Shift: A Novel (40 page)

Chandler would have launched himself at Melchior if he could have mustered more than a twitch. But he could feel things changing inside him, the warmth coming back into his body, the strength beginning to return to his muscles. Just a few more minutes …

“Of course you’re right,” Melchior continued. “Coercion’s a poor substitute for voluntary action. At this point we’re less interested in you as an operative than a research tool. We’re pretty sure Logan gave you nothing but garden-variety acid, which means that whatever made you into you is inherent. In your genes, or your blood, or your brain. But wherever it is, whatever it is, Dr. Keller’s gonna find it and cut it out of you, and then we’re gonna make us a whole army of Orpheuses. So if you don’t mind”—Melchior raised his gun—“let’s just put you back to sleep and get you as far from Dallas as we can, cuz in a couple-a days no one’s gonna want to be anywhere
near
this town.”

Chandler gathered himself. He heard the click of the trigger, saw the dart’s needle emerge from the barrel. It was too late to dodge. He would have to—

His arm swung, his hand smacked against something. He wasn’t sure it was the dart until it thudded into the far wall.

The expression on Melchior’s face was half-stunned, half-delighted.

“Well now, that
is
impressive.”

Chandler launched himself at Melchior. The spy didn’t panic. Just brought the handle of his gun down on the back of Chandler’s head, slamming him to the floor. He stepped to the side and kicked Chandler toward the staircase. The spindly rails snapped and he clattered down the narrow treads.

“Yep,” he heard Melchior say at the top of the stairs. “I’d say the changes are definitely more than mental. Keller’s going to have a lot of fun taking you apart.”

Chandler managed to roll his bruised body through the doorway just before another dart pounded into the wall. He wasn’t sure how many darts Melchior had, but he wasn’t shooting like a man with a limited supply of ammo.

He ran toward the bar. As he ducked under the drop-down door, a figure stood up in front of him, gun in hand. The bartender. He wasn’t a threat—Chandler punched him six times before the man managed to open his mouth—but he’d had no sense of the man’s mind. His juice was gone. He was on his own.

He grabbed the gun on the floor, sighted on the doorway, and waited for Melchior to come through it. But no one came. Instead a voice called through the curtain.

“Chandler?”

The curtain rustled. A figure stepped through. It was BC.

“Chandler? Are you here?”

“BC! Get down!” But it was too late. Melchior’d somehow gotten behind BC, and now he pressed a gun to his temple—a real gun, Chandler saw, not the tranq shooter.

“Hail hail, the gang’s all here. Put down the gun, Chandler.”

“Chandler, go,” BC said firmly, calmly. “I’ll deal with Melchior.”

“Chandler, stay,” Melchior said, “or I deal with BC.” He knocked his gun against the detective’s temple. “I gotta tell you, Beau, you surprised me when you showed up at Song’s. I didn’t think you had that kind of initiative. But then I read up on you. You’re like a latter-day Melvin Purvis, ain’t you? Spotless case record, bright future ahead of you, but then you made the mistake of getting your picture in the paper, at which point J. Edna pulled you out of Behavioral Profiling and made you write book reports. You ever read that novel by Mr. Dick?”

“Get out of here, Chan—”

Melchior smashed his gun into the side of BC’s face.

“Put the fucking gun
down
, Chandler. Or that little speech become’s Beau’s eulogy.”

Chandler looked back and forth between them. Finally he set his gun on the bar.

“Good boy,” Melchior said. He fished in his pocket with his free hand, tossed something to Chandler. It was a small pouch containing a syringe and a vial of clear liquid.

“Fill the syringe all the way and inject yourself.”

“Don’t, Chandler,” BC said. “I’ll be fine.”

Chandler filled the syringe. “I’m not just doing it for you,” he said as he put the needle in his vein. “I’m doing it for Naz.”

This time there was no fighting the rush of chemicals. His legs wobbled, his vision blurred. But just before he blacked out he saw BC turn suddenly, strike the gun in Melchior’s hand. The gun fell behind Melchior, and before the spy could retrieve it BC had thrown himself over a booth. Shots echoed in Chandler’s gauze-filled ears as BC ducked from one piece of cover to another. The last thing Chandler heard was the smash of glass as BC’s body crashed through a curtained window into the parking lot.

