Shift: A Novel

He’d been recruited while still at Yale. It was no secret the Company was thick with the university’s alumni, and he knew he was a prime candidate: president of the College Republicans, possessed of a trust fund sizable enough to cover the shortcomings of a government salary, and a track star to boot (javelin and high jump, although how these skills would serve him as a spy was unclear). He was passionately patriotic—had had to be talked out of going to West Point but then signed up for ROTC without his parents’ knowledge—but his desire to join CIA was motivated by more than mere love of his country: he believed it was a moral imperative for the United States to deliver freedom and democracy to the enslaved populace of the Soviet Union. The world stood at a precipice. Forget what Khrushchev said about burying us. The United States and its allies possessed a clear military advantage with both conventional and nuclear weapons. Western economies were humming along while Eastern Bloc nations were having a hard time keeping the lights on. Now was the time to make a concerted push into Red Europe, with propaganda, with money, and with arms if need be. Forget South America for the moment, forget Africa and Asia; these were just distractions from the real battle. As Hungary had shown a few years ago, the citizens of Russia’s satellite states were ready to revolt, and if the United States backed them in that uprising, there’d be NATO troops in Moscow before John F. Kennedy stood for reelection. The worst possible outcome was that he might win a second term.

His idealism and zeal had impressed his higher-ups, but, no surprise, they hadn’t decided to change the course of Company policy based on the theories of one Yale poli-sci major, even if he had been graduated summa cum laude. After a brief training period—munitions, hand-to-hand combat, and the “utter boredom” of ciphers and cryptography, he’d been sent to “cut his teeth” in the Boston station before eventual reassignment (he was fluent in German, and hoped for a place in the Berlin station). Although what he was supposed to cut his teeth on was a mystery. Boston hadn’t been a center of intrigue since the Tea Party. Morganthau thought there might be some action at the docks—contraband, human smuggling, something like that—but most of his job consisted of taking meetings in spindly old colonial houses with spindly old colonials who, after cucumber sandwiches or shortbread, would produce wads of cash (none of them trusted banks, and one man, who didn’t even trust paper money, pulled out a bag of gold coins) and talked about “funneling” it to anti-Communist forces in Chile or Vietnam (their choice of words made Morganthau think of a pneumatic tube running under Nob Hill all the way to Santiago or Saigon). One of them had asked point-blank why we didn’t just shoot “Uncle Joe” already (this was the man with the gold); when Morganthau pointed out that Uncle Joe had been dead for almost a decade, his host had looked confused for a moment, then winked knowingly. “Still a secret, eh? Well, mum’s the word, old boy, mum’s the word,” and he had gesturally locked his lips and thrown away the key.

Probably his most interesting assignment had been chaperoning the activities of a half-cocked Harvard psychiatrist named Timothy Leary, who was conducting experiments with a powerful hallucinogen called lysergic acid diethylamide. Technical Services hoped the drug might have military applications. Apparently it was so powerful that the municipal water supply of a city the size of Boston could be tainted with just a few quarts of the stuff, leaving it susceptible to invasion or even the illusion of invasion—all you’d have to do is tell the citizens that the tanks were on the way, and their amplified imaginations would take care of the rest. In his eighteen months in Beantown—Beantown! even the nickname is boring!—the boy had often thought of dumping acid in Boston’s water supply, just to break the monotony. To make things worse, he had been instructed to watch Leary’s work from afar; photographs of Leary’s notes were brought to him by someone who worked in the office of the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Morganthau had argued that Leary’s experiments could prove much more informative to the Company if they were actually directed, and had argued for a chance to speak to the psychiatrist directly, but before approval was granted Leary was fired by Harvard, who found his experiments rather less interesting than CIA.

That left him with Naz. The assignment had come from none other than James Jesus Angleton, who felt that Naz had the potential to be recruited either by the enemy abroad or by pro-Communist forces working in this country. Her father had been killed working for CIA; her mother had been collateral damage, and along the way she lost her country and her family. Her emotional fragility was well known, and it was easy to imagine a scenario in which her resentment was stoked until she turned against the country that had taken her in. Morganthau had chafed against the surveillance at first—it seemed prurient, if not simply voyeuristic—but that had all changed when he saw her for the first time. Saw the haunted look she seemed always to wear on her proud, beautiful face. Saw the way she gulped her drinks down in an obvious—and obviously futile—effort to numb the pain. And saw the way she degraded herself with men who weren’t worthy of opening a door for her, let alone opening her blouse, her skirt, her . …

He had watched a lot. And, though he didn’t say it aloud, it was clear he wanted to see more.

Our Man in Havana

After languishing in a Havana prison for more than three months, he’d been dragged out of his cell one morning, into a courtyard whose western wall was stained darkly with the blood of previous executions. His guards stripped him, handed him a sliver of soap, told him to clean himself up. It was his first time in direct sunlight in three months, and he had to squint to see. Rubbing only seemed to spread the dirt across his skin, until finally his weakened eyes realized it wasn’t dirt he was massaging into the sallow flesh of his arms and legs, but bruises. Naked and dripping, he was brought to a barber, who shaved his head with an electric clipper, then took a straight razor to his beard, chest, underarms, and the rest of his body. Prickly as a poorly plucked chicken, he was handed a thick tube of anti-lice cream, then given a piss-elegant suit in midnight blue linen—brass buttons, silk lining, and two carefully mended bullet holes under the left lapel—and a pair of rather dainty leather sandals for his sockless feet. Gussied up like a scarecrow on his way to the yacht club, he was hustled into the back of a van and driven through the sweltering maze of Havana’s Old City until, just over three hours after he thought he was being taken to his death, he was instead escorted into the office of none other than the brother of the revolution, El Segundo himself, Raul Castro.

Melchior had to admit: he hadn’t seen this coming.

In many ways, Raul Castro was more fearsome than his older brother. He’d personally overseen the summary execution of scores, possibly hundreds, of soldiers and government officials loyal to deposed President Fulgencio Batista, and he was the man Fidel dispatched to Moscow to negotiate a military alliance that brought Soviet tanks, troops, and planes to Cuban soil. But more than that, he had the reputation of being fanatically loyal—not to Communism, which would have been familiar enough and easy to handle, nor even to the age-old concept of Cuba libre, but to his brother. To Raul, Fidel was Cuban Communism, and Segundo would do more than lay down his life to protect him: he would kill, mercilessly and indiscriminately.

But reputations, as it turned out, are not always what they’re cracked up to be.

The office of the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Raul’s only official title, occupied the fourth floor of a converted town house just off the Malecon, the long promenade on Havana’s northeastern coast. It was a long room, possibly a ballroom in its previous existence, or a gallery. The tread of thousands of military-issue boots had bruised the delicate parquet, and tiny pieces of sycamore and mahogany creaked and splintered beneath Melchior’s sandals like the shells of dead cockroaches. The sound reassured him somewhat—reminded him that, despite his diminished frame and the legs that wobbled beneath him, he still had a presence in the world. Was still capable of having an effect on things outside of himself. He shuffled as steadily as he could to a curule chair planted in front of the desk but didn’t sit down. While he waited for Raul to acknowledge him, his gaze drifted of its own accord out