‘It’s a strategy,’ Gallio says, ‘all mapped out.’ He rubs his finger across the kitchen counter, not a trace of dust. ‘This simple lifestyle, dependent on the will of god and human fellow feeling, is supposed to express a philosophy. It also allowed Thomas to avoid detection until now. That’s not a coincidence.’
Baruch gives Gallio a quizzical look. ‘Everything all right, Cassius? Holding it together?’
‘Never better.’
Gallio’s heart rate is a little fast, and he leans over the counter and makes the ends of his fingers fit together, back and forth, until he gets it right. In Germany and beyond he’d worried about losing his skills as a Speculator, but he can still put a story together that doesn’t involve Jesus as a supreme being.
‘Think of James in Jerusalem,’ he says, straightening up. He can do this. ‘Think of Jude in Beirut. The disciples favour cities, classic fugitive behaviour, and immediately after Judas died they split up and dispersed. They took evasive action and committed to the cash economy. Jesus even picked two men called James. He wanted to confuse, keep us from catching up with them, which he’d need to do if he was alive, making his appearances, telling them what to do. Sometimes maybe pretending to be one of his own disciples.’
‘We should investigate every donor who supported Thomas.’ Baruch hates the idea of the disciples getting something for nothing. ‘You can’t explain his survival in a dog-eat city by kindness. Jesus has to be channeling food and supplies through intermediaries.’
‘The donors check out,’ the police chief says. ‘Mostly the poor, with no obvious connecting factor except a belief system that includes Jesus coming back from the dead. Their motives seem entirely selfish. They helped out Thomas to be rewarded in heaven.’
‘The wife of the deputy finance minister said Thomas didn’t have enemies.’
The police chief laughs at that.
‘Imagine I’m a god,’ he says. ‘I’m going to be thrilled if you tell me I don’t exist. Thomas told the Babylonians their gods were worthless. So excuse me, if I’m the god, and my faithful believers decide to take revenge, as a furious god I reckon I’d give them a hand.’
Baruch looks under the pillow. ‘Who doesn’t exist now, Thomas?’
Gallio keeps his thoughts to himself. There may be a feud within the group of original disciples, and this killing is part of a power struggle. Jesus, presumably, would be on the winning side, and Thomas in the morgue wasn’t an obvious winner. It’s only a theory, Gallio reminds himself. Don’t let the speculation get out of control. The murderer is more likely an outside antagonist.
‘You’re right,’ Gallio says. ‘The disciples are not universally popular.’
He is preoccupied with the thought that if the disciples can live like this, off the grid, then presumably so can Jesus.
Can he? Gallio checks and checks again that he’s making a thoroughly professional deduction—no one found a corpse, so reason dictates that Jesus may well be alive. That’s a reasonable conclusion, and one an objective Speculator needs to accommodate. If Jesus survived, by means Cassius Gallio doesn’t presently understand, he can be re-apprehended for significant rewards: an honorary doctorate, lecture tours, hotel room with spa for the visiting keynote speaker. Acclaim, forgiveness, a kind of heaven.
The glory awaiting Cassius Gallio will be greater if he finds Jesus and Jesus is alive. Eating food, sleeping in beds, hurting when he realizes 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 realization 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.
V
Philip
“INVERTED HANGING”
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, cold 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. Three disciples down, and Gallio with his feet not yet safe 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 cardboard packaging. 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 southwest 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. ‘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 them both. 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 toward 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 be 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 toward the back, and as the coach moves away the airport streetlights 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.
A red sun will climb above the horizon, and Cassius Gallio will attune to the holiday excitement. The black girls tell a nun that at his Antioch conference Paul shared the platform with a disciple, it said so in their parish newsletter. The Jesus passengers are enthusiastic but ill informed. A man in a fleece winks, a punchline coming up, and says it’s nice to take the bus because on his last church trip he had to walk. Santiago de Compostela. Two hundred miles on foot to touch the bones of James.
The bones. Only now will Cassius Gallio spare a thought for bones. The disciples continue to exist as relics after they die, but however long he lives Gallio will never understand how the bones of James travelled from the city of Jerusalem to the coast of northwest Spain. The when and how rarely matter to pilgrims: every Christian tripper has walked all or part of the Camino, and the once-in-a-lifetime adventure provides a lifetime’s subject of conversation. James the disciple of Jesus will and will not end his days in Jerusalem, and even though the authenticity of the Compostela bones remains unproven, future believers will forever keep on walking.
In the second hour of the coach trip the conversation fades, and Gallio rests his head against the window. He will sleep lightly, meaning not well. He will dream of his head pattering the glass of the emergency exit, of the stutter of his past and fragments from his life yet to come.
‘Hi, I’m Claudia.’
They know. Valeria has just introduced her. She’s Claudia the highly rated analyst, arrived from Rome this morning. ‘I’m joining you on background research.’