Sergei Vladimirovich Maisky followed the directions Pavel Semyonovitch
had sent him via encrypted cable. In addition to the map, there had been the explicit directive to take no one with him or tell anyone what his business was. If word got out to the Cubans or, God forbid, the Americans, that officers in the Red Army were stealing nuclear warheads, the fallout—all puns intended—would be catastrophic. Reluctantly, the engineer set out alone.

God, how he hated this little country! Its dingy people with their dark rums and noxious cigars stuffed in their mouths like amputated darky dicks. Alcohol, like skin, should be colorless—odorless, too, for that matter—and if you had to smoke, the only dignified way to do it was with a pipe. But what he really hated about these dusky peasants was their naive belief in the Communist bullshit spouted by their ridiculous leader with his ridiculous beard of an Orthodox priest, along with his sidekicks: worshipful younger brother Raúl and swashbuckling Argentino midget Che. Together the three of them were like some Dostoyevskian version of the Marxist Brothers, all of them pretending to be half saint Alyosha and half rational Ivan, when the truth was they were all 100 percent Mitya: drunken vainglorious blowhards fighting for a Caribbean atoll only slightly larger than Vasilevsky Island in Leningrad. They could have it as far as he was concerned.

Sergei Vladimirovich was a Tolstoy man. He hated Dostoyevsky. Hated Gogol even more.

When he finally reached the outpost Pavel Semyonovitch had sent him to—even village was too grand a word for the dozen stuccoed huts squatting along the edges of a pair of muddy crosshaired lanes—he had to drive around for two hours on the rutted cart paths that passed for roads before he found the spot on the map. The locals stared at his truck as though it were some variety of medieval monster (or perhaps they were just staring at his bald scalp, pink and blistered like a snake shedding its skin), and everyone seemed to him to be sick or crippled,
though whether this was poverty or
la revolución
or radiation leeching into the water supply was anyone’s guess.

The building was on the outskirts of town, shielded by a ten-foot-high cinder-block wall whose stucco had all but washed off, but whose glass-sharded heights looked recently installed. The key Pavel Semyonovitch had sent him opened the gate and he drove the truck through. Inside was the hull of yet another burned-down hacienda and a few intact outbuildings.

Sergei Vladimirovich donned his hazard suit before entering the old stables, which, though missing a roof, had their doors and windows solidly bricked up; the only working door was, like the glass shards embedded in the top of the wall, an obvious recent addition. Steel over wood. Probably stronger than the walls themselves. The same key that had opened the gate opened its lock. By the time he got the door open, he could feel the sweat coursing down his back and soaking into his underpants. The sweat was due to the heat, not nerves. Sergei Vladimirovich was made nervous by all animals larger than carpenter ants, food that hadn’t been cooked to a tasteless, colorless pulp, anyone in a uniform, and women—especially women—but he thought of nuclear bombs the way a pastry chef thinks of a chocolate soufflé: a concatenation of ingredients that need only be put together in the proper way to produce the most splendid effects. Only nuclear bombs were better than soufflés, because you could take them apart after you’d made them, put them back together again better than they’d been the first time around.

But not this one. The warhead sat in a bed of straw like a giant metal egg—a cracked egg, its olive plates dented and coming apart at their seams, which oozed a powdery ocher albumen. Someone had ripped open the bomb’s housing and soldered it back together as though it were a cast-iron tub. They’d really done a number on it. It looked more like they’d tried to dismantle it than steal it.

Condensation fogged the inside of Sergei Vladimirovich’s visor, and his drawers were so wet it felt like he’d pissed himself, but there was nothing he could do about that now. It took more than an hour to uncover the explosive assembly, at which point he saw what was really going on.

“Son of a whore,” he said, and his visor completely fogged over, and
he had to wait five more minutes before it cleared. But when it did, the problem was still there, staring him in the face. Well, not his problem. Pavel Semyonovitch’s. Sergei Vladimirovich had only to render what was here safe for transport. Working carefully, he stitched, soldered, and glued the whole thing together, then welded the external plate back on. When he was finished, he removed the sodden hazard suit and stowed it in a radiation-proof bag. He’d just finished when he felt a pair of eyes on him. He looked up to see a young man standing in the open doorway of the barn. He leaned heavily on a cane and carried a gun in his free hand.

