Orla swiveled the chair so it turned away from the door. He wouldn’t see her as he came into the room. She sat there alone, waiting. She remembered something he had said in his office. He’d told her that Judas Iscariot wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the Gospel of Peter and asked her what she thought of that. Now, thinking about it, she realized how odd that was. There was Peter, the rock on which the Church was founded, the first Apostle, and he didn’t have a word for the betrayal of his Lord? According to John, Peter was the swordsman who cut off the ear of Malchus when they came to arrest Christ. How could he have not written about Judas, then, if Judas really had been the great betrayer?
Then it occurred to her that perhaps Judas and Peter had in fact been one and the same, that Judas had written the Gospel accredited to Peter. It was a passion, one of the most prominent in early Christianity but denounced as heretical because it blamed Herod Antipas and not Pilate for the crucifixion. The resurrection and the ascension weren’t separate events, either. Where Matthew claimed Christ’s cry from the cross was “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? Peter claimed Christ was not calling to God but asking, “My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken me?” and when he had said it he was taken up. There was no death. The other thing she recalled was that there was no disloyalty in Peter’s story. The disciples were arrested for plotting to burn the temple. Could those have been Judas’ thoughts? Judas’ truths?
Peter was the rock the Church was founded upon. Judas’ was the sacrifice the Church was founded upon. Could they be one and the same? Did it even matter, or was Schnur just playing with her, running theosophical rings around her?
The one thing she could understand was that if the Disciples of Judas didn’t believe the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then there was no need for them to believe in redemption from man’s sins by the suffering on the cross. It was all propaganda and lies, after all, wasn’t it? Made up to sell this new ministry and creling to faith in retrospect. What was it the toad had said? All of these random acts of violence, hate, war and death made him think we weren’t redeemed at all, we were damned. She wondered if he actually believed the stuff he said, or if it was a convenient excuse to strike back at the people he believed had hurt him, the people behind his wife’s murder? Attacking an entire system of faith seemed a little extreme for that.
No, surely in Acts, Peter, Prince of the Apostles, stood up and decried Judas as a traitor? In the same passage he described Judas’ death in gory detail, his guts rupturing in the field of blood as he collapsed. Didn’t the Apostles welcome Matthias in Judas’ place? She could almost hear Schnur’s counter argument in her head: the Gospel of Luke names Jude for Thaddeus; John doesn’t name any of the twelve and adds his own Nathanael. All these testimonies and they can’t keep their key players straight? Peter being described alongside Judas in these other texts and not in his own? Was it revisionist history, trying to erase the sinner from the course of history? Or was it a case of trying to hide something else?
These other gospels were the ones that promised the miracles, the healing of the sick, the driving out demons, even raising the dead. There was nothing like that in Peter’s passion. The story of Akeldama was preposterous, Judas rupturing and exploding was like something out of a bad movie. It’s not even a convincing lie. And of course there were the problems of language. In the original texts the vocabulary was quite limited, meaning that the translations could be very easily made more explicitly divine should the translator wish. For instance, the prepositions on and by were often the same word in Aramaic, which would completely change the whole walking on water thing. Walking by water was far less impressive a feat. So what was Peter hiding? What truth did he not want recorded? If he wasn’t Judas, then perhaps he knew the truth about Judas?
It came back to the word messiah, didn’t it?
And if a messiah really was no more divine or god-touched than the one who brings peace and restoration to Israel, well then it couldn’t exactly be claimed that Judas’ kiss brought peace. For almost a century after either Christ or Judas the Romans were still suppressing the names Judaea and Jerusalem. The Jews were still exiles.
Israel was in her blood. She knew its history and its pains as well as any Jew. She had studied the Diaspora and the destruction of the First Temple. She understood the effect the destruction of the Second Temple had on the people. And she understood the hope Simon bar Kokhba had represented. Bar Kokhba had reestablished a Jewish state of Israel seven centuries after the Diaspora began, a state which he ruled as Nasri for three years, bringing the scattered Jews home. Surely, by Schnur’s definition this made Kokhba more effectively a messiah than either Judas or Jesus? For two of those years he fought tooth and naihome. Suinst the Romans to maintain a free Israel, but for three years he gave his people a home, a place. He unified them. Of course after he failed history was unkind-the Jews were scattered, sold into slavery or driven out-and writers with little sympathy to his cause called him Simon bar Kozebah, or Simon, son of The Lie.
That was the way of the world though, was it not? History was written by the winners, not the valiant losers.
She didn’t have the answer.
Two millennia on no one did.
She didn’t think they were meant to.
It came down to faith. That was what all these contradictions came down to in the end. Some people needed to believe that Jesus suffered on the cross to redeem mankind’s sins. They needed to believe that there was a point, that the sacrifice of his earthly body meant something.
These words that so many clung to, so many drew faith from and believed in, could be twisted to say almost anything, and there was no way of knowing one way or the other what the truth was.
In the end it didn’t matter what she believed, what Schnur believed, what any of them believed. However improbable it was, Judas could be Peter, or he could be the Messiah, or a messiah; or he could be both or neither. It didn’t matter. People would find a way to twist the truth into whatever they wanted it to be.
