Any one of these definitions could generate a positive response. Gallio includes them all, looks up from the screen of his computer, and he’s alone in the case room. Everyone else has gone home, even Claudia. He has no one to tell that the material is nearly ready.
Instead he has an unwanted flashback to his posting the last time round. He’s working too hard, making the same mistake. How can Jesus be a door? he wonders. How can Jesus be a plough? He reaches for the telephone, and his home number is there in his head and he dials it. His ex-wife, Judith, picks up.
‘Hello,’ she says. Gallio doesn’t know what to say to her. In the silence he might as well not have bothered. ‘Hello, hello,’ she says again, ‘is there anyone there?’
The silence stretches out. Gallio wants her to know he exists, and that he doesn’t mean any harm, but he doesn’t know where to start, not after so much time and so many errors. His silence and his unknowness end up frightening her.
‘Whoever you are, stop it. Don’t call again.’
And then it’s too late to make himself known, and anyway, Judith hands the phone to another person in the room wherever she is. It’s Baruch.
‘Fuck off,’ he says. ‘Whoever you are. Do this again and I’ll trace the number and hunt you down and kill you. Understand?’
Cassius Gallio puts down the phone, but gently, so they might think he never put it down, and that in fact he is always there, should she want him. He reactivates his computer screen, his list of hopeful words alongside pictures of a man either dying or dead on the cross. Jesus is the pearl. He is the grace. Gallio can’t see the connection: for him, Jesus is harsh and without compassion. The soldiers who guarded the tomb were sentenced to death, their wives and little children tormented by shame and grief. And not just the guards, Gallio thinks, what about me? I was a decent human being before Jesus.
At least he thinks he was, or could have been, but Jesus ignores the damage he causes. He comes back from the dead but his disciples still die, horribly and for no apparent reason.
Cassius Gallio concentrates on the here and now, on uploading his data. At the final screen, before going live, he once again has the choice of Missing or Wanted. He considers calling Valeria for guidance, but decides the responsibility is his. He taps Wanted. And Done. This is now a manhunt, and the live alert activates an immediate fugitive warrant across every civilized territory. The priority of a file marked Wanted brings back a reply within minutes.
They have a man answering the published description of Jesus. He is in Jerusalem.
The sighting is recent, the evening of the day before, and Gallio is still in the office and shocked by the time. It’s the morning of the next day already. He checks the Wanted response. An individual fitting the description of Jesus was issued with a verbal warning by the Jerusalem traffic police at 18:12 the previous evening. The suspect was helping an elderly lady across the road, but was reprimanded for not using a designated crossing, which is hardly surprising. Jesus is an outlaw, a potential terrorist and a suspect for at least three murders. He’s not going to wait for the man to go green.
Cassius Gallio gets the traffic cops out of bed.
‘Why only a warning?’
‘He was very polite.’
‘You took an address?’
‘We did.’
Gallio calls in Code Orange, and signs out an unmarked Lexus from the motor pool. He hesitates, then calls Baruch on his mobile. If Jesus is dangerous, Gallio needs backup.
Twenty minutes later they’re sitting in the Lexus, no siren, parked with a view of Veronica’s Gift Shop.
‘Networks within networks,’ Baruch says. ‘How the Jesus cult survives. One in all in.’
The shop has a Closed sign in the window. No evidence of the owner or his daughter, but the man who looks like Jesus gave his address as the flat above the shop. Gallio watches the second-floor window. A shadow, moving one way then the other. Baruch fixes a long lens to a camera, puts the window down and aims at the Juliet balcony.
‘You want to make the big announcement we’re here?’
‘I think he knows.’
A figure appears at the window. Jesus. That’s Cassius Gallio’s honest first impression. Jesus has a telephone in one hand and pushes it between his ear and his shoulder as he opens the double window. He stands there talking, enjoying the fresh air, sometimes listening and smiling. Baruch reels off a set of automatic shots. Then he sits back in his seat.
‘Shit,’ he says. He looks at a series of digital screen zooms. ‘It’s not him, is it?’
‘Run the photos against the database.’
They look at each other, two middle-aged security operatives on a stake-out with no idea how to use the technology. They phone Claudia, wake her up. She talks them through it. They have the camera leads? Yes. Camera to phone, JPEGs to her office email. She’ll activate the program. Once the photos are in the database a match will come up within minutes.
‘We knew that,’ Gallio says. ‘But thanks.’
While they wait for the results they tell each other they never expected this Jesus to be Jesus. Statistically, with seven disciples at large, a Jesus sighting now in Jerusalem always looked unlikely.
‘I’m tired.’ Gallio rubs the base of his thumb into an eye. ‘I’ve been up all night. I’m seeing things.’
Claudia texts the results back to the car, and Baruch says in the old days they’d never have believed it: he’d still be unloading film from the camera. Gallio holds his phone toward the centre of the dash where they can both read the screen. The jaywalker staying in the flat above the Veronica shop turns out to be James, the second James, a disciple but not the man himself. Seconds later Claudia texts across the Wikipedia page.
