Numex Tower jutted up through the predawn sky like an obsidian blade. On the top floor, Jason Numec sat at his desk beneath the tilting glass, stars glittering faintly above. On the far wall hung a fifteen-foot curved OLED display. To either side of his desk, dimly lit cases housed cultural artifacts of extraordinary value. An Acoma vase perched high on a shelf, its dusky, voluptuous hips skirted with titanium triangles. Below it, a seven-hundred-year-old Nahuatl codex slept in its nitrogen-filled case. A Tlingit raven mask guarded the room's only door.

From a nearby shelf, Numec took a double-bladed jade knife and set it on his glass desk. The knife was exquisitely knapped from a single piece of stone, its twin blades curling out like opposing arms of a spiral galaxy. He gave the knife a nudge, and as it spun on the desk, perfectly balanced, he looked over his left shoulder at the painted portrait hanging there.

In it, the artist had depicted a young Jason Numec standing with a woman and two children on a white-sand beach, a mango sunset behind them. At their feet lazed a brawny jaguar. Numec wore a plain brown tunic, and his arm was around the woman's waist. She was tall and brown-skinned, her slender frame wrapped in a fine, sea green gown. With his other arm, Numec gathered two black-haired girls to his hip. One wore a scarlet tunic, the other jade.

Now, from somewhere just above Numec's desk, a bell chimed. He reached out and patted an invisible head, and from the head, he plucked an invisible hair. A moment later, a digitally encrypted voice spoke from the same point in space. The software had given it a high, clarion tone.

"What is Orion's Belt?" it asked.

"The hearth of the world," was Numec's reply.

"This is Factotum. I have a situation report."

"Proceed."

"Facial recognition analysis of surveillance photos confirms the identity of the woman who neutralized our assets in Seattle."

"Was it who you thought it was?"

"Affirmative."

Numec frowned, his left eyebrow knotting up around the pale scar. "What do the Israelis want with Peter Barshman?"

"Unknown. We haven't been able to locate Barshman again, but the Israeli was pinged in London."

"What is she doing there?"

"Ground assets tracked her to the British Museum about an hour ago."

Numec reached out and stopped the spinning knife.

"She was seen speaking to a curator there, someone named Adriana Fitzimmin. Then they lost her."

He extended his right hand toward the OLED screen, palm out, fingers splayed. One after the other, he tapped his fingers to his thumb until he had completed the five-digit code. The screen blossomed with a dazzling mosaic of minute colored tiles. He grabbed at a cluster of them near the bottom of the screen, and the rest fell away. He made a gesture as if tossing them into the air. They fluttered like confetti across the screen then settled down into neat columns and rows. As the tiles grew to fill the space around them, each began to glow with a fiery-orange glyph, the bold lines suggesting faces, tongues, serpents, and vultures. Selecting a tile with his thumb and index finger, he flipped it over to reveal an undercoat of tiny facets, each a separate image. He zoomed in, sliding the tile up, down, left, and right with his hand until he found the image he was after. With a tap, the image expanded to fill the screen with a pair of ancient wooden writing tablets, badly burned around the edges, the Latin script barely legible—Vindolanda Tablet III-245.

His gray eyes narrowed. "The Israeli is searching for the Mustard Seeds."

"Sir?" said Factotum.

"Go to London immediately and track her down. Find out what she learned from that curator, and then destroy all evidence of the Mustard Seeds."

"Sir, what are the Mustard Seeds?"

"I'll brief you en route."

"And what about the Israeli?"

"Don't kill her, not yet."

There was a long pause. "Yes, sir. On my way."

With a quick chop of his hand, Numec closed the link. He raised his palm to the screen, fingers splayed. Then he clenched them into a fist, and the screen went black.

***

The taxi dropped Peter off in front of the Fitzimmins' house in Hampstead Garden suburb. Theirs was like all the others, modest and compact, two stories, brick on the ground floor, plaster and timber façade on the second. Dark ivy climbed the gutters to a steeply pitched slate roof. All along the south side of the house, shrubs and herbs grew in happy chaos. Two birch trees, their leaves already yellow, shaded a small back yard that abutted some sort of park.

Peter was about to knock on the front door when it opened to a pale, heavyset elderly woman swatting at the air over her head with an enormous straw hat.

"Out, you little beast!" she screeched. "Out!"

Peter ducked as a sparrow shot out over his head and flitted across the street.

"Oh dear," said the woman, smoothing down her flowered dress. "I'm sorry. The creature must have got in while I was in the garden." She held the hat to her bosom and composed her face, lined it seemed with perpetual concern. "You must be Mr. Barshman. I'm Helena Fitzimmin. It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

Peter took her hand. "A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Fitzimmin."

