to keep it apart. But I always live in fear they’ll make an attempt on you again, Your Holiness. It’s a torment.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I appreciate, my good man, all you’ve done to protect me,’ the Pole said. He thought for a few moments.

  ‘You can start investing in South America as you consider best.’

  ‘That couldn’t be better news, Holy Father.’ Marcinkus smiled sincerely. ‘I’ll make intelligent investments that won’t hurt your good name.’

  ‘So I expect. I don’t want another Ambrosiano, Marcinkus,’ he replied firmly. ‘But I haven’t called you for this.’

  ‘No?’ There is more to come? Marcinkus thought.

  ‘No.’ Wojtyla got up and looked out the window. ‘I want to tell you I’m going to name you vice president of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City.’

  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.

  21

  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.
r />   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.

  It was three hours before dawn. Everything was calm. He had established a surveillance perimeter of fifteen hundred yards that he covered personally every two hours. In other times he would have had several men distributed at key points, chosen by him, prepared to give the alarm and neutralize the menace. All of a sudden Kabul, Budapest, Sofia, Ramallah came to mind. Today he was alone, hindered by a bad leg, but no less lethal for all that. He got off the seat of the tractor where he had rested for a few minutes after the fourth round and covered the distance from the barn to the house.

  On top of the table were three plates with leftovers from the meal, half a ham, stuck on the carving board, several glasses, some with wine, others empty but with the reddish bottoms, remnants of an apparent banquet.

  Raul Brandão Monteiro rested on the sofa, covered with a light blanket. He had prepared one of the three bedrooms for the old man, JC, but refused to sleep in his own. His military background didn’t permit comfort at times of crisis. That, and his wife, Elizabeth, had given him a dirty look when she arrived home and learned
the identities and intentions of the illustrious visitors. She blamed Raul for what was going on and she was right, in so far as his past was the reason for this situation. His initiation as a rebellious youth into a Masonic lodge was the cause. The effect: JC was the present Grand Master of that order and had interests that interfered with their lives and their daughter’s … for the second time. She was in danger, and he could do nothing. They were all in danger. This time Elizabeth was not going to forgive him.

  The cripple sat down on a chair next to the wall with the wagon wheel on it surrounded by Alentejan handicrafts. He would rest for an hour, with one eye always open. He wouldn’t let the devil catch him napping, in a manner of speaking, of course, since the saying assumes the devil exists.

  ‘There’s another bedroom available. You can rest there,’ the captain suggested, stretched out on the sofa without opening his eyes. ‘I’ll keep watch.’

  ‘I’m used to this. There’s no need,’ the cripple answered, leaning back on the recliner and shutting his eyes, as well.

  ‘As you like,’ the captain replied. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, nothing more. He forced his knee to flex. It seemed to ache more and more. Some days the pain interfered with his thinking. At least today was not one of them. He’d had to live with this pressing, permanent, implacable problem for almost a year.

  ‘I’m worried,’ the captain confessed with his eyes still closed. It was evident he couldn’t sleep. His daughter never left his thoughts, his daughter and his wife.

  ‘You’re not helping anything with that,’ the other said harshly. ‘You can only hope.’

  ‘She should have spoken with my contact.’ He opened his eyes and sat up with the blanket covering his legs.

  ‘Don’t start talking about that,’ the cripple interrupted. Raul’s mere mention of the contact provoked so much anger he forgot the pain that punished his leg.

  ‘I understand your anger. Believe me, I understand, but this time we’re on the same side,’ Raul tried to explain.