Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  Suddenly the girl screamed again. BC couldn’t see her but he heard the difference in her voice: this was a scream of pure terror. A moment later there was a gunshot and she fell silent.

  “Miss—” BC’s words were choked out as the armoire he was leaning against suddenly tipped over and pinned him into the corner. His gun was knocked from his hands and his body was trapped in a low, painful crouch. His cheek was mashed against the wall so hard that it felt like his skull was going to crack. The little sliver of the room he could see began to blur as spots danced before his eyes.

  “Is someone there?” he called, his voice a choked whisper. “Someone, please! Help me!”

  There was a second gunshot then, and all at once the armoire fell off him and BC half stumbled, half rolled away from the wall. He wobbled toward his gun, but even as he reached for it he saw a large object hurtling toward him. He turned his head, had time to see that the object was a portable typewriter. A dark shadow filled the doorway, and the faint smell of cigar smoke, and then the typewriter smashed into his skull and the room went black.

  Millbrook, NY

  November 4, 1963

  The first thing he saw when he came to was a tattered lattice of sunset shining through the needles of the pine forest. There was something wrong with this picture, but he couldn’t tell what it was at first. Then it came to him: the pine trees were solid now, their only movement caused by the breeze.

  He sat up, wincing in pain. He felt the crust of dried blood on his face, looked down and saw a few drops on the front of his suit. Then he saw the car.

  A Lincoln, flat, black, and rectangular, was slotted into the trees like a gigantic domino. He turned toward the cottage, looked first at the second-floor window to the bedroom where he’d confronted the girl and Forrestal. He stared at it a long time before accepting the truth of what his eyes told him: it was unbroken. Light shown through the drawn curtain, and dark shadows moved back and forth inside the room.

  He started to stand and immediately felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see a stony-faced man sitting on a section of sawn tree trunk.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to wait until the ambulance arrives, sir.”

  “I’m fine,” BC said, and moved to get up again.

  The man’s hand was heavy on his shoulder, and BC sat down hard enough to send daggers of pain through his forehead.

  “Sir, please. I’d hate to see you injured further.”

  BC squeezed his left arm against his side, confirming what he’d already suspected. His gun was gone.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “The ambulance will be here shortly, sir. You should take it easy. That’s quite a bump on your head.”

  BC would’ve shaken his head but it hurt too much. He turned back to the cottage, just in time to see a man back out the front door pulling something long, black, obviously heavy.

  A body bag.

  He dragged his burden across the lawn and stowed it in the Lincoln’s trunk.

  BC would’ve asked where he was taking the body, but he knew it was pointless. The man returned to the house and came out a few minutes later with a second body, then a third, this last one significantly smaller than the first two, and carried in his arms in a gross perversion of the Pietà.

  “Lord have mercy. What have you done?”

  The lights went off in the upper bedroom. As BC watched, the rest of the house went dark. The black-suited man scanned the ground, then got in the car. The engine started, the lights came on. Then a shadow filled the cottage doorway. Another dark suit, but there was something different about this one. It was bigger for one thing. Bulkier. More rumpled.

  For some reason BC looked at the feet for confirmation of the man’s identity. There were the sandals. When he looked up at the face, he saw that it was covered by a broad-brimmed fedora and a pair of mirrored sunglasses, as if the man was hiding his identity even from the people he worked with.

  He was different now. The clothing was still shabby, ill-fitting, but there was nothing disheveled about the man himself. He was clearly in charge.

  “Did you have to kill them? Mr. Forrestal? The girl?”

  Melchior descended the steps and walked toward the car.

  “Isn’t it bad enough that you dragged them into your experiment? Did you have to shoot them when it went awry?”

  A grin flickered over the corner of Melchior’s mouth, and for some reason BC knew it was his use of the word “awry.”

  “Was Logan his real name?” he called as Melchior reached for a door handle. “Or Morganthau? His parents will want to know what happened to him. What about the girl? What was her name?”

