no? What you faced wasn’t the response of surprised men, was it? So you know
what I say is so.”
Janson felt another heaving surge of nausea: what Phan Nguyen said was true. It
may have been wrapped in deceit, but the truth remained, stony and indigestible.
“You say you did not divulge the details of your identity to me. But that leaves
you with a more troubling question. If not you, who? How is it that we were able
to intercept your team and capture a senior officer of the legendary American
counterintelligence division of the legendary Navy SEALs? How?”
How indeed? There was only one answer: Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest had
tunneled the information to the NVA or its VC allies. He was too careful a man
for the leak to have been inadvertent at this point. It would have been
extraordinarily easy. The information would have been “accidentally” revealed to
one of the ARVN personnel whom Demarest knew to have close NVA links; it could
have been “hidden” in a cache of papers “accidentally” left behind at a jungle
outpost, too hastily decamped under enemy fire. The details could have been
deliberately transmitted via a code and radio frequency known to the enemy.
Demarest had wanted Janson out of the way; he had needed him out of the way. And
so he had taken care of the matter as only he could. The whole mission had been
a goddamn snare, a subterfuge from the master of subterfuge.
Demarest had done this to him!
And now the lieutenant commander was no doubt sitting at his desk, listening to
Hildegard von Bingen, and Janson was trussed to a stool in a VC compound, foul
pus oozing from open sores where the rope cut into his flesh, his body
shattered, his mind reeling—reeling, most of all, at the realization that his
ordeal had only begun.
“Well,” Phan Nguyen said. “You must concede that our intelligence is superior.
We know so much about your operations that to hold back would be pointless, like
depriving the ocean of a teardrop. Yes, I think so, I think so.” He walked out
of the compound, conferring in a low voice with another officer, and then
returned, taking his seat at his chair.
Janson’s eyes fell on the man’s feet, which didn’t touch the ground, and took in
the large American lace-ups, the childlike calves.
“You must get used to the fact that you will never return to the United States
of America. Soon, I will tell you about Vietnamese history, starting with Trung
Trac and Trung Nhi, the joint queens of Vietnam who ousted the Chinese from our
lands in thirty-nine a.d.—yes, as far back as that! Before Ho, there were the
Trung sisters. Where was America in thirty-nine a.d.? You will come to
understand the futility of your government’s efforts to suppress the rightful
national aspirations of the Vietnamese people. You have many lessons to learn,
and you will be well taught. But there is much you must tell us as well. Are we
in agreement?”
Janson said nothing.
At an eye signal from the interrogator, a carbine smashed into his left side:
another electric bolt of agony.
“Perhaps we can start with something easier and work up to the more advanced
subjects. We shall talk about you. About your parents and their role in the
capitalist system. About your childhood. About America’s abundant popular
culture.”
Janson paused, and he heard the sound of metal sliding on metal, as the thick
steel bar was inserted between his leg irons again.
“No,” Janson said. “No!” And Janson began to speak. He spoke about what was
shown on television and at the movie theaters; Phan Nguyen was particularly
interested in what counted as a happy ending, and what sort of endings was
permissible. Janson spoke about his childhood in Connecticut; he spoke about his
father’s life as an insurance executive. The concept intrigued Phan Nguyen, and
he grew scholarly and serious, pushing Janson to explain the underlying
concepts, parsing the notions of risk and liability with near Confucian
delicacy. Janson might have been telling a fascinated anthropologist about the
circumcision rites of the Trobriand Islanders.
“And he led a good American life, your father?”
“He thought so. He made a good living. Owned a nice home, nice car. Could buy
the things he wanted to buy.”
Phan Nguyen sat back in his chair, and his broad weathered features were alert
and quizzical. “And this is what gives meaning to your life?” he asked. He
folded his slender, childlike arms around his chest and tilted his head. “Hmm?
This is what gives meaning to your life?”
The questioning went on and on—Nguyen refused to call himself an interrogator;
he was, he said, a “teacher”—and each day Janson was permitted more and more
mobility. He could walk around a small bamboo hut, although always under
watchful guard. Then one day, after an almost good-humored discussion of
American sports (Nguyen suggested, as if it were self-evident, that in
capitalist societies the class struggle was provided imaginary resolution on the
playing field), Janson was given a document to sign. It stated that he had been
given good medical care and had been kindly treated by the National Liberation
Front, whom the document heralded as freedom fighters devoted to peace and
democracy. It called for the withdrawal of the U.S. from imperialist wars of
aggression. A pen—a fine fountain pen of French manufacture, evidently a legacy
of one of the old colonials—was placed in his hand. When he declined to sign the
document, he was beaten until he lost consciousness.
And when he regained it, he found himself chained inside a sturdy bamboo cage,
six feet tall and four feet in diameter. He could not stand up straight; he
could not sit down. He could not move around. He had nothing to do. A pail of
brackish water, strewn with ox hair and dead insects, was placed near his feet
by a closed-faced guard. He was a bird in a cage, waiting only to be fed.
It would be, he somehow knew, a very long wait.
“Xin loi,” the guard taunted. Sorry about that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Molnar. The town that history erased.
Molnar. Where it all began.
It now looked like their last hope of finding any link to Peter Novak’s origins.
The last hope of unraveling the web of deceit that ensnared them.
Yet what, if anything, remained of it?
The route they took the next morning skirted the major cities and highways, and
the Lancia groaned and bounced as they drove through the Bükk Hills in northeast
Hungary. Jessie seemed preoccupied for much of the time.
“There’s something about those men yesterday,” she finally said. “Something
about the way they set it up.”
“The triangle config?” Janson said. “Pretty standard, actually. It’s what you do
when you’ve got just three men on hand. Surveillance and blocking. Straight out
of the manual.”
“That’s what’s bothering me,” she said. “It’s straight out of our manual.”
Janson did not speak for a few moments. “They had Cons Op training,” he said.
“Felt that way,” Jessie said. “Sure felt that way. And seeing that blond guy
blasting away … ”
“Like he’d anticipated the possibility of your maneuver and was resorting to the
countermeasure.”
“Felt like it, yeah.”
“Very sound, from a tactical point of view. Whatever his reasons, he had to
eliminate you or the hostage. Nearly did both. Shooting a colleague like that
meant that a hostage—and therefore the possibility of a security breach—was the
one thing he couldn’t risk.”
“I gotta tell you, it’s freaking me out,” Jessie said, “The whole Cons Op angle.
It’s like everything’s lined up against us. Or maybe it’s more complicated than
that. Maybe it’s like what that creep at the Archives was saying about how
records get destroyed. Something about how fire and water are opposites, but
they’re both enemies.”
The terrain grew increasingly hilly; when even the Soviet-era tower blocks had
vanished from the horizon, they knew they were approaching their destination.
The village of Molnar was near the Tisza River, between Miskolc and Nyiregyhaza.
Sixty miles to the north was the Slovak Republic; sixty miles to the east was
Ukraine and, just beneath it, Romania. At different points in history, all
represented expansionist powers—geopolitical predators. The mountains funneled
the river; they also funneled whatever armies wished to proceed from the eastern
front to the Magyar heartland. The countryside was deceptively beautiful, filled
with emerald-like knolls, foothills ramping toward the low, bluish mountains
farther away. Here and there, one of the hills swelled to a lofty peak, lower
elevations terraced with vineyards, ceding the higher altitudes to the
camouflage drab of forests. Yet the landscape was also scarred, in ways that
were visible and in ways that were not.
Now they rolled over a small bridge across the Tisza, a bridge that had once
connected two halves of the village of Molnar.
“It’s unbelievable,” Jessie said. “It’s gone. Like somebody waved a magic wand.”