Acts of the Assassins Read Online Free PDF

say.
Wanted, Jesus, Dead or Alive
. You fatigue me, Gallio. You acted without my authority. You’re supposed to be looking for a body, not a ghost.’
    ‘I’m covering the angles. We’re making progress.’
    ‘You haven’t found the body, which by now will be in a severely perished condition. It’s in everyone’s interests to sort this out. I want you to bring me Judas.’
    ‘To the Antonia?’
    ‘In the usual way.’
    Pilate squares off the pages of the report, even though they’re square. Gallio feels exposed, alone: the next time Judas enters the Antonia he won’t be coming out.
    ‘I promised him our protection,’ Gallio says. ‘He’s essential to my strategy.’
    ‘I promised him nothing. Certainly not the most visible table at Canela. He knows more than he’s saying. He’ll talk.’
    ‘Will he?’
    Torture hadn’t worked with Jesus: overdo the pain and he’d confess to anything. I’m hurting, Jesus said, but they kept on until he swore he was the son of god, if that’s what they wanted. Gallio is convinced he has a better approach: ‘Your authorization for Joseph to take away the body is in my report. You may have noticed.’
    ‘Is that a threat? I’ll send you to Moldova where you’ll dig latrines.’
    ‘Where’s Moldova?’
    ‘Exactly. No fucking idea.’
    Pilate shouldn’t be speaking to him like this, not to a Speculator sent from Rome. ‘Why did you let a senior Jew take charge of the body? This is material information.’
    Pilate fends again at thin air, but can’t brush away an imaginary insect. ‘Politics. You wouldn’t understand. Do a bad thing, send a man to his death. Then do a good thing, agree to a reasonable request from a senior member of the local priesthood. Keep a balance, keep the peace. Politics.’
    ‘In that case, politically, let me have Judas for one more week.’
    Pilate considers the balance, the this-way-and-that. Gallio adds weight to his side of the scales. ‘I’ll assume full responsibility.’
    ‘One week. But don’t let anything happen to him. Find the body in the next week or your career becomes my priority. And not in a good way.’
    Day by day Gallio increases the pressure. He trains Judas to debate against Peter, providing every reasonable argument against life after death. Then in the afternoons he picks the weakest of the disciples, at least to his eyes, and follows them. By now it’s them or him. The disciples travel in pairs, for security reasons or to keep their stories straight, and in East Jerusalem on a Tuesday afternoon Gallio wastes valuable time watching Bartholomew and Philip from an unmarked Antonia car. They’re serving soup to the poor from the back of a van.
    Cassius Gallio doesn’t crack, he doesn’t have a breakdown, despite what the army psychiatrist later claims on oath to the military tribunal. Cassius Gallio does nothing during this period that is irrational or unjustified. On this particular day hemay have been guilty of impatience. He is frustrated. He wants to make something happen, and he tells his driver to move fast, brake hard behind the soup van. Doesn’t bother with introductions, puts Bartholomew in an armlock and ducks him into the back of the Mercedes.
    ‘Keep your hands off the leather.’ Gallio dives in beside him. ‘Drive.’
    The car climbs the switchback up the Mount of Olives, until they pull in at a Panoramic Viewpoint, bumper to low steel barrier. Below is the walled city of Jerusalem, past and present merged in every stone. An Arab boy calls out from the ramparts. In the car park beside them the bin overflows with burger cartons. Bartholomew ignores the view.
    ‘What do you want from me?’
    ‘I thought you were Jesus.’
    ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
    ‘My mistake. I can’t tell any of you apart.’
    Bartholomew is thinner, less solid than the others, but the resemblance is intact. He is thin-boned, breakable, like Jesus with a drug habit. Otherwise Gallio knows him from his file,