  Melchior pulled the door open. He paused a moment.

  “She doesn’t have a name,” he said finally. “Not anymore. Give him back his gun, Charlie,” he threw in, then got in the car.

  The agent guarding BC handed him his gun, then the bullets that had been in it. Then he got in the Lincoln with Melchior and the other man, and, almost silently, the car pulled away over the pine needles. More out of instinct than hope, BC glanced at the rear bumper, but black fabric had been draped over the license plate, as though the car itself were in mourning for the three bodies it carried.

  Camagüey Province, Cuba

  November 5, 1963

  Maria Bayo’s uncle had died by the time Ivelitsch reached him, but there were a half dozen other cases of radiation poisoning in the village. The epicenter was a small shed one block off the village’s only paved road. Even without the Geiger counter Ivelitsch would have been able to find it: someone had painted the skull and crossbones on all four sides of the building.

  “Readings are incredibly high, comrade,” Sergei Vladimirovich confirmed. “Either the unit was damaged when Vassily Vasilievich stole it, or afterwards, when Raúl’s man got it.”

  “Is there any other danger? Besides the leak, I mean?”

  “You mean an explosion? No, comrade—” Sergei Vladimirovich broke off.

  “What?” Ivelitsch demanded.

  “Just a premonition. The thieves obviously stored the device here, but they moved it before we arrived. That means they knew we were coming. Next time they won’t just stick it in a shed. They’ll look for something less noticeable.” Sergei Vladimirovich waved a hand, indicating the flat fields stretching beyond the village in every direction. “My guess is they’ll bury it.”

  “And?”

  “It’s just that the water table’s extremely shallow here, and porous as well. If this thing actually gets into the local supply, you could end up with hundreds sick, perhaps thousands.”

  “Your concern for human welfare is touching.” Ivelitsch’s voice would have raised the fur on a cat’s back.

  Sergei Vladimirovich surprised Ivelitsch. “I wasn’t thinking of the villagers, comrade.” He looked around the windblown shacks with almost as much distaste as he’d shown the pile of dog carcasses a few days ago. “An outbreak of suspicious cancers and birth defects is going to be hard to keep a secret, even in Cuba. If word gets to the relief agencies, everyone in the world will know what we’re looking for.”

  “Well then. We’d better find the device before that happens.”

  Most of the sick people in the village didn’t know anything. Ignorance, of course, is the Communist condition—in four years with the Czech secret police, Ivelitsch had been hard-pressed to find a single resident of Prague or Bratislava who knew his brother’s wife’s name, let alone whether his neighbor was an enemy of the proletariat—but even with a little cajoling the villagers stuck to their story. Ivelitsch ordered the sick to be quarantined and given tetracycline to combat the radiation sickness, which in most cases was fairly mild. The quarantine was more for his sake than the villagers’, since it allowed him to interview each of the patients privately. Most of them knew nothing helpful, and Ivelitsch was beginning to lose hope—and patience—when finally he came to the last man. He’d been unconscious the fir
st time Ivelitsch visited him, but was awake now, barely. The skin of his lips and nostrils and eyelids was pocked with blisters, and thin yellow mucus leaked from beneath his fingernails.

  “Favor,” the man croaked, his tongue bulging from his mouth like a lizard’s. “They said you had medicine.”

  There was a cane leaning across the arms of a chair, and Ivelitsch laid it on the floor before sitting down next to the bed. He pulled a pill bottle from his jacket and set it on the bedside table, just out of the patient’s reach.

  “I need information.”

  “Favor. Se nada. I know nothing.”

  Ivelitsch thought the man’s response came too quickly. It wasn’t an answer. It was a denial.

  “An American in a truck. Dark like a Cuban, but big.”

  “¿Gordo?”

  “Not fat. Atlético.”

  The man turned his head toward the pills. The action triggered a cough, long and deep but hollow, as though he were almost emptied out.

  “There was a man. He could have been American. He paid Victor Bayo to park it in his shed.”

