Shift. Part 5

Logan just stared at him a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.

"It depends who you talk to. Talk to Joe Scheider, he'll say don't be crazy, we're just trying to make a truth serum, a knockout potion, maybe our own Manchurian candidate. But talk to Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, that lot, they'll tell you the sky's the limit. Telepathy, the astral plane, naked walks on the rings of Saturn." He looked between Naz and Chandler and shook his head again. "If you'd backed me into a corner and forced me to pick sides, I guess I'd've gone with the headshrinker. But there you go. Sometimes even the beatniks can be right."

Chandler nodded. "What's the Gate of Orpheus?"

Logan glanced at Chandler sharply.

"How did you-"

"I pulled it out of your head," Chandler said coldly, "when you were jerking off on the other side of the mirror."

Logan's cheeks turned bright red. His mouth opened, then closed.

"Jesus Christ." He shook his head incredulously. "Look, all I know-"

He broke off again, his jaw hanging open as the magnitude of what had happened settled into his brain. Nearly a minute pa.s.sed before he took a deep breath and started speaking again.

"All I know is that some scientists have theorized the existence of a receptor in the brain. Just as certain people have unusually keen senses of smell or taste or rhythm, the hypothesis went, so other people might have retained some vestigial receptiveness to ergot alkaloids, which is what LSD is made from. Ergot's a fungus that affects most grains. It's one of those things like alcohol-its existence is so enmeshed with human civilization that most people have developed a genetic resistance to it. But, just as many Indians are especially susceptible to the effects of alcohol because they didn't evolve with it, it seemed possible that there might also be a population, albeit a much smaller one, similarly sensitive to ergotism. Even its proponents admitted that the possibility was remote, but the consequences if it proved true were so profound that the Company couldn't ignore it. We know the Soviets are conducting their own experiments, and we can't risk falling behind."

It was a moment before anyone spoke. Then Naz said: "So how do we find out if Chandler possesses this receptor?"

Logan looked at Naz as if he'd forgotten she was in the room.

"We take a little road trip," Logan said. "It's time you two met LSD's fairy G.o.dfather."

Mount Vernon, VA November 1, 1963

Melchior sat in the front seat of the battered Chevy he'd pulled from the garage beneath the Adams Morgan apartment. A hand-me-down from the Wiz, who'd driven it for half a dozen years, then pa.s.sed it to his eldest son, then his youngest, then handed off what was left-rust held together by paint and prayers-to Melchior. You had to hand it to the good folks at General Motors: Melchior had hooked up the battery, and the jalopy started right up. from the garage beneath the Adams Morgan apartment. A hand-me-down from the Wiz, who'd driven it for half a dozen years, then pa.s.sed it to his eldest son, then his youngest, then handed off what was left-rust held together by paint and prayers-to Melchior. You had to hand it to the good folks at General Motors: Melchior had hooked up the battery, and the jalopy started right up.

The radio was on. The speaker spat out angry white and defiant black voices calling one another names-n.i.g.g.e.r, redneck-in b.u.m f.u.c.k, Alabama, or s.h.i.t Hole, Mississippi, the insults and epithets interrupted by hopeful or sentimental or otherwise naively wishful songs: "One Fine Day," "Be My Baby," "Blowin' in the Wind," along with the indecipherable but infectious "Louie Louie."

Outside the window, a big white house sat on the far side of a wide lawn. Picket fence, towering beeches, four Doric columns holding up the porch: the Wiz hadn't missed a detail in his colonial fantasia. Revolutions had been planned behind those paneled doors, a.s.sa.s.sinations, infiltrations, arms sales to ex-n.a.z.is and Muslim extremists, yet it was hard to imagine anything more coming through them than a smartly dressed housewife with her arms around a pair of well-coifed children, the beaming face of a Negro maid looking over their shoulders.

Something was coming through the door now. Something as far from that dream of domestic bliss as it was from the equally unreal world of international espionage and covert ops.

