Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

The next morning Gallio shadows James as far as the hospital, where he witnesses a touching scene. The guards let James through and he prays at the bedside while Bartholomew fails to wake. While James is at the hospital, Baruch enters the flat above the gift shop to install CCU eyes and ears. In these old city buildings the electrics are prehistoric so another engineer with a toolbox barely raises an eyebrow. From now on, Gallio will see and hear everything. He expects answers.

In the surveillance hub, which is an Ideal Flooring van across the street from Veronica’s, Claudia switches on the monitors. When Gallio arrives back from the hospital he’s impressed by Baruch’s placing of the bugs and cameras. In the black and white images they can see a single bed, tightly made with a blanket and sheet, an upright chair, a wall-mounted crucifix, and on a low table the landline telephone handset. The room looks like a statement of simplicity, or like expert fieldcraft — if anything is disturbed James will know. Only Baruch has more experience than that.

Baruch calls in. ‘All working?’

‘You know it is. Great job.’

‘Then I’ll stay where I am.’

Baruch has volunteered for the surveillance shift on Paul, who is booked into a garden suite at the five-star King David Hotel. Paul knows Baruch from when they worked as colleagues, but Baruch insists they’ve changed since then, both of them.

‘Anyway, he won’t see me, so he can’t recognise me. He didn’t see me in Antioch. I didn’t ask rash questions from the floor, unlike some people.’

For Baruch, keeping an eye on Paul is synonymous with protecting the two disciples currently in Jerusalem. Paul is involved in the killings, Baruch is convinced. This leaves Claudia and Gallio to work as partners in the van. They sit and watch and wait for signs of the second coming.

The inside of the Ideal Flooring van is laid out lengthways, one side taken up by a narrow bench-seat with a black plastic cover. Everything inside the van is either black or silver, and opposite the bench there are screens, amplifiers, equalisers, levellers. Gallio and Claudia share the bench, wait with pens and pads to make black and white notes about the beginning of the end of time.

They wait some more.

‘What will you do if they’re right?’

Three days go by, and they’re living another slow morning in the van. The first takeout coffee of the day is halfway drunk, and Claudia would rather talk than not. ‘Say the world is going to end at lunchtime. What would you do?’

Gallio would kiss Claudia. At least ask her if a kiss might be acceptable, at some point between her question and the end of the world.

‘I’d have my lunch now,’ Gallio says, so as not to lose out completely.

‘Coward. If you don’t risk saying what you really want you’ll never get it.’

‘And then the world will end.’

‘On a day like any other, full of disappointments. Monitor One.’

They watch Jesus supporters drawn to the street where a genuine disciple is known to be staying. Claudia manipulates the streetcams to freeze close-up headshots, then on her laptop she runs face-checking software on everyone who enters and leaves the building. As believers these people are used to feeling watched, but none of them are red-flagged insurgents. None of these people are Jesus. They’re men and women from different classes and professions, with no distinctive hairstyle or clothing. As a means of identification they’re supposed to act kindly, though the confessions phoned through to James at night are not unfailingly kind.

Whereas Cassius Gallio, who is not a believer, makes a point of acting kindly towards Claudia, a young recruit new in the field. She has a husband and possibly children in Rome, and he tells himself he would not be so unkind as to try to seduce her.

Still nothing happens, day after day. Baruch reports that Paul stays within the compound of the King David Hotel, mostly in the business centre where he writes his letters. Cassius Gallio gets nervous. With Claudia he speculates that the presence in Jerusalem of two former disciples, and also Paul, is a strategic decoy. While Bartholomew and James make Jerusalem the centre of the Jesus world, for now, the man himself is stalking the other survivors. Matthew has been traced to Egypt, and is in danger there. Andrew is in Scotland, probably, and there are stories of John along the Black Sea coast and Simon in Southern England. Gallio keeps the disciple map open on his laptop, but the lights stay on. The disciples far from Jerusalem remain alive and well.

Cassius Gallio holds his nerve. This is Jerusalem, where Jesus made his name. He is expected at all times.

More pressure is required. When darkness falls, Valeria sends in the riot police, she stations an armoured Land Rover outside the Veronica shop, and twelve paramilitaries on eight-hour shifts. The black-clad police officers are a challenge, a provocation: Come on Jesus, kill James now. The riot police raise the visors on their helmets and do what riot police do. They lean on barriers and watch women go by. They fiddle with their chinstraps, and their fingers brush the clubs at their belts.

James keeps to his nightly routine. He is back at the flat before ten and between his inspiring phone calls, whenever a pause develops, he kneels to pray. Gallio gives the prayers of James a chance to work. Nothing immediate ever happens, either inside or outside the room. No change in the van, where the latest technology fails to identify how this series of actions in this order keeps James in touch with Jesus.

Again before sleeping James prays like a champion, on and on, eyes closed, head bowed, lips moving. He prays as if he knows he’s being watched and will be judged on prayer and simplicity. He sleeps on top of the grey blanket, hands visible on his chest.

Gallio passes Claudia the bag of pretzels, but just now she’s cutting an apple into slices. On reflection she leaves the apple on a paper plate, takes a pretzel and pops it into her mouth.

James’s phone is busy tonight. He hears from Judith whose marriage is over. She wants to kill herself. He hears from Joseph whose son is dead and his life therefore meaningless. He wants to kill himself. James listens patiently then reassures each desperate caller with the story of Jesus. Don’t worry, he says, because the world is about to end. Jesus is alive, and he will return. Whatever the problem, even if you want to kill yourself, make yourself ready for the Day of Judgement.

At the end of each call James prays, eyes closed, lips moving across patterns of words. Gallio asks Claudia how she became what she is. ‘How did you get involved?’

‘I’m somebody’s daughter.’

‘Ambitious?’

Her mouth angles down at the edges. ‘Do what I’m told.’

‘You’re well placed, at your age. Married young. That’s serious ambition, in our business.’

‘I suppose, by some measures. I have two kids. Girls.’

‘Excellent,’ Gallio says. ‘Get it over with. Efficient.’

‘Something like that.’

Claudia swipes through her phone and shows Gallio a picture of her children. White background, a studio session that betrays no details of her home. The girls are lying down, chins on hands, grinning at the camera.

‘They’re very pretty.’

‘Thank you.’

She puts her phone away, lifting one buttock off the bench to free her pocket.

‘What does your husband do?’

‘Architect. Good time to be an architect, after the fire. The place won’t be rebuilt in a day.’

Claudia doesn’t want to talk about her husband, so Gallio asks about the fire. ‘How bad was it?’

For years, in the ditches of the Empire, Cassius Gallio had burnished a memory of Rome as the eternal, shining city. Pillars gleamed white, and high-browed senators applied the law with justice. Rome was the past and future, a model of organisation that made outlying superstitions look feeble. If nothing else, he never stopped believing in Rome.