Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard Read Free Book Online Page B

that comes from a lifetime of civil service health insurance and not making mistakes.
    She stops and points out a street where the locals stoned a Jesus follower to death, a short while after Gallio’s disgrace. An Israeli agent called Saul set up the hit to showcase his talents, but the street has reverted to what it was and always will be: shopfronts filled with toiletries and battery-powered fans. Gallio checks they’re not being followed. Jerusalem puts him on edge.
    ‘Ruthless, ambitious, highly capable. We liked the look of him. Saul was the kind of driven local agent who didn’t need our help.’
    Valeria walks on. Gallio lets her go, watches her hips swayleft and right, her buttocks, then catches up. ‘Saul targeted Peter in Damascus,’ she says. ‘A trained international agent against a lake fisherman in a major world city. Should have been a mismatch.’
    ‘Peter turned him. Saul became one of them.’
    ‘Well done. I’m glad not everything passed you by, but the truth is we didn’t have a back-up plan. We kept to our civilized policy of not intervening in religious affairs. Saul was converted, but even then we expected the Jesus cult to fold.’
    ‘But it didn’t. It hasn’t.’
    ‘It hasn’t followed the usual pattern of Judaean self-hatred and implosion, no. Every year the number of Jesus believers increases, and across a wider geographical spread. We underestimated them.’
    ‘You don’t say.’
    The disciples of Jesus had negated a crucifixion and rigged a burial. They could break in and out of a sealed and guarded tomb, leaving no trace, and managed to hide a body in a city under martial law. Simple upcountry peasants? Cassius Gallio didn’t think so.
    ‘They could organize a fire,’ he says.
    ‘Possibly. What’s certain is the disciples have a history. Whatever they’ve become will depend on what happened in the past. We need people who were there at the beginning and who appreciate the specific difficulties.’
    They walk into a cavalry exercise ground, separated from the housing scheme behind it by a high link fence. On the far side of the fence, the public side, about fifteen to twenty gawpers—including children, an Asian family—cling to each other and cry out. Yellow crime-scene tape flutters across the door of a stable, the centre stall in a block of five.
    Gallio is first to duck under the tape. Old habits.
    Inside, a free-standing aluminum spotlamp heats up the base note of rotting straw and horseshit. Two objects on the ground. The first looks like a hessian sack, but closer up the lump is beige clothing silted with blood. Gallio holds his hand across his nose. Get closer, right up close, because closeness comes with the job, and a nub of tendon glistens in the half-light, where the head should be. Blackflies rise from the severed neck, settle on the top of the spine.
    Above the lamp, Gallio notices, looking away and up, and further up, anywhere but down, afternoon sunshine pierces the knotholes in the roof slats, light coming through in pinpoint beams. He looks back down. The second object is the head. Valeria finds a riding crop on a nail in the wall. She asks Gallio for a handkerchief. She takes his handkerchief and uses it to handle the whip, which she unhooks and pokes at the severed head. It lies stubbornly on one side on a patch of straw. She levers the head upright, it pauses, seems for a moment to be the head of Jesus (long brown hair, beard) then topples back onto a blood-caked ear.
    ‘You were there. You saw the twelve of them together. Is this Jesus?’
    In Benghazi, staring at a pathway of moonlight across the water of the bay, Gallio had allowed the killers of Romulus a change of clothing and rolls of plastic bags. He could speculate about their actions but couldn’t unmake the world he knew: with minor improvements their murderous scheme looked plausible. The senators would need odorless floor-cleaning materials, concealable in a toga. He gave them some