Gallio is not breathing well. He’s panting like a dog, sweating. The hard drive in the computer at the Heritage Centre, credit card records, the hotel register in Patras. He’d been so pleased with his procedures, but if CCU were tracking him then Valeria would find him regardless. She sees everything and knows everything. He needs a concealed place where he can locate and destroy the tracer.
The façade of the Greek Orthodox Agios Andreas church looks like a train station. Inside, every wall and archway glitters with mosaic, and Gallio’s footsteps on the marble floor echo back from the central dome, decorated with Jesus in the centre surrounded 360 degrees by his disciples. The twelve of them twinkle brightly down on him, watch as he searches for a confessional box, any place of privacy.
But today Cassius Gallio is out of luck. The ornate interior of the huge church is mostly open space. Gallio negotiates thousands of seats set out for a church performance that coincides with Carnival, not just this year but always. At the end of one of the rows a nun is kneeling at prayer, black headscarf wrapped squarely across her forehead. No confessionals. There’s a screen at the front of the church and Cassius Gallio acts as if he belongs, steps behind it into the space reserved for priests and for god. He’s in a hurry. In the private half-darkness he puts his bag on the ground and kneels to rummage through the contents. So many mistakes. He spreads out a T-shirt and pats it down, feeling for a foreign object the size of a watch battery. He squeezes toothpaste out of the tube, and breaks soap onto his T-shirt. No sign of a tracer.
He takes off his clothes, all of them, fingers the seams of his trousers and the collar of his shirt. Naked, he checks the waistbands of his underpants.
His phone rings.
Shit. In church the ringtone sounds out like a blasphemy. Unknown number, which he rejects. The phone, of course. He dresses clumsily, but fast. Claudia couldn’t leave phones alone, whereas Gallio, from an older generation, often left his unattended. Now he feels old as well as foolish but the tracer is inside the phone, it has to be. He goes down on one knee, takes aim and slides the phone across the marble floor and under the altar. Bullseye. Then his ID, spins his ID under there too. He becomes no one, absent without leave. He disconnects himself, because nothing matters. There is no god, and no CCU, and Cassius Gallio is disinclined to look for Jesus.
He tucks in his shirt, inhales deeply, picks up his bag and emerges from behind the Orthodox screen a free man. He bumps into Jesus. In front of the holy screen of the Agios Andreas, in the city of Patras in the Greek Peloponnese, Jesus appears exclusively to Cassius Germanicus Gallio.
‘Surprise,’ Jesus says. He holds out his hands.
Gallio drops his bag, clutches his heart.
‘Sister Hilda told me which way you went.’
It is Andrew. Gallio peers at the face and Andrew is a wiry, toughened version of Jesus, up close not as young as he used to be. His gaunt face has dried out with the years. He is pale, papery, illuminated.
‘You can relax,’ Andrew says. He has the eyes, the beard, the sandals. ‘I found you.’
Gallio does not relax. He looks beyond Andrew into the body of the church, the thousand waiting seats. Left, right, up to the dome, down to the floor. Where else is there?
‘Calm down,’ Andrew says. ‘You’re acting like a man possessed.’
He lays his hands on Gallio’s shoulders, leans heavily on him as once Cassius Gallio had weighed himself down on Judas. ‘Trust me. I’m here for you. I can drive out your demon.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Jude told me you were looking for Jesus. I can help.’
Very kind, Gallio thinks, but not now. From the beginning, way back in Jerusalem, the disciples had led him on, luring him into traps he mistook for his own intentions. He’s had enough of their prayers, their blessings. Andrew makes the sign of the cross.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Jesus has a special place in his heart for you. For all of us.’
‘It was a tracking device, wasn’t it?’
Gallio had instantly blamed Claudia, but it could just as easily have been Bartholomew. In between the bandaging and the handouts, with Gallio distracted by social inequality, Bartholomew could have accessed his phone and planted the bug. ‘The tracking device was yours. I should have guessed. I am god’s biggest idiot.’
‘You’re in a basilica, Cassius, in a cloudless country open to the eye of the Almighty. How did you expect to hide from Jesus in a big open church? He can see you everywhere, that’s true, but in here you come to us.’
Andrew’s implacability is exhausting. He must have tracked Gallio first to Caistor, asked questions, sorted through Search History on the computers in the Heritage Centre, then out to Patras on the next chartered flight. Gallio sits down on a front row seat, defeated. Andrew sits next to him. On the screen of the sanctuary they admire the visual focus for every eye turned towards god in the Agios Andreas, which is an oversized icon of Andrew the disciple of Jesus in cobalt and gold. Andrew is roped to an X-shaped cross, a shimmering image on which to meditate a spiritual truth, and Andrew’s iconic expression is inscrutable, as he gazes directly back at Gallio.
‘Jesus remembers you from Jerusalem,’ Andrew says. ‘And from that fantastic day with Lazarus. You’ve seen and shared so much with us. You could tell people what you know, what you’ve witnessed with your own eyes. You’d be welcome to join us.’
Cassius Gallio could give himself up, especially his ambition and pride. He could discard his former self, and this knowledge shines like light — to become a believer he need only be weak. That’s why Jesus has so many followers. But surrender feels like possession, like being inhabited by a person who isn’t him. The meek shall not inherit the earth, not while Valeria is regional director of the CCU, and anyway Gallio isn’t confident of what he’s witnessed or how much he knows. He doesn’t have the facts.
‘Approach Jesus with humility,’ Andrew says. ‘Not as a Speculator, hunting him down, but by opening yourself up to him.’
‘Speculators have open minds. That’s one of the requirements, written into the job description.’
‘Not your mind, your heart. That’s how we the disciples came to Jesus. We felt something was wrong, and we believed Jesus could put the wrongness right. After you find him with an open heart the rest is easy. Then he’s always there.’
A ray of sunshine beams through a window high in the dome, whitens a rectangle of marbled floor. ‘Think how much you have to give.’
‘Nothing,’ Gallio says. ‘I’ve resigned from the case, and I’m looking for no one. You should leave me in peace.’
Cassius Gallio rejects Andrew’s idea of Jesus, and tears brim in his eyes. He hates that. He has several thousand euros in his pocket, and he’s in a Greek ferry port where he can buy travel tickets without question for cash. He should be looking forward to a quiet and comfortable retirement, but the disciples of Jesus want more than his ruined career. Not once, but now twice. Still they refuse to let him be.
‘Are you scared of dying?’ Andrew asks.
‘Yes, like everyone else. Aren’t you?’
‘No. That’s the difference between us.’
Gallio believes him. Andrew projects the same certainty Gallio had envied in Jude and Bartholomew — Jesus died and came back to life, which to a sincere believer constitutes proof that something or somewhere exists on the far side of death. Andrew can die horribly, and at the same time he can succeed. This is the story retold in mosaic on the walls of the basilica, and Gallio remembers the ruined martyrium where Philip hung from his thighs. It was a beautiful spot, high above the blue pools of Pamukkale, impeccably picturesque. The story had been plotted in advance, because Jesus is always a step ahead.