“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 beyondsanction 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 Sárospatak 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 vis
ible 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 photographs. “Trapezium to metacarpal. That’s another index. Check it out. The ventral surface of the scapula—you can see it against his shirt. Let’s look at that ratio, too.”
With the loupe and the ruler, she continued to look for and find tiny physical variances. The length of the forefinger in relation to the middle finger, the precise length of each arm, the exact distance from chin to Adam’s apple. Skepticism melted as examples multiplied.
“The question is, Who is this man?” She shook her head bleakly.
“I think you mean the question is, Who are these men?”
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “OK, try this on. Let’s say you wanted to take everything this guy has. You kill him, and you take his place, because you’ve somehow made yourself look identical to him, almost. Now his life is your life. What’s his is yours. It’s genius. And to make sure you can get away with it, you go on some public outings pretending to be the guy, kinda like a dress rehearsal.”
“But wouldn’t the real Peter Novak catch wind of that?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But say you also had the goods on him, somehow, knew about some secret that he had tried to bury … so you could blackmail him some kinda way. Couldn’t that make sense of it?”
“When you’ve got no good explanations, the bad ones start looking better and better.”
“I guess.” Jessie sighed.
“Let’s try another route. I can’t get to Peter Novak, or whoever is calling himself that. Who else do we know who might know?”
“Maybe not the people trying to stop you, but whoever’s giving the orders.”
“Exactly. And I’ve a strong suspicion I know who that is.”
“You’re talking about Derek Collins,” she said. “Director of Consular Operations.”
“Lambda Team doesn’t get dispatched without his direct approval,” he said. “Let alone the other teams we’ve seen deployed. I think it’s time I paid the man a visit.”
“Listen to me,” she said urgently. “You need to keep a good safe distance from that man. If Collins wants you dead, don’t count on leaving his company alive.”
“I know the guy,” Janson said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“So do I. You’re talking about putting your head in the lion’s mouth. Don’t you know how crazy that is?”
“I’ve got no choice,” Janson said.
Heavily, she said, “When do we leave?”
“There’s no ‘we.’ I’m going by myself.”
“You don’t think I’m good enough?”
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” Janson said. “Are you looking for validation? You’re good, Jessie. Top-drawer. Is that what you need to hear? Well, it’s true. You’re smart as a whip, you’re fast on your feet, you’re adaptable and levelheaded, and you’re probably the best marksman I’ve come across. The point remains: what I’ve got to do next, I’ve got to do alone. You can’t come along. It’s not a risk you need to take.”
“It’s not a risk you need to take. You’re going into the lion’s den without so much as a chair and a whip.”
“Trust me, it’ll be a walk in the park,” Janson said with a trace of a smile.
“Tell me you’re not still sore about London. Because …”
“Jessie, I really need you to reconnoiter the Liberty Foundation offices in Amsterdam. I’ll rejoin you there shortly. We can’t ignore the possibility that something, or somebody, might turn up there. As far as Derek Collins, though, I can take care of myself. It’s going to be OK.”
“What I’m thinking is, you’re scared of putting me at risk,” Jessie said. “I’d call that a lapse of professionalism, wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hell, maybe you’re right.” She was silent for a moment, averting her gaze. “Maybe I ain’t ready.” Suddenly, she noticed a small splotch of blood on the back of her right hand. As she examined it more closely, she looked a little sick. “What I did today, in those hills …”
“Was what you needed to do. It was kill or be killed.”
“I know,” she said in a hollow voice.
“You’re not supposed to like it. There’s no shame in what you’re feeling. Taking the life of another human being is the ultimate responsibility. A responsibility I spent the past five years running from. But there’s another truth you’ve got to remember. Sometimes lethal force is the only thing that will defeat lethal force, and though zealots and crazies may twist that precept to their own perverted ends, it remains a truth. You did what had to be done, Jessie. You saved the day. Saved me.” He gave her a reassuring smile.
She tried to return it. “That grateful look doesn’t become you. We saved each other’s lives, OK? We’re even-steven.”
