Free Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard Page B

didn’t see how Jesus could have survived for more than a few weeks afterward. A month at the outside, with expert medical attention.
    There was always another file to open. Gallio respected the assignment, such as it was. He treated Jesus as a missing person and pulled relevant information from Valeria’s Complex Casework networks. He reviewed every theory. The rational approach was to keep an open mind until the evidence convinced one wayor another, and the Speculator protocols came back to Gallio like riding a bike. He contacted Israeli banks and had them search for an account in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. He was meticulous, accessing the benefits register to see if any likely Jesus was claiming, and if so how he collected his money. Neither initiative generated a result.
    Cassius Gallio swung on his chair, this way, that way. He chewed the end of his propelling pencil. Why not? If you’ve lost something, as his stepfather liked to say, look again in the obvious place. He spent a morning checking police and hospital records for unidentified bodies. He respected the assignment but he was a realist. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross he might have died since, and the alleged resurrection hadn’t put a stop to violent assaults in Jerusalem, nor vagrants dying alone. The worst of life continued, here and now as everywhere and always, and the official records contained a separate category for unclaimed corpses.
    Some of the dead bodies, not many, had mutilated fingers where prints had been removed by sanding or slicing. Gang crimes, scores settled and souls lost. Not one of the unclaimed corpses had extremity damage compatible with crucifixion. And even if a likely candidate did emerge, Gallio didn’t have a DNA profile to confirm the match with Jesus.
    The burial clothes, those left behind at the tomb, had long gone missing. There were no body fluids to sequence or physical remains to analyze. The cross, pretty much any remnant of it, would provide blood spots for a DNA sample, but no one could locate the cross. Valeria had tracked down fragments across the ancient world, but the provenance was never certain. And in any case, so many hands had touched these suspect relics that the DNA was unusable. The contemporary evidence was lost.
    Gallio looked again in an obvious place: the family. Valeria had labelled a dossier ‘Nazareth,’ and repeated searches of the house where Jesus grew up were routinely logged in the weeks after his body vanished. Gallio now sees from photocopies that he signed the original warrants himself, back in the day, but Valeria had raided the house more recently. Empty, mother gone, father long dead, neighbours adamant that Joseph and Mary had seemed a normal couple who kept themselves to themselves. Yes, they remembered Jesus. Always had time for everyone.
    None of these enquiries revealed a hidden twin who could have died in his place. Valeria made sure her people asked, checking back through school yearbooks and birth certificates. No secret twin or brother of about the same age. Only Jesus, from Nazareth, and his circle of Galilean friends.
    His friends. The original twelve disciples, with the violent exceptions of Judas and James, were alive. No reported deaths from natural causes, as yet, but not one of the disciples was resident in Israel. The beheading of James was unlikely to tempt them home.
    Gallio thought some more about the disciples, and how they looked so similar. He dug out the tape of the crucifixion and watched it again, and again. He stayed in the office after everyone had left, and gradually he remembered how to speculate. Cassius Gallio felt meaningful for the first time in years, and reacquainted himself with his youthful desire for glory, like a lost friend he was surprised to recognize.
    Then he suppressed his ambition as best he could. There was no glorious return to Rome in this, consuls rising to acclaim him. The CCU did not call for its finest minds to track down a