It is him. It is Thomas. Gallio has no doubt about it, even though he looks like Jesus.
They could have arrived earlier, and Cassius Gallio could have saved the life of doubting Thomas, only Baruch had won the battle of the Jude debrief.
Back in Jerusalem their case room had been cleared of mops and buckets. An electrician was shooed away so they could talk, sitting on folding chairs round a trestle table. Pictures of Jesus had been pinned to the walls. Gallio squinted: images of Jesus, of disciples, hard at a glance to tell one from the other. Between two long windows a map of the ancient world was dotted with plastic pins for each confirmed sighting: eight so far.
Gallio opened the meeting by reporting on the intelligence he’d gained from Beirut. Essentially, though without being able to say when or how, Jude was convinced that Jesus was coming back.
‘What does that mean?’ Valeria had her hands flat on the table, a signal everywhere in the world of straight-talking honesty.
‘Don’t know,’ Gallio had to admit, ‘but it sounds dramatic. Jude told me Jesus is coming back while at least one of his disciples is alive, so that’s our best idea of the timescale. Also that Thomas is operating out of Babylon. Our next step should be a visit to Thomas, interview him about the switch theory. Thomas has privileged information about the health status of Jesus in the period after the crucifixion.’
‘Any other way he’s special?’
‘He was allowed to doubt the resurrection. Then he confirmed it, so Thomas was picked out to spread the significant lie. True or false, he knows more than some of the others.’
Cassius Gallio was pleased with the progress he’d made, but Baruch had not been idle in Damascus. While Gallio was questioning Jude in Beirut, Baruch had convened meetings of his own in Damascus about Paul. Not all his encounters had been consensual, and occasionally he sucked at the grazed lower knuckles of his scuffed right hand.
According to Baruch, there were features of Paul’s story relevant to this investigation that failed to compute. Many years ago Paul had set off on an Israeli-sponsored mission to infiltrate and assassinate the disciples. On the Damascus road, up in the mountain passes, some unexplained event had interrupted his journey and he arrived in Damascus blind and incapacitated. The Jesus sect knew who he was, after earlier persecutions in Jerusalem. They should have taken advantage and killed their most vicious public oppressor. At the very least they should have fled from him. Instead they stayed and cared for him and made him welcome in the city.
Baruch still couldn’t understand, even after his ruthless day and night in Damascus, how the disciples had turned Paul from oppressor to believer. At first — and Baruch accepted some of the responsibility for this — the Israeli home security forces had refused to believe in Paul’s dramatic conversion. Stand back, Baruch had advised them, wait for the pay-off. He’d assumed that Paul was running his own interference, an ingenious solo mission of his own devising. Paul was a high-flyer capable of coldly orchestrating the fatal stoning of a Christian called Stephen in a public Jerusalem street. He’d have worked out a plan for Damascus.
‘I remember that time like yesterday,’ Baruch said. ‘We sent Paul into Syria with instructions to find and eliminate Peter, who was leading the spread of the lie about the resurrection of Jesus. But Paul, Paul was always ambitious. We could imagine him lining up all twelve disciples, and he’d have thought deeply about how to do it. He’d have worried that by starting with Peter he’d scare the others into hiding, and have to spend the rest of his life finding them one by one.’
Baruch had admired Paul’s talent, his energy, so he wasn’t fooled by the first emergency encryption from the Damascus bureau. Paul ambushed in mountains. In the following days the bureau stopped bothering with encryption. Paul’s plight was more shocking than that, arriving in the city blind, delirious, not the cool and ruthless agent they’d been briefed to expect.
His sight returned first, if not his sense of reality.
‘Claimed to have been struck by lightning,’ Baruch said. ‘Also to have spoken with Jesus. This last time in Damascus I had to remind several people that Paul was a liar, because by then Jesus was dead or in heaven. Either way, he wasn’t on the road through the mountains.’
‘They only had Paul’s word for it,’ Valeria said. ‘He must have been convincing.’
‘Something else I checked out in Damascus. In a full and frank exchange with a witness who was there at the time. He confirmed that when Paul arrived in the city he was in bits.’
The first time Baruch heard Paul’s version of events he’d burst out laughing. Lightning, a speaking appearance by Jesus, the whole bold performance was transparently a wonderfully conceived plan. Paul’s instant enlightenment was a brazen invention, a faked event perfectly targeted at believers in the miracles of Jesus. In his own life Baruch had never experienced revelation, and it seemed reasonable to assume that neither had anyone else, including Saul of Tarsus. Paul had set out to infiltrate the disciple network in Syria, and his first move, in an isolated spot on the Damascus road, was to strike himself down in a storm. He comes out the other side a Jesus believer, changes his name, the full defector’s charade.
Baruch had remained convinced for years that Saul as Paul was faking it. It would be only a matter of time before Paul filed the inside line on every mystery and miracle, trapping the disciples and rolling up the network. But so far, right up until now, there had been no pay-off and no big reveal. Baruch and the Israeli hierarchy were still waiting, and in Damascus Baruch had failed to uncover any telling inconsistencies. Paul might truly have gone over to the other side.
‘This has gone on too long,’ Baruch said. ‘We need to talk to Paul himself, find out what really happened on the Damascus road. If Paul was confronted by Jesus, as he claims, then Jesus must have made some kind of offer he couldn’t refuse. That’s also the most recent sighting, the freshest lead we have. On the road to Damascus Paul was the last person to see Jesus alive. He’s the only member of the cult to have seen Jesus after the ascension, by which time Jesus was supposed to have disappeared. This fact has to be significant. Paul made Jesus break cover, and he deserves our attention.’
‘Paul is unrelated to the immediate investigation,’ Gallio said. He remembered his hours of work on the dossiers, the risks he took in Beirut. ‘We’re looking into the switch theory, a plot the experienced disciples were hatching while Saul was a boy tentmaker in Tarsus. Paul had no personal connection with Jesus. And don’t forget that he’s one of us.’
‘He is,’ Valeria said. ‘He has the full protection of the law.’
‘That’s something else that needs clearing up,’ Baruch said. ‘Once Paul went over to Jesus, why didn’t Rome revoke his citizenship?’
‘He’s one of your lot too,’ Valeria said. ‘A Jew.’
Baruch pulled a finger across his throat. ‘He’s in this up to his neck.’
Gallio had heard enough. As far as he was concerned Paul was a latecomer, a hanger-on who’d missed the main event. ‘My recommendation is that we follow the lead from Jude that points us towards Thomas.’
‘We should lean on Paul.’ Baruch sucked at a knuckle, made some progress on a scab with his teeth. ‘Jude threw us a few scraps, no more than that. We’re not any closer to Jesus after talking to him, so why should Thomas be different?’
‘You didn’t even bring Jude in,’ Valeria said. ‘You can’t think the disciples have every answer or you’d have brought Jude in.’