Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  But what about the girl? BC looked beside the bed. Immediately he saw a smattering of brownish red dots that had soaked into nicks in the old wooden bed frame. Scrubbed, but still visible. So she had been shot. There were no stains on the floor, however, and BC wanted to believe she hadn’t bled a lot, that the wound hadn’t been serious. But even if the bullet hadn’t hit anything major, if it wasn’t removed quickly it could easily lead to sepsis.

  He put his hand on the wall. The plaster felt cool and slightly damp. It could’ve just been the humidity from the rain, or … He ran his fingers over the wall like a blind man reading Braille. It took nearly a minute to find it. A soft spot about eighteen inches above the mattress. BC pushed hard, and a bullet-sized hole appeared in the plaster. Now he knew for sure: whoever’d shot at Forrestal had aimed above his head. The body bag had just been a cover. The CIA wanted BC to tell J. Edgar Hoover that Chandler Forrestal was dead.

  He pressed deeper, feeling for the slug. His fingertip bumped against something smooth and hard. He had to wiggle his finger to widen the hole so he could get it around the bullet, and when he pulled it out a chunk of wet plaster fell to the floor. A red gleam caught his eye, and he jerked his hand back as though it might be a lump of congealed blood. But of course it wasn’t.

  It was the girl’s ring.

  For a moment all he could do was stare at the dark ruby, wondering why Melchior had chosen to hide it here of all places. But then he realized: Melchior hadn’t hidden it. He’d left it for BC to find. It was both a test and bait, and as BC picked it up and slipped it in his pocket he knew: he was hooked.

  Just then a thump sounded from the lower floor—outside. The porch. A moment later the door creaked open, clunked quietly closed.

  The bedroom was directly above the living room. If BC moved, whoever was downstairs would know he was here. All he could do was wait. He pulled his gun out. A part of him—it seemed to be centered on his trigger finger—prayed that it was Melchior. He would shoot him in the hip. He would cripple him, then beat the girl’s location out of him.

  For a long time there was no sound downstairs. It was as if whoever’d come in was as awed by the cottage as BC was. Then, slowly, steps marched toward the center of the house. The staircase. The person’s tread was heavy, and BC couldn’t help but imagine Melchior’s large form moving through the living room. He sighted on the door and waited.

  The steps mounted the stairs, slowing as they neared the top. BC knew the person was staring at the open door, working up the nerve to look in. He could almost hear him counting under his breath. Then, almost as if he’d been pushed, a man’s form filled the doorway.

  “Don’t move!”

  “Aaah!” Timothy Leary screamed like a frightened child and immediately collapsed on himself, covering his face with his hands. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”

  When Leary could walk again, BC took him downstairs, sat him on the couch (a cushion was missing, he noted now—the one he’d knelt on to keep from getting Logan’s blood on his pants). Even after BC identified himself as an FBI agent, the doctor remained terrified, and his fear only increased when BC, hedging his bets, told him about the three body bags that had left the cottage.

  “Chandler? Naz? Dead? Dear God.”

  “That was the girl’s name? Naz?”

  “Nazanin Haverman. She was Persian,” Leary added, almost tenderly.

  “Why was she even here? Was she Mr. Forrestal’s girlfriend?”

  BC felt almost jealous as he asked the question, but when Leary shook his head and said, “She was a prostitute,” it was all he could do not to slug the man.

  “What do you mean, a prostitute?”

  “I only know what Morganthau told me. As near as I can tell, he made her give LSD to her johns in exchange for not having her arrested. She’s been working for him for almost a year.”

  BC couldn’t believe it. Even in her emotionally fraught state, the girl had looked like anything but a prostitute—and, as well, the idea that the nephew of the former secretary of defense would have to resort to whores beggared belief. But it also coincided with what Melchior had told him on the train yesterday.

  “The girl called him Logan. Was that his first name, or …?”