"Oh, please do call me Helena." She pulled him into the tiled entryway and hung her hat on a peg. "William!" she hollered. Then to Peter she said, "He won't be but a moment. We've known there were Barshmans in Seattle for some time now. How was your flight?"

He touched the bandage over his eye. "I'm still a little jet-lagged."

"Where are you staying?"

When Peter told her, she nearly fainted. "Those inns simply swarm with thieves, and worse. I do hope it's proper. In any case, stay for supper if you will. You look as though you could use a hot meal. Oh, William's just here."

He was older than Helena, taller too, gangly and erect. He wore a dark blazer, tan slacks, and slippers that shuffled across the polished wooden floor of the hallway. The hairless skin of his pallid scalp and face was blotched with sunspots.

With a scowl, he held out his gnarly right hand, elbow cocked at ninety degrees. "William Fitzimmin, Captain, Royal Navy, retired."

Peter took the captain's hand, introduced himself, and slid his left hand underneath, precisely as Adriana instructed. The man's grip was hydraulic. "Mrs. Fitzimmin invited me for dinner," said Peter, feeling utterly foolish. "Are we having cabbage?" Cabbage was definitely on Adriana's list of passwords.

The captain's pale-blue eyes glinted. "I should hope not. I prefer steamed mustard greens."

Peter glanced down at the trembling cross formed by their arms, struggling to remember a third plant from the list he thought he had memorized.

"William!" said Helena. "You're frightening the lad."

"Celery?" said Peter.

The captain shook his head, face beet red.

"Carrots?"

"William, your heart condition!"

"Kale!"

The captain released his grip, exhaled, and doubled over, hands on his knees. "Splendid," he puffed. "I was just about to turn you out."

Helena sighed emphatically. "Please accept my apologies. Ever since retiring, William's taken his avocations far too seriously."

Recovered, the captain straightened his jacket, and with a bombastic flick of his head, commanded his wife to bring them tea in his office. Then he shuffled down the hallway as fast as his slippers would carry him, beckoning Peter to follow.

They settled in his office, Peter on one of the two leather-padded chairs flanking an antique gate-legged table, William behind an imposing gray steel desk that looked like it had been salvaged from a battleship. A single lead-paned window looked out on the shrubs along the side of the house. Three of the room's four walls were crammed with books, floor to ceiling; the fourth was adorned with framed diagrams of warships and photos of uniformed men.

Captain William Fitzimmin knitted his fingers together beneath his chin as if he might offer a prayer. "Adriana told me the awful news about your father. I am truly sorry."

"Thank you."

"I only met him once."

"Was that when he came to see the Vindolanda Tablet?"

He nodded. "Just this spring it was. But I'm not certain now how to proceed. When he visited, he said we might expect you one day soon. He even left a photograph with Adriana. Yet she tells me you did not know the usual means of identification."

"You mean the handshake and the passwords."

"Precisely. So, if you don't know their significance, what brought you here to London and the Vindolanda Tablet?"

Peter handed Fitzimmin the note his father had hidden in the Grieg album. "It says Vindolanda Tablet III-245, the British Museum. The runes in the center stand for SS, semina sinapis, Latin for mustard seeds." Or maybe "Solveig's Song".

Fitzimmin regarded the note with a crinkled brow. "Semina sinapis, you say? That's possible, likely even. Your father was fascinated by the Mustard Seeds. Perhaps he had a change of heart. Yes, that must be it." Glancing at his watch, Fitzimmin handed back the note, got up, and closed the office door. On the backside of the door hung what appeared to be a framed coat of arms.

He took a dusty green bottle and two glasses from a high shelf. Pouring a finger of amber liquid into each glass, he handed one to Peter and stood before him. "Rise and speak the truth now when you answer me."

Peter stood, glass in hand.

"Are you Peter Barshman, son of Daniel Barshman, true descendant of the Barshman family of Ireland?"

That the Barshmans emigrated from Ireland during the Potato Famine was all he really knew about that side of the family.

"Is that your lineage?"

"Yes, as far as I know."

"Do you swear on your immortal soul that you are telling the truth?"

"Yes, of course."

"Do you swear it?"

"I swear it."

"Do you also swear to employ all wisdom God has given you before divulging with another human being what I am about to tell you?"

Peter nodded. "I swear it."

The old man hesitated, his pale eyes diving into Peter's. Then he raised his glass. "Drink with me."

