Acts of the Assassins (28 page)

Finally the Heritage Centre opens its doors. At a computer screen he logs in and for the last time, out of habit, he uses his Speculator ID to access the restricted Missing Persons pages. He clicks through to the locator map, and at first he thinks there’s a glitch, or that he opened the wrong program. Eight of the disciples are dead, he knows this for a fact. Gallio had expected a maximum of four lights for the surviving disciples—Andrew, Matthew and, in or near Rome, John and Peter. But the map is signalling multiple sightings, many more lights than twelve, double that number in locations all across the screen. A light comes on at Ephesus in Turkey even as Gallio watches. The disciples seem to have divided, and divided again, and from limited beginnings can now be everywhere at once.

The nearest sighting to Caistor is a light on the southeast coast of Scotland. The drop-down box, unconfirmed, names the disciple as Andrew, last seen in a town called Whitehorn. Gallio
magnifies Scotland’s North Sea Coast, activating a refinement that plots Andrew’s movements from the page history. In the last few days Andrew has been moving steadily southward. Gallio sits back and considers the light, thinks about Andrew coming closer. He’s heading in the general direction of Caistor.

Cassius Gallio blinks twice and the third time he keeps his eyes clenched shut, mouth stretched tight, showcasing the wreck of his face. He grimaces and dips his chin into his collarbone. He can resist them. He can run away from Jesus, like in the old days in Germany.

The light representing Andrew moves a measure south, reaching the border with England. Gallio wants this over. He rocks forward and links through to the travel websites accessed by Claudia the day before. The northern Peloponnese, to the west of Athens. Not the most popular of Greek holiday destinations, but a world away from Lincolnshire and from Andrew, and in Patras Jesus has no obvious use for him. Cassius Gallio puts the holiday package on his credit card, taxes included, flying from Humberside Airport later that day.

Patras is a medium to large southern European city, rich with history but made present by urban planning and prestressed concrete. The season is Carnival. Through the window of the airport shuttle bus, on a city-centre route to his designated hotel, Cassius Gallio sees Argonauts blowing saxophones and Socrates on a Jamaican steel drum. Nothing is sacred, everything is allowed, and in Patras at this time of year at this time of night Bacchus the god of revels is god.

His bus brakes at traffic lights and Gallio reads a wall of fly-posts for the Black Pussy club, first sixty-nine ladies in for free.
He doubts Jesus would linger here, but if Jesus is watching, if he’s interested, he’ll see that Cassius Gallio has disengaged. He has given up looking for good.

Gallio makes an arbitrary decision to get off the bus at a stop near the Roman Odeon. The heat of the Greek night rises from the pedestrian asphalt, a welcome change of temperature from Caistor, and in among the sailors and angels, hearing the timeless music, Gallio enjoys being no one. He does not represent Complex Casework. He attempts none of the difficult answers.

He retreats, blots himself into the corner of a streetside bar. In the warmth and the flamelight, Cassius Gallio convinces himself that the disciples are of as little concern to him as they are to the revellers of Patras. Also he is indifferent to Claudia, reunited in Rome with her family. The point is, he reminds himself, nothing matters. There is no god, no love, no plan. He raises his arm to the waiter for another drink. One more, and then he’ll justify Patras to Valeria. He turns on his phone, off since the plane, to show his positive intent.

For this second failure of his they’ll probably skip the tribunal. Gallio has bungled his search for Jesus as completely as he did the crucifixion. He overcomplicates, he thinks, or complications happen around him. Should have killed Lazarus while he had the chance. Should have closed Jesus down in Jerusalem before he went to trial.

He drinks half his Mythos beer then texts Valeria his resignation.
Hereby
, he texts—not a word recognized by autocorrect—
Hereby I end my connection with the Jesus case
. He could thank Valeria for giving him a second opportunity to fail, but settles for
Best wishes
and a reminder of his full family name,
Cassius Marcellus Gallio
. Repeat any name often enough and it sounds absurd.

He sips his beer, adds an
X
, and sends the text. Then he
sends another with a single word:
Sorry
. He sits and drinks and waits for a reply that doesn’t come. The penalty for desertion is death. He does not want to die.

He sits and drinks, but alcohol hadn’t helped in Moldova. He sits. He sends back a double ouzo from a man alone at the bar. He doesn’t want to care and he doesn’t want to die. Or to kill. For his sanity as well as his safety he needs to engineer a disappearance. In training a Speculator learns procedures for most patterns of behaviour, including the urge to vanish off the face of the earth, and it occurs to Gallio that Jesus and CCU Speculators have similar skills. Though Gallio can think of more discreet ways to disappear than starting with a faked crucifixion. Show-off.

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 that most people have never heard of.

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 the 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, an Uncle
Sam 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 toward 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 remembered Valeria snapping at him for not planting a tracer on Baruch while he had the chance—as a precautionary measure that would have warned them he was leaving for England. For Valeria, tracers were standard CCU procedure, and in Caistor Claudia had 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 facade 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 every year. 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 is from an older generation and leaves 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 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.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘Jude told me you were looking for Jesus. I can help.’

Very kind, Gallio thinks, but not now. From the beginning, way back in Jerusalem, the disciples had led him on, luring him into traps he mistook for his own intentions. He’s had enough
of their prayers, their blessings. Andrew makes the sign of the cross.

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Jesus has a special place in his heart for you. For all of us.’

‘It was a tracking device, wasn’t it?’

Gallio had instantly blamed Claudia, but it could just as easily have been Bartholomew. In between the bandaging and the handouts, with Gallio distracted by social inequality, Bartholomew could have accessed his phone and planted the bug. ‘The tracking device was yours. I should have guessed. I am god’s biggest idiot.’

‘You’re in a basilica, Cassius, in a cloudless country open to the eye of god. How did you expect to hide from Jesus in a big open church? He can see you everywhere, that’s true, but in here you come to us.’

Andrew’s implacability is exhausting. He must have tracked Gallio first to Caistor, asked questions, sorted through Search History on the computers in the Heritage Centre, then out to Patras on the next chartered flight. Gallio sits down on a front row seat, defeated. Andrew sits next to him. On the screen of the sanctuary they admire the visual focus for every eye turned toward god in the Agios Andreas, which is an oversized icon of Andrew the disciple of Jesus in cobalt and gold. Andrew is roped to an X-shaped cross, a shimmering image on which to meditate a spiritual truth, and Andrew’s iconic expression is inscrutable, as he gazes directly back at Gallio.