Shift: A Novel

The door opened and the director’s voice sailed into the room.

“Well, we’ll just have to put the squeeze on him tomorrow morning. A Junghans would be a rare prize indeed.”

Junghans? The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it. German possibly, or Dutch, neither of which was the Bureau’s province. Perhaps a smuggling ring? BC tried to concentrate, but it was hard, with the director’s chair squeaking a few inches in front of him and dust tickling his nostrils. He bit back a sneeze. His hand was in his pocket, squeezing Naz’s ring as though, like the Ring of Gyges, it could make him invisible.

A drawer opened, papers rustled. “Billy was telling me about a little place in Oak Hill the other day.”

“Really?” the voice of Associate Director Tolson said. “The land of lawn jockeys and chipped chamber pots?”

“Billy says he found a John Pennington gravy boat there.”

“No!”

“He says he did. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I once saw a Pennington butter dish with a group of Chinamen fishing for carp, or whatever they fish for in China. I tell you, you could practically hear the wind rustle in the reeds.”

Now BC had to bite back a laugh as well as a sneeze. Here he was, a fly on the wall in the office of J. Edgar Hoover, and the director and his second in command were discussing gravy boats and butter dishes!

“Ah, here they are. Leave a note for Helen to order me another pair tomorrow, would you, Clyde.”

“Already did.” A pause, then: “Your dinner disagreeing with you, John?”

“What? No. Just”—an audible sniff—“someone used too much Lysol when they cleaned tonight.”

A chuckle. “I’ll have someone fired, okay, John?”

The chair squeaked as Hoover stood up. “Very funny, Clyde. I want them shot.” A guffaw, then: “Come on, let’s go home.”

Footsteps receded across the carpet.

“So’d you hear about Caspar?”

“The friendly ghost?”

“Just came back from Mexico City. Spent a few days trying to get a visa to Russia.”

“Didn’t he just come back from there?”

“Last year.”

“Interesting. I wonder what the Company’s cooking up now.”

“The Dallas office sent a man to his house twice, but he’s been conveniently out both times, so they’re going to pay him a visit where he wo—”

A sputtering motorcycle on the street below drowned out the director’s voice, and by the time it sped away the door to the Vault had closed. BC waited a moment to make sure they were gone, then let out the biggest sneeze of his life.

TWA Flight 2697, SFO to Idlewild

November 7–8, 1963

Melchior did his best to relax on the flight back to DC. It was hard. His brain was whirring and whizzing around like clock parts spun free from each other, cogs, gears, levers, and arrows all floating free inside the vast cavernous space that was his mind. Because that’s what Chandler had done. He’d made Melchior’s brain real to him. Physical. Not physical like a bunch of cells, but physical like a space. A place. An underground city populated by memories so far gone that he’d forgotten he’d forgotten them. Chandler’d walked around his mind like a beat cop, poking his nose in this door, peeping through that window. Who knew how much he’d seen, how much he’d learned before Melchior, with a supreme effort of will, had been able to lead him to that particular memory. To the one event in his life he’d taken greater care to conceal than anything else. He suspected that he’d only half chosen it. That Chandler had gone looking too. For the thing that had turned Melchior into Melchior. Well, it certainly explained the narrative of his life. Whether it explained his character was anybody’s guess.

And then … what? What the fuck had Chandler done? He’d made it real somehow. Melchior knew it had just been an illusion. But there was no