Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard Page A

historical instinct for the damage religion can do. Gallio understands that, because he too has suffered. ‘I thought the worst was over? I heard Beirut was getting safer.’
    ‘It is.’ The man holds up his crossbow, balancing it on his meaty trigger finger. ‘No guns in this sector of the camp. Not even in the hospital. Believe me, that counts as progress.’
    He turns, flips the crossbow upright, and fires at the
Push
panel on a door about thirty yards away. The bolt punches two-thirds of the way through the door. Gallio and the boy admire his work. The man has sent the bolt from A to B, a straight cause and effect between him and his target, the reassurance of connecting what he intended to happen with what then visibly happens. Bullseye. It’s practically all anyone wants.
    On the top floor they push through another set of doors into a ward. High ceilings, a double row of beds. For a heart-stopping moment Gallio sees Jesus—the long hair, the beard. The fluorescent light, possibly, quivering on washed-out linen. The eyes, the pitiful brown eyes.
    After sending out the Missing Persons bulletin, Gallio had waited to see what would happen, which was pretty much the essence of police work as he remembered it. The waiting, and the hope that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Some bright Antonia IT spark had written code for a drop-down tab that displayed a map of the known world. As soon as a station or associate bureau responded to the bulletin, a small star would light up in that place on the map. One sighting was all Gallio needed to justify his existence, and to make his first progress report to Valeria. A star, a light, a reason to begin.
    Within minutes, a star lit up in southern Turkey. The city of Hierapolis. Gallio paged Valeria. Another light in Ephesus, then a star above Athens, and another in central France. Lights started blinking across the screen, in Beirut, north into Russia. A star appeared above Whithorn in southwest Scotland, over Cyprus, across into Turkmenistan.
    Gallio could barely keep up.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Valeria leaned over his shoulder, her head close to his. ‘How can he be in all of these places at once?’
    Gallio rolled the cursor over each light in turn but the text box never guaranteed the identification. Not a hundred per cent certain. These were sightings that fitted the description on the bulletin, but none positively confirmed a location and lock for Jesus.
    ‘The disciples, it must be.’ Cassius Gallio pushed his chair back from the screen. ‘They look like Jesus, act in his name. Wherever they go the disciples are mistaken for Jesus.’
    ‘Or Jesus is mistaken for them.’ Valeria took over the mouse, rolled over each of the lights one more time. She stopped, read the text that appeared over each star, moved on. ‘He can poseas a disciple just as his disciples pretend to be him. Clever way to hide.’
    ‘It would be, if that’s how he’s hiding.’
    ‘Call Baruch.’
    Valeria chaired the meeting in a disused case room. Apart from the reopened Jesus puzzle, Israel was quiet, and the room was currently the military police storeroom for military mops and buckets. Valeria sat Gallio down and invited him to talk them through his switch theory. She let Baruch guffaw and draw a penis in the dust of a storaged whiteboard.
    ‘One of the disciples stood in for Jesus on the day of the crucifixion,’ Gallio said. ‘It wasn’t Jesus who died. That explains how he could reappear after the crucifixion.’
    ‘We’d have noticed at the time.’
    ‘Would we? If there were ten disciples instead of eleven, who really would have noticed? That’s why he had Judas killed. Judas would have worked it out, eventually, because he knew the disciples up close. Nobody else can tell them apart, except their families who were safely out of the way in Galilee. The disciple who changed places with Jesus would have been one of the lesser ones. Collateral damage.’
    ‘I always forget their