Shift: A Novel (24 page)

It was a mean world, Chandler thought, and yawned widely. With or without mental powers, it was a mean, cold world. The mere thought of it exhausted him, and he struggled to keep his eyes open as he piloted Mossford’s car on the rainbow ribbon of deserted highway. All he wanted was to find Naz and curl up with her and sleep forever, or at least until this nightmare was over.

The blade of Rip’s knife glinted in the dim light. He appeared in
no hurry to press the attack, and Melchior took a step back, slipping off his jacket. Rip was bending his right wrist tenderly, and Melchior suspected he’d fractured a bone or strained the tendons. Hard to stab someone when you can’t close your hand all the way. After a moment Rip moved the knife to his left hand. That’ll make things easier, Melchior thought.

“Tell me, Rip,” he said as he wrapped his jacket around his right hand, “were you ever actually trying to kill Castro, or were you just there to keep an eye on me?”

“I’d tell you that you’ve got an inflated sense of your own importance,” Rip countered, “but you’re almost right. Killing Castro was the primary mission, but getting rid of you was the fallback.”

“It wasn’t the Cubans, was it?
You
ratted me out. I spent eight months in Boniato because of
you.”

Rip’s smile caught the streetlights and glowed wetly.

“I’d’ve preferred killing you myself, but I’d been made and had to get out of the country.”

The two men circled each other warily. Melchior suspected Rip wouldn’t actually kill him unless he was forced to, since a dead man can’t provide any information. He’d have to pull his blows, at least at first. That might be Melchior’s only chance.

“So tell me. Does the Company know Orpheus is alive?”

“They do now. Jesus Christ, Melchior. You’re Frank Wisdom’s personal pickaninny. We always knew you was crazy, but a traitor? What gives?”

“It was the Company that betrayed the Wiz. Pushing him out of Plans, frying his brains to shit. My loyalty was to him. It still is. I’m disappointed in you,” he threw in. “I’d’ve thought an old-timer like you would’ve known to bring a radio. Now I don’t have any choice but to kill you.”

Rip blinked. Melchior didn’t wait for a second chance. He lunged. Rip went for him with the knife, and Melchior put his padded right hand directly in its path. A searing pain sliced across his knuckles but he ignored it, twisting the rapidly dampening jacket around Rip’s wrist. The blood-soaked fabric tangled around Rip’s weapon, tying him to Melchior, who kicked his right foot into the side of Rip’s left knee. It buckled and Rip went down with a grunt. The tangled jacket pulled Melchior down on top of Rip, and he felt the knife drive deeper into his hand. At the same time there was a sharp pain in his right arm: in his panic, Rip was actually
biting
him. Melchior yanked his arm free. His elbow came down hard on Rip’s nose, and the man’s face vanished in a burst of dark blood. He brought it down a second time on Rip’s Adam’s apple, crushing it. The third blow, snapping the fallen man’s sternum, was purely punitive—he couldn’t believe the fucker had actually
bit
him.

Rip tried to suck air through his collapsed throat with a sound like greasy water going down a clogged drain. Melchior kept one eye on him as he untangled his bloody jacket. The knife had gone through the edge of his hand. Gritting his teeth, he pulled the blade out, then used it to cut a strip of fabric from the sleeve of his jacket and bound the wound. The whole time Rip gurgled and thrashed on the ground.

“It’s a shame it had to come to this,” Melchior said. “You’re gonna miss all the fun.” Then he stepped on Rip’s throat to shut him up.

When Rip was finally still, Melchior just stood there, catching his breath, staring down at the dead agent. He was a little woozy from loss of blood, and his hand was starting to throb like a motherfucker, but at the same time he felt exhilarated. Another link between himself and the Company had been severed.

He pressed his foot into Rip’s neck, felt the jelly of the dead man’s Adam’s apple spread beneath the thin sole of his sandal. He stared down at his foot for a long moment. Something about it bothered him. Then he knew. He plopped down on the grass, kicked off the sandals Segundo’s men had given him when they pulled him out of prison, took Rip’s shoes, and put them on his own feet. Pointy wingtips in shiny black leather. For a thug, Rip was a bit of a dandy.