Melchior could only look at it in bits and pieces. A bathrobe. A cane. Licks of gray hair sticking out like antennas from a mostly bald head. The Negro servant was there, though. A man, not a woman, guiding the shaking figure like a parent teaching a toddler to walk. A toddler with a bottle of bourbon in his right hand and a dark patch in the middle of his half-open robe. Melchior had photographed the bodies of thirteen schoolchildren killed by an errant rocket in the mountains of rural Guatemala, had picked up the pieces of a Company agent after the man walked by a Saigon cafe just as a shrapnel bomb went off, but he couldn't look at the Wiz. Not like this.

Instead he looked down at the seat next to him. A creased sheet of paper sat on the pa.s.senger's side. The blueprint had been through a lot in the past five days. There was a bullet hole in the upper-left quadrant, a few drops of dried blood in the lower left. The creases from the time it had spent folded in his shoe were so deep they'd rendered the diagram all but useless-that is, if you wanted to attempt to duplicate what had been drawn there. But you could see what it depicted just fine.

He looked up at the porch. The man in the bathrobe was talking animatedly to no one, gesticulating so wildly with his bottle that twelve-year-old bourbon splashed all over him. A part of Melchior wanted to walk up there and pour the whole bottle over the decrepit figure and set it on fire. The Wiz would have wanted him to do it. The Wiz would have put the lighter in his hands. But that wasn't the Wiz up there. The Wiz would've recognized his own car. The Wiz would have told him to get his a.s.s up there and have a drink. Of course, the Wiz would have made him use the back door, but that was the Wiz for you: you could take the boy out of Mississippi, but, as the plantation house testified, you couldn't take Mississippi out of the boy.

Melchior looked down at the blueprint again. At the time, he hadn't been sure why he didn't give it to Everton. Oh sure, he was p.i.s.sed off. But he'd been p.i.s.sed off at the Company a million times before, over substantive issues, like the refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in '56 or the idiocy of sending fourteen hundred poorly trained men into Cuba on the heels of a wildly popular revolution. But now he knew that he could've never given the paper to Everton. Not even if Everton had shaken his hand and offered him the country's thanks and given him a corner office and a secretary who didn't wear panties. Because Melchior didn't work for Everton and he didn't work for the Company and he didn't work for the United States of America. He worked for the Wiz, and even after Drew Everton had stared at him like a Klansman looking at a black man with his d.i.c.k in the lily-white p.u.s.s.y of Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Melchior would've still walked across that wide green lawn beneath the shade of the towering beeches and up the bluestone steps flanked by those Doric columns and handed that piece of paper to the Wiz. All the Wiz had to do was c.o.c.k a finger at him, say "Git on up here, boy," as though he were calling his dog for dinner.

"Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest," Melchior said to the empty car. Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself. Melchior said to the empty car. Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.

The Wiz hadn't taught him Latin, but he'd taught him that phrase. But that wasn't the Wiz up there.

The Wise Men were on their own.

Camaguey Province, Cuba November 1, 1963

Maria Bayo trembled before the tall man in the gray suit. He wasn't a particularly big man-he was in fact as lean as a knife-and he'd done nothing to threaten the eleven-year-old. But there was something dead about his gray eyes and hair so blond it was the color of ice, and inside the gray suit his wiry body was taut as an icicle. Maria had never seen an icicle, but she thought it must be the worst thing in the world: water rendered hard as steel, and just as sharp. wasn't a particularly big man-he was in fact as lean as a knife-and he'd done nothing to threaten the eleven-year-old. But there was something dead about his gray eyes and hair so blond it was the color of ice, and inside the gray suit his wiry body was taut as an icicle. Maria had never seen an icicle, but she thought it must be the worst thing in the world: water rendered hard as steel, and just as sharp.

"What is this barn used for?" the iceman said in heavily accented Spanish-the same Spanish used by the soldiers who wore uniforms with the hammer and sickle in their insignia.

