Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  “No shit.” Robertson’s whistle elicited a sharp groan from Donny, who seemed to think it emanated from the plane. “I thought they was all gone now.” He studied Melchior a moment. “I’d’ve figured you to be older. What are you, thirty, thirty-one?”

  Melchior had to give him that one. Not out loud of course, but still. He got it on the nose.

  “They say the Wiz recruited them when they was kids,” Sturgis explained. “Orphans, runaways, juvenile delinquents. Whatever gutter trash he could round up.”

  Melchior wondered what Sturgis was getting at. Or rather, he wondered if Sturgis was getting at what he thought Sturgis was getting at.

  “No shit,” Robertson said again, too busy scraping the bottom of his can to hear the edge in Sturgis’s voice. “Well, I guess that means this mission is serious. Either that, or we’re being thrown to the wolves.”

  Another one, right on the kisser. Melchior wondered if maybe Robertson wasn’t as dumb as his eating habits. The Spam did smell curiously good after three hours of sitting around.

  “So, Mr. Wise Man,” Robertson said as he popped the top on his ninth or tenth can of Spam, “what’s the deal with the cigars?”

  Before Melchior could give the standard answer—“Need-to-know only,” which is what Dick Bissell had said to him when he asked the same question thirty hours earlier—Sturgis said, “Shit, Rip, you don’t think Alvin fucking Domenico’s gonna tell a couple-a ex-grunts like you and me what’s going on, do you? He’s a fucking Wise Man, for Christ’s sake.” He took a pull off his bottle. “I mean, he was practically bred to be an agent.”

  Melchior noted the word. “Bred” rather than “raised.” Sturgis was almost there now.

  “Of course, I guess the days of the Wise Men are over.” Sturgis had dropped the pretense of talking to Robertson, was looking directly at Melchior now. “I mean, what with the Wiz being out of the game and all.”

  “Flank Wis …” Robertson swallowed, tried again. “Frank Wisdom retired?”

  “I wouldn’t say retired.” Sturgis put his fingers on his temples, made a bzzt sound.

  “No shit.” Robertson’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. “Wait. You are saying he went crazy, right? Bzzt? Shock treatments?”

  Melchior heard a loud staccato, realized it was his fingers tapping dangerously hard on the box of cigars.

  “The whole DDP is on the outs now,” Sturgis was saying, a smirk flicking at the corner of his mouth. “It’s all about Technical Services these days. Knockout drops and truth serums and every other kind of magic potion you can think of. Before you know it, the Company’s gonna be able to program sleepers like Big Blue punch cards, and then I guess DDP won’t need to train no garden-variety pickaninnies …”

  Melchior was just about to jump out of his seat when the plane banked sharply to the left and he had to clutch at his harness to keep from falling instead. Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor wasn’t so lucky. He tumbled across the hold and smashed face-first into the far wall. His crucifix punctured his lip, and a stream of blood poured from his mouth. His murmurs, barely tolerable before, turned to wails.

  “Jesus Christ, will someone shut that bitch up,” Sturgis said. “Pablo’s trying to talk.”

  Melchior noted how quickly Sturgis shifted gears. He might be an asshole and a turncoat, but he was a professional. And let’s face it: they were all assholes, which was why they’d become soldiers of fortune in the first place, and the only thing that mattered was whether they could do their jobs. Melchior figured he could count on Sturgis in the days ahead—assuming he didn’t have to kill him first.

  “Bogey at four o’clock,” the Guatemalan pilot was calling through the open door of the cockpit. “Too low for commercialism. No se if they made us, but you gonna have to bail just in case.”

  “Shit,” Sturgis said. “At least tell me we’re over land.”

  “Cerca de. Nearling.” Between the accent and the engines, Melchior couldn’t tell if Pablo was joking or not.

  The plane banked hard to the right. Robertson, who’d been reaching for the door handle, smacked his head against the window, and the spoon sticking out of his mouth clanked against the glass.

  “Jesus Christ, Pablo, give a guy some warning. You could-a poked a hole in my cheek.”

  “Definitely bogey. You want out, you got to go now.”

