A pity, he thought, that his director’s present physical and mental condition rendered him useless, possibly in the permanent sense of the word. He’d decide the younger man’s fate as soon as the physicians reported back to him on the prognosis.

From the hospital Genaro had his driver take him to his private estate outside the city. Genaro rarely visited his personal residence during the week, as the guest suites at the GenHance building were more convenient, but tonight he needed a few hours alone to think.

His butler, who had once served in the households of British royalty, met him at the door. “Good evening, Mr. Genaro.” He took his coat and briefcase. “Will you be dining at home tonight?”

“I’ll have coffee and sandwiches, James. Bring it down to the armory.” He walked to the elevator and took it down to the third sublevel of the house, where he stepped out, closed his eyes, and waited as jets of cool air blew down from the ceiling grid and a beam of UV light passed over him. A soft chime indicated the end of the decontamination cycle, and he went up to the wall scanner beside two massive steel doors and leveled his left eye with the lens.

The automated security system scanned his retina, identified him, and produced a small keypad from a concealed slot. Genaro entered his master code and stepped through as the doors slid silently apart.

He’d originally built the armory to serve as his personal vault and a lockdown safe room where he could retreat if the house security was compromised. The room had independent power, ventilation, and water supply systems as well as enough nonperishable foods to keep a single occupant alive for as long as eighteen months. One wall contained security camera screens that continually monitored the interior of the house and sublevels as well as the grounds of the estate; the other had been outfitted with televisions that received their signals from three different satellites, an Internet server and access terminal, a powerful radio array, and direct voice lines to trusted allies in half a dozen countries.

An adjoining room served as a personal living space, with a comfortable bed, a large bath, and movie screens modeled as faux windows that displayed realistic outdoor views of the country and were timed to lighten or darken depending on the actual hour of the day.

When Genaro had left Italy to come to America in the nineties, he brought with him a small but unique collection of antiquities, which at first he displayed in the house and then moved to the vault room after some of the more fragile relics began to show signs of deterioration. The filtered air and climate-control units helped to preserve his collection, but there was another, more immediate benefit: securing them away from all other eyes. Genaro had spent most of his life acquiring the antiquities, and felt very possessive about them. He found he enjoyed storing them in the one place where they were safe and only he could enjoy them.

That was something taught to him by the practices of the one man he thought might have understood him, his noble ancestor Septus Janus Genarius of Rome.

The twelve hundred and forty-two artifacts ranged from marble statues liberated from his ancestor’s ancient Tuscan villa to dozens of bronze and terra-cotta figurines that had been purchased from collectors or the various Middle East black markets for antiquities. All depicted the head, bust, or form of Genarius in the flowing toga of a Roman senator or clad in the ornate armor of a legion commander.

Several ensembles of armor, exact reproductions of what Genarius would have worn during his years serving in the legion, were displayed on mannequins Jonah had commissioned to be made in the image of his ancestor’s many busts and statues. He would have preferred to have the originals, but they had been lost to the sands of time.

Genarius had been one of the wealthiest men of his time, and his possessions reflected that privileged life: costly bronze mirrors, cast vessels, hand-fashioned goblets, and extravagant lamps had been recovered from his country home, as well as a few of the only blown-glass ornaments and finger rings of the era known to still exist. The cautious senator had also hidden beneath his villa sacks of coins, some so rare that they had yet to be cataloged by anyone in the world except Genaro.

Records and carbon dating indicated that all of his possessions had been removed from the house and hidden in an underground bunker by Genarius a short time before he had died. Perhaps he had been warned about the epidemic and tried to secure his wealth before the sickness reached his household; Genaro would never know for certain. In any case, before he had died the senator had moved most of his wealth to secret caches and vaults, where it had lain undisturbed for two millennia.

It had taken longer to find the scrolls Genarius had written, sealed, and secreted away in the tunnels beneath his city compound, but eventually Genaro had also discovered and opened that vault. There were books, letters, and manuscripts written about Genarius or mentioning him in some significant manner that dated back to the tenth century, many telling the tale of the common foot soldier whose courage had brought him up through the ranks until he had commanded his own armies.

The prize of Genaro’s collection was the original proclamation issued by Augustus appointing Genarius to the Roman senate; that had been preserved and passed down through countless generations of the Genaro family as proof of their ancestor’s nobility.

