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 closedfaced 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

Chapter Twenty-five

Molnár. The town that history erased.

Molnár. 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.”