  “What was in the truck?”

  “He kept it covered.”

  “You would not be sick if you hadn’t looked.”

  The man on the bed closed his eyes. For a moment Ivelitsch thought he’d lost consciousness. He was reaching for the cane to prod him when the man opened his eyes.

  “I don’t know what it was. Some kind of machine. As big as my sister’s dowry chest. There was writing on it. Russian writing.”

  “How do you know it was Russian?”

  “It was like the letters on the jeeps.” A tiny croaking laugh. “Backward consonants and funny shapes.”

  “And what happened to it?”

  “Someone came for the truck and took it away. Two days ago. He went east.”

  “The American?”

  “No. Cubano. But the American sent him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He had keys to the padlock on the shed, and to the truck as well.”

  Ivelitsch nodded, and stood up.

  “You did well to answer my questions. You saved your people much sickness.” He grabbed the pill bottle and tossed it on the bed. “You might have even saved yourself. You are a lucky man.”

  Louie Garza waited for the Russian to leave before he took the first pill. Indeed, he was a lucky man. He only hoped the pills worked before the Russian figured out Louie’d sent him on a wild-goose chase, and came back for the truth.

  Millbrook, NY

  November 5, 1963

  The rain beating on the roof of his motel, coupled with the pain in his forehead, kept BC awake all night. It wasn’t the drumming on the zinc sheets or the throbbing in his skull: it was the thought of all the evidence it was destroying. Tire treads and footprints melting into useless blurs; fibers, hairs, and other minuscule clues washing away; drops of blood dissolving into the soil. Any one of them might hold the key to unlocking what had really happened in the cottage—who killed whom, and how, and why. Morganthau, aka Logan. Chandler Forrestal, aka Orpheus. And the girl who, so far, had no name.

  BC had looked at dozens of cadavers, stuck his fingers in knife and bullet wounds and probed nether orifices for signs of rape or cruder trauma. But never once had he looked a living victim in the face. Never once had he heard pleas for succor or mercy. And even though he knew she was incidental to this story, that Orpheus was the real star—or at any rate the chemical, the project that had made him—it was the girl who haunted him. Somehow he’d tricked himself into believing that victims acquiesced to their fate in the end. That the greatest crime was murder, not the horrible psychic torture that led up to it. But all night long the girl’s screams echoed in his ears, and every time he closed his eyes he saw hers, wide with terror. Long after he’d forgotten she was dead, he remembered how she’d suffered when she was alive.

  In an effort to get some sleep he tried to read The Man in the High Castle, the book Director Hoover had sent him north with. Among other things, the director expected a report Monday morning—assuming BC still had a job, of course. But he only got as far as the end of the second page. How easily I could fall in love with a girl like this. His cheeks reddened, the book fell from his fingers. He filled a rag with ice from the machine down the hall and put it on the bump on his forehead, then lay in bed listening to the rain wash away his chances of finding out what had happened to her.

  The storm let up shortly after dawn. By the time the sun crested the Berkshires he was stashing the Corvair a quarter mile from the front gate of the Castalia estate. A bone-chilling fog filled up the road, the lawns, the space between trees. The reduced visibility seemed to amplify what little noise there was—mostly BC, his shoes crunching over gravel, his breath whistling as he scaled the crumbling stone wall, and then his slip-sliding passage as he made his way up the slick hill toward the main house. Fog ribboned through the deciduous trees on this side of the house, and the ground was cushioned by layers of leaves and mulch. BC, punchy from his sleepless night but wired on two cups of bitter coffee, half felt that he’d stepped into another hallucination. He wanted to tell himself that was impossible, but after yesterday he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to say that about anything again.

  There wasn’t a light on in any of the main house’s windows, and the building emitted a pervasive silence, as if its occupants weren’t just asleep but unconscious, suppressed by the gargantuan structure until it chose to recognize a new day. BC skirted the wide lawns and made his way toward the pine forest. His chest tightened and he willed himself to relax. Forrestal was gone, he reminded himself. Orpheus was dead, and couldn’t hurt him now.

