“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 Molnár was near the Tisza River, between Miskolc and Nyíregyháza. 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 Molnár.

“It’s unbelievable,” Jessie said. “It’s gone. Like somebody waved a magic wand.”

“That would have been a lot kinder than what happened,” Janson said. One winter day in 1945, he had read, the Red Army swept down these mountains and one of Hitler’s divisions attempted an ambush. The artillery units had been passing through the road along the Tizsa River when the German and Arrow Cross soldiers sought to head them off, failing, but taking many lives in the attempt. The Red Army believed that the villagers of Molnár had known all along of the ambush. A lesson had to be taught to the rural Hungarians in the area, a penalty paid in blood. The village was torched, its inhabitants slaughtered.

When Jessie had scrutinized maps of the region, she found that on the same spot where the prewar maps showed the small village, the contemporary atlases showed nothing at all. Jessie had pored over the densely printed maps with a jeweler’s loupe and a draftsman’s ruler; there could be no mistake about it. It was an absence that spoke louder than any presence could.