Shift. Part 15

He felt for the driver's mind. He was as gentle as he could be-he didn't want the man, Peter was his name, Peter Mossford, to veer out of control when the road turned to water. Facts flitted past like flash cards. Mossford was fifty-two. Divorced. Was returning from an emotionally hollow rendezvous with the woman he'd foolishly left his wife for. Not that he missed Lorna-a shrew, born and bred-but he missed his boys. Mark, fourteen, still living at home with his mother, and Pete Jr., in his second year at Dartmouth. Mossford used to love to take Pete camping in the hills north of the city when the boy was younger-h.e.l.l, when he he was younger, before work left him too tired for anything on the weekends besides a steady stream of Scotch-and-sodas. What he wouldn't give to go back to the good old days, when his hair was still brown and thick and his sons didn't retreat to their rooms the minute he walked through the door, blasting their ridiculous jungle music on the hi-fis he'd mistakenly bought them in a bid to win their affection. When the city wasn't crawling with peac.o.c.ky fellows like this one-a beatnik probably, "messed up" on Mary Jane, or who knows, maybe one of the fruits who'd started settling in the Castro. I swear, Mossford thought, it's not safe to let your kids walk the streets these days. Why, if that were Pete- was younger, before work left him too tired for anything on the weekends besides a steady stream of Scotch-and-sodas. What he wouldn't give to go back to the good old days, when his hair was still brown and thick and his sons didn't retreat to their rooms the minute he walked through the door, blasting their ridiculous jungle music on the hi-fis he'd mistakenly bought them in a bid to win their affection. When the city wasn't crawling with peac.o.c.ky fellows like this one-a beatnik probably, "messed up" on Mary Jane, or who knows, maybe one of the fruits who'd started settling in the Castro. I swear, Mossford thought, it's not safe to let your kids walk the streets these days. Why, if that were Pete- Mossford stepped on the brakes. Peered through the window. On the other side of the gla.s.s, his fair hair dappled in a ray of sunlight that shone on him like a spotlight, eleven-year-old Pete Jr. pantomimed rolling down the window.

"Hey, Dad," Chandler said as a blissful smile spread across Mossford's face. "Wanna go camping?"

It was too tricky to keep the image of Pete Jr. firmly fixed in his father's mind and at the same time convince Mossford that the western route out of Oakland was actually the road leading to the hills north of the bay, so Chandler let his chauffeur pilot the car as he wanted. Mossford spewed a stream of regrets to his son, apologies, pledges to do things differently. It wasn't right, Chandler thought. In the morning Mossford would wake up with the night's events pulsing in his brain more vividly than any memory, any dream he'd ever had, and how great would his sorrow be then? Life was hard enough already. One man shouldn't be able to do this to another. But the longing for Naz was too great, and he pressed on. tricky to keep the image of Pete Jr. firmly fixed in his father's mind and at the same time convince Mossford that the western route out of Oakland was actually the road leading to the hills north of the bay, so Chandler let his chauffeur pilot the car as he wanted. Mossford spewed a stream of regrets to his son, apologies, pledges to do things differently. It wasn't right, Chandler thought. In the morning Mossford would wake up with the night's events pulsing in his brain more vividly than any memory, any dream he'd ever had, and how great would his sorrow be then? Life was hard enough already. One man shouldn't be able to do this to another. But the longing for Naz was too great, and he pressed on.

When they were safely in the deserted hills, the fantasy of Pete Jr. told his dad that he thought this place looked swell. Mossford parked the car, then went to the trunk to unpack the tent. Chandler couldn't bear to watch him go through the motions, a beaming smile on his face as he pounded imaginary tent pegs into the ground with an invisible hammer, so Pete Jr. said, "Look, Dad, I did it myself," and there before Mossford's eyes was a perfectly pitched pup tent. Mossford didn't question it, just as he didn't wonder how it had gone from a golden morning to a bl.u.s.tery night in the hour it had taken them to drive out of the city. Instead, father and son crawled into their respective sleeping bags for the night.

"Can we go fishing tomorrow, Dad?" was the last thing Pete Jr. said to his father.

Mossford pulled the imaginary zipper of his sleeping bag all the way up. "Whatever you want, son."

Chandler waited till Mossford was asleep before he lifted the man's wallet from his pants and got back in the car. He felt like a complete heel. He wanted to punish the people who had done this. Wanted to make them feel what Peter Mossford would feel when he woke up. But as soon as he had that thought, an image of Eddie Logan flashed in his mind-his face, contorted in terror, his own hand driving a knife into his heart to spare himself the horror that Chandler had put in his mind-and he knew that he'd already done much worse than what he'd done to Mossford.

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.

Washington, DC November 9, 1963

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. 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 You ratted me out. I spent eight months in Boniato because of ratted me out. I spent eight months in Boniato because of you." 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 s.h.i.t. 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 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 f.u.c.ker had actually 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 f.u.c.ker had actually bit bit him. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 motherf.u.c.ker, 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 gra.s.s, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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.