The stuff tasted like turpentine.

Peter cleared his throat. "So, what did my dad have a change of heart about?"

"Our heritage." Fitzimmin sat at the gate-legged table and asked Peter to fetch a leather binder from the bookshelf. The binder was fat with loose documents, letters, newspaper clippings, photos—the fruits of thirty years' genealogical research, he said.

Fitzimmin plucked out a photograph and handed it to Peter. It showed three men in front of a small stone house, all mossy and ancient looking. In the middle stood William Fitzimmin, gray hair still clinging to his temples. On his right stood a younger, shorter man with fair skin, black hair, and a face that seemed somehow familiar. To Fitzimmin's left a similarly featured man slumped in a wheelchair. "This is the last of the Barshman family in Ireland."

"My dad never mentioned them."

"Neither did he mention that you and I are descended from the same ancient family, father to son."

"But we don't have the same last name."

"This will come easier by degrees." He drank the last of his scotch and, through pursed lips, exhaled the vapors. "Do you know what my name, Fitzimmin, means? It's Irish, of course, but its origin is French. Norman to be precise. Fitz is a corruption of the French word fil, son. Fitzpatrick means son of Patrick. Fitzimmin is just a variant of the more common Fitzsimon."

"Son of Simon."

"Precisely." He pointed to the coat of arms on the back of the door, a shield of sky blue and a golden boat with high prows and many oars, its sail a giant white flower of four petals. "That is the Fitzimmin family seal. Not a coat of arms, mind you. That was a Norman invention. This is a far older device."

Peter went over to the seal and held his father's note up to it. In shape, the flowers were identical.

"They're mustard flowers," said Fitzimmin, guessing Peter's question. "A botanist would describe them as being cruciform, cross shaped. Mustard is a member of the Cruciferae, the cross-bearing plants, although I hear they've changed it to something more politically correct."

Peter turned to face the captain. "Simon the Apostle."

"And his Mustard Seeds. Yes, this seal commemorates Simon the Apostle's voyage to Ireland two thousand years ago, as documented in the Vindolanda Tablet. The boat and the flower are Simon's true attributes, his true symbols."

"But you said this is your family seal."

"It is." He rose unsteadily and came near, laying his frail fingers on Peter's shoulder.

"I am a living descendant of Simon the Zealot, Simon the Apostle of Jesus Christ, our lord and savior. And so are you."

Peter shrank from the old man's touch. "Come on, how can anyone know that?"

"No one can, not for certain. And yet I have faith. But if you don't believe me, believe your name."

"What do you mean?"

"Before the Normans came, we Fitzimmins were all Barshmans. Only those in the remotest parts of Ireland retained the original name. Barshman is simply a corruption of bar Shimón, son of Simon in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and the Apostles."

A thrill ran through Peter's stomach. "Why didn't my dad tell me any of this?"

"He thought it was nothing but hogwash."

"I can see him saying that."

"Yet he might have had a change of heart."

"That's what you said before."

Fitzimmin pointed to the note still in Peter's hand. "He left you that. Those letters in the center of the flowers, SS. They might stand for Sons of Simon, the name of our secret order."

"Secret order?"

The captain returned to his steel desk and sat as if he weighed a thousand pounds. "It's nothing like you see in the movies or read about in thriller novels. You might think of us as an exclusive genealogy club. There are precious few of us left. The handshake and passwords are the usual means by which we identify one another."

"Why usual means?" asked Peter. "Is there some other way."

"Not that I know of," he said, voice beginning to slur, head nodding. "That's simply what we've called it, generation after generation. But they're such fitting symbols, don't you think? The flower, the cross formed by flesh and bone." His eyes closed, chin settling against his chest.

Peter stepped forward and gently shook the man's shoulder.

The captain rallied, saying, "Please fetch Helena for me. A sip of tea might do me good."

Helena must have been eavesdropping, because the door opened and in she stepped, tea tray balanced on one hand. She set the tray on the gate-legged table and smiled at Peter. "I do hope he's not made you swear any oaths." Then seeing her husband asleep at his desk, she stood at attention and sniffed the air. "Have you been drinking, William? You know what the doctor said." She rushed to his side and shook him awake. "He's not permitted scotch, not in his condition. Come, help me get him to bed."

They hauled him upstairs and laid him out on the bed. As Helena removed his slippers, the captain turned to Peter, his eyes glossy slits. "We are the last," he whispered, slipping back toward unconsciousness. "They're all gone. All dead."

"Dead? Who's dead?"

"Semina sinapis." Then he began to snore.

______________