Acts of the Assassins (12 page)

‘None of your wish list is going to happen, Jude. Believe me. I’ve seen the world, and you’re asking too much.’

‘Jesus will be back within a lifetime. He promised.’

‘Is that a threat?’

Cassius Gallio wants to make a stand, as he had the first time round in Jerusalem by insisting on the human truth that somewhere in the city the disciples had hidden a body. He could kill Jude now, here in the dark, in the stairwell of a quarantined hospital. Except the CCU are not assassins. This enquiry, entrusted to him by Valeria of the Complex Casework Unit, will proceed on a civilized and rational basis. Jude can pass on a warning about this meeting. Let the surviving disciples know that Cassius Gallio the former Speculator is back, and he’s seriously looking for Jesus.

The electricity clunks back on, and they shield their eyes from the light. Jude’s hands tremble, and his face is pale and bloodless. He’s dying, but Gallio will not be distracted. Jesus is alive or Jesus is dead. Only one of these statements can be true.

‘Is Jesus injured? How will I recognize him?’

‘I’ve told you what I know.’

‘The drugs, Jude. I’m thinking you want to save the little children.’

Jude rests his hand on Gallio’s shoulder, then pushes himself back to his feet. He has work to do. ‘You’re talking to the wrong disciple, my friend. Try Thomas. Take your doubts to doubting Thomas. He can tell you the truth.’

“STONED AND SPEARED”

The Babylon morgue is on the far side of the Euphrates bridge, next to police headquarters, a long hour’s drive from the airport. Baruch is silent, recovering from his second flight in two days, this time deep into the saddle of land between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Not a good flyer, Baruch. Gallio looks the other way, out of the reinforced window of the commandeered UN Land Cruiser.

Babylon never stops. The streets are crammed with bicycles weaving through cows and goats, the animals grazing at middens of household waste. Everyone in this city has something to do, somewhere to go, and if they could get there faster they would, to the exchange and markets, to the roadside traders with nimble hands who sort through car parts and electrical innards. There
are so many people here, so many Babylonians, that Cassius Gallio finds it hard to believe in the sanctity of every life. Millions have come before him and millions will come after.

In his own way Cassius Gallio is a believer, not in divine oversight but in medical investment and the rule of law. The work of civilization is rarely spontaneous, like a miracle, but it is solid and worth pursuing. The disciples with their superstitions threaten the status of civilized progress, because reason and observation insist that death is death. If the CCU let the Jesus mystery slide, along with the myth of his continued existence, they’re committing cultural suicide. Gallio feels he’s providing a genuine service by tracking down the truth about Jesus.

The Babylon police chief was at the airport to meet them, and on this occasion Cassius presented genuine CCU ID, issued to him by Valeria to establish his authority in Babylon. The embossed eagle to the side of his photo is a guarantee that he comes from the arrowhead of human evolution. Not just now but always. He has access to education and information that the citizens of Babylon can barely imagine.

The chief has pitch-dark eyebrows and sad green eyes. He knows the reality of international politics, where every lesser power owes allegiance to the dominant culture. He sighs, and from the front of the car he asks where first. ‘Morgue is closer than the crime scene. As instructed, we’ve sealed his apartment.’

‘Idiots,’ Baruch says. In the back seat of the Land Cruiser he fails to click his seat belt, tries again, fails again, lets the belt recoil across his shoulder. ‘They’ve already moved him.’

Up front the chief shrugs, an elegant and foreign gesture. He doesn’t expect the advanced West to understand every nuance of
the Old World. ‘We wanted to avoid hysteria. Thomas has built up quite a following.’

‘Morgue,’ Gallio decides. His instinct with the Jesus followers is to check they’re really dead. ‘Let’s see what’s left of the body.’

The morgue is underground to hide from temperatures that in summer can reach 40 degrees Celsius. The broad lift is reserved for the dead (going down), but for the living the attendants burn incense in the spiral iron stairwell. Not quite enough of it. In the main underground autopsy room the overhead fan is stuck on slow, and stains watermark the ceiling above the walk-in fridges. In the centre of the room, a corpse on a steel trolley is covered in a green sheet. The sheet is too narrow and a male arm, naked, pale, sparsely haired, sticks out to the side.