  “Fuck. I wasn’t finished eating. Last American food we’re gonna have for a while, I wanted to enjoy it.”

  Even as Robertson spoke, he rolled the hatch open. Outside, the clouds were dense as cotton batting. Except for the rain that whipped into the hold, he could’ve been standing in front of a blank movie screen, one hand reaching casually for his chute like a commuting businessman grabbing an umbrella before heading off to the train. He stood in the spray, chewing slowly, then tossed the empty can into the void.

  Sturgis had buckled Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor’s chute on him and was dragging him toward the door. Blood streamed down the defector’s face, and his legs trailed after him as limply as the tentacles of a jellyfish. “I’m gonna have to jump with Donny here, or he’ll be too busy praying to open his chute. Rip, you come next. García, López”—the Miami exiles, although Melchior hadn’t bothered to learn which was which—“after that. And you, Agent Domenico”—the contempt was audible in Sturgis’s voice—“bring up the rear.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Just tossed Donny out the side of the cabin like a bag of garbage and hopped after. Robertson waited till Sturgis was gone before grabbing three cans of Spam in one of his big hands.

  “Betcha I finish ’em before I pull cord.” Spoon in one hand, cans in the other, he jumped out of the plane. Another sharp turn more or less dumped García and López into the clouds, and then it was Melchior’s turn.

  Up in the cockpit, Pablo was manhandling the unwieldy cargo plane through the zero-visibility slop like a little boy on a dirt bike. Something about the kid—the sharp-featured face, shiny and desperate for approval—reminded Melchior of Caspar, and before he knew it he’d taken one of the cigars out of the box and lit it as he made his way to the cabin. Dick Bissell, the Wiz’s replacement as deputy director for plans, could deduct it from his pay.

  It was damn good cigar. Sat on the tongue like gunpowder and blood. If the Catholics handed out these instead of those stale wafers, he’d go to mass seven days a week.

  “To keep you company on the ride home, Pablito,” he said, stealing one more drag before passing off the fragrantly smoking imperiale. “Cuban tobacco. El mejor. Gracias, Señor.” Pablo shoved the cigar in his mouth, more Groucho Marx than Jimmy Cagney. “Next year in Habana!”

  The honor of being chosen haloed the kid’s angular face. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-one. Caspar’s age. Most kids his age were just getting out of college, starting a family, and here these guys were, risking their lives for Company and country. He didn’t care how many chemicals TSS pumped into someone’s bloodstream. Only a leader could inspire this kind of loyalty.

  Melchior had just turned from the kid from when something slammed into his back and threw him ten feet into the hold. He thought it was turbulence at first, or who knows, maybe one of Castro’s hand-me-down Russian fighters had actually managed to get off a shot. But when he turned back to the cockpit he saw that the blow had come from inside the plane.

  Pablo’s torso still sat in the pilot’s chair. His feet were still on the pedals and his hands still held the wheel, but where his head had been there was just a jagged stump spurting fountains of blood.

  “Oh give me a goddamn fucking break,” Melchior said, even as the plane dipped and spun toward the left. He’d known the plan was going to be stupid, but he had no idea it was this stupid. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  The plane’s sharp turn put the open hatch almost directly above him, and he had to climb the floor like a ladder, cursing Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Sidney Gottlieb, and
everyone else who had anything to do with such a cockamamie scheme. Grunting, he chinned himself through the opening. The plane’s engines screamed as it dipped into a death spiral. If he timed his jump wrong, he was going to get sliced in half by a tail fin. But Pablo’d been instructed to come in under 2,500 feet, so it was now or never. He counted—three, two, one!—and threw himself clear. The left elevator ripped by so close that if he’d turned his cheek, he could’ve gotten a free shave. A second later, the plane disappeared into the clouds.

  He pulled the cord as soon as he was level. There was that interminable quarter second when it always seemed like nothing was going to happen, and then he felt the familiar snap and tug as the chute opened and caught. He listened for the sound of a crash but the cloud-choked air wrapped around his head like a pillow, and all he heard was the sound of his own breath. The cigar’s smoke still sat on his tongue.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered as he spat the taste of gunpowder and blood into the cottony void. “Exploding fucking cigars.” In the category of need-to-know, he was pretty sure someone could’ve bothered to mention that.