That was the only truth.
And then it hit her, all of the messages, the prophecy of the Popes, the quatrains of Nostradamus, the lectures on the meaning of the word messiah, all of it. It wasn’t about Mabus ushering in the Antichrist, as Nostradamus had said, it was about a new messiah. Mabus was Caspi’s herald. He had said Caspi’s real name was Solomon. One sign of the Messiah was the restoration of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, and another was the rebuilding of the Temple. Who had built the First Temple?
Solomon.
It was Solomon’s Temple.
That was it. Caspi didn’t see himself as the Antichrist at al, he saw himself as the new Messiah. He was the man who was going to bring peace to Israel by creating a Jewish state. She didn’t believe for a minute that his real name was Solomon any more than it was Caspi.
Suddenly it all made sense. She saw how Gavrel Schnur had been recruited by Solomon to his cause. Dassah. It really had all been about his wife. That explained the shrine in his office and the shrine upstairs. She still dominated his life. Dassah Schnur had been murdered because of his vocal support of the Jewish presence on the West Bank and Gaza. He had never changed that position. He lived his entire life to that one fundamental truth. He wanted a homeland for the Jewish settlers. The PLO had murdered his wife because of it, which only made him want it more.
She understood Schnur’s role in her little triptych. He was the idealist who had been offered the one thing he always wanted.
Orla almost pitied him.
If Schnur was the idealist, the other roles were very easily defined. Miles Devere was the opportunist. There was money in death-there always had been-and he had started in Israel, in the very areas Schnur wanted to see a Jewish homeland. He understood the people and the politics and the needs of the region. Who better to help rebuild the infrastructure after the fallout? And, who better to be the grand architect and help build the new monument to Solomon’s m
essiah? Was that what he had offered Devere, the Last Temple? Surely it would be the most iconographic building of modern times. That would appeal to a man like Devere, even if the money and power didn’t.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was underestimating Miles Devere. There was a sinister undertone to his involvement. She recalled the payments into the Swiss bank made by Silverthorn and withdrawn by Caspi or Solomon or whatever his real name was. She remembered Humanity Capital and its modus operandi, how it stimulated unrest and promoted war for financial gain, and the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. Devere wasn’t some innocent attracted by Solomon, he was the money man. He was financing this war for a New Israel, pumping money into the Shrieks’ coffers, knowing that every dollar spent would in time be reaped five, six, eight, tenfold. It was what he did, he traded in human suffering and disaster.
The irony that Judas’ line was again being exploited for the gain of others didn’t escape her. As far as Devere was concerned it wasn’t about faith at all, it was about money. His own thirty pieces of silver.
She sat back in the chair. It was all there to see.
That left Solomon as the fanatic, the one man who really did believe all of it-the broken faith, the false church, the defamation of Judas-and through it all, the truth of what being a messiah really meant. It was never about being the son of God.
Surely that made him the most dangerous animal of them all, because a man like that couldn’t be reasoned with. Fanatics by definition weren’t open to reason. They didn’t want their eyes open to alternatives. And if they were persuasive, they could draw others closer to their flame of madness; but that wasn’t reason, that was trading on their rigid insanity. And he was insane. Make no bones about it. He could act the part in public-he could be convincing-but underneath the skin he was gone. That made him all the more frightening. A man like that would stop at nothing to see his dream of a new Jerusalem, a new recognized Israeli state for people of the one faith, come to pass. A man like that wouldn’t care if it meant stripping down the faiths of the Catholic Church and all of those other religions that didn’t subscribe to the glory of man. The trappings of religion and heresy were meat and potatoes to a man like that. It played into his messianic complex.
It was like a trail of breadcrumbs had been left for her to follow, and all the way she’d been picking them up and not thinking about what they really meant. But now she’d got it. She knew who they were. She knew how their roles fitted together. Everything made sense.
She called Lethe on the toad’s home phone and told him everything.
Then she waited for Mabus the Herald to come home.
And while she waited the sun went down.
Downstairs, she heard the front door slam.
The toad was home.
She waited.
She heard him breathing heavily as he labored up the large staircase. Gavrel Schnur was a grotesque man. He was gasping hard, seriously out of breath, before he was even halfway through the ascent. Orla was patient. She waited, looking at her ghostly reflection in the glass.
The toad came into his study. He paused momentarily, stari the reflection of the devil in his wife’s blue dress, and then he composed himself. “Did you think seeing you in my wife’s dress, with your hair like that, would stop me from killing you?” he said. It was the last thing he ever said. Orla turned the chair around slowly. She looked at him. The arrogance faded when he saw the Jericho 941 she held low in her lap. She didn’t see the man responsible for torturing her. She didn’t see the man behind the terror attacks on Berlin and Rome and all of those other cities. She saw a fat, frightened man who had never recovered from losing his wife.
And right at that moment it didn’t matter whether she had seven shots or four left.
She only needed one.
29
Scapegoat
Konstantin Khavin didn’t know whe he was.
