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.”