“Pavel Semyonovitch wanted me to thank you for plugging our leak,” he said in perfect American English. “Unfortunately, now I have to plug a leak of my own.”

Two shots rang out, and the last thing Sergei Vladimirovich saw as he fell to the ground was the legend on the bag, written in Russian and English.

He was disoriented when he opened his eyes. His senses were
cloudy: vision blurry, hearing muffled, skin floating a fraction of an inch off his body. His limbs were so sluggish that he thought he was tied up again, and he thrashed to free himself.

“Easy there,” a voice came to him. “You’re okay.”

He sat up quickly, his head whipping from side to side. A bed. A sour-smelling room. Grimy green walls, cigarette-scarred furniture. A strange man sitting in a straight-backed chair with a glass in his hand, his delicate-boned face full of concern—first for the man on the bed, but then, when he realized what the man was going to do, for himself.

“Chandler, no! It’s BC! I’m your friend!”

The man on the bed launched himself into the air. His hands shot from his sides like striking snakes. A blow to the chin, the gut, the chin, the gut. The man in the chair toppled to the floor and his assailant ran for the door.

“Chandler, wait! I can help you find Naz.”

The man paused.

Naz.

He turned.

“BC?”

BC daubed at the blood on his lip. “Chandler? Are you back?”

For a moment Chandler just stood there, wavering slightly. Then his nose wrinkled. “Since when do you drink whiskey?”

BC retrieved his
glass, poured a fresh round for himself and Chandler. “I’ve learned that a little drink takes the edge off.”

He handed a glass to Chandler, which the latter tossed back gratefully, then poured himself another.

“You sure you want to do that?” BC said, sipping at his drink. “You’ve been out for twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-five actually. And eleven minutes. How’d you get me away from Melchior? No, wait. How’d you find me in the first place?”

“The Company has a tap on Song’s phone. A friend in Langley pulled the tapes for me. Turns out she put in a call to Jack Ruby two days ago, right after Melchior was sent here, asking if he was looking for any new dancers.”

Chandler nodded. “And? After you got there?”

“One of the dancers called Dallas’s finest. I flashed my badge, told them you were wanted in connection with a major drug trafficking ring.”

“Melchior—”

“He got away. I’m sorry.”

BC would have expected Chandler to be bothered by this news, but all he said was, “What about Naz?”

“I spoke to Ruby. He said Song never sent him a girl.”

“He’s lying. I saw it in Ivelitsch’s mind.”

“What did you see?”

Chandler wracked his brain, trying to sort through the thousands of fragments of various consciousnesses that now took up space in his own head.

“Melchior. He called them. He told them to send Naz here.”

“But did you ever see them actually send Naz here?” When Chandler shook his head, BC said, “I think the whole thing was a trap. Melchior’s order, Song’s call to Ruby. It was all designed to get you here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Melchior knows it’s impossible to lie to you, so he did the next best thing. He fed Ivelitsch and Song false information, figuring you’d probably end up at Song’s establishment sooner or later. The call to Ruby was just insurance. In case—oh, Jesus.”

BC jumped for the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

BC ignored Chandler. He screwed ten digits into the phone, tapping his foot impatiently as the dial scrolled back between every number.

BC swilled his drink. “Come on, Jarrell, pick up.”

“What is it?” Chandler insisted.

“Melchior must’ve suspected someone was watching him at CIA. If
he finds out it was Jarrell—” He slammed the phone down, dialed another number. “May I speak with Charles—I’m sorry, with Virgil Parker?” There was a pause, and then BC’s face fell. “When did this happen?” he said, and then, “No, I don’t need to speak to anyone else. Thank you.”

“BC?” Chandler said. “What’s going on?”

“Charles Jarrell’s house burned down this afternoon.”

“He was killed?” Chandler said, and when BC nodded: “You think it was Melchior? But what’s this Jarrell fellow got to do with me or Naz?”

“Nothing.”

“Then—”

“Don’t you get it? Melchior
wanted
us to know he was going to be here. He’s killing everyone who’s seen his face or knows something about him.”