There was a glass of water on the table, a tape recorder and microphone, and two chairs on the other side of the table. He was alone in the room. They worked him in shifts, refusing to let him sleep. They had taken his prints and run him through the system. They knew who he was. Worse, they knew what he was. They wanted to know who he was working for, who else was with him in Germany, why he had killed the Pope. Then someone came in with a security photograph of him in Berlin on the day of the sarin gas attack.
They put it on the table in front of him and asked, “Is that you?” He couldn’t deny it. It was a good picture. It caught all of his features in full frontal. Any half-decent facial recognition software would identify him. There was no point lying. “Yes.” He said and suddenly they were looking at a two-for-one deal on a sociopathic killer.
Because they knew who he was, they knew all about his training. They knew he was versed in interrogation techniques and torture. And they knew his experience wasn’t just theoretical.
They came back in.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the woman said, taking the first seat on the other side of the table. “Things don’t look good for you, Konstantin. You story does not check out.”
Her partner, a straight-faced bodybuilder in a suit, sank into the seat beside her.
“That’s her polite way of saying you’re screwed. We’ve got hundreds of witness testimonies, video evidence, your prints on the weapon, all the physical evidence we could dream of, including the sworn testimony of the Swiss Guard who tried to stop you. That’s what she means by ‘things not looking good.’ It gets substantially worse when we add your own story to the mix. A Russian defector, Konstantin? Do you have any conception of the word loyalty? Or is that it, you’re some sort of sleeper agent? Did they plant you on this side of the Wall and wait for you to grow? Maybe this was always your mission? Is that it, Konstantin? Were you ‘let go’ so that you could do this all these years later? Did they think the humiliation of another defector was worth it in return for the death of the Holy Father? How did they sell the mission to you? Or are you programmed to obey?”
Konstantin stared straight ahead. He didn’t so much as twitch. The words didn’t register on his face. He gave them nothing, knowing it would frustrate them. People were behind the one-way glass watching the whole dance.
“In Moscow they would have brought a doctor in by now,” he said, looking at the woman.
“Why?”
“To elicit a confession,” Konstantin said.
“You mean soften you up with sodium pentothal to weaken your resolve? We have ways of making you talk and all that bullshit,” the man said, full of scorn.
“I see you watch the movies,” Konstantin said.
“I suppose they’d send the muscle in next to beat the confession out of you if the drugs didn’t work?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they would let the doctor use the instruments of his trade. A lot of truths can be learned under a doctor’s scalpel.”
“That’s barbaric,” the woman said.
“It is one of the reasons I left Moscow. Not the only one. It was another world back then. Do not think you can intimidate me with threats like your colleague is trying. I come from a different world, one where violence is commonplace. I do not fear pain. I do not fear torture. But if you want to hear it, I will tell you the truth of torture, officer.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Everyone talks. That is the truth. Everyone talks even if they know it is going to kill them in the end. They just want the pain to end. The movies where the square-jawed hero doesn’t break is just that, a movie. The reality is he will foul himself. He will cry snot and tears. He will piss down his legs and he will scream, and in the end, he will beg you not to hurt him anymore; he will tell you everything you want to know and more; he will offer secrets you didn’t know he had, just to lessen the pain for a little while.”
“Are you telling us to torture you?”
“Would you if you thought it would give you the truth?”
“We have th
e truth,” the man cut across their little dance. “It’s on bloody film for the entire world to see.”
That is not the truth,” Konstantin said.
“You’re insane. Do you know that? You’re a freakin’ sociopath! So what, you want us to waterboard you?” The man shook his head in disgust.
“There is no way I can convince you. Even if you open my stomach and reach in with your bare hands to pull at my guts, my truth will not change. I did not kill him.”
“Easy to say,” the man said. “We can all be brave when it’s only words.”
“Then cut me,” Konstantin said. “My people will not save me. I am alone here. I have nothing to gain by lying and nothing to lose by telling the truth.”
“I don’t believe you, Konstantin,” the man said. “You’re a liar. One way or the other. Either you lied to your people when you fled to the West, or you lied to us when we welcomed you? Which one is it?”
“Silence is not a lie.”
“Why did you do it, Konstantin?” the woman asked, taking over the interrogation. Her voice was calm, honeyed. She smiled at him. It was a “we’re all friends here” smile. It was the biggest lie of the day so far.
“I didn’t do it.”
“We know you did, Konstantin. What we don’t know is why. We’ve got a lot of other questions as well, things we don’t understand, like, how does killing the Pope link in with the Berlin subway attack? And how are you tied to Rome and the people who burned themselves alive in London and all of those other cities? We’re only seeing part of the picture, Konstantin. Help us see all of it. Talk to us. If you help us, we can help you.”
She wasn’t particularly good. She wasn’t one of the A team, Konstantin thought, listening to her. Neither was her partner. They were the breakers, the waves sent to crash against the shore just to wear him down. They were never meant to get the truth out of him. It was all about weakening his resolve. They were the sodium pentothal, figuratively speaking.
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