Maria looked back at the car the iceman had driven her in. She hadn't wanted to get in the car with him, but she had wanted to get out of it even less when she saw where he was taking her.

"It's a mill, senor," Maria said, looking back at the car, gauging how long it would take her to run to it. "No one uses it since the revolution."

"There are tire tracks leading to the door, fresh bullet holes in the wall."

Long before the Communists came to power, Cuba's proletariat had learned to hide things from whoever was running the country. Whether it was a party official or tax man or sugar hacendado hacendado, the people in power made their money off the backs of the poor. But Maria was too scared to lie. Too scared to lie well anyway. Her brother had disappeared, and she was afaid she would disappear too.

"Maybe it was the American in the village. I never saw him in a truck, though."

"How do you know he was American?"

"He wasn't hungry."

The iceman nodded, then leaned close to her. "And how do you know it was a truck, if you never saw it?"

"N-n-no one from my village comes here, senor. The dogs guard it. They kill anyone who comes close."

"Dogs?"

"The wild dogs." Maria's head swiveled around, as if just mentioning the dogs could bring them. "They say the ones who guard this barn developed a taste for human flesh. Even one bite from them will make you sick."

Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch paused. His men had shot four of the animals when they arrived this morning-mangy skin-and-bones wraiths with sores all over their bodies. The men said the dogs had stalked them as though they were a herd of deer or tapir. They'd found a couple of human skeletons, too. Ivelitsch had a.s.sumed the dogs were rabid. But now he was wondering.

"Maybe the man was in a truck with something like this in the back?" He drew on the ground, a complex arrangement of squares and tubes.

Maria shrugged. "There are many trucks, but usually they are covered. Farmers want to hide their produce from the inspectors so they can keep some for the black market."

"That is bad Communism."

"Yes, but good for their wallets, and their stomachs."

The iceman smiled, but at the same time he was using his shoe to rub out the image in the dirt. He moved his foot methodically back and forth until every trace of the drawing had been completely erased-so completely that Maria wished she hadn't seen it, because he clearly wanted it to remain secret.

Just then Sergei Vladimirovich Maisky came out of the barn, the wand of a Geiger counter dangling from his hand like a golf club. He took off his headphones and scratched his bald, sunburned scalp.

"Nothing, sir."

Ivelitsch had a hunch.

"Wave your wand over the dogs."

"The dogs, sir?" Sergei Vladimirovich was a thin, bookish man, and his lip curled in disgust.

"Humor me."

Sergei Vladimirovich walked over to the motley pile half hidden by some bushes. The carca.s.ses hadn't begun to smell, but there were so many flies buzzing around them that they could be heard from twenty feet away.

Seeing the pile, Maria's eyes went wide with horror and she crossed herself. "You shouldn't have killed the dogs. They will only send worse next time."

Ivelitsch, who'd seen the mutilated corpse of her brother, thought perhaps the little girl was right, but he said nothing. He watched his man wave the Geiger counter over the grisly pile. After less than a minute Sergei Vladimirovich turned and ran back to Ivelitsch.

"You were right, comrade!" he yelled in Russian. "All of them! Trace amounts of radiation!"

Ivelitsch turned back to Maria. He squatted down, being careful not to put the knees of his suit on the dirt, and took one of her hands in his. It was a hot day, but his hand was as cold as the Arctic fields she imagined had sp.a.w.ned him.

"Do you know anyone who has been made sick by these dogs?"

Maria opened her mouth but nothing came out.

Ivelitsch squeezed her hand. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to press the chill to the bone.

"Listen to me, little girl. I am the man they sent to take the place of the dogs, and it will be much better for you and your neighbors if you tell me what I need to know."

Maria swallowed. "M-my uncle."

"Take me to him."