Washington, DC November 9, 1963

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 f.u.c.king 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 part.i.tioned 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 in one before. one before.

"Sit your f.u.c.king a.s.s 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 lowb.a.l.l.s and his right hand was wrapped around a bottle of rye. He filled the two gla.s.ses 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 a.s.s-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 f.u.c.k!" Jarrell looked around as though someone might be hiding behind a stack of newspapers. "It's Parker! Virgil Parker! 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 heard of cover. So leap to the obvious conclusion." 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 s.h.i.t. But then he thought better of it, sent me undercover." He waved a hand. "Enough background. What the h.e.l.l 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? that? Jesus, no one's mentioned that in a dog's age." 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 f.u.c.king Vault? Vault? Sweet mother of G.o.d, you've got b.a.l.l.s, I'll give you that. So look, CB-" Sweet mother of G.o.d, you've got b.a.l.l.s, I'll give you that. So look, CB-"

"BC actually."

"Yeah, I don't give a f.u.c.k. 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 f.u.c.k 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-f.u.c.k-ing-Bu-reau. Capisce?" 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 f.u.c.k happened?"

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

"That is the craziest bunch of horses.h.i.t I ever heard-and I've heard some crazy horses.h.i.t 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 cla.s.sifieds 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 f.u.c.k." 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 dips.h.i.t. 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 c.r.a.p. 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."

"And Caspar?" The name rang a bell, but BC couldn't place it.

Jarrell shrugged. "Who knows? Even odds says there never was a Caspar-that the whole thing was just a story the Wiz made up, or maybe even Melchior. At any rate, Melchior got a reputation for being a crazy f.u.c.k-among other things, he's repeatedly destroyed his own file, so no one besides the Wiz knows his real name or what he's been up to for the last ten or twenty years." Jarrell looked BC up and down in his vacuum repairman's uniform. "You, my friend, are one lucky son of a b.i.t.c.h."

BC ignored this.

"So how do I find him?"

"Melchior? Fat f.u.c.king chance. The Wiz had a nervous breakdown in '56 after the whole Hungary thing blew up. I guess he'd told the rebels that if they rose up against the Soviet Union, the U.S. would help them out. But Ike, you know, he'd already fought his war, plus he had an election coming up, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Thousands of rebels were pretty much slaughtered, and the Wiz took it hard. Ended up going for shock treatments and all that, never really did recover. They farmed him out to London, then finally forced him out entirely last year. Without his patron, Melchior was pretty much persona non grata. You'd hear stories. One day he was in the Congo, the next in Southeast Asia, then he was off to Cuba. They could've all been true or all been lies. But the one thing I can tell you is that he don't spend much time in DC." Jarrell paused. "Although, come to think of it, if he is here, you might want to check out Madam Song's."

"And she is?"

"Oh baby." Jarrell licked his lips like a teenager in the locker room about to describe the wonders of eating p.u.s.s.y. "Only the finest purveyor of female flesh on the Eastern seaboard. In addition to running an exclusive brothel, she also procures and supplies girls to mob bosses and politicians and other movers and shakers. Specializes in exotics-Orientals, Africans, niche-market cooz. She and Melchior were once 'linked,' as they say in the gossip pages, and there's a reasonable chance he's paid her a visit if he's back in town."

"For such a supposedly super-secret spy, his habits seem pretty well doc.u.mented."

Jarrell shook his head at BC like a disappointed teacher. "You got to understand how the trade works. There's no such thing as a secret no one knows. Espionage is built on half truths, quarter truths, and lots and lots of lies. Every piece of useful information is attached to dozens, hundreds, of pieces of misinformation, and the best spy is the one who can sift through the bulls.h.i.t to the truth. Part of it's what we call legend-the invented story that creates an operative's cover-and part of it's just aura, the mystique that Melchior cultivates in order to give himself more clout out there in spyland. I've probably heard more stories about the Wise Men than I have about my uncle Joe, but the difference is 99.9 percent of those stories are complete and utter fabrications."

"You don't have an uncle Joe."

"No." Jarrell smiled. "But Virgil Parker does."

"So what you're saying is that you have no idea if Melchior really even knows Madam Song, let alone if he'll have visited her."

"What I'm saying is that Melchior's name has been mentioned in connection with Song's often enough that there's probably something there. Whether they f.u.c.ked once, or she's an agent herself, or just runs a really good brothel, is anyone's guess." Jarrell shrugged. "But yeah, that's about all the help I can give you."

"There is one more thing. A woman. I don't think she has anything to do with this, but-"

"Who?"

"Her name is Mary Meyer. She-"

"Yeah, I know who she is, and what she did. Who Who she did." she did."

"She gave him LSD."

Jarrell shrugged. "So? He's already hopped up on more pain pills and antianxiety drugs than all the housewives in Arlington combined. What's one more?"

"She got the LSD from Edward Logan."