‘Could be worse,’ Gallio says. ‘He’s an original disciple, not a nobody or an impostor.’
‘Are we going to pick him up?’
‘No, I don’t think we are.’
They wait. If James knows they’re watching he doesn’t let that stop him from leaving the building. Early evening, plenty of people on the street. Gallio decides James doesn’t know, and they follow him on foot. He stops a few times to touch this hand or that, well wishers who recognize his face. Baruch wishes he’d brought his camera, but James is moving again, and he goes into a church in the Armenian quarter. A new church, built since the first James died and dedicated to his memory. Death has not deterred the Armenians.
‘Let’s pick him up,’ Baruch says. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘We’re not after James. He’s a means to an end.’
In the St. James Armenian Cathedral the disciple has a full congregation, and in their rapt attention Gallio sees they couldn’t care less which of the disciples James is, or even which James. For the churchgoers he is an early adopter who has touched the hand of Jesus, and that direct connection is enough. Or more than that, Gallio thinks. In James they see the face of Jesus, and are made glad.
From the pulpit James repeats the stories his listeners mostly know: what Jesus said, what he did. He acts as if the disciples, possibly in Jerusalem after the disappearance of Jesus, held a strategy meeting and decided that a popular story would be enough to keep their movement alive. Good triumphs and evil is vanquished. Why not? Gallio too would like to believe in this.
Like the other disciples James has told and retold the story: a manual worker grows up in a provincial backwater of Israel. I know, Gallio thinks, I know this, I’ve heard it before. Also, the information is in the file. Around the age of thirty Jesus reveals extraordinary powers, including a flair for public speaking that he uses to promote a notion of social justice. He argues for the existence of a single god, a supreme being attentive to individuals, who will reward the virtuous with joyful everlasting life. But only after they die.
There is nothing that James will not do for Jesus, no heartening story he will not tell. James finishes his sermon with the second coming, when Jesus will return from the clouds along with tongues of fire. He
will judge the living and the dead.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Baruch whispers from the back of the church. Heads turn, frowns in place. ‘Let’s pick the fucker up.’
‘No,’ Gallio says. ‘We wait.’
For the first time they have not one but two disciples under observation, James in central Jerusalem and Bartholomew in the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. Cassius Gallio’s strategy is to make Jesus come to them: Jesus didn’t like Gallio interviewing Jude or closing in on Thomas. Now James and Bartholomew in Jerusalem will lure Jesus in. If Valeria is right, and disciples are being killed because they know too much, the killer needs to act before Gallio picks James up, which is what he’d expect Gallio to do.
‘We wait,’ Gallio says, ‘and we watch. James is bait. If Jesus is the killer we trap him when he makes his move. If he isn’t, we catch who we catch. If no one comes for him, then we find out how the disciples keep in touch. We’ll learn more from surveillance than from locking James up in the Antonia.’
‘I can’t just watch people all the time,’ Baruch says.
Now he gets a definite shushing from the churchgoers. Cassius Gallio receives an audible alert on his phone, and the two of them are instantly the least popular atheists in the St. James Armenian Cathedral. Gallio reads the message, and places a hand on Baruch’s sleeve.
‘You’re in luck,’ he says, dropping the phone into his pocket and standing up. ‘Because we have a new arrival in Jerusalem. Paul is in town. The believers are coming together. This is the gathering.’
It takes twenty-four hours for Cassius Gallio to coordinate surveillance. At Terrorist Threat High, Code Orange, Valeria gives him the resources he needs.
‘Including Claudia?’
‘Whenever you need her.’
Each night after his sermon in the Armenian Cathedral James the disciple of Jesus, also known as James the Less, presses the flesh. But always by ten o’clock he’s back in the second-floor flat above Veronica’s Gift Shop. Often, his landline rings, because the phone number is advertised on flyers at the cathedral. Any problem, the flyers say, any time. Cassius Gallio watches James through binoculars as Claudia phones him just after eleven. Gallio has decided the call sounds more innocent coming from a woman.
‘I’m a nurse,’ Claudia says. ‘At the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. It’s about Bartholomew.’
She draws it out, acting a part, thinking James should know that Bartholomew is utterly alone, which is surprising for an original disciple. Only recently arrived, she confirms, yes, from Hierapolis in Turkey, not in good shape, no, but receiving first-class hospital treatment as if in answer to prayer.
‘Visiting opens every day at nine,’ Claudia says. ‘He never has any visitors.’
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 recognize 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, equalizers, levellers. Gallio and Claudia share the bench, wait with pens and notebooks 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 on everything.
‘Coward. If you don’t risk saying what you 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 toward 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 are 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 phone calls asking for help, 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 daughters. 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?’
Acts of the Assassins Page 15