  The next minute or so was a surreal interval, as he floated through a layer of cloud so dense he could’ve been a fly suspended in amber. He found himself remembering certain rumors that had come to him—rumors that, until sixty seconds ago, he’d dismissed as Communist propaganda or, who knows, an exercise in disinformation on the Company’s part, an attempt to make the rest of the world think CIA had lost the thread in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Now it was starting to look like the rest of the world was right.

  Before he left the Congo, Joe Mobutu—this was before all that Sese Seko Nkuku nonsense—told him about a microphone in a radio station that would spew deadly gas when Castro delivered his weekly address. In Saigon, a jaded British journalist–cum–MI-5 freelancer named Fowler told him about a jar of poisoned cold cream one of Castro’s mistresses was supposed to put in his mouth while he was sleeping, and on the Laotian side of the Vietnamese border, a Hmong warlord told him about a seashell packed with C4 that Castro was supposed to find when he went scuba diving. In a whorehouse outside Clark AFB, a Filipino madam of questionable gender (but unquestionable assets) told him about a ballpoint pen that was really a syringe filled with poison, and the Marine who handed his girl off to Melchior told him about a wet suit infected with some kind of toxic fungus. Perhaps the most ridiculous story of all, though, had come from Caspar: a plan to put thallium salts in El Jefe’s boots, which would supposedly cause his hair to fall out (apparently the bright young things Bissell had brought in with him felt that Castro’s power, like Samson’s, was vested in his hair—more specifically, his beard—and a bald, bare-cheeked leader would lose his hypnotic hold over the people). Caspar’d told this story at a bar a few miles outside of the Atsugi Naval Air Facility on the east coast of Japan; Melchior had flown there for the sole purpose of having a drink with him before he went into deep cover, and he was inclined to put the story up to their third or nineteenth bottle of saki. But the wet stains splattered all over the back of his shirt suggested that Caspar’d been telling the truth. That all the stories were true. The Company hadn’t just lost the thread, it had lost its head. All due respect to Pablo, of course.

  The fact that these rumors seemed to be true lent credence to other things he’d heard about during his time away. Namely that Technical Services, under the leadership of its clubfooted, folk-dancing Jewish genius, Sidney Gottlieb, had all but superseded the Directorate of Plans as CIA’s paramount division and was pushing an ever greater reliance on technology over manpower—everything from wiretaps to U-2 stratoflights to crazy drug experiments designed to create truth serums and knockout drops, with, apparently, exploding cigars and poison pens and who knew what other James Bond type of stuff thrown in for good measure.

  Melchior couldn’t help but think that none of this would’ve happened if Frank Wisdom, the man whom Bissell and Gottlieb had made redundant, were still around. The man who, with the help of James Forrestal, the nation’s first secretary of Defense, built CIA out of the remnants of the wartime OSS and pretty much single-handedly founded the concept of covert ops. The man who led the fight against Communist expansion in France, Italy, and the Ukraine (two out of three seemed like a pretty good win-loss record in that department, especially given which two they’d won), in Korea, Persia, and Guatemala (ditto the two-out-of-three stat, and they’d only lost half of Korea anyway). The man who recruited Melchior and Caspar out of that orphanage in Dallas almost exactly twenty years ago, anointing them the first of his Wiz Kids. Twenty years later, they were the last of the Wise Men. The Wiz himself had been out since ’58. Not officially retired, no, but sidelined. There were rumors of a breakdown, time in a sanatorium, shock treatments. The last Melchior heard, he was stationed in London. For a man who’d spent his whole life fighting Communism in Eastern Europe, Central America, the Middle East, and beyond, cold, gray Westminster must’ve seemed like a fate worse than death.

  Well, it wasn’t as cold and gray as Moscow. Caspar could’ve told you that.

  Just then he broke through the clouds. Immediately he snapped into focus. He could see a few twinkling lights in the distance, judged the nearest to be at least three miles away. The area directly beneath him, however, was a dense black void. It could’ve been open water or a cane field or …

  “Aw, shit.”

