Acts of the Assassins Read Free Page A

match, no criminal recordor previous arrests. The first part of this death/resurrection scam is clean, Jesus and his disciples passing every test of criminal hygiene. Gallio uncovers no loose ends, no careless recruitment of accomplices with a history.
    Jesus falls again. The third time he falls some more women, as a group, hold up the procession with their local weeping and wailing. They are suspects, and every face needs identifying before being cleared. Then Jesus falls again. Falling could be a signal, but this time nothing special happens, no one else arrives to help him, to deliver a message or receive instructions. The execution is back on track, though behind schedule due to the many delays. By the time the procession reaches Golgotha the soldiers have regained control. Beside the cross they strip the prisoner, following orders. Cassius Gallio’s orders.
    Gallio studies the images, even though he was there. On the cross Jesus is naked, to ensure he can’t conceal some secret device to help him counterfeit death. If Gallio has learned anything in Jerusalem, it’s that Jesus can’t be trusted. He’d pretended to bring Lazarus back to life, and staged various medical illusions that he passed off as real. Gallio was wary of whatever he’d come up with next, and had vowed to be ready.
    Naked, however, nailed to a cross, Jesus has been decisively outwitted. He dies. Gallio watches him die. Over and over again. Civilization is the winner.
    The body needs to be down before sunset, out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath, but this next part of the tape makes Gallio’s chest seize. The endgame is a lesson in bad practice. Either side of Jesus the two prisoners have their legs broken, as is standard procedure, to accelerate death. Jesus does not.
    Why not? No one can tell him. The Prefect gave permission for a Judaean high priest and councillor, identified as Joseph ofArimathea, to take down the body. Why would he do that? No one can say, but there are regulations, and the regulations have been flouted. The camera tracks Joseph, a known Jesus sympathizer, as he carries the body of Jesus to his tomb. His own tomb, private property. The body of Jesus disappears inside and the image blurs and whites out. Show over. The security geeks cut to a drug deal in a bus shelter, then a cat asleep on a bin.
    The cameras see everything; understand nothing.
    Rewind. Stop. Play, pause. Gallio stills the moment of death, watches Jesus die frame by frame in slo-mo, and Jesus has one of those faces. When the face is moving, it is him, recognizably a cult leader with a fanatical following. On pause, however, the stilled image never accurately captures the living individual Gallio would recognize. Forget the face and trust the body, bruised and defeated and bleeding—that part of it, the violence and the killing, is real from whichever angle Gallio chooses to look.
    ‘Nothing? A total empty zero-shaped hole of nothing?’
    Pilate slams his hand against the arm of his chair, against a marble pillar, and a third time against a window frame. He finds the hard edges of what is otherwise an office of soft furnishings, a big man running to fat since his posting to Jerusalem as Prefect. In the good old days, when he was a soldier, he had fewer crimson cushions in his life.
    He paces. He points his rigid finger. ‘All you had to do was guard a fucking corpse. You’re a young man but you’re also my regional Speculator, a member of the supposedly elite military police. What is going on here?’
    ‘On the day of the execution there were irregularities.’
    ‘Not good enough. This nonsense about resurrection has to stop. Now. Yesterday. The day
before
yesterday.’
    Gallio feels a powerful urge to smack Pilate down. He’s a Speculator, with authority to think more creatively than a senior administrator, stuck with his present tense chores. But after Lazarus, Cassius Gallio isn’t so sure of himself, of what he can do or when he’s right.
    ‘The