Cassius Gallio approaches the trolley, while Baruch hangs back. They can’t be sure, not yet, that this isn’t a case of mistaken identity. It seems a grim coincidence for a second disciple to die so soon after James, and as at the Veronica souvenir shop Gallio senses other forces taking an interest. He hopes this isn’t so.

He stares at the thin exposed fingers. Thomas is the disciple who doubted the resurrection, which meant he helped convince the others it was true. According to Jude, Thomas put one or all of these fingers into the various wounds suffered by Jesus, who was crucified and came back from the dead.

Jude was probably lying.

Nevertheless, Gallio uses his imagination. Thomas would most likely have used his index finger, one of the fingers Gallio can see, and he supposedly placed it inside a five-day-old wound. Thomas would have had to go deep, to be sure of the severity of the injury, as far as the second knuckle at least, curving his finger
past bones, inside the flesh. Waggle it from side to side, to make absolutely certain. Dead, alive. Dead and alive.

‘I could have made the bastard talk.’ With his feet back on solid ground, the memory of the aeroplane fading, Baruch is livening up. Poor Thomas, who for Baruch has let himself down by getting himself killed. Careless of him. Instead of lying here in the morgue he should have waited for Baruch, and been tortured before he died.

‘You’re seconded to CCU,’ Gallio reminds him. ‘We can’t be having any torture.’

‘Too real for you?’

‘Something like that.’

The murder of Thomas isn’t ideal. This is the disciple who persuaded the others that Jesus had come back to life. He was heavily complicit in the original lie. Peter and John were first into the tomb, but Thomas authenticated the wounds. Three or four disciples in this story were dominant, and they could have been used by Jesus to bully the others into believing, Thomas acting as a kind of insurance for anyone outside the loop who had doubts: Jesus died, Thomas assured them, and Jesus returned from the dead. For those disciples who weren’t in on the switch, and maybe not all of them were trusted, no one but Jesus had been crucified. No one but Jesus came back.

If Thomas was telling the truth, that is. Cassius Gallio will never know for sure, not now, not from the man himself. He takes the top seam of the sheet, stamped
Babylon City Morgue
, between his finger and thumb. Gallio is gentle with it, as if the green polyester were itself a living thing. He peels back the sheet.

It is him. It is Thomas. Gallio has no doubt about it, even though he looks like Jesus.

They could have arrived earlier, and Cassius Gallio could have saved the life of doubting Thomas, only Baruch had won the battle of the Jude debrief.

Back in Jerusalem their case room had been cleared of mops and buckets. An electrician was shooed away so they could talk, sitting on folding chairs round a trestle table. Pictures of Jesus had been pinned to the walls. Gallio squinted: images of Jesus, of disciples, hard at a glance to tell one from the other. Between two long windows a map of the ancient world was dotted with plastic pins for each confirmed sighting: eight so far.

Gallio opened the meeting by reporting on the intelligence he’d gained from Beirut. Essentially, though without being able to say when or how, Jude was convinced that Jesus was coming back.

‘What does that
mean
?’ Valeria had her hands flat on the table, a signal everywhere in the world of straightforward honesty.

‘Don’t know,’ Gallio had to admit, ‘but it sounds dramatic. Jude told me Jesus is coming back while at least one of his disciples is alive, so that’s our best idea of the timescale. Also that Thomas is operating out of Babylon. Our next step should be a visit to Thomas, interview him about the switch theory. Thomas has privileged information about the health status of Jesus in the period after the crucifixion.’

‘Any other way he’s special?’

‘He was allowed to doubt the resurrection. Then he confirmed it, so Thomas was picked out to spread the significant lie. True or false, he knows more than some of the others.’

Cassius Gallio was pleased with the progress he’d made, but Baruch had not been idle in Damascus. While Gallio was questioning Jude in Beirut, Baruch had convened meetings of his own in Damascus about Paul. Not all his encounters had
been consensual, and occasionally he sucked at the grazed lower knuckles of his scuffed right hand.