Before he knew it, he was pulling Rip’s pants off him, his jacket, his shirt. In full view of a dozen darkened houses and any cars that might
happen along, Melchior stripped off the linen execution suit he’d been wearing for nearly a year and put on Rip’s thoroughly respectable gray wool. He pulled his wallet and keys from his bloody jacket, tossed his old clothes in the backseat of his car, then walked up the block until he found a car with an unlocked trunk and stuffed Rip’s nearly naked body inside. The corpse would probably start to smell in a day or two, and in another day or two, maybe longer if Melchior got lucky, someone from the Company would make the rounds of the morgues and put everything together. That was fine. Keller could erase any trace of the lab by then.

He drove a few miles out of his way to dump the knife in a trash can, then headed home. Before he went upstairs he threw his old suit and shoes in the incinerator in the basement, stood there in his new clothes watching them reduce to ash. It seemed to him that the last thing to burn away was the bullet hole over the breast of his old suit. A fantasy, he knew, the product of blood loss. But even so, the hole seemed to burn before his eyes, growing larger and larger and larger until it consumed the world.

All he needed to do now was get Orpheus back. But he wasn’t too worried about that. He was pretty sure Chandler was going to come looking for him.

Charles Jarrell took one look at the figure on his front porch
, then pulled BC inside and slammed the door.

“Jesus H. Christ. Take that ridiculous thing off your head. You look like Phyllis fucking Diller.” He looked BC up and down one more time, then shook his head. “Does he know you’re here?”

BC pulled off the ratty wig and scratched his itching scalp. “Who?”

Jarrell kicked BC’s mother’s Electrolux hard enough to dent the motor’s housing. “J. Edgar Vacuum, that’s who.”

“Oh, ah—no.”

Jarrell opened his mouth, and even as a whiff of liquor-soaked breath floated BC’s way he said, “I need a drink for this,” turned on his heel, and disappeared.

He lived in a decrepit row house just a few blocks north of Capitol Hill, one of those DC neighborhoods that, forsaken by the nation’s prosperity, seemed doomed to eternal poverty. But not even the boarded-up windows and beaten-up cars on the street could have prepared BC for the chaos inside Jarrell’s house. The walls were covered with peeling paper whose color and pattern were completely obscured by a coating of cigarette smoke as sticky as creosote. Stacks of newspapers, five, six, seven feet tall, made a veritable maze of the floor, while the air was similarly partitioned by bolts—clots—of smoke. Despite the reek of tobacco, BC could smell the spicier tinge of alcohol and sweat beneath it. He’d heard the expression “down the rabbit hole” innumerable times in reference to CIA, but had never actually been
in
one before.

“Sit your fucking ass down, you’re making me nervous,” Jarrell said, returning from another room—or who knows, maybe just from behind a stack of paper. “This better be good, or I’ll be mailing pieces of your body to Hoover for the next several weeks.”

The newsprint- and nicotine-stained fingers of Jarrell’s left hand were tucked into a pair of ice-filled lowballs and his right hand was
wrapped around a bottle of rye. He filled the two glasses to the rim and shoved one across a stack of papers that served as a coffee table. BC sat down gingerly on a sofa mummified in what could only be described as ass-wrinkled newspaper. There were several dark kinky hairs on the pages. Given the fact that what hair remained on Jarrell’s head was limply straight and gray, BC perched as close to the sofa’s edge as he could without falling off.

“Well?”

“Mr. Jarrell—”

“Aw, Jesus Fuck!” Jarrell looked around as though someone might be hiding behind a stack of newspapers. “It’s Parker! Virgil
Parker!
”

“Mr. Parker.” BC shook his head helplessly. “I thought you’d been fired.”

Jarrell smacked the side of his head, hard enough to make BC wince.

“Jesus, this really is amateur hour. I can tell by your ridiculous costume that you’ve at least
heard
of cover. So leap to the obvious conclusion.”

“Ye-es. But you don’t work for CIA under your real name. So why go to all the trouble of firing Charles Jarrell if it’s Virgil Parker who’s going to be hired by the Agency?”