Washington, DC November 4, 1963

As part of the privileges of his first-cla.s.s ticket, the tall young man in the gray suit was helped into his seat on the 10:27 Pennsylvania Railroad bound for New York City by an elderly Negro conductor decked out in full livery-bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, gold braids, a flat-topped cap with a shiny visor. The conductor projected officiousness and obsequiousness in equal measure as he punched the young man's ticket, stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack, and laid his hat atop it. Finally he lowered the table between the man's seat and the empty one across from it and set a foil ashtray atop faux wood-grained plastic. man in the gray suit was helped into his seat on the 10:27 Pennsylvania Railroad bound for New York City by an elderly Negro conductor decked out in full livery-bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, gold braids, a flat-topped cap with a shiny visor. The conductor projected officiousness and obsequiousness in equal measure as he punched the young man's ticket, stowed his suitcase in the overhead rack, and laid his hat atop it. Finally he lowered the table between the man's seat and the empty one across from it and set a foil ashtray atop faux wood-grained plastic.

"Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

The conductor was already turning away, his uniform as square on his shoulders as a Marine's dress blues, and, although the young man would have liked an RC Cola, he only shook his head at the stiff fabric stretching across the man's retreating back.

At twenty-five, Beau-Christian Querrey couldn't have looked more like a G-man if he'd tried. Six-one, narrow waist, shoulders broad as a yoke; dark suit, white shirt, skinny black tie held in place with a bra.s.s clip. A buzz cut crowned the whole package, number one on the back and sides, three-quarters of an inch left on top. Though the effect was probably meant to be martial, there was something about his high forehead and wide, wondering eyes that made it seem like a little boy's first-day-of-school crew cut.

Despite outward appearances, however, he didn't feel feel like an FBI agent. Hadn't felt like one for the past year, since he'd been "promoted" from Behavioral Profiling to the Counterintelligence Program. But this latest a.s.signment took the cake. like an FBI agent. Hadn't felt like one for the past year, since he'd been "promoted" from Behavioral Profiling to the Counterintelligence Program. But this latest a.s.signment took the cake.

He sighed now, set his briefcase on the table, opened it. On the left sat a stack of folders held together with typewritten labels: MK-ULTRA MK-ULTRA16 and and ORPHEUS, GATE OF ORPHEUS, GATE OF. On the right sat a hardcover book: The Man in the High Castle The Man in the High Castle7 by Philip K. d.i.c.k. The black cover depicted the flags of imperial j.a.pan and n.a.z.i Germany, as well as the tagline: "An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been." Since every novel was essentially a story of the world "as it might have been," this struck BC as a particularly pointless addendum, even for a work of science fiction. Nevertheless, in light of his morning meeting with Director Hoover by Philip K. d.i.c.k. The black cover depicted the flags of imperial j.a.pan and n.a.z.i Germany, as well as the tagline: "An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been." Since every novel was essentially a story of the world "as it might have been," this struck BC as a particularly pointless addendum, even for a work of science fiction. Nevertheless, in light of his morning meeting with Director Hoover4, it seemed the less far-fetched of his two choices for reading material, and, sighing again, he placed it on the table, snapped his briefcase closed, and set it in the aisle beside his seat.

Before he could crack the cover, however, a commotion at the far end of the car distracted him. He looked up to see the Negro conductor with his hand on the shoulder of a large, suety figure in a wrinkled navy blazer. BC was surprised at the old man's boldness. They were still forty miles due south of the Mason-Dixon Line, after all, sixty by the train tracks.

"Sorry, son," the conductor said in a weary voice, "you got to ride in the lead car till the train reaches Bal'more."

