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.