Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  The whole time Leary spoke, BC was remembering the feeling in Madam Song’s. The hatred—the loathing—pouring from Naz like heat from the open door of a furnace. The way she’d haunted his thoughts ever since he’d laid eyes on her, so much more than Chandler.

  “Are you telling me Chandler isn’t the real Orpheus?” he said now. “That it’s actually Naz?”

  “I wish it were that simple. In chemical terms, I would call Naz a catalyst. I think it was some innate ability on her part that made it possible for LSD to change the way Chandler’s brain works. To make it possible for him to project his own hallucinations onto outsiders.”

  “So you’re saying Naz is the key? That, in the right hands, she could be used to create a legion of Chandlers? Of Orpheuses?”

  Leary shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  “And what about her? Was she changed too?”

  Again Leary shook his head. “I’m sorry, Agent Querrey. I just don’t know.”

  “Did you write your suspicions down anywhere?”

  “Yes. But after—after the incident, I caught Billy trying to find my notes, and I destroyed them.”

  “So you’re the only person who knows the role Naz might have played in Chandler’s transformation?”

  “Well, there’s you now.” Leary offered BC a weak smile. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

  “I should,” BC said in a voice so cold that the doctor recoiled. “But as long as no one suspects you have secret knowledge, you should be fine.” He stood up abruptly. “You’d better pray no one followed me here however.”

  “CIA—”

  “Melchior’s not CIA,” BC said as he headed for the door. “Not anymore. And if he comes after you, you’re going to wish I had killed you.”

  Dallas, TX

  November 20, 1963

  It was nearly midnight when Chandler pulled into the parking lot of the Carousel Club. He’d flown into Dallas just after noon, but it had taken him most of the day to track down a single hit of acid—if Dallas had well-marked Bohemian hotspots like New York, he couldn’t find them, and, following a chain of hints, recommendations, and flat-out guesses, he eventually managed to score in, of all places, Neiman Marcus, where he also picked up several compliments on the clothing he’d taken from BC’s suitcase.

  The tab in his hand was of unknown provenance, like a package of batteries lacking an expiration date. It could charge him up all the way or give him only enough energy to emit a dim glow. If he took it and Naz wasn’t in the club, he’d be forced to go after her—after Melchior—unaugmented. But Ivelitsch couldn’t have lied about her whereabouts. Chandler had read it in his brain like a neon sign. She had to be here.

  He popped the tab in his mouth. He could process the chemical and normalize the hallucinations and fine-tune his mind in minutes now. The acid, thank God, was good. Not great, but good. When he opened his eyes there was a greenish tint to his vision, but it seemed less impediment than augmentation, like some kind of night-vision lens.

  He got out of the car. A tall man sat beside the front door, his lardy ass spilling over either side of the narrow stool that held his linebacker-gone-to-seed frame.

  “Evenin’, bub,” he drawled in a voice that could’ve been hostile or friendly, Chandler didn’t know and didn’t care. “It’s five tonight.”

  Chandler’s fist caught the bouncer square in the face. The man’s nose exploded in blood, and the stool splintered beneath his flailing limbs and he hit the ground like a rotten tree knocked over in a storm.

  Chandler grabbed the man by the wrist and dragged him into the shadow of some crepe myrtle that didn’t so much adorn the front of the club as shrink away from it. He tossed the pieces of stool after him, then pushed open the smoked-glass door. As he went in he noted a flyer pasted to the glass:

  BILL DEMAR

  Versatile Ventriloquist And Comic

  master in the art of extra-sensory perception

  A mephitic glow illuminated a long narrow corridor that sloped toward a black curtain. Mid-tempo jazz pushed through the curtain, and smoke, sweat, and stale alcohol saturated everything. Another bouncer sat on the far side of the curtain, and Chandler fought back the urge to use his power to reach into his mind. He had to save his energy. Pick his battles.

  “Has the new girl come in?”

  The bouncer didn’t take his eyes from the peroxide blonde shimmying off-tempo on stage.

  “We got a lotta girls, bub. They’re all good.”

  “The new girl,” Chandler insisted. “Short, dark, black eyes.”

  “Our girls aren’t really known for their eyes, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Olive complexion,” Chandler said, his throat tight. “Dark hair.”

  The bouncer must’ve heard the edge in Chandler’s voice, because he turned to him, his mouth curled in a snarl.

  “Little Lynn?” The man licked his lips lasciviously. “Jack’s saving her for prime time. Why don’t you grab yourself a beer and a chair and enjoy the show till then? Either that or get the hell out, makes no difference to me.”

  Chandler hit him then. He couldn’t help it. The idea of this creature—this crowd—mooning over Naz, waving dollar bills at her, pawing at her, was just too much. Their lust surrounded him like a locker-room funk, and bits and pieces of their disgusting fantasies flickered in his mind like pages ripped out of a blue magazine.

  As soon as the bouncer went down, Chandler knew he’d made a mistake. Shouts came from the tables and chairs fell over as men stood up too rapidly, spoiling for a fight to liven up the evening. Chandler could feel their excitement, knew he had to deal with all of them now, instead of just Ruby, wherever he was, or Melchior, if he was here.

