Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

The glory awaiting Cassius Gallio will be greater if he finds Jesus and Jesus is alive. Eating food, sleeping in beds, hurting when he realises how many lives he has ruined. Looking round the emptied Babylon studio-room Gallio is suddenly convinced that Jesus is involved in this murder. This realisation is uncomfortable, almost unthinkable, but he follows his speculation through and checks once more in the obvious place, under the bed. Lies there on his stomach, his cheek against the grain of the floorboards. Lies there some more. The secret is knowing how to look.

ANTIOCH, SCHIPHOL, BABYLON, Schiphol, Jerusalem.

They feel like seasoned travellers, hand baggage only. At Ben Gurion Cassius Gallio deactivates flight mode, and as soon as his CCU phone picks up a signal, between the gate and Passport Control, there’s a text from Valeria. Code Yellow, it says. Code Yellow requires immediate attendance at the Antonia Fortress. All the same, this is Israel, now as always. Baruch with his Israeli passport is waved through Customs. As a foreigner Gallio waits in line, and has to explain his lack of baggage.

The Antonia case room, when Gallio eventually gets there, has evolved in the short time they’ve been away. More computers, more desks pushed together, exploded dossiers, done takeout coffee and an empty pastries box. Several of the screens have switched to their savers — free-form shapes that bounce from edge to edge, waiting out the hole caused by Valeria’s displeasure.

‘What?’ Gallio is unnerved by the silence, and also by the five or six officers he hasn’t seen before. Crossed arms, all of them, never a good sign in a case room. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. It wasn’t my fault.’

Philip the disciple of Jesus is dead. Code Yellow. James, then Thomas in Babylon, now Philip. Four disciples down, and Gallio with his feet barely beneath the desk. He feels like it’s next to no time since Valeria called him back.

‘We were investigating the murder of Thomas in Babylon,’ Gallio says. ‘Philip wasn’t on our radar. Which one’s Philip?’

‘You should have assessed the risk,’ Valeria says. ‘You could have identified the pattern before we had it confirmed. Someone out there is killing disciples.’

‘Is it a pattern, though?’

‘You must have missed something.’

Changes are under way in the case room. A man from the works department power-drills the wall, making it ready for a big whiteboard fresh from Supplies. A graduate trainee rearranges pins on the wall-map. In Jerusalem and in Babylon, she replaces the pins with an adhesive black disc, one each for the dead disciples James and Thomas. For Philip, at the south-west corner of Turkey, the disc is brown until Philip’s identity can be confirmed by Baruch and Cassius Gallio, the only two operatives on station with personal knowledge of Jesus.

At a new desk in the corner, a young woman in an Italian sweater wears a landline headset, nods at whatever she’s hearing and types rapid notes into her computer.

‘Everyone should calm down,’ Baruch says. ‘Whoever killed Philip can’t be the same perp who stoned and speared Thomas.’ Baruch has recovered from the flying, though lack of sleep makes him irritable, a man back from a long journey with a home to go to. At the same time, assassination and killing is his business, so he’s not planning on leaving this discussion to amateurs.

‘We need the details,’ he says. ‘How did they kill him?’

‘Nastily. So no reason it couldn’t be the same killer.’ Valeria is captain of crossed arms, of hands on hips, not in a sunny mood. ‘We call it the miracle of flight. If you can catch a plane from Babylon to here, an assassin could fly from Babylon to Hierapolis in Turkey in the same time period. We’ve checked the timetables, and don’t forget the killer had a head start. Thomas was dead when you arrived.’

‘Could be a coincidence, like Baruch says.’ Gallio makes eye contact with his surprise ally, his partner Baruch. ‘We need more to go on than possibility.’

On the plane Gallio had slept like a baby, thousands of feet above the earth, and he feels calm and reasonable because Code Yellow is not so high a security level. Code Yellow: Elevated. Two clear stages below Severe. ‘The disciples of Jesus make themselves unpopular pretty much wherever they go. James, Thomas, Philip. Common sense catches up with them and they’re due a losing streak, which happens to have started now.’

Gallio helps himself to the last of the filter coffee, avoiding Valeria’s glare. In Speculator training, coincidence is a forbidden word, and his fearlessness surprises her. Unstable, she’ll think. Not all there, as befits a career that began with a view of the Colosseum and was finishing in Germanic Lowlands.

‘Coincidences do happen.’ Gallio swallows some coffee, and wishes he hadn’t. ‘Luck, bad luck, inexplicable sequences of events. We’d make sensational mistakes if we assumed everything had to be connected.’

Too much. Valeria points her finger, like Pilate once had, then changes her mind about putting him right. He knows, and doesn’t need to be told. A Speculator is tasked with making connections, exactly that, with finding the pattern and meaning in disparate events. Jesus has defeated their attempt once, by faking his death then claiming to come back to life. This time Valeria will not be deterred from being too clever. Every connection has to be made, to stop Jesus from outsmarting them again.

‘Cassius is right,’ Baruch says. ‘There don’t have to be connections between these deaths. The beheading of James was an accident. I was involved with locking James up and we didn’t mean him to die, but it happened.’ He frowns, hoping someone was punished, and if he ever gets a moment he’ll check. ‘Then Cassius tracks down a couple of Galilean immigrants in cities far apart, first Jude in Beirut, next Thomas in Babylon. You’ve seen how the disciples dress, making no attempt to assimilate. They exist outside the mainstream, with no record of gainful employment, which suggests they’re involved in unlawful activity. That’s enough probable cause to explain why Thomas and Philip can get unlucky in similar ways, thousands of miles apart.’

Valeria paces. ‘The case has been upgraded,’ she says. ‘We’ve moved to Elevated, Yellow. The bad news is you shouldn’t plan any days off. The good news is we can access more resources. I’ve sent those glass samples to Forensics, for example, and the two of you are getting some help.’

The young woman in the corner is back on the phone and has a pad and pencil in her hands. She looks clever, Gallio thinks. Attractive, but mostly clever. Cassius Gallio wanders towards her desk and looks over her shoulder. She manages a grimace and a raised finger, then listens hard while shading abstract shapes in her pad. A hexagon, almost perfect; could mean anything.

What will be will be. Valeria has made up her mind and on one of the days that follows, whether they like it or not, Cassius and Baruch will fly on an early-hours charter to Denizli-Cardak airport in western Turkey. As their cover, they will be carrying advance tickets for a Bible Lands coach tour to Hierapolis and Pamukkale. Gallio will dress to blend in: hybrid walking shoes, cargo-style trousers, a fleece. Baruch makes fewer concessions, and will stay what he is in his suit.

On the coach Baruch will refuse to sit with Gallio because during their flight Gallio said ‘for god’s sake, no’ when asked to demonstrate the brace position for the fifth time. But in some ways that’s a good thing, because on a Bible holiday journeying alone is not unusual. Cassius will take a seat towards the back, and as the coach moves away the airport street lights will strobe the faces of their fellow travellers. If Jesus were alive, he might rely on a secret network of helpers like these, single women from church groups and couples who hold hands against the darkness. Two black teenage girls, wearing knitted maroon bobble-hats, smile so broadly they must never have heard of sex before marriage.