Shift: A Novel (14 page)

The girl shook her head. “We’d already taken it, and—” She broke off, shook her head. “We didn’t understand what happened to us. Agent Logan thought Leary might be able to help.”

“You knew Logan before?”

The girl suddenly snapped back into a panic. “He made me! He said he would go to the police otherwise! I had no choice!”

BC took a step closer. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But what you’re describing sounds a lot like motive.”

“Stay away!” The girl brandished the bloody knife in both shaking hands, but what BC noticed was the ring on her finger. A large ruby, its
color deeper and richer than the blood that spotted her hands. He didn’t know why, but it seemed to him that you would take off a ring like that if you were going to commit murder, or at the very least afterward.

“You have to believe me,” the girl implored. “He stabbed
himself
. He couldn’t take it.”

“Take what?”

“I don’t
know
. Whatever Chandler—whatever
he
saw.”

BC glanced at the man on the bed. “What does he have to do with this?”

“I told him not to give Chandler any more acid, but he wouldn’t listen! You have to get away.”

Suddenly BC realized: the girl wasn’t afraid
of
him. She was afraid
for
him. “You’re trying to protect
me?”

“He—” The girl gulped back the word. “It’s out of control. You have to get away. Out of its reach. Until it wears off.”

“But … but how did he—”

The girl screamed in frustration, so loud the man on the bed moaned. “Don’t you see? Don’t you
see?”

And now BC did see: saw that the entire room had begun to shimmer like the trees outside. Only this time it wasn’t just a hallucination. He could feel the floorboards warping beneath his feet.

“You have to run!
Please
. Before it’s too late.”

BC tried to hold the gun on the girl but the seesawing motion beneath his feet made it impossible. He reached for the wall but the wall was rocking too. Splaying his feet, supporting his right arm with his left, he mustered as much authority as he could.

“I’m sorry, miss. I have to ask you to put the knife down and step away from Mr. Forrestal. Until I figure out what’s going on here, you’re going to have to come with me.”

The girl screamed, even as the bureau lifted up and flew across the room at him. He threw himself to the floor just before it hit the wall so hard that it smashed through, hung half in, half out of the melting bedroom in a cloud of plaster dust. A rain of random objects began pelting BC—books, lamps, pictures, little pieces of bric-a-brac that flew at him too quickly to make out. He squeezed himself into the corner behind a tall armoire and shielded his face as best he could. Glass
exploded as objects crashed through the window over his head. This isn’t happening, he tried to tell himself. It’s just an illusion. A hallucination. It has to be. But he could feel glass and plaster and wood chips rain down on his hair and knew he was wrong. Somehow the man on the bed was throwing things at him without touching them. Throwing them with his mind.

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.

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.

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 first 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.

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.