Genarius had been an important man, serving three grateful emperors and building much of the Roman Empire. Aside from the Caesars, few Roman noblemen had ever been depicted in stone, which emphasized Genarius’s standing among the elite of the empire.

His ancestor had also left behind evidence of a devoted but puzzling interest in the career of a distinguished praefectus castrorum, Tanicus. Like Genarius, Tanicus had risen through the ranks from foot soldier to centurion to primus pilus, and then had been named third in command of his legion. At first Genaro had assumed his ancestor had used his influence to help promote the man, until the translations of Genarius’s many letters and records made it obvious that Tanicus had been made prefect while Genaro’s ancestor still served as a centurion. From the intense interest Genarius had shown in following the commander’s career, he assumed the man had been one of his ancestor’s mentors or patrons.

Tanicus had been listed as one of the casualties of Kalkriese, but for years after the tragedy, Genarius continued to search for the commander. Apparently worried that his friend had been sold into slavery by Arminius, he had written to every known survivor of Kalkriese, begging for news of what had happened that day. He had a statue carved of the commander, which he kept in his house and, according to the dates on the scrolls, had continued looking for him until the last day of his life.

All that historians knew about Tanicus was that he was the childhood friend of Germanicus, the emperor’s favorite grandson, and the most trusted of his commanders. He was also rumored to have been a member of a small, elite group of triarii. Little was known about the band of veteran soldiers, except that each member had been awarded the corona muralis, the simple crown of laurel leaves given to soldiers who had risked their lives to save another’s. That highly prized award had prompted scholars to refer to the unit as the Laurels, and some estimated that the group might have been established as far back as the foundation of Rome itself, some seven hundred years before Tanicus had been born, and continued until the final collapse of the empire some five hundred years later.

Only Genaro knew that Tanicus had indeed belonged to the Laurels, and like the other members had tattooed himself with their distinctive mark. His ancestor had referred to the mark over and over in his descriptions of the commander, and had gone so far as to have it carved into the statue of Tanicus that he had commissioned.

Genaro went to the statue recovered from his ancestor’s villa, the only known image of Tanicus. Oddly the sculptor had not attempted to idealize the commander’s features, but portrayed him as an ordinary man with an austere face and dressed in the unadorned garments of the freeborn.

He seldom looked at the statue, for it had no value to him except as one of Genarius’s personal possessions, but now he went to it and removed the protective cover draping it. Across two thousand years, the grim-faced commander stared at him through his blank marble eyes, his arms at his sides, his body poised as if he were preparing to take a step toward him. Genaro reached out and touched the mark chiseled on the side of the statue’s neck, the tattoo of the Laurels, a mark that would have been covered by his armor or easily concealed by the collar of a cloak.

Only Genaro knew that the mark of the Laurels was an ancient pagan symbol that had been found etched into the walls of caves in Tibet and on the trunks of enormous trees worshiped by forest pagans. No one knew the true origins of the mark, but the Romans had called it the lemniscus—the ribbon—and the Greeks sometimes called it the Ουροβóρος, the tail-devouring snake.

The Greeks had named it correctly, Genaro thought as he traced the mark with his fingers. It did resemble a snake that had twisted itself in half as it ate its own tail.

It also looked exactly like the number eight, tipped over on its side.

Chapter 7

Matthias left the freeway and drove to a busy twenty-four-hour rest-stop complex, where he parked his car out of sight in a back lot next to the second vehicle Rowan had arranged for him. A magnetic cache hidden in the second car’s rear wheel well also contained a tight roll of currency, a new disposable mobile phone, and a note from Rowan.

They’re after you now. Keep her out of sight and call in when you switch cars.

He transferred his pack and wiped down the surfaces he had touched before lifting Jessa out of the passenger seat of the first car. As he straightened and nudged the door shut with his knee, Matthias noticed a couple with four young children walking from the restrooms into the back lot. Quickly he turned around and went to one of the metal benches beyond the curb and sat down, holding her upright against him on his lap. He placed her hands inside his shirt and tucked her face against his neck as he lowered his head and put his mouth against her cheek.

“What’s that man doing, Mommy?” he heard one of the children ask as the family passed him.