“Don’t talk in riddles.”
“Everybody works for him now. It’s just that only some of us know it.” He
laughed, a dry, unpleasant laugh. “You think you’ve got the upper hand. You
don’t.”
“Try me,” Janson said. He placed his boot on Czerny’s neck, not yet applying any
pressure, but making it clear that he could crush him at any moment.
“You fool! He’s got the whole U.S. government under his thumb. He’s calling the
shots now! You’re just too ignorant to see it.”
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
“You know what they always called you: the machine. Like you weren’t human. But
there’s something else about machines. They do what they’re programmed to do.”
Janson kicked him in the ribs, hard. “Get one thing straight. We’re not playing
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. We’re playing Truth or Consequences.”
“You’re like one of those Japanese soldiers in the Philippine caves who doesn’t
know the war’s over and they’ve lost,” Czerny said. “It’s over, OK? You’ve
lost.”
Now Janson bent down and pressed the point of the combat knife to Czerny’s face,
drawing a jagged line under his left cheek. “Who. Do. You. Work. For.”
Czerny blinked hard, his eyes watering with pain and with the realization that
nobody would save him.
“Grip it and rip it, baby,” Jessie said.
“You’ll tell us, sooner or later,” Janson said. “You know that. What’s up to you
is whether you … lose face over it.”
Czerny closed his eyes and a look of resolve settled itself on his face. In a
sudden movement, he reached for the hilt of the knife and, with one powerful
twist, wrested control of it. Janson pulled back, away from the blade’s range,
and Jessie stepped forward with the gun, but neither anticipated the man’s next
move.
He forced the blade down with shaking muscles and, carving deeply, drew it
across his own neck. In less than two seconds, he had sliced through the veins
and arteries that sustained consciousness. Blood geysered up half a foot, then
ebbed as the shock stilled the pumping organ itself.
Czerny had killed himself, had sliced his own throat, rather than expose himself
to interrogation.
For the first time in the past hour, the hard ball of rage within Janson
subsided, giving way to dismay and disbelief. He recognized the significance of
the spectacle before him. Death had been deemed preferable to whatever Czerny
knew was in store for him if he were compromised. It suggested a truly fearsome
discipline among these marauders: a leadership that ruled, in no small part,
through terror.
Millions in a Cayman Islands bank account. A beyond-sanction order from Consular
Operations. A Peter Novak who never was, who died and who came back. Like some
grotesque parody of the Messiah. Like some Magyar Christ.
Or Antichrist.
And these men, these former members of Consular Operations. Janson had known
them only dimly, but something nagged at his memory. Who were these assailants?
Were they truly former Cons Op agents? Or were they active ones?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The drive to Sarospatak took only two hours, but they were two hours racked with
tension. Janson kept a careful eye out for anyone who might be following them.
In town, they made their way past the vast Arpad Gimnazium, part of a local
college, with its intricate, curving facade. Finally, they pulled up to a
kastély szálloda, or mansion hotel, which had been converted from the property
of the former landed gentry.
The clerk at the front desk—a middle-aged man with a sunken chest and an
overbite—barely glanced at them or their documents. “We have one vacancy,” he
said. “Two beds will be suitable?”
“Perfectly,” Janson said.
The clerk handed him an old-style hotel key with a rubber-ringed brass weight
attached. “Breakfast is served from seven to nine,” he said. “Enjoy Sárospatak.”
“Your country is so beautiful,” Jessie said.
“We think so,” the clerk said, smiling perfunctorily without showing teeth. “How
long will you be staying?”
“Just one night,” Janson said.
“You’ll want to visit the Sárospatak castle, Mrs. Pimsleur,” he said, as if
noticing her for the first time. “The fortifications are most impressive.”
“We noticed that, passing through,” Janson said.
“It’s different up close,” the clerk said.
“A lot of things are,” Janson replied.
In the sparsely decorated room, Jessie spent twenty minutes on his cell phone.