The big man turned beneath the conductor's hand like a statue rotating on a plinth. You could practically hear stone grinding against stone as he pivoted on the soles of-BC wasn't sure what what you'd call the shoes he was wearing. Some kind of woven sandals, the leather worn away almost to nothing. The man's dark hair had been brilliantined to his skull, but even so the distinctive ringlets were visible. His nose was thick, his lips full, his skin olive-colored, as they say, but an olive not fully ripened-if he you'd call the shoes he was wearing. Some kind of woven sandals, the leather worn away almost to nothing. The man's dark hair had been brilliantined to his skull, but even so the distinctive ringlets were visible. His nose was thick, his lips full, his skin olive-colored, as they say, but an olive not fully ripened-if he was was a Negro, as the conductor had a.s.sumed, he was a watery specimen of the race. But the more BC looked at him, the more he thought it just as likely that the man was simply a swarthy white fellow, in which case- a Negro, as the conductor had a.s.sumed, he was a watery specimen of the race. But the more BC looked at him, the more he thought it just as likely that the man was simply a swarthy white fellow, in which case- The conductor's eyes widened as he realized his error, and he shrank within his uniform. BC prayed the pa.s.senger would handle the situation with dignity, but, given the man's appearance-not just the swarthiness and slovenliness, but the flush that had turned his cheeks from olive to tomato-that didn't seem likely.

"What did you just say to me, boy?" did you just say to me, boy?"

The accosted man's large, powerful frame outlined the conductor in wrinkled shadow. He tapped his finger into the side of the conductor's head hard enough to knock the older man's cap askew.

"I ast ast you a question, boy." you a question, boy."

The conductor's head wobbled up and down as though his cap had grown too heavy for his neck to support.

"I'm sorry, sir. Here, sir, let me take your briefcase-"

"You touch my case and I'll break your arm, boy. Who the h.e.l.l do you think you're talking to?"

"I'm sorry, sir. There's a nice seat-"

"Get outta my sight before I have you strung up behind the pump house so I can beat the black off your a.s.s." The big man elbowed past the conductor and lumbered down the aisle.

Please, BC said to himself, don't let him sit- "G.o.dd.a.m.n uppity n.i.g.g.e.rs." The man dropped into the seat opposite BC. Knees the size of cannonb.a.l.l.s collided with his, b.u.mping the fold-out table so hard the foil ashtray flew away like a flying saucer. The man slapped his briefcase on the table's quivering surface. "I blame Martin Luther King."

A pause while he spun the dials of the lock on his briefcase, a loud click as it snapped open. He opened the case and riffled through what sounded like a ream of wadded paper.

"What the h.e.l.l are you you staring at?" staring at?"

"P-pardon me," BC stuttered. "I just-"

"And get me a G.o.dd.a.m.n rum toddy!" the man hollered over his shoulder. "G.o.dd.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r calls me me out in front of a respectable crowd of my peers, I need a drink, I don't care if it out in front of a respectable crowd of my peers, I need a drink, I don't care if it is is ten thirty in the G.o.dd.a.m.n morning." ten thirty in the G.o.dd.a.m.n morning."

The briefcase snapped closed, and the man began setting out items on its scarred surface with ritualistic precision: an aluminum humidor sized for a single cigar; a box of wooden matches; and, instead of a cutter, a small, well-worn, pearl-handled pocketknife.

BC stole another glance at the man's face. Noted again the tinge of color. The full lips, broad nose, small ears, the tight curl of his hair. Really, it was anyone's guess.

"Sicilian." BC didn't see the man look up but suddenly his glittering black eyes were boring directly into BC's watery blues. "Mafiosi, paisanos paisanos, and the blood of Aetna. But no darkie."

Caught out, BC dropped his gaze. The man was sliding a cigar from the humidor as though it were some rare species of b.u.t.terfly emerging from its chrysalis. BC noted the marque on the cigar's band: La Gloria Habana La Gloria Habana.

"I did a stint as muscle for a couple-a casinos in Havana back in the fifties," the man said. "Embargo or no embargo, there's no subst.i.tute for a fine Cuban."

The man opened his pocketknife forty-five degrees, unwrapped the cigar, placed it in the notch between blade and handle, popped the end off with a snap as quick and clean as the jaws of a caiman. It shot straight up like a jumping jack, came to rest on the man's closed briefcase, looking for all the world like a severed fingertip.

BC stared at it for a long moment, then looked up to find the man watching him, an amused, contemptuous smile playing over his thick, moist lips.

"Go on," he said tauntingly. "Smell it."