Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

Valeria grabbed the envelope from Claudia and pulled out a brick of banknotes, shook them in the air. ‘Tell John, tell everyone — this payment is for information that led to the death of Peter.’

‘He has gone ahead,’ John said. ‘In glory.’

Paul recited a prayer out loud and John filled the gaps with Amens, until the prayer between them became a chant.

‘He has gone ahead.’

‘In glory.’

‘To share the table of Jesus. Amen.’

‘This isn’t right.’ Claudia looked from Paul to John and back again. The line was deep in her forehead. ‘They’re not supposed to like each other.’

Paul shivered violently where he stood, then lay down on the stones of the terrace. He tried to make himself small, clamped his fingers between his thighs. He lay curled up, face drained of colour and teeth clenched, his brain unable to control his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

The bodyguard balanced his blacked sword against the wall and on one knee he attended to Paul, his hand reaching out for Paul’s shoulder but not quite touching. Gallio saw for the first time the love the bodyguard had for Paul, that he had always loved him.

‘You’re saying Paul played us.’ Claudia wanted to believe in the infallibility of the CCU, but she had a Speculator’s open mind and the unbelievable truth was making itself felt. Her faith had not been rewarded. ‘No, yes. Paul was playing us while we thought we were playing him.’

‘All the time,’ Gallio said, ‘since the beginning. The most effective way to spread news of Jesus was to hitch a ride with the dominant secular power, accelerating the Jesus story in every direction. That’s right, isn’t it, Paul? You were always aiming at two billion Christian believers worldwide, a number that never stops growing. Look at him. You never turned him, Valeria. Most of those people found Jesus thanks to Paul.’

Gallio had an urge to kick the traitor where he lay. The bodyguard stood and moved between them, one eye on Valeria, who took this opportunity to pick up the sword. She examined the blacking on the blade while the bodyguard lifted Paul to his knees, made sure with his muscular hands that Paul could kneel unaided.

‘Enough speculation,’ Valeria said. ‘Everyone step away from John.’

‘You’re not thinking straight,’ Gallio said. ‘Watch them, Val, be careful. They’re experts in deception.’

‘John,’ Valeria said. ‘Move away from the others. Now, please.’

Paul was making a visible effort to hold himself together, humbled at the end on his knees, a short bald man shimmering with fear. He was letting Jesus down but he was only human, and he couldn’t help himself. Gallio glanced skyward, but saw stars and half the moon, not a cloud in god’s heaven.

‘I have stepped away,’ John said. For the second time that evening he lifted up his hands, offering himself to Valeria as the last of the disciples of Jesus.

‘Listen, Valeria, think.’ Gallio watched the bodyguard. ‘Did you want Paul in Rome? Are you sure you were in control of that? He led us to the minor disciples before Peter. He kept us away from Peter until the end, meaning the most famous disciple was available for a grandstand death for which we’re clearly responsible. And which via a huge audience will reach the greatest number of people.’

‘I have not been deceived,’ Valeria said, but the words ate at her pride, opened up the possibility of their untruthfulness in the act of being spoken. ‘John is the last of the twelve.’

‘You think you’re being reasonable, and you are,’ Gallio said. ‘That’s your weakness. Everything we do is what Jesus wants.’

Jesus had plotted every cause and effect, guiding the disciples and their assassins to this moment in the Abbey and beyond. The Abbey, the museum, the free admission, the knowledge that visitors would come here not just now but for countless lifetimes into the future.

‘Every dead disciple becomes a martyr,’ Gallio said, ‘and brings Jesus new converts. Together we can turn this round, but only by not doing what Jesus wants. We should do nothing, or nothing he’d expect. Doing nothing at all, especially right now, is our safest course of action.’

‘None of us can refuse his work,’ Paul said, his voice squeezed by the tightness of his breathing. His body was at war with itself, or with his brain. ‘If Jesus is the son of god.’

On his knees he took half a shuffle towards Valeria. He swayed where he knelt, wanting her attention, but unable to force his body any closer. Cassius Gallio recognised the wildness of defeat in Valeria’s eyes, another Speculator outwitted by Jesus. She knew. Suddenly she knew she was losing everything. Thanks to Jesus she could see her career shrivel in the white heat of Gallio’s revelation: I have been wrong. The brilliance of Jesus blistered her sense of herself and burst holes in her faith that reason would prevail. Only she couldn’t be destroyed like this, not Valeria, not a Regional Director of the CCU.

Sword in hand, Valeria would seize back control as Cassius Gallio had once sworn he’d restore sanity by finding the body of Jesus in Jerusalem. Wrong and wrong again.

Gallio lunged at Paul, to save him from the death he so fervently desired. Paul’s bodyguard had orders for exactly this situation, the only specific instruction he’d ever received, and the day had finally come.

He blocked Gallio, making sure he couldn’t reach either Paul or Valeria, then expertly used Gallio’s momentum to turn and hold him arm-locked with his wrist at breaking point. Gallio tried to shout out, but the bodyguard’s free hand pressed hard over his mouth. Cassius Gallio was made powerless to intervene.

On Patmos, the martyrdom of Paul joins the pantheon of legendary deaths suffered by the eleven murdered disciples. In the stories that reach the island Paul dies extravagantly, as an equal with the apostles of Jesus. The pilgrims bring pictures, and Paul’s assassin is a muscular brute in white marble, or a black angel with ragged wings. Cassius Gallio spends years politely considering the visual evidence, the postcards of paintings and sculptures, but he sees little these days that can’t be faked.

According to legend, Paul was beheaded at a site close to Rome but outside the city itself, and with each bounce of his severed head a fountain sprang to life. At the Abbey of the Three Fountains the three water sources are about ten paces apart on a downslope. To achieve the velocity for this length of carry, Paul’s head must have been cleaved off with appreciable force, in anger.

At her tribunal Valeria presented a different version of events. Paul’s untimely death was the fault of Cassius Gallio, a rogue Speculator who assassinated an embedded CCU agent in an ignorant rage. Check the archives, she said, Gallio had a history of mental instability, and a fixated belief that a minor Israeli insurgent was capable of returning from the dead. She conceded that her error of judgement was to have brought Gallio back, but she couldn’t have predicted the long-term damage to his powers of reason caused by earlier setbacks in Jerusalem. The tribunal disagreed, and noted that the archives also suggested the two of them had once been romantically linked.

‘That’s not true.’

The members of the tribunal decided, on reflection, that it was their duty and no longer hers to judge the truth. Paul had measurably advanced the interests of Jesus, whatever secret plans she might have devised for him. Valeria was found guilty of neglecting due diligence in her recruitment of Paul as an undercover agent. The arrogance of her method suggested she was either a traitor or a fool, and Valeria was nobody’s fool. In sentencing, the tribunal took pity, offering Valeria a brief window in which to exercise her free will as a high-ranking guardian of secular behaviour. She bled to death in the bath after cutting the veins in her wrists.