The Last Pope

by Luís Miguel Rocha

  “I need you to make a passport for this lady.”

  “For this lady. I like your elegant words, my friend.”

  The young man took a camera and grabbed Sarah by the arm.

  “Stand there.”

  It was a wall prepared for making ID photos, with a neutral blue background.

  “Don’t smile.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t smile. For passport photos you don’t need to smile.”

  “Right.”

  Sarah turned serious, perhaps too serious, while Rafael inspected a wall covered with photographs.

  “Who are all these people?”

  “All the chaps who’ve passed through here.”

  “You’ve got quite a sizable clientele.”

  “No complaints.” He connected the camera to a computer and began his work. “Do you have a particular country in mind, or a name that you especially like?”

  Sarah was embarrassed. She hadn’t thought about this.

  “Sharon Stone,” Rafael answered.

  “I like that name, old chap. I think I might even know someone by that name.”

  “As for the country, anything in the Schöningen region.”

  “Okay, man. Do you have five thousand?”

  Sarah went back to Rafael.

  “Did you know this character?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I didn’t. I know somebody who knew him.”

  “Anyone would think you were friends for years.”

  “Well, we aren’t.”

  Hans continued working on the passport on his computer, typing and retouching the photo he’d just taken. Then he stood up and opened a cabinet. Reflecting for a few moments, he picked out several blank passports of different countries.

  “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.”

  27

  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.”

  28

  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, Operati
on 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.”

  29

  It was well established that Geoffrey Barnes generally moved the pieces out in the field from his office on the third floor of a building in central London. But a telephone call from a certain house in Rome, more precisely on Via Veneto, made him get his butt out of his chair considerably faster than usual. Actually he climbed into one of the agency cars, accompanied by three other vehicles, in order to meet with the agents who were already posted around the critical area.

  “I’m leaving now,” the voice told him, “and I want this solved before I get there. See to it personally, or you won’t sit in that chair again. Get moving.”

  Very few people could talk that way to him. Those who did had so much power that Barnes had no means to counter them. He confined himself to nodding, or to murmuring “Yes, sir,” in order to clarify his compliance with whatever the order was.

  “You have carte blanche,” were the farewell words. He was authorized to do whatever seemed most effective, to move the pieces however he saw fit, in order to achieve checkmate posthaste.

  That explained how Geoffrey Barnes found himself in the backseat of a powerful car, his service weapon in its holster, watching the lights outside. “How could an infiltrator reach such a high level?”

  This is going to end badly, he thought. Then he attempted to banish the evil spirits. What needed to be done would be done. Neither a woman nor a double agent, no matter how dangerous the latter might be, would cause him to fail before his superiors. This certainly was going to end badly for the target, known as Sarah Monteiro, and just as badly for her savior. Damn you. How could you dare do something like this? he lamented in silence. Taking his radio transmitter, he leaned forward in the backseat. They were already approaching their destination, and this time it was necessary to manage the pieces correctly, including his own position.

  “Stop the cars a good distance back. We mustn’t reveal our presence. Over.”

  “Roger, over,” came back through the device.

  30

  The subject was sitting in a black van, in the middle of Sixth Avenue in New York. He always answered when his cell phone rang, since it could be from the man who was calling now, and that caller could never be kept waiting. Once again the conversation unfolded in Italian, though it couldn’t exactly be called a dialogue, since the man in the dark overcoat restricted himself to occasional interjections and assents, listening, acutely tuned to the message—its order, its information, and its news.

  The capacity for synthesis was an intrinsic quality of the speaker, who in a matter of seconds parceled out all the information, making it perfectly comprehensible, leaving not even the slightest doubt on the listener’s end. The one who listened considered him a lion, someone born to dominate men. Though he would like to see the man in person, just thinking about him made his hair stand on end. Not many other people could achieve that effect.

  He hung up the phone, infused with a kind of ecstasy, as if he had just finished speaking with God. But he immediately pulled back to his usual bearing, not wanting his associates—in this case, the driver of the van—to catch him so awestruck.

  “Any news?” The driver had tremendous respect for the Master, with whom he had never spoken. His respect escalated to fear when he observed, sitting beside him, the incredible reverence that his superior, a man of few feelings, showed toward him. “Any news?” he repeated.

  “Things have gone badly again in London.”

  “Is it so difficult to kill that wretched woman? Even with the help of the CIA?”