  “We all assumed Morganthau was an alias, especially since he slipped up once and called himself Morganthal.” A little smile flickered over the doctor’s mouth, then quickly faded. “He was a little boy playing at being a spy. Logan could’ve been his real name, or just another alias.”

  BC was about to ask if Leary had ever seen Melchior before, but the doctor spoke first.

  “Apparently Miss Haverman’s father was what they call a CIA ‘asset.’ In Persia. He provided assistance during the revolution in ’53, but was killed during the fighting, along with her mother and the rest of her family. Naz was barely a teenager then. The CIA brought her to the States and placed her with the Havermans, a wealthy Boston family. They even went so far as to adopt her, but she had trouble fitting in. Morganthau, Logan, whatever his name was, he alluded to the idea that her adoptive father might have behaved inappropriately. She was expelled from private schools up and down the East Coast for drinking and aggressive behavior and, ah, precocity. Morganthau told me he saw her name in a file when he was hired by the Boston office and decided to check up on her. When he found her, she was living hand to mouth, exchanging sex for cash or drink or whatever she could get. He seemed to think the arrangement he created was a step up for her. That he was helping her out.” Leary shrugged. “It seemed to me he was obsessed with her. Even after he brought Chandler here, it was her he talked about. Her he was fascinated with.” The doctor looked up at BC. “Just like you.”

  Even as Leary spoke, BC felt his hand in his pocket, fiddling with the ring that Melchior had left for him. It’s not just me and Logan, he thought. Melchior was also caught in Naz’s spell.

  “I was going to get to Mr. Forrestal,” he said brusquely, yanking his hand from his pocket. “It’s just …” He shrugged helplessly. “I’m not really sure what to ask beyond, well, what happened yesterday?”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, the smile came back to the doctor’s face, and a look of awe gleamed in his twinkling eyes.

  “It’s easiest just to say it. Rippling trees. The Mezquita of Córdoba. Furniture flying across a room of its own accord. These images came from Chandler’s head. Somehow he is able to broadcast his thoughts—his hallucinations—into the minds of the people around him.”

  An image of the burning boy filled BC’s brain. “But there were other things. Things that came from my head. My past.”

  If anything Leary’s smile grew bigger. “His ability seems to be related to the amount of LSD in his body. Seemed to be. Toward the end Morganthau was pumping him with thousands of times the normal dosage.”

  “But Miss Haverman said he administered the drug with an eye dropper while Mr. Forrestal was sleeping. How do you get thousands of doses—”

  “You have to understand, Agent … Querrey?” Leary paused just long enough to remind BC that Morganthau wasn’t the only young man who’d tried on an alias. “LSD is extraordinarily powerful. Doses are measured not in grams or milligrams but micrograms—one one-millionth of a gram. The threshold dosage is only about twenty or thirty mics. An eyedropper could contain enough acid to give everyone in Manhattan a buzz.”

  BC shook his head in confusion. “But LSD’s been around for years. I don’t know much about it, but I know it’s been used in quite a few psychiatric trials. And I assume you’ve taken it a few times. You don’t have any mental powers, do you?”

  “It’s not illegal,” Leary said quickly. “Just controlled. But no. No mental powers—yet.” He sounded almost disappointed.

  “Was it just the amount?”

  Leary shook his head. “I don’t think so. In fact, LSD has analeptic—stimulating—properties, and beyond a certain dosage it really should give you a heart attack. But this is the CIA. Who kno
ws what they added to Morganthau’s LSD? Who knows if it was even LSD at all?”

  “And what does all this have to do with the Gate of Orpheus?”

  Leary waved his hand. “You should think of the Gate as less object or organ than metaphor. Opening it was meant to lead to higher states of consciousness, not murder.”

  “You mean Morganthau?”

  “Think how frightened you were yesterday. Imagine if that fear were amplified a hundred times. A thousand.”