“What are you, a sniper or a CPA?”
She gave a rueful laugh, but her eyes returned to the dot of dried blood. She was silent for a moment. “It’s just all at once I had the thought that, you know, these guys had moms and dads, too.”
“You’ll find you learn not to think about that.”
“And that’s a good thing, right?”
“Sometimes,” Janson said, swallowing hard, “sometimes it’s a necessary thing.”
Now Jessie disappeared into the bathroom, and Janson heard the shower run for a long time.
When she returned, a terry-cloth bathrobe was wrapped around her slim yet softly curving body. She walked toward the bed nearest the window. Janson was almost startled at how delicately feminine the field agent now appeared.
“So you’re leaving me in the morning,” she said after a few moments.
“Not the way I’d put it,” Janson said.
“Wonder what the odds of my ever seeing you again are,” she said.
“Come on, Jessie. Don’t think like that.”
“Maybe we’d better seize the day—or the night. Gather ye rosebuds or whatever.” He could tell she was afraid for him, and for herself, too. “I got real good eyes. You know that. But I don’t need a sniper scope to see what’s in front of my face.”
“And what’s that?”
“I see the way you look at me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, come on now, make your move, soldier. Now’s the time you tell me how much I remind you of your late wife.”
“Actually, you couldn’t be less like her.”
She paused. “I make you uncomfortable. Don’t try to deny that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You survived eighteen months of torture and interrogation from the Viet Cong, but you flinch when I come too close.”
“No,” he said, but his mouth was dry.
She stood up and moved toward him. “And your eyes widen and your face flushes and your heart starts to race.” She reached over, took his hand, and pressed it to her throat. “Same with me. Can you feel it?”
“A field agent shouldn’t make assumptions,” Janson said, but he could feel the pulse beneath her warm, silky skin, and it seemed to keep rhythm with his own.
“I remember something you once wrote, about interagency cooperation between nations. ‘To work together as allies, it is important that any unresolved tensions be addressed through a free and open exchange.’” There was laughter in her eyes. And then something softer, something like heat. “Just close your eyes a
nd think of your country.”
Now she stood closer and parted her bathrobe. Her breasts were two perfectly shaped globes, the nipples swollen with tension, and she leaned toward him, cupping his face now with her hands. Her gaze was warm and unwavering. “I’m ready to accept your diplomatic mission.”
As she started to remove his shirt, Janson said, “There’s an ordinance in the reg book prohibiting fraternization.”
She pressed her lips to his, smothering his halfhearted demurrals. “You call this fraternization?” she said, shouldering off her robe. “Come on, everyone knows what a great deep-penetration agent you are.”
He became aware of a delicate fragrance that emanated from her body. Her lips were soft and swollen and moist, and they moved across his face to his mouth, inviting his into hers. Her fingers gently stroked his cheeks, his jawline, his ears. He could feel her breasts, soft yet firm, pressed against his chest, and her legs thrust against his, matching his strength with hers.
Then, abruptly, she began to tremble, and convulsive sobs came from her throat even as she gripped him all the more fiercely. Gently, he pulled her face back, and saw that her cheeks were now stained with tears. He saw the pain in her eyes, pain that was compounded by her own fear, and her humiliation that he was now witness to it.
“Jessie,” he said softly. “Jessie.”
She shook her head, helplessly, and then cradled it against his deeply muscled chest. “I’ve never felt so alone,” she said. “So frightened.”
“You’re not alone,” Janson said. “And fear is what keeps us alive.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid.”
He kissed her forehead tenderly. “You’ve got it wrong. I’m always afraid. Like I say, it’s why I’m still here. It’s why we’re here together.”
She pulled him to her with a savage intensity. “Make love to me,” she said. “I need to feel what you feel. I need to feel it now.”
Two intertwined bodies rolled over on the still-made bed, flushed with an almost desperate passion, flexing and shuddering toward a moment of fleshly communion. “You’re not alone, my love,” Janson murmured. “Neither of us is. Not anymore.”