A tractor-trailer, its powerful horn blasting like a ship’s, missed hitting the car by a few feet.

If she kept down, out of range, she risked a serious collision with onrushing traffic. If she tried to clamber to the front seat and take control of the vehicle, she would likely get shot in the attempt.

A few seconds later, the car, moving ever more slowly, rolled through the intersection, across the four lanes of traffic, and crashed gently into a parked car. Jessie was almost relieved when she felt herself slammed against the back of the bucket seats, for it meant that the car had come to a stop. Now she opened the door on the side nearer the street—and she ran, ran along the sidewalk, weaving in and out of groups of pedestrians.

It was fifteen minutes before she was absolutely convinced that they had lost her. At the same time, the requisites of survival had trumped the requisites of investigation. Yes, they had lost her, but the converse was also true, she realized with a pang: she had lost them.

They rejoined each other in the spartan accommodations of Griff Hotel, a converted workers’ hostel on the street Bartók Béla.

Jessie had with her a volume she’d picked up somewhere along her wanderings. It was apparently a sort of tribute to Peter Novak, and though the text was in Hungarian, there wasn’t much of it: it was basically a picture book.

Janson picked it up and shrugged. “Looks like it’s for die-hard fans,” he said. “A Peter Novak coffee-table book. So what’d you find out at the Archives?”

“A dead end,” she said.

He looked at her closely, saw her face mottled with apprehension. “Spill,” he said.

Haltingly, she told him what had happened. It had become obvious that the clerk was on the payroll of whoever was trying to stop them, that he’d sounded the alarm and then set her up.

He listened with growing dismay, bordering on fury. “You shouldn’t have done it alone,” Janson said, trying to maintain his equipoise. “A meeting like that—you had to have known the risks. You can’t go freelancing like that, Jessie. It’s damn reckless … .” He broke off, trying to control his breathing.

Jessie tugged on an ear. “Am I hearing an echo?”

Janson sighed. “Point taken.”

“So,” she said after a while, “what’s Mesa Grande?”

“Mesa Grande,” he repeated, and his mind became crowded with images that time had never faded.

Mesa Grande: the high-security military prison installation in the eastern foothills of California’s Inland Empire region. The white crags of the San Bernardino Mountains visible in the near horizon, dwarfing the small, low-slung beige-brick buildings. The dark blue outfit the prisoner had been made to wear, with the white cloth circle attached by Velcro to the center of his chest. The special chair, with a pan beneath it to catch blood, and head restraints that were attached loosely to the prisoner’s neck. The pile of sandbags behind, to absorb the volley and prevent ricochets. Demarest had faced a wall, twenty feet away—a wall with firing ports for each of the six members of the squad. Six men with rifles. The wall was what he had protested most about. Demarest had insisted on execution by firing squad, and his preference had been accommodated. Yet he also wanted to be able to see his executioners face-to-face: and this time he had been refused.