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unstoppable. Gallio might be wrong. He’s her dad but knows nothing about her. He looks for Judith. Doesn’t know much about his wife, either, not any more.
    He’s trying to force himself into making a decision, some definitive move either forward or back, when Alma looks straight at him. He’s convinced she sees the half of him that’s visible, though she won’t recognize him, not after so long. He steps out from behind the crates, but then a silver Range Rover pulls up between them, the only car that dares park directly in front of the school gates. A man comes round from the driver’s side and offers Alma his hand. She ignores his help and climbs in the back. The man picking her up is Baruch.
    ‘Who was following you? We checked. There was nobody there. We made sure. Nothing.’
    They’re at the B meet—Gallio remembers the procedure—a Lebanese place in the Old City’s Armenian quarter. Valeria is inside, at the back with an unobstructed view of the doorway, and Gallio sits beside her on a bench against the whitewashedwall. No eye contact. They watch the door instead, ready for surprises.
    ‘Why all the secrecy?’
    ‘We don’t know who’s watching.’
    ‘Neither do I,’ Gallio says, ‘apart from your lot and the cops at the airport. Didn’t like the look of the other place. Can’t be too careful.’
    Cassius Gallio had prepared for this meeting, had visualized it incessantly since her orders had found him in Germany. But now they’re sitting beside each other he leaves his sunglasses on. From Valeria he gets: authority, curiosity, no perfume. A streak of silver in her hair.
    She gets: he doesn’t know what she gets, and wishes he didn’t care.
    A yellow drape over the entrance shifts in the late afternoon breeze, and at the other occupied table off-duty recruits rate the local women. They go through a range of criteria, count on their fingers, burst out laughing.
    ‘You went to your daughter’s school. That wasn’t the plan.’
    Of course she knew. Cassius Gallio is the junior now, the exile who should expect to be monitored.
    ‘I haven’t agreed to any plan.’
    Gallio remembers this place, and the only change is a TV in a corner, halfway up the wall. The TV is off, or broken. He wants a beer, an Amstel, and probably a chaser if Valeria can claim expenses. His hands feel unsteady. He puts them under the table and orders a mineral water, gas. The bubbles may convince him there’s more to the drink than the water.
    ‘You look older,’ she says. Her blonde eyes, turned on him for the first time, have a hard edge. A hard centre too. He wonders why she’s putting on a stern face, auditioning for the role ofan older woman. Then he realizes she is an older woman. She doesn’t need to audition, because ageing has chosen them both.
    ‘Thanks. Moldova, Germany. The ranks.’
    ‘Must have made a big mistake.’
    Cassius Gallio leans forward over his water, weight on his elbows, aware of Valeria at his shoulder. He does a thing he does. He taps the pad of each finger precisely against its opposite, pad after pad in sequence, thumb through to pinkie and back, proving his brain has absolute control over his ageing and sober body. He goes through the sequence several times. Finger to finger, back again. Never misses. ‘So the judges of the tribunal decided. In their wisdom.’
    They pinned him on two indictments: misplacing the corpse of an executed criminal and failing to protect a key witness, even from himself. They recorded Judas as a suicide, and Gallio didn’t cover himself in glory by suggesting an alternative: the disciples had murdered Judas to avenge his betrayal of Jesus. Either way, the death of Judas was Cassius Gallio’s fault, but he’d been confident of support from Valeria. As a Speculator, even a junior one, she should have insisted on approaching the evidence objectively. Judas was a civic hero who’d outwitted a leading terrorist. He had plenty of money, nothing to fear from