She has a face that makes Gallio think of the future, of what his life would be like with Claudia as part of it. That’s his Speculator first impression, he tells himself. After further objective assessment, of her dark eyes and angled jaw, he decides that she’s not unreasonably pretty but she is an impeccable shape, slim at the waist, broad-hipped. Probably not that useful in a scrap, to be honest, no bone weight.
‘You two can’t do everything.’ Valeria sucks her teeth, as if to dislodge the taste of the little they’ve done. ‘I’ve asked Claudia to give you a briefing.’
Claudia walks over to the new incident board, now in place and dominating the far wall of the case room. At the top in the centre is an artist’s impression of Jesus, which only Gallio knows is the image based on James. The incident board looks like a family tree, with lines of connection branching from Jesus at the top down to the more prominent disciples: Peter, Thomas, John, Andrew. Then more lines connecting to a bottom row of disciples who are less well known. The hard bald face of Paul is the odd man out. His image is pinned mid-row in a gap between John and Philip.
Cassius Gallio, as a professional, evaluates Claudia as she talks, and he’s careful not to miss anything: grey sweater, black trousers, highish black heels. Quite tall, good hips. He remembers he already noticed the hips. Unprofessional. To the heels and back again. He doesn’t think anyone notices.
First presentation, unfamiliar surroundings, so as a young woman she brings her business voice.
‘I’m up to speed with the context,’ she says, ‘and my job is to work out why Thomas and Philip are dead, and whether these murders connect either to each other or to your recently launched enquiry into a certain missing person. James may also be relevant, if we pick up obvious echoes.’
Claudia is efficient, but also vulnerable, because there must be more to her than efficiency. Whatever she’s hiding, Gallio thinks, she can be found out.
‘What type of connections?’ Baruch asks. ‘I presume you mean whether they were killed by the same person.’
Gallio suspects Baruch knows the answer but wants Claudia’s attention. So transparent. Claudia takes a red marker pen from Baruch’s desk and turns to the incident board. She taps on the images for James, Thomas and Philip, the three dead disciples. Gallio hasn’t seen this picture of James before, kneeling in prayer while an angel with a broadsword waits to behead him. That can’t be how it happened, not in that equestrian backyard in Jerusalem. Claudia uncaps the pen and draws a cross through James’s face.
She moves on, crosses out Thomas and then Philip, recaps the pen and taps it against each of the images. Tap, tap, tap. She lets the pen rest on Thomas. In this picture a muscular infidel wearing a leather helmet is driving a spear into his chest. It’s all speculation.
‘We need to establish whether any of the connections are material. So far Thomas and Philip are linked as disciples of Jesus and as victims of violent crime. One was stoned and speared. Unusual. Philip, hundreds of miles away in Hierapolis, had a rope worked through his hamstrings. He was then hauled up on the rope, head down, feet in the air. He was left to hang and bleed until he died.’
Claudia lets them consider the fate of Philip, and the process of passing a rope through a chunk of living resistant muscle. Gallio’s legs feel flimsy, insubstantial. He pushes his thighs into the edge of the chair and imagines the specialist tools, the
necessary hardware. He’s in awe of the implacable will of whoever decided to sew a rope through the flesh of another human being.
‘Both disciples died curious and violent deaths,’ Claudia says. ‘Agreed? In that case, we have the beginning of a pattern.’
Hierapolis is the end city in an earthquake belt that stretches from southwest Turkey round the northeastern Mediterranean as far as Israel. The coast is not rock solid here, never was or will be, and the planet can crack and shift seventy miles out to sea and six miles down. At Pamukkale, near Hierapolis, the earth’s core has thrown up terraces of travertine rock where hot springs deposit calcium carbonate that hardens into an impermeable crust. The whiteness of the mountainside pools turns the water a bright crystal blue.
The matching blue sky is scarred by vapour trails. An occasional seagull will drift left, drift right, looking for food or other seagulls to love. At the postcard stand, at the van selling Pepsi. Tourists without a guide probably won’t know either about the geology of the region nor that up the hill behind Pamukkale, beyond barefoot vacation snaps in the white-blue water, the ruined martyrium of Philip is waiting. Philip the one-time disciple of Jesus.
Claudia carried out her analysis and from that point onward Cassius Gallio and Baruch were destined to start up this hill, the sun lunchtime high and the path at a serious angle. They will persevere, hands on knees as they struggle with the gradient, a challenging hike even in sensible shoes. They will overtake some stragglers and Gallio will recognize passengers from the coach tour. Who will soon overtake them back again, because unlike Gallio and Baruch they’ve trained on the rigors of the Camino.
‘What do we care if the disciples get killed?’ Baruch will stop to rest, doubled over, breathing heavily.
‘We don’t care. Not really.’ Gallio will also suffer, but he has recently returned from active duty. He will recover his breath more quickly. ‘The disciples are important because of what they tell us about Jesus. Three of them are dead. Something is happening, as if we’ve shaken their nest.’
Acts of the Assassins Page 12