“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.”