  “We had an infiltrator.”

  “Who? One of our own, in the Guard?”

  The man in the overcoat didn’t answer right away. He watched the moving traffic of the city that never sleeps, the neon lights flashing their advertisements, their invitations to consume. It was all for money. Also working for money were the doormen guarding the entrance of a building. Even the sack of Rome was paid for, as was the elimination of Father Pablo in Argentina. Ideals did not fill anyone’s stomach. Nothing was done for free.

  “Jack,” he finally replied.

  “Jack? Are you sure?”

  “He fled with her. He didn’t come back, and he killed Sevchenko.”

  “The driver?”

  He just nodded.

  “Goddamn bastard,” the man at the wheel cursed.

  “Jack. Who would have thought it? This complicates things a great deal.”

  “Indeed. So much so that the Master’s coming over.”

  31

  We’d like to speak with Professor Margulies,” the man told the watchman at the guard station beside the giant doors of the British Museum.

  “Professor Margulies is busy. Who would like to see him?”

  “We’re the police, and we received a call—”

  “Oh, yes. I called you. Go on in.” Proud, self-satisfied, he opened the entrance for the man with the tie and the five people who were with him. “You’ve come fast. I only called ten minutes ago. Why aren’t you in uniform?”

  “We’re not uniformed police,” the fattest one answered, showing his badge with a quick gesture, but sufficient to satisfy the gum-chewing watchman. “We know that two individuals we’re seeking have been here, two suspects.”

  “That’s why I called,” said the watchman. “I mean, as for the man, I don’t know if he’s a criminal—it’s not the first time he’s been here. But the woman, definitely. I recognized her the minute I saw her, from the telly news on the local station. She’s the Portuguese woman who killed that guy.”

  “When you called, you said they were looking for a Professor Margulies, right?”

  “That’s right. One of the main conservators of the museum.”

  “Do you know why they were looking for him?” It was the fat one asking all the questions.

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “Fine. Can you take us to his office?”

  “But of course. Follow me.”

  They went ahead, the six moving in single file, with the guard in front, the fat man behind him, and then the rest. They walked until they got to the spot where they would find Joseph Margulies, engrossed in his cryptographic pursuits. The guard’s proud smile expressed his satisfaction. To have called the authorities, at the number listed at the bottom of his television monitor, was a good deed for him.

  “The Metropolitan Police requests anyone who sees the person shown in the photo to call 0202 . . .” They were looking for a young female reporter as witness to a shooting. The woman had such an angelic face that the image had stayed with him. He couldn’t have expected to actually see her a short time later. It totally astonished him. Nevertheless, he didn’t rush things. At first he even feared for Dr. Margulies’s safety. So he decided
to keep an eye on them. A short while later he saw them leave. Damn it, he scolded himself. Missed my chance. Afterward he went to see the director, to find out what they were up to. The professor had a serious expression, amid his books, absorbed in his thoughts.

  “Is everything all right, Professor Margulies?”

  “Fine, Dobins.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No, you can return to your station. I’m just looking at some things for a friend,” Margulies answered, his eyes still on the books and a sheet of paper. “They’ll be returning in a little while, so you can let them back in.”

  Music to his ears. The suspect was coming back. It was his chance. He was going to have his fifteen minutes of fame. He already pictured himself being interviewed by all the television networks. Maybe his superiors would reward him with a raise and all.

  That was how he made the phone call to the Metropolitan Police that was intercepted by the men looking for Sarah.

  Eagerly attending to his duties, the watchman stopped in front of the door to the room where they could meet Joseph Margulies.

  “His office is right in here.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, the fat man pointed his gun with a silencer at the watchman and shot twice.

  “Take him away,” he ordered. Then he opened the door and entered the room. “Professor Margulies? I’m Geoffrey Barnes.”

  32

  All was peaceful around the British Museum. Rafael parked in the same spot he had used the first time. They retraced their steps along Great Russell Street, up to the doors. There was no one at the guard station, so they rang the bell and waited.

  Sarah was immersed in her thoughts. Rafael could easily sense she was still caught up in their recent conversation.

  Finally a watchman appeared, a bald man who came running out of the building.

  “Yes?”

  “Professor Margulies is expecting us,” Rafael confirmed.

  The man looked at them for a few moments, his gaze icy.

  “Please go in.”