  BC shuddered. “You think Mr. Forrestal killed him? Made him kill himself? With his mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Leary said. “I don’t know what happened here.” His eyes flickered to the ceiling, to the stripped bedroom above. “And my sense is that now we never will. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless they make another one.”

  “Another—”

  “Another Orpheus.”

  BC just nodded his head, but what he thought was: they don’t have to make another Orpheus. Chandler Forrestal is still alive. And so was Naz, he thought, reaching for the ring in his pocket. But both of those facts could change quickly, unless he found them. And the only way he was going to do that was if he found Melchior.

  Falls Church, VA

  November 5, 1963

  The headlights on the the stretch Fleetwood went dark just before it pulled into the back parking lot of the Falls Church storage facility. Silent and invisible, detectable only by the glint of moonlight off chrome and glass and black lacquer, it sluiced across the empty asphalt like the lead ship of a naval battalion until it pulled up soundlessly in front of a lone man standing in the cone of darkness beneath a broken streetlight. A broad-brimmed hat further shadowed the man’s face, but beneath it a nervous hand fiddled with a tiny hole in the suit jacket, under the lapel, over his heart. For the past thirty-six hours Melchior had been trying to make sense of what he’d experienced at Millbrook—the rippling trees, the objects that seemed to fly of their own accord—but as soon as he saw the car he forgot all that. He’d heard that Song was doing well, but not this well, and with a pang of embarrassment he wished he’d abandoned the affectation of Segundo’s execution suit, or at least the worn-out sandals. Thank God today’s socks didn’t have any holes in them.

  His regrets only increased when the tinted back window rolled down with a space-age hum, revealing a plush cavern lined with black leather, white silk, chrome accents—and a woman whose face, though familiar, still took his breath away. It had been almost seven years since he’d last seen Song. She was in her mid-twenties now—she’d been shady about her age even when he met her a decade ago in Korea. The features were still sharp, but they lacked the hollow, starved look they’d worn when Melchior first met her, had taken on a cast of polished onyx. The eyes were if anything larger and darker, but, though the anger was gone, it had been replaced by a hardness that was even more daunting.

  Melchior couldn’t help himself. He whistled.

  Song didn’t deign to look at him. “If you use the term ‘Dragon Lady’ in any context whatsoever, I’ll have Chul-moo shoot out your knees. Now, what’s so important that after seven years you suddenly need to see me personally, immediately, and at one in the morning?”

  Well, that hadn’t changed. Song had always been a no-nonsense type of girl.

  “Actually, I was going to say that if I’d known you were going to turn out this pretty, I’d’ve never—”

  “One more word and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “You’re afraid I’ll offend poor ‘Iron Weapon’ in the front seat?” Melchior glanced at the chauffeur. “Is he even old enough to drive?”

  “His license says he is,” Song said. “And he speaks no English, so the only person who will be offended by your banter is me. Let’s cut to the chase: what do you need?” Song looked at Melchior for the first time, from the ragged sandals all the way up to the battered fedora, proffering an ironic smile that sent shivers down his spine. “And what do you offer?”

  In return for services rendered to the United States government during the war in Korea, Song Paik—Song to her friends, Madam Song to everyone else—asked only that she be allowed to emigrate to America. Melchior had traveled to Korea with the Wiz when he was all of twenty years old, had recruited her himself. She was that one in fifty asset who neither disappeared behind the 38th parallel nor turned out to have been a Communist plant. She’d been fourteen or fifteen then, a slip of a girl, all angles and lines, with sunken eyes that burned with hunger and hatred. Like Melchior, she was an orphan, but unlike him she’d known her parents and witnessed their murder—and the murder of her brother, her nanny, and six more members of her extended family, not to mention countless friends and neighbors—at the hands of Kim Il-sung’s soldiers. Melchior was pretty sure she’d’ve helped the Company even if the Wiz hadn’t offered her U.S. citizenship. No one carried a grudge like a Korean. Of course he hadn’t met any Persians at that point, so it was a qualified opinion.

