Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

Gallio will wipe himself out. Caistor wasn’t disappearance enough, and drinking himself into oblivion in Greece is too predictable a refuge. Valeria would find him in no time, visibly helpless in the gutter.

He pays up and hails a cab. At the hotel Gallio signs the register, agreeing to the many unread terms and conditions applicable to a seven-day package at the Patras Porto Rio. This is the first step in his textbook disappearance. There will be a final sighting, so he might as well make his last known movements more enjoyable than dying on a cross. He sleeps soundly between the fresh sheets of a hotel bed.

In the morning Cassius Gallio fills up on buffet breakfast at a table within range of the restaurant’s single security camera. One more slice of cheese before dropping his napkin on the table and pushing out his chair. The trail has to end somewhere, and the procedure requires Gallio to be traceable on the grid. He knows what he’s doing. He walks to the cashpoint machine in the hotel lobby and withdraws 3,900 euros, the limit. There is an extortionate charge, which in the circumstances doesn’t bother him.

So far he has risked nothing. The credit card transaction for the holiday package already links him to the charter flight and the Patras hotel. He might as well withdraw the money while he’s here. In his room he packs his bag with essentials, toothbrush and underwear and a hat, and his last recorded act in the hotel is to pay cash in the gift shop for another hat, a conspicuous straw panama. The sun is already high and hot so he puts the panama hat on his head and leaves the hotel on foot, steps serenely into an unexceptional city.

One more thing: ten minutes later, in a local bar without CCTV, he downs an espresso and crumples his hat into a sanitary bin in the toilets. Wearing a plain black baseball cap, he leaves the bar. He disappears.

Gallio ought to feel safe, lost, confident of an invisible journey from the Patras ferry terminal to Corfu and from there to any of a hundred Greek islands. Instead, in a city he doesn’t know and where nobody knows him, he is convinced he’s being watched. He can’t explain it. He has followed the approved procedure but in his inner ear, and in his heart, he senses that he’s not alone.

Stay undercover. He doesn’t know how, but it must be either the disciples or Valeria, and instinctively Gallio feels the surveillance is coming from above. The CCU have satellite, so Gallio ducks under the parasols of pavement cafés, excusing himself between tables. As the streets fill with people he slips into a one-room bookshop, and browses a Lonely Planet while checking the street for anyone walking too slowly or too fast, but Carnival cancels out normal. A teenage girl dressed as a Pierrot does nothing much but smoke a pipe. A giant head bobs past, a Minotaur in papier mâché. Men are women and the last are first. Half the people in the street are wearing masks, others walk with heads down, hands in pockets, kicking the overnight cartons.

Cassius Gallio works his way towards the centre of Patras, wary of mime artists and the occasional surge of revellers. He passes the Catholic church of St Andreas, and shelters for a moment in the shaded courtyard of the Protestant Church of St Andrew, where a curate is brushing the flagstones. He detours along Andrew’s Avenue and ignores the woman in the St Andrew’s Juice Van who shouts at him to cheer up, it might never happen. He hurries past the general hospital the Patras Agios Andreas, and for a sick moment thinks a nurse is following him. In his paranoia the world is suddenly all about Cassius Gallio, and if only they weren’t watching him so closely he could settle on a plan, shape the immediate future.

A tracer. He stands still. Of course, what a fool he is, that’s how they’re keeping track of him. Gallio remembers Valeria snapping at him for not planting a tracer on Baruch while he had the chance — a precautionary measure that would have warned them he was leaving for England. For Valeria, tracers were a standard CCU procedure, and in Caistor Claudia had all the time in the world to fix up Gallio. The shared room, the sex: he was not being vigilant. Gallio pats his clothes. No, she was a Speculator, and the tracer would be expertly hidden.

Gallio is not breathing well. He’s panting like a dog, sweating. The hard drive in the computer at the Heritage Centre, credit card records, the hotel register in Patras. He’d been so pleased with his procedures, but if CCU were tracking him then Valeria would find him regardless. She sees everything and knows everything. He needs a concealed place where he can locate and destroy the tracer.

The façade of the Greek Orthodox Agios Andreas church looks like a train station. Inside, every wall and archway glitters with mosaic, and Gallio’s footsteps on the marble floor echo back from the central dome, decorated with Jesus in the centre surrounded 360 degrees by his disciples. The twelve of them twinkle brightly down on him, watch as he searches for a confessional box, any place of privacy.

But today Cassius Gallio is out of luck. The ornate interior of the huge church is mostly open space. Gallio negotiates thousands of seats set out for a church performance that coincides with Carnival, not just this year but always. At the end of one of the rows a nun is kneeling at prayer, black headscarf wrapped squarely across her forehead. No confessionals. There’s a screen at the front of the church and Cassius Gallio acts as if he belongs, steps behind it into the space reserved for priests and for god. He’s in a hurry. In the private half-darkness he puts his bag on the ground and kneels to rummage through the contents. So many mistakes. He spreads out a T-shirt and pats it down, feeling for a foreign object the size of a watch battery. He squeezes toothpaste out of the tube, and breaks soap onto his T-shirt. No sign of a tracer.

He takes off his clothes, all of them, fingers the seams of his trousers and the collar of his shirt. Naked, he checks the waistbands of his underpants.

His phone rings.

Shit. In church the ringtone sounds out like a blasphemy. Unknown number , which he rejects. The phone, of course. He dresses clumsily, but fast. Claudia couldn’t leave phones alone, whereas Gallio, from an older generation, often left his unattended. Now he feels old as well as foolish but the tracer is inside the phone, it has to be. He goes down on one knee, takes aim and slides the phone across the marble floor and under the altar. Bullseye. Then his ID, spins his ID under there too. He becomes no one, absent without leave. He disconnects himself, because nothing matters. There is no god, and no CCU, and Cassius Gallio is disinclined to look for Jesus.

He tucks in his shirt, inhales deeply, picks up his bag and emerges from behind the Orthodox screen a free man. He bumps into Jesus. In front of the holy screen of the Agios Andreas, in the city of Patras in the Greek Peloponnese, Jesus appears exclusively to Cassius Germanicus Gallio.

‘Surprise,’ Jesus says. He holds out his hands.

Gallio drops his bag, clutches his heart.

‘Sister Hilda told me which way you went.’

It is Andrew. Gallio peers at the face and Andrew is a wiry, toughened version of Jesus, up close not as young as he used to be. His gaunt face has dried out with the years. He is pale, papery, illuminated.

‘You can relax,’ Andrew says. He has the eyes, the beard, the sandals. ‘I found you.’

Gallio does not relax. He looks beyond Andrew into the body of the church, the thousand waiting seats. Left, right, up to the dome, down to the floor. Where else is there?

‘Calm down,’ Andrew says. ‘You’re acting like a man possessed.’

He lays his hands on Gallio’s shoulders, leans heavily on him as once Cassius Gallio had weighed himself down on Judas. ‘Trust me. I’m here for you. I can drive out your demon.’