  Melchior jerked his feet up as the jagged outlines of forest canopy suddenly came into view. Pablo’d dropped them directly over the goddamned Zapata Swamp. He tried to steer clear but ran out of airspace way too soon. His right ankle slammed against a branch and he whirled around in an explosion of pain. He did his best to shelter the volatile cargo in his backpack even as branches pounded his legs, ribs, arms, head. A sudden jerk and then a long tear as the chute tangled in the branches. Something smacked him right in the kisser, something else slammed into his gut, and his descent came to a sudden, stomach-churning stop.

  He hung there for a moment until he could breathe, then opened his mouth, let a thin stream of blood and saliva fall to the ground. A faint splat reached his ears about two seconds later, meaning he was about twenty feet up. He flexed his throbbing right ankle. It didn’t seem to be broken, but even so. This wasn’t gonna be fun.

  He was reaching for his knife to cut himself free when he heard a rustle, grabbed his light instead. A pair of green eyes glared up at him, but it took a couple of seconds to discern the outline of the full beast. Some crocodile-looking critter, jaws wide open like a toothy funnel, as though all it were doing was drinking the drizzle still falling from the sky. It was only seven or eight feet from nose to tail—an iguana compared to the behemoths he’d seen in the Congo—and it seemed to be alone, as well, but Melchior wasn’t in the mood to mess around. Although it occurred to him to light one of the cigars and drop it in the croc’s mouth, he pulled his sidearm out instead, sighted between the twinkling orbs of its eyes, squeezed the trigger. The croc collapsed like a punctured tire. Melchior waited thirty seconds to see if anything else came running, then used his knife to sever the strings of his chute one at a time, slipping and jerking his way downward. When he was about six feet off the ground, he unbuckled his harness and dropped right on the croc’s back. He took most of the weight on his left leg, but his right still screamed with pain. If he got out of this pissant country alive—never mind if this cockeyed plan came off—he vowed to put his throbbing foot all the way up Richard Bissell’s pasty white ass. He’d save the cigars for Sidney Gottlieb.

  He figured the shot would bring the others to him, so he sat down on the dead croc, took off his right boot, reached for one of the rolled strips of fabric he always carried with him. It had been one of the Wiz’s first field lessons all those years ago. Flat ribbon was more compact than a similar length of rope, and more versatile too: you could use it to bind wounds as well as wrists, write ciphered messages, or rappel out a third-floor window. Sturgis found him before he’d
finished wrapping his ankle. One of the exiles—García, it turned out—came in about five minutes after, but there was no sign of Robertson or López or Donny.

  They found Robertson hiding in the low branches of a mangrove, a half dozen empty candy wrappers littering the base, which smelled strongly of urine. They found López a half hour later. He’d broken his wrist in the landing but was otherwise okay. Melchior set it with a pair of sticks and a couple yards of fabric, and then they spent another two hours combing the swamp before they finally found Donny—or what was left of him, which was mostly the smell of his cologne. He’d drifted two miles east of the drop point. Whether he’d landed in a nest of crocs or they’d simply come across his dead body (Sturgis joked that the weight of all those names was too much for his parachute to carry) was anybody’s guess.

  “Guess it’s only fair,” Sturgis said, leering at Melchior. “We killed one-a them, they get to kill one of us.”

  “But we didn’t eat it,” Robertson said, his protest reeking of Spam and nougat.

  “Surprised they managed to keep him down,” Sturgis said, “what with that nasty-ass perfume he wears. So, Poco?” He turned to Melchior. “You think it’s about time you let us in on the plan?”

  Melchior looked at Sturgis, who was trying to work Donny’s crucifix free from what remained of his head and neck. Even so, there was more of him left than Pablo.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Sturgis gave up and just snapped the chain. He rinsed the gore off in a puddle of swamp water and dropped it in his pocket. When he stood up, his rifle was hanging loosely off his shoulder, the snout pointing directly at Melchior.

  “Try me.”

  Melchior combined what he knew with what he surmised, presented it all as though he’d been in on everything from the beginning. Bad enough that he was the Company representative for such a stupid plan; no need for him to look like a patsy as well.