  Suddenly he noticed the fallen bouncer was reaching inside his jacket, pulling out a gun. He was in Texas, after all. Chandler’s foot lashed out and the gun sailed all the way across the room, smashed into the racks of bottles above the bar.

  The music continued to play, but the dancer slowed to a little shake, her bare breasts swaying, her heavily painted eyes staring at the two men like a barbarian queen looking down on a pair of warriors. Chandler caught glimpses of himself and the fallen bouncer through the dancer’s eyes. Apparently the bouncer’d been pressuring her to sleep with him and she was hoping he was about to get his ass kicked but good.

  “This is for Felisa,” he said, dropping to one knee and slamming his elbow into the side of the bouncer’s face. He heard the man’s jaw snap over the thumping bass.

  A big man in a Stetson was bum-rushing him when he stood up. Chandler felt him before he saw him. The man had no interest in what was happening. He just wanted to hit someone.

  Chandler sidestepped, sent the man flying into the wall. There was another patron, this one with a chair. Chandler barely managed to get out of the way. He bumped against a table and his fingers closed around a lowball. He hurled it at the man’s temple and the man went down like a deer shot at close range.

  There were four, no, six more patrons. The dancer was among them, a bottle in her hand like a club. Now that her man was down she wanted nothing but to defend him. Chandler had no choice but to push.

  “Okay, folks,” he said in the most authoritative voice he could muster. “That’s enough excitement for tonight.”

  The six men and one girl paused, blinking. The dancer even rubbed her eyes, wondering how she’d failed to notice the troublemaker was a cop.

  “Get on outta here,” Chandler said, adding a little local color, “before I see fit to call your wives and mommas and tell ’em where you been keeping yourselves.”

  He continued pushing until the last of the men, supporting the patron Chandler had clocked with the rocks glass, filed out the front door, while the dancer retreated through a curtain at the back.

  Chandler sighed now, let his concentration drop. The effort of reaching into so many minds had used up a good portion of his energy, and he needed to save what little he had
left.

  Something was wrong, though. Where was Ruby? How come he wasn’t out here trying to figure out why he’d been raided? Chandler sent out the lightest feelers he could, trying to discern who was still in the club. He counted three girls in the dressing room, all of them thinking about stuffing their tips into their purses before Ruby could take his cut. There were the two unconscious bouncers, the barman hiding behind the bar. Nothing that felt like Ruby. But …

  He pushed toward a mirror set in the wall high over the bar. Not a mirror, he realized. A window. It must be the office. There was a … cloud on the other side of the glass. Not a mind, not as he’d come to understand it, but not a void either.

  He looked around, saw a door off to one side of the bar. He went to it, pushed it open. A narrow staircase led up.

  He mounted the stairs slowly, pushing all the while at the cloud. It had edges but no dimension. He kept trying to see around it, but there was just more cloud.

  His head came up to the floor level of the office. He saw a carpet littered with cigarette butts, coffee cups, soda bottles, the kind of stains you don’t want to look at too closely in a place like this. He mounted higher, reached the landing, turned around.

  A voice spoke from the shadows at the opposite end of the room.

  “Hello, Chandler.”

  He squinted, and Melchior’s face jumped out of the darkness. He pushed then, pushed with all his might, but all he felt was the cloud, and he stumbled forward and nearly fell.

  Melchior smiled, and only then did Chandler see the gun in his hand.

  Chandler heard the click when Melchior pulled the trigger, but instead of a shot he heard a hiss of compressed air followed immediately by a stabbing punch in his abdomen. He looked down to see a barb dangling from his chest, then felt himself falling to the floor.

  Washington, DC

  November 20, 1963

  At first glance, it seemed that Charles Jarrell had acquired several new stacks of newspaper in the eleven days since BC’d seen him last. The foyer was barred by a wall of densely packed newsprint; to get into the rest of the house you had to veer into the living room, following a trail that led almost all the way to the far wall before doubling back into the front hall. Jarrell led BC through this maze into a room that had apparently once been a library or study: several thousand books still filled the built-in shelves, but they’d been turned spine in, so that all one saw was the different colored pages aligned in faded vertical strips like one of the abstract paintings in Peggy Hitchcock’s house.

  Jarrell tipped his bottle of rye into the two glasses that sat on the stack of papers in front of the couch. BC was sure they were the same glasses from his last visit.

  “Excuse the mess. You caught me in the middle of refiling.”

  “Refiling?”

  “Goddamn Company broke in here night before last. They break in pretty regularly, so I need to make sure they can’t find anything.” Even as he spoke, Jarrell grabbed two feet off the top of one of the stacks, moved it to another.

  BC looked around the room. In addition to the stacks, loose papers lined the floor and snaked up the walls. He felt like he was inside a giant papier-mâché sculpture.

  “The, uh, Company breaks in?”

  “Once a month, sometimes more. They try to put things back, but I can always tell when they’ve been here.” Jarrell split a stack into a half dozen units, reshuffled them like cards, then moved the whole pile to a corner of the room. “Bureau probably comes half that often.”