  In fact, after he and the Wiz had been in Korea for just over ten months, Douglas MacArthur made it clear he didn’t give a shit about intelligence as long as he had tanks and bombers and 155-millimeter shells and napalm—God only knows what would’ve happened if he’d gotten his hands on the thirty-eight atomic bombs he’d requested. Never one to stick around where he wasn’t wanted, the Wiz decamped for Persia to take care of Mohammed Mossadegh, dragging Melchior with him, while Song made her way to the States. Melchior kept tenuous tabs on her in the intervening decade. Though her presence in this country was legal, the rest of her activities appeared to be less above-board. He gathered that she’d tried a little bit of everything: smuggling, drug running, even espionage. Her primary source of revenue, however, was an exclusive brothel that offered every kind of Asian girl—Indian, Thai, Japanese, as well as more rarefied “varietals,” as she called them, as though they were species of orchid—and whose regular patrons had come to include captains of industry and congressmen, along with a regular flow of intelligence agents from around the world, who came there for the information that was on sale along with the girls. Although the official line at the Company was that Madam Song’s was allowed to operate unmolested because she funneled a large percentage of her income to organizations and individuals working for the overthrow of Kim Il-sung’s regime, the truth was she’d taken her cues from the Company and kept extensive evidence—photographic and forensic—on the most sensitive visitors to her establishment. A nosy reporter might take her down one day (assuming she didn’t have the goods on the paper’s publisher), but no government agency ever would.

  Melchior shook his head now. “The years haven’t softened you, that’s for sure. I need to move something,” he said quickly, before she threatened to shoot him again. “Someone.”

  “Some who?”

  “That’s not important.”

  “Some where?”

  Melchior chuckled. “Kind of far, actually. San Francisco. I’d take him myself, but I have some business to attend to first, and this is a priority.”

  “Seoul is kind of far. San Francisco is only six hours by plane, and I happen to have one.”

  Melchior resisted the urge to whistle again. “I see I called the right lady.”

  “You called no one. No one answered. Nothing will be moved. It just so happens that I enjoy visiting San Francisco. Usually I go in January, but I guess I can go in November this year.”

  “Understood.”

  “Sometimes when I’m in San Francisco I like to meet new people. Perhaps you know someone who could show me around?”

  “In fact I do. He’s a nice man. A doctor.”

  Song looked at Melchior skeptically. “I’m not looking for a husband.”

  Melchior laughed. “He’s not that kind of doctor.”

  A pause. “Let me guess. One of the leftovers from Nightingale?” When Melchior nodded, she continued: “You want me to deliver someone to a Nazi scientist?”

  �
��Ex-Nazi,” Melchior said. “I haven’t offended your sense of propriety, have I?”

  “Assuming I ever had such a thing, I left it in Korea. I’m in America now, where the difference between right and wrong is a matter of dollars and cents. Why San Francisco? Aside from the fact that it’s as far from Langley as you can get without leaving the country.”

  “I was in Laos for a few years, recruiting warlords to fight the Viet Cong.”

  “The Hmong,” Song said, as though this were common knowledge. “Laos is not exactly in California.”

  Melchior did his best to keep the surprise off his face—fewer than a dozen people had known about his mission.

  “The Company couldn’t buy guns for them directly, so I helped them move some of their merchandise to market in order to finance the purchases.”

  “By merchandise you mean opium?” When Melchior nodded, Song said, “I thought it went to Marseilles, entered the U.S. through the East Coast?”

  “Most of it. But I was able to funnel some to Frisco.”

  Song’s eyebrows twitched. For the first time she seemed impressed. “You skimmed. And here I thought the Wiz had raised you to be a good boy.”

  “The Wiz never had anything against a little initiative.”

  “True.” Song paused, and for the first time Melchior thought he saw a real emotion flicker over her face. “Have you heard anything about Caspar?”

  Melchior had been just about to ask her the same question.