  The cottage came into view more quickly than he remembered. Without the interference of a shimmering hallucination, he could see it for what it was: a small building outfitted in the same combination of Bavarian and Catskill kitsch that decorated the Big House. He combed the yard first, but Melchior’s team had been thorough. The only sign that they’d been there was the chewed-up ground itself. Inside, the rooms had the distinct look of a scene that’s been gone through by professionals who don’t care about covering their tracks. Books sat unevenly on the shelves from which they’d been taken and flipped through and hastily put back; drawers hung half-open, bits of clothing or paper peeking out; couch cushions bunched together like boxcars on a crashed train. They’d even pulled up the carpet, leaving it in a roll against one wall, and a couple of floorboards had been pulled up as well. BC had no idea if they’d found anything, but the one thing all this effort made clear was that the team hadn’t known what was going on in the house before it arrived.

  It wasn’t until he unrolled the carpet that he realized the cleanup team hadn’t simply been searching for evidence: it had also been eliminating it. A huge hole had been sawn out of the center of the carpet where Logan’s body had lain, ragged-edged, contemptuous even, as though someone had hacked the blood-soaked portion out with the same knife that killed Logan. BC looked at the walls again, realized that all the bloody handprints had been scrubbed away. He was able to find a couple of small stains in the carpet, but doubted there was enough fluid in the fibers to get anything like a usable sample. Nevertheless, he clipped the strands and dropped them into his pocket—his evidence bags had been in his briefcase—then made his way through the rest of the first floor, taking two or three more samples, but not really expecting anything to come of them. Only when he was convinced the lower floor had been thoroughly exhumed did he make his way upstairs.

  He’d meant to go through the ancillary rooms first, but the open door lay just past the top of the stairway and he couldn’t help but look in. The bed had been stripped. Naked pillows lay atop the dingy white mattress like seashells on a beach. A strong scent of bleach came to his nostrils.

  He stepped in. There was the bureau that had flown across the room and slammed through the wall. It sat between two windows, not a nick on it, and certainly none of the drawers were sm
ashed into pieces; the wall that it had crashed through was unmarked as well. The books and lamps that had flown at him sat on shelves and tables, equally intact, gleamingly clean. Could CIA have repaired the walls, replaced all of the furniture? No, that was just paranoia—the kind of thinking that dealing with CIA brought out in you. Somehow he had hallucinated the whole thing. But how?

  He looked at the armoire that had pinned him into the corner. It stood a good three feet from the wall now, but when BC walked to the far side, he saw faint scuff marks on the bare wooden floors. Someone had made an effort to scrub them away—had gone so far as to fill them in with wax. As aha moments go, it was small; but still, it was good to know he hadn’t imagined everything. Now BC saw a deep round dent on the windowsill, flecked with black paint. He looked for the typewriter that had knocked him unconscious; it was missing from the room. More evidence that not everything that happened yesterday had been the product of his own mind. What was it his mother used to say? The devil mixes lies with truth to confuse you. An image of Melchior’s smug pucker materialized in BC’s head. Yes, he certainly did that.

  BC crouched down in the corner. From this position, the armoire blocked his view of the door. Melchior could have stood there, assessing the room, formulating a plan: shoot the girl, then Chandler, then deal with BC. He shifted his attention to the bed. It sat exposed on top and bottom, barren of any sign a body had lain on it. But it was too barren. BC strode to the bed, threw the pillows off. The mattress was completely clean. I.e., no bloodstains. BC didn’t care what kind of solvent the cleanup team had used, how hard it had scrubbed: blood always left a mark. Especially when it came from a gunshot wound, especially on white cotton ticking. And besides, the bed was completely dry, which meant the CIA team hadn’t had to clean it. Which meant, finally, that there’d been nothing to clean off. He flipped the mattress just to be sure, but there was no blood on the bottom either.