‘Are you sure it’ll work?’ Jacopo asked.
‘No,’ Rafael answered.
Jacopo sighed. The cold London morning penetrated to his bones. They hadn’t stopped since yesterday. He needed to rest. He’d tried to sleep on the train, but with no success. He wasn’t used to seeing people killed in front of him. Gunter and Maurice were the first, and it wasn’t pleasant. He admired Rafael’s presence of mind. He had helped Gavache with the investigation, answered every question succinctly, as if he had not been present at a tragedy and lost a friend. Probably he’d lost so many in such different ways that one more didn’t matter. Life can make us immune to anything. He shivered at the image of a shot exploding in his own brain. He didn’t want to be Rafael’s next friend to die… one more.
‘I can’t believe I’ll ever get to Rome,’ Jacopo confessed.
‘Tonight you’re going to be sleeping with Norma,’ Rafael asserted.
‘I hope so,’ Jacopo replied, thinking of his wife, whom he normally didn’t have the patience to put up with. Her shrill voice asking him for money to go shopping wasn’t so unpleasant anymore.
‘Did you remember everything?’ Rafael wanted to check.
‘I’m a historian. Of course I remembered everything,’ he joked to lighten the mood.
‘A historian tends to remember things his own way.’
‘Do you think we’ll be successful?’ A serious question.
Rafael didn’t answer.
‘Fighting with Ben Isaac and Jesus Christ,’ the historian said, ‘is not going to be easy.’
‘If it were easy, we wouldn’t be here,’ Rafael replied.
Jacopo had to acknowledge this. The Holy Father would not have sent him just anywhere. The truth was that the Holy Father didn’t know he’d sent him anywhere. Jacopo was too insignificant for the pope even to know his name. The secretary was the one who gave the orders, the mediator between the earth and the god who rested in the Apostolic Palace. Despite not being a believer, Jacopo was the one Tarcisio relied on most to carry out the duties asked of him, evaluating works of art and ancient documents. This work was the reason for his loss of faith. Thousands of parchments, papers, bones, pottery jars, and coins passed through his hands. If a document said one thing, another soon appeared to contradict the first. There was an erroneous understanding of the people who had lived in antiquity. Most imagined them as savages, not very hygienic, who lived short lives, killed one another, and were always at war. This could not be further from the truth. The ancients were as intelligent as modern people. Everything the world was today, for better or for worse, was due to them.
‘Great Russell Street,’ the taxi driver informed them.
‘Okay,’ Rafael said, immediately looking at Jacopo.
‘I’m ready.’
‘That’s good. Don’t forget that not everything is what it seems.’
‘Look who’s talking,’ Jacopo said eagerly. ‘I hope Robin will collaborate. Don’t let them kill him.’
‘That doesn’t depend on me,’ Rafael asserted. ‘You take care of your part, and let him decide how to do his.’
‘Is that how it works?’
‘That’s how you survive.’
35
Not everything is what it seems. Who would guess that a simple London taxi, one of thousands cruising the British capital every day, would be the target of intense surveillance by the CIA?
David Barry remained at his command post, monitoring every detail transmitted on the screens and simultaneously anticipating and providing for every eventuality.
‘Great Russell Street,’ Staughton alerted them.
‘Is the team on the ground?’ Barry asked.
‘Affirmative,’ Aris assured him. ‘Prepared and waiting.’
‘Remember, we’re only going to observe. Any change in the plan must come from me and me alone. I don’t want any extemporizing, understood?’
Aris, Staughton, Davis, and the other technicians answered with an okay, so there would be no doubt.
Samantha burst into the control center at precisely that moment. Barry looked at her.
‘What do you have for me?’
Samantha made a brief report on each of the victims and their professional and personal background. Barry listened carefully while keeping his eyes on the monitors.
‘Jesuits?’ Barry commented when Samantha was through reporting. ‘What’s the common denominator?’
‘All worked for the Vatican, but at different times,’ Sam informed him.
‘Is that all?’ Barry didn’t want anything to escape him.
‘Apparently so. I’m still checking on what they did for the Holy See. They could have even been working on the same project at different times,’ she replied.
‘Well done,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘Do we have the museum cameras?’
‘They’re with me,’ Davis said.
‘Staughton, man the satellite. We’re going to depend on it for the first few yards.’
‘It’s secure. No one will get away,’ the technician assured him.
‘Stand by, folks,’ Barry alerted them.
The taxi entered Gower Street and then turned to the left at Great Russell Street, where the museum appeared on the right. The taxi pulled over. For a few moments nothing happened, but then two passengers got out into the cold.
‘They’re with you, Staughton.’
The technician, so used to these situations, handled the joystick calmly. The image focused to show the two men crossing the street and entering the gates of the museum, which at that hour already had thousands of visitors. It was a great archive of human history, with thousands of objects from every continent, the most remote locations, and the most ancient civilizations.
The Ionic columns stood imposingly at its entrance, marking a separation between two worlds, the frenetic, modern one and the dead past.
‘Alert the agents on the ground,’ Barry ordered.
Aris communicated with his men.
‘Don’t be careless. I don’t want them to detect us,’ the director said.
‘They’re going into the building,’ Staughton said. ‘Now it’s up to you, Davis.’
The cameras of the Great Court, an enormous dome with windows, became the eyes of the control center. Various angles of the Great Court appeared on the central monitor.
‘There they are,’ Davis said.
‘Where can they be going?’ Barry asked.
Staughton superimposed a map of the museum on his monitor, defined the specified location, and designated the possible exits.
‘There are several possibilities,’ Staughton said. ‘They could go into the Reading Room, the circular library in the middle of the Great Court that only has one entrance and one exit. To the right they could go to the King’s Library, left to the ancient Egypt room, or straight ahead to the Wellcome Trust Gallery. Each location connects with other rooms.’
‘We have the Great Court well covered with cameras, so it’s better to place the agents at the exits. We don’t want to lose them,’ Barry ordered. ‘What are they doing there?’ he was asking himself more than the others. ‘What’s your plan, Rafael?’
‘It’s a good place for a meeting,’ Aris suggested. ‘You have to admit it.’
Barry said nothing but silently agreed.
The images continued to show the two men, the dark one and the white-haired man.
‘Define the image more, Davis,’ the director asked.
