Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard Page B

his trousers. He registered Gallio’s miserable face, decided he was probably harmless.
    ‘Last week someone else was asking, same as you,’ he said. ‘All we know is she’s gone.’
    ‘Leave anything behind?’
    ‘No, just like the last time I was asked. She sold her possessions and made a donation to the School for the Blind. Then she sold me the empty house. Couldn’t its potential. Her loss. She gave the money from the house to the Daughters of Charity.’
    ‘No forwarding address?’
    ‘None. Last I heard she went abroad somewhere. France? One of those places.’
    Gallio reached for the beads in the doorway, then turned back. ‘The other person asking after Veronica. What did he look like?’
    ‘Could have been a woman.’ This from the girl, who popped a bubble as a follow-up.
    ‘Your father came in because of my voice.’
    ‘He’s not my father.’
    ‘Forget it,’ Gallio said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    The Swiss passports provided by Valeria keep Gallio and Baruch out of trouble. Cassius Gallio is travelling as a pharmaceutical salesman from Basle. He had wondered, briefly, why Valeria needed him undercover.
    ‘Jesus disguised himself as a gardener, and an angel,’ Valeria had reminded him. ‘He went undercover as a
carpenter
. To catch him out we can learn those lessons.’
    With Jesus, the trickery is without end. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get. He turned the death of Lazarus to his advantage, and then his own crucifixion. Jesus is not a problem that can be approached head-on. Jesus has skills, fieldcraft, and at a purely professional level is a worthy opponent for a disgraced Speculator with a point to prove.
    Cassius Gallio tells lies to cross the border into Syria and the lies don’t matter, are part of how once he’d decided to live. His only regret is being out of practice. The good news is thatthey reach the Al Kadam station in south Damascus without incident, where Baruch is scheduled to leave him. No trains are running, so Baruch walks away into the bombed suburbs without looking back. Not many cars on the roads, but a yellow Cherokee is in the Toyota’s mirror when Gallio pulls away.
    His stepfather the Roman general, who knew what he wanted in life, had expected Cassius Gallio to join the uniformed army. He’d planned to ease Gallio along, using his experience and connections to nudge his stepson ahead of contemporaries and competitors. He wasn’t a great believer in colleagues, or friends. Not in the army. Gallio’s main refuge from his stepfather’s ambition was the chess club, and one evening after he’d checkmated a civil servant their casual conversation shaded into recruitment. We don’t call it spying, the man said, because that’s not exactly what it is. We’re looking for bright people like yourself to police civilization, and to shape everyone’s future for the best.
    A successful Speculator, as Gallio would soon learn in training, must be rational, deceptive if necessary, then ruthless. Powerful, invisible, but never a killer beyond the rule of law, or at least not without a transparent objective. No one should be certain he existed. And remember, his instructors said, knowledge is power. Knowledge is always power.
    His stepfather was furious but Cassius Gallio escaped overseas, and on his first posting to Jerusalem he was greedy to learn as much as possible as quickly as he could. Initially this meant the language and the women, the easiest available territories. He met Judith, who was direct and uncomplicated. Gallio had lived in a villa with his stepfather’s third wife, and was cynical about communication between the sexes. It was therefore a relief to spend time with a woman and not expect immediately to understand her.
    Or Cassius Gallio was lonely, and Judith in Jerusalem was kind. He’d been aiming to conquer, in a small way, but at the same time