Cassius Gallio blinks twice and the third time he keeps his eyes clenched shut, mouth stretched tight, showcasing the wreck of his face. He grimaces and dips his chin into his collarbone. He can resist them. He can run away from Jesus, like in the old days in Germany.
The light representing Andrew moves a measure south, reaching the border with England. Gallio wants this over. He rocks forward and links through to the travel websites accessed by Claudia the day before. The northern Peloponnese, to the west of Athens. Not the most popular of Greek holiday destinations, but a world away from Lincolnshire and from Andrew, and in Patras Jesus has no obvious use for him. Cassius Gallio puts the holiday package on his credit card, taxes included, flying from Humberside Airport later that day.
Patras is a medium to large southern European city, rich with history but made present by urban planning and pre-stressed concrete. The season is Carnival. Through the window of the airport shuttle bus, on a city-centre route to his designated hotel, Cassius Gallio sees pirates blowing saxophones and Socrates on a Jamaican steel drum. Nothing is sacred, everything is allowed, and in Patras at this time of year at this time of night Bacchus the god of revels is god.
His bus brakes at traffic lights and Gallio reads a wall of fly-posts for the Black Pussy club, first sixty-nine ladies in for free. He doubts Jesus would linger here, but if Jesus is watching, if he’s interested, he’ll see that Cassius Gallio has disengaged. He has given up looking for good.
Gallio makes an arbitrary decision to get off the bus at a stop near the Roman Odeon. The heat of the Greek night rises from the pedestrian asphalt, a welcome change of temperature from Caistor, and in among the sailors and angels, hearing the timeless music, Gallio enjoys being no one. He does not represent Complex Casework. He attempts none of the difficult answers.
He retreats, blots himself into the corner of a streetside bar. In the warmth and the flamelight, Cassius Gallio convinces himself that the disciples are of as little concern to him as they are to the revellers of Patras. Also he is indifferent to Claudia, reunited in Rome with her family. The point is, he reminds himself, nothing matters. There is no god, no love, no plan. He raises his arm to the waiter for another drink. One more, and then he’ll justify Patras to Valeria. He turns on his phone, off since the plane, to show his positive intent.
For this second failure of his they’ll probably skip the tribunal. Gallio has bungled his search for Jesus as completely as he did the crucifixion. He over-complicates, he thinks, or complications happen around him. Should have killed Lazarus while he had the chance. Should have closed down Jesus in Jerusalem before he went to trial.
He drinks half his Mythos beer then texts Valeria his resignation. Hereby, he texts — not a word recognised by autocorrect — Hereby I end my connection with the Jesus case. He could thank Valeria for giving him a second opportunity to fail, but settles for best wishes and a reminder of his full family name, Cassius Marcellus Gallio. Repeat any name often enough and it sounds absurd.
He sips his beer, adds an X, and sends the text. Then he sends another with a single word: Sorry. He sits and drinks and waits for a reply that doesn’t come. The penalty for desertion is death. He does not want to die.
He sits and drinks, but alcohol hadn’t helped in Moldova. He sits. He sends back a double ouzo from a man alone at the bar. He doesn’t want to care and he doesn’t want to die. Or to kill. For his sanity as well as his safety he needs to engineer a disappearance. In training a Speculator learns procedures for most patterns of human behaviour, including the urge to vanish off the face of the earth, and it occurs to Gallio that Jesus and CCU Speculators have similar skills. Though Gallio can think of more discreet ways to disappear than starting with a faked crucifixion. Show-off.
Gallio will wipe himself out. Caistor wasn’t disappearance enough, and drinking himself into oblivion in Greece is too predictable a refuge. Valeria would find him in no time, visibly helpless in the gutter.
He pays up and hails a cab. At the hotel Gallio signs the register, agreeing to the many unread terms and conditions applicable to a seven-day package at the Patras Porto Rio. This is the first step in his textbook disappearance. There will be a final sighting, so he might as well make his last known movements more enjoyable than dying on a cross. He sleeps soundly between the fresh sheets of a hotel bed.
In the morning Cassius Gallio fills up on buffet breakfast at a table within range of the restaurant’s single security camera. One more slice of cheese before dropping his napkin on the table and pushing out his chair. The trail has to end somewhere, and the procedure requires Gallio to be traceable on the grid. He knows what he’s doing. He walks to the cashpoint machine in the hotel lobby and withdraws 3,900 euros, the limit. There is an extortionate charge, which in the circumstances doesn’t bother him.
So far he has risked nothing. The credit card transaction for the holiday package already links him to the charter flight and the Patras hotel. He might as well withdraw the money while he’s here. In his room he packs his bag with essentials, toothbrush and underwear and a hat, and his last recorded act in the hotel is to pay cash in the gift shop for another hat, a conspicuous straw panama. The sun is already high and hot so he puts the panama hat on his head and leaves the hotel on foot, steps serenely into an unexceptional city.
One more thing: ten minutes later, in a local bar without CCTV, he downs an espresso and crumples his hat into a sanitary bin in the toilets. Wearing a plain black baseball cap, he leaves the bar. He disappears.
Gallio ought to feel safe, lost, confident of an invisible journey from the Patras ferry terminal to Corfu and from there to any of a hundred Greek islands. Instead, in a city he doesn’t know and where nobody knows him, he is convinced he’s being watched. He can’t explain it. He has followed the approved procedure but in his inner ear, and in his heart, he senses that he’s not alone.
Stay undercover. He doesn’t know how, but it must be either the disciples or Valeria, and instinctively Gallio feels the surveillance is coming from above. The CCU have satellite, so Gallio ducks under the parasols of pavement cafés, excusing himself between tables. As the streets fill with people he slips into a one-room bookshop, and browses a Lonely Planet while checking the street for anyone walking too slowly or too fast, but Carnival cancels out normal. A teenage girl dressed as a Pierrot does nothing much but smoke a pipe. A giant head bobs past, a Minotaur in papier mâché. Men are women and the last are first. Half the people in the street are wearing masks, others walk with heads down, hands in pockets, kicking the overnight cartons.
Cassius Gallio works his way towards the centre of Patras, wary of mime artists and the occasional surge of revellers. He passes the Catholic church of St Andreas, and shelters for a moment in the shaded courtyard of the Protestant Church of St Andrew, where a curate is brushing the flagstones. He detours along Andrew’s Avenue and ignores the woman in the St Andrew’s Juice Van who shouts at him to cheer up, it might never happen. He hurries past the general hospital the Patras Agios Andreas, and for a sick moment thinks a nurse is following him. In his paranoia the world is suddenly all about Cassius Gallio, and if only they weren’t watching him so closely he could settle on a plan, shape the immediate future.
A tracer. He stands still. Of course, what a fool he is, that’s how they’re keeping track of him. Gallio remembers Valeria snapping at him for not planting a tracer on Baruch while he had the chance — a precautionary measure that would have warned them he was leaving for England. For Valeria, tracers were a standard CCU procedure, and in Caistor Claudia had all the time in the world to fix up Gallio. The shared room, the sex: he was not being vigilant. Gallio pats his clothes. No, she was a Speculator, and the tracer would be expertly hidden.