According to Baruch, there were features of Paul’s story relevant to this investigation that failed to compute. Many years ago Paul had set off on an Israeli-sponsored mission to infiltrate and assassinate the disciples. On the Damascus road, up in the mountain passes, some unexplained event had interrupted his journey and he arrived in Damascus blind and incapacitated. The Jesus sect knew who he was, after earlier persecutions in Jerusalem. They should have taken advantage and killed their most vicious public oppressor. At the very least they should have fled from him. Instead they stayed and cared for him and made him welcome in the city.

Baruch still couldn’t understand, even after his ruthless day and night in Damascus, how the disciples had turned Paul from oppressor to believer. At first—and Baruch accepted some of the responsibility for this—the Israeli home security forces had refused to believe in Paul’s dramatic conversion. Stand back, Baruch had advised them, wait for the pay-off. He’d assumed that Paul was running his own interference, an ingenious solo mission of his own devising. Paul was a high-flyer capable of coldly orchestrating the fatal stoning of a Christian called Stephen in a public Jerusalem street. He’d have worked out a plan for Damascus.

‘I remember that time like yesterday,’ Baruch said. ‘We sent Paul into Syria with instructions to find and eliminate Peter, who was leading the spread of the lie about the resurrection of Jesus. But Paul, Paul was always ambitious. We could imagine him lining up all twelve disciples, and he’d have thought deeply about how to do it. He’d have worried that by starting with Peter he’d scare the others into hiding, and have to spend the rest of his life finding them one by one.’

Baruch had admired Paul’s talent, his energy, so he wasn’t fooled by the first emergency encryption from the Damascus bureau.
Paul ambushed in mountains
. In the following days the bureau stopped bothering with encryption. Paul’s plight was more shocking than that, arriving in the city blind, delirious, not the cool and ruthless agent they’d been briefed to expect.

His sight returned first, if not his sense of reality.

‘Claimed to have been struck by lightning,’ Baruch said. ‘Also to have spoken with Jesus. This last time in Damascus I had to remind several people that Paul was a liar, because by then Jesus was dead or in heaven. Either way, he wasn’t on the road through the mountains.’

‘They only had Paul’s word for it,’ Valeria said. ‘He must have been convincing.’

‘Something else I checked out in Damascus. In a full and frank exchange with a witness who was there at the time. He confirmed that when Paul arrived in the city he was in bits.’

The first time Baruch heard Paul’s version of events he’d burst out laughing. Lightning, a speaking appearance by Jesus, the whole bold performance was transparently a wonderfully conceived plan. Paul’s instant enlightenment was a brazen invention, a faked event perfectly targeted at believers in the miracles of Jesus. In his own life Baruch had never experienced revelation, and it seemed reasonable to assume that neither had anyone else, including Saul of Tarsus. Paul had set out to infiltrate the disciple network in Syria, and his first move, in an isolated spot on the Damascus road, was to strike himself down in a storm. He comes out the other side a Jesus believer, changes his name, the full defector’s charade.

Baruch had remained convinced for years that Saul as Paul was faking it. It would be only a matter of time before Paul filed
the inside line on every mystery and miracle, trapping the disciples and rolling up the network. But so far, right up until now, there had been no pay-off and no big reveal. Baruch and the Israeli hierarchy were still waiting, and in Damascus Baruch had failed to uncover any telling inconsistencies. Paul might truly have gone over to the other side.

‘This has gone on too long,’ Baruch said. ‘We need to talk to Paul himself, find out what really happened on the Damascus road. If Paul was confronted by Jesus, as he claims, then Jesus must have made some kind of offer he couldn’t refuse. That’s also the most recent sighting, the freshest lead we have. On the road to Damascus Paul was the last person to see Jesus alive. He’s the only member of the cult to have seen Jesus
after
the ascension, by which time Jesus was supposed to have disappeared. This fact has to be significant. Paul made Jesus break cover, and he deserves our attention.’

‘Paul is unrelated to the immediate investigation,’ Gallio said. He remembered his hours of work on the dossiers, the risks he took in Beirut. ‘We’re looking into the switch theory, a plot the experienced disciples were hatching while Saul was a boy tentmaker in Tarsus. Paul had no personal connection with Jesus. And don’t forget that he’s one of us.’

‘He is,’ Valeria said. ‘He has the full protection of the law.’

‘That’s something else that needs clearing up,’ Baruch said. ‘Once Paul went over to Jesus, why didn’t Rome revoke his citizenship?’