  “That just leaves KGB,” BC said, his voice light but tight.

  “They’ve only been here once or twice.” Jarrell busied himself building what looked like a castle wall complete with gun emplacements. “That I know of.”

  “I meant in New York. I, um, had a run-in with them.”

  “I know.” Jarrell grunted now, continued moving paper. “In a mere eight weeks you’ve gone from being a COINTELPRO weasel to being a person of interest to both the Bureau and the Company, albeit they don’t know it’s you they’re looking for. But I gotta admit even I was surprised to hear that you took out Dmitri Tarkov.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Heard that you caused a bit of a ruckus at Madam Song’s, too.” Jarrell paused to regard BC through his stacks of paper. “What have you stumbled into, Beau-Christian Querrey?”

  “I had him,” BC said then. “I had him, and I let him get away.”

  “Melchior?”

  “Orpheus,” BC said. “Chandler. I had him. I had Naz, too, and I let them both get away.” He looked up at the crazy man spreading paper around with the frantic energy of a rat lining the walls of its cage. “I’m sorry I came back here, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve run out of leads.”

  Jarrell met BC’s gaze, then looked away. He grabbed his glass, saw that it was empty, walked over to BC and picked up his drink, and drained it in a swallow.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said then. “Must be those puppy-dog eyes.”

  “What?” BC demanded.

  “Melchior got called into Langley day before yesterday about a little dustup at Union Station.”

  “The gunfight? I read about that in the, uh, paper.”

  “He said he’d been contacted by a Soviet agent with a cipher no one’d ever heard of, wanted to ask him some questions about Cuba, then pulled a gun on him when he wouldn’t talk. Story had more holes in it than a loaf of bread after a mouse has been at it, but instead of keeping him locked up until they got to the bottom of it, Angleton and Everton sent him to Dallas instead. They want him to retrieve an agent known as Caspar.”

  “One of the other Wise Men?”

  “He just got back from almost two years in the Soviet Union. Angleton thinks he might’ve been doubled by KGB, told Melchior he wants him brought in for more debriefing.”

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  “I took the liberty of looking that up, just in case.” Jarrell reached into a stack of papers. It was impossible to conceive that he could find anything amid the thousands and thousands of sheets of paper, but he had to sift through only a couple of pages before he pulled out a copy of the Dallas Times Herald. The front page was covered with hatch marks—no, not hatch marks, but a series of red and black X’s and O’s drawn around single letters. Jarrell scanned them a moment, then began copying out an address a letter at a time.

  “I meant to ask you about that,” BC said. “The X’s and O’s.”

  “Old cipher system from OSS days,” Jarrell said, moving on to a second address. “Computers made it pretty much obsolete, but I still use it. Keeps my mind sharp.” He was on to a third address, a fourth.

  “Good lord,” BC said.

  “Guy seems to move around a lot,” Jarrell said, although BC had been referring to the fact that somehow Jarrell had managed to encode four different addresses on the front page of a newspaper that had come out only that morning.

  “This is the most recent address Everton had,” Jarrell said, tapping the first, “but they gave him these others too. This is the wife, who lives in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. The Bureau’s sent men out there a couple of times, but apparently he’s only around on the weekends.”

  BC nodded absently. His eyes had been caught by the two-line headline that stretched almost all the way across the page.

  PLEA FOR SPACE PLAN

  KICKS OFF JFK TOUR

  “BC?” Jarrell said.

  “Melchior isn’t the only one going to Dallas, is he?”

  Below the headline was a map of the president’s motorcade route. BC and Jarrell stared at the diagram—Main Street, Houston, Elm, and on to the Trade Mart—and then Jarrell wrote down a fifth address on the page, labeled it “Texas School Book Depository.”

  “What’s that?” BC said.

  “It’s where Caspar works.”

  “Why are you—”

  “Because it’s right there,” Jarrell said, circling the inte
rsection of Houston and Elm on the motorcade map. “Right across from—”

  “From Dealey Plaza,” BC finished for him, and reached for Jarrell’s bottle.

  Dallas, TX

  November 20, 1963

  He was on his hands and knees. He had no idea how long he’d been—

  A foot caught him in the side of the head and he went sprawling.

  “I’m starting to wonder why I’ve invested so much energy in you,” Melchior said. “I mean, if you’re this easy to take out, what good are you?”

  It felt like ice water was flowing through Chandler’s veins. His hands and feet were numb, his head a sodden pillow, save for the sharp pain where Melchior’s shoe had made contact.

  Melchior kicked him again, and Chandler’s shoulder slammed against the wall. He slumped there, too heavy to move, head hanging, eyes staring at the dart dangling from his chest.

  “What’s in the dart?” he said weakly.

  “I believe the preferred term is fléchette.” Melchior giggled. “Thorazine mostly. Keller figured out that it protects our minds from you, although we have to chew amphetamines like vitamins to counteract the sedative effects. Between that and the other downers flowing in your veins, you should be out cold. I’ve been wondering for a while if whatever Logan gave you did more than change your brain. Now it looks like the answer is yes. Fortunately, however—”

  Melchior popped another dart into the gun, leveled it at Chandler.