She held a piece of paper on which Janson had written the names of the three
former Consular Operations agents he had identified. When she clicked off, she
looked distinctly unsettled.
“So,” Janson said, “what does your boyfriend tell you about their status:
retired or active?”
“Boyfriend? If you ever saw him, you wouldn’t be jealous. He makes wide turns,
OK?”
“Jealous? Don’t flatter yourself.”
Jessie formed another W with her hands and rolled her eyes. “Look, here’s the
thing. They’re not active.”
“Retired.”
“Not retired, either.”
“Come again?”
“According to all the official records, they’ve been dead for the better part of
a decade.”
“Dead? Is that what they’re telling you?”
“Remember the Qadal explosion in Oman?” Qadal had been the location of a U.S.
Marines installation in Oman and a station for American intelligence gathering
in the Persian Gulf. In the mid-nineties, terrorists set off a blast that cost
the lives of forty-three American soldiers. A dozen “analysts” with the State
Department had also been on site, and had perished as well.
“One of those ‘unsolved tragedies,’ ” Janson said, expressionless.
“Well, the records say that all those guys you mentioned died in the blast.”
Janson furrowed his brow, trying to assimilate the information. The terrorist
incident in Oman must have been a cover. It enabled an entire contingent of
Consular Operations agents to conveniently disappear—only to reappear, perhaps,
in the employ of another power. But what power? Who were they working for? What
kind of secret would motivate a hard man like Czerny to slash his own throat?
Was his final deed an act of fear, or conviction?
Jessie paced for a while. “They’re dead, but they’re not dead, right? Is there
any chance—any chance whatever—that the Peter Novak we saw on CNN is the same
Peter Novak as ever? Never mind what his birth name might have been. Is it
conceivable that—I don’t know—he somehow wasn’t on the aircraft that exploded?
Like maybe he boarded it and then somehow slipped away before takeoff?”
“I was there, I observed everything … I simply don’t see how.” Janson shook his
head slowly. “I’ve gone through it again and again. I can’t imagine it.”
“Unimaginable doesn’t mean impossible. There must be a way to prove that it’s
the same man.”
On a wood-veneer table, Jessie spread out a stack of Novak images from the past
year, downloaded from the Internet back in Alasdair Swift’s Lombardy cottage.
One of them was from the CNN Web site and showed the philanthropist at the award
ceremony they had watched on television, honoring the woman from Calcutta. Now
she took out the jeweler’s loupe and ruler she had acquired for analyzing the
maps of the Bükk Hills region, and applied them to the images spread in front of
her.
“What are you trying to do?” Janson asked.
“I know what you think you saw. But it ought to be possible to prove to you that
we’re dealing with the very same person. Plastic surgery can do only so much.”
Ten minutes later, she interrupted a long, unbroken silence.
“Christ on a raft!” she said under her breath.
She turned to look at him, and her face was pale.
“Now you got to take into account things like lens distortion,” she said, “and
at first I thought that’s all I was seeing. But there’s something else going on.
Depending on the photograph, the guy seems to be slightly different heights.
Subtle—no more than half an inch difference. Here he is, standing next to the
head of the World Bank. And here he is again, separate occasion, standing next
to the same guy. Looks like everybody’s wearing the same shoes in both shots.
Could be the heels or whatever, right? But—subtle, subtle, subtle—he’s got
slightly different forearm spans. And the ratio between forearm span and femur
span … ” She jabbed at one of the pictures, which showed him walking alongside
the prime minister of Slovenia. The outline of a bent knee was visible against
his gray trousers, as was the line where the upper thigh turned at the hip. She
pointed to a similar configuration in another photograph. “Same joints,
different ratios,” she said, breathing deeply. “Something is deeply fucked-up.”
“Meaning what?”
She riffled through the picture book she’d bought in Budapest, and busied
herself with the ruler again. Finally she spoke. “Ratio of index finger length
to forefinger length. Not constant. Photographs can be flopped, but he’s not
going to switch the hand he’s got his wedding band on.”
Now Janson approached the array of images. He tapped certain areas of the