Acts of the Assassins Read Free

the centre. She pushes the notebook close to Gallio’s face.
    ‘I need more than that.’ Gallio bats her hand away. They touch, for a split second. ‘Has he tried to contact anyone? How frightened is he?’
    ‘That’s all I’ve got. I’ve thought it through.’
    Fair enough—the silent treatment because he won’t sleep with her. Not now, Gallio wants to say, let’s get this sorted and maybe then. You know I want to, only this is a difficult time, and she should remember he’s married. Until now his marriage hasn’t deterred her. She kept coming all the same, split up publiclywith her boyfriend, a uniformed sergeant. I’m married, Gallio had said, but she sensed his weakness. She knows he doesn’t believe that faithfulness matters, because like her he’s ambitious, and what matters most is a promotion one day to chief of section Complex Casework Unit, Europe. As a minimum career requirement.
    Their shared vision of the future can make ‘now’ feel a limited experience, and Jerusalem an insignificant posting. They earn a hardship allowance for serving in the field, but in these peaceful days the garrison feels more like a complacent army in camp. They can get frustrated, spies in a country where there’s nothing to spy on. They have been bored. Then Lazarus. Lazarus changed everything. Now this.
    ‘Thanks for your help,’ Gallio says.
    ‘You’re welcome.’
    Gallio submits a request to the Prefect of the Province of Judaea, in writing, to bring in a disciple from the leadership group. He doesn’t care which one, probably Peter. The way Cassius Gallio sees it he can play Peter off against Judas: the two former colleagues in separate rooms, neither of them sure what the other may confess. Then in the same room, to wonder how much pain the other can bear. Not that the interviews need descend into violence. The anticipation of pain is often enough.
    Pilate refuses Gallio’s request, also in writing. He’s covering his back. Pilate has seen no evidence to incriminate the disciples, and this is the Middle East. The zealots in the mountains are unpredictable, and in this particular region a riot could start a war. Cassius Gallio should avoid inflaming the situation, and an arrest would be a negative at this time.
    Gallio barely goes home. He sleeps at his desk, arms as a pillow,woken by a.m. phone calls when his wife needs help with the baby. He tells her not now, he has a lot on his plate. She shouts down the phone, says if she’d known he’d be like this with his work then she’d have married one of her own.
    ‘Like who?’
    ‘Someone simple. A Jerusalem man without big ideas.’
    ‘I don’t do big ideas.’
    ‘You do about yourself.’
    In his office in the early hours of the morning, now that he’s awake, Gallio wipes the sleep from his eyes and explores the angles: before, during, after, determined to work out how they did it. He reviews the coverage. Play, rewind, play. Pause. Break it down. Look for deviations from best practice. He finds so many they make him wince. He can’t understand why this man Jesus was treated differently from everyone else.
    The cameras pick Jesus up in the street outside Herod’s Palace, and there’s footage from there until the waste ground of Golgotha outside the city gates, where the execution takes place. The street-views on tape are cut from fourteen separate cameras, and the screen geeks have spliced the shots into a single sequence. From the beginning Jesus is not in good shape, weakened by flaying. He carries the crossbeam himself and often he falls. His mother breaks from the crowd to help him, a lapse in security. She should never have made it through the cordon.
    Soon after that the uniformed escort forces a spectator, a youngish black man, to help with the crossbeam. Gallio freezes the face, but recognition software can’t find a match. A little later a second unidentified individual, this time a woman, comes out of the crowd to wipe Jesus’s face. No