For the first time, Jarrell chuckled. “Oh. Well. He really did fire me. Didn’t like the way I dressed or talked or some shit. But then he thought better of it, sent me undercover.” He waved a hand. “Enough background. What the hell are you doing here, especially if Hoover didn’t send you?”

“I need to talk to you about Orpheus.”

“Who?”

“Orpheus? Project Orpheus?”

“Never heard of it.”

“A division of MK-ULTRA? LSD experiments—”

“Oh,
that?
Jesus, no one’s mentioned that in a dog’s age.”

“But according to the director’s files, you’re the Bureau’s liaison—”

“You broke into the fucking
Vault?
Sweet mother of God, you’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. So look, CB—”

“BC actually.”

“Yeah, I don’t give a fuck. So look, CB-BC, there ain’t many of us
inside Langley, so we’re spread a little thin. I’m the ‘liaison,’ as you so elegantly put it, on about forty different operations, projects, actions, and individuals at the Company. Orpheus or whatever the fuck you called it is about thirty-ninth or fortieth on my list of priorities.”

BC felt his heart sink. Jarrell seemed as ignorant as he was crazy. “There was an incident,” he said, a desperate whine making his voice sharp. “At Millbrook.”

Jarrell’s face softened slightly. “Is that where that nut job Leary set up camp? I can call someone in the Boston office, see what they know.”

“Bureau? Or … Company?”

“Jesus Christ!” Jarrell practically screamed. “I—do—not—work—for—the—fuck—ing—Bu—reau.
Capisce?”

BC nodded. “A Boston agent was involved in the incident.”

“By involved, you mean died?” For the first time Jarrell perked up. “What the fuck happened?”

BC took a deep breath, then told the story as clearly as he could. Halfway through, Jarrell started drinking from BC’s glass, and by the time BC finished he’d refilled both glasses and drained them as well.

“That is the craziest bunch of horseshit I ever heard—and I’ve heard some crazy horseshit in my life.”

“I know it sounds unbelievable.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. You strike me as a man incapable of telling a lie, as your pathetic attempt at a disguise makes clear. Whether or not you know the truth is another question. What’d you say the guy’s cipher was? The swarthy fellow?”

“Melchior.”

“Melchior, Melchior.” Jarrell got up and began rummaging through the piles of newspaper, moving methodically from the living room through a wide doorway into what was probably the dining room, although it contained nothing but a maze of newspaper and boxes. As Jarrell worked his way through the stacks, BC noticed that colored slips of paper poked from them at various places—red, yellow, and blue flaps fluttering like pinfeathers. With a combination of fascination and revulsion, BC realized that the thousands of papers served as some kind of filing system, like one of IBM’s room-sized computers. Only instead of punch cards, it was newsprint.

Now Jarrell pulled a classifieds section from a stack of paper. The ads were covered with hatch marks, and Jarrell’s eyes flitted up and down the columns like a bookkeeper scanning accounts.

“Mother of fuck.” He wadded the paper and tossed it on the floor. “You had yourself a run-in with one of the Wise Men.”

BC’s brow wrinkled. “The Magi? Melchior, Balthazar, and what was the last one called?”

“Caspar. And yes, those three. But also no. By which I mean no, you literal-minded dipshit. Wise Men is Company lingo for three agents Frank Wisdom brought in with him in ’52.”

“Brought in?”

“Wisdom was OSS during the war. Was one of the advocates for a permanent agency to oversee American intelligence-gathering activities as well as a direct-action division to follow up on that intelligence when more visible options weren’t available.”

“You mean covert ops.”

“The Wiz more or less invented the concept. Legend has it that him and Joe Scheider recruited a couple-a three kids in his OSS days, was basically raising them to be spies—some spook story about sleepers and all that. In fact, now that I think of it, the program was pretty much the forerunner of Artichoke, Ultra, Orpheus, all that sci-fi crap. Anyway, the Wiz’s recruits were known as the Wiz Kids at first—big surprise, right?—which later gave way to Wise Men, which in turn led to the idea that there were three of them—Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. According to legend, the goal was to place them in deep cover inside the Soviet Union, but Balthazar supposedly died during the course of his training, and Melchior was already too old—not to mention too dark—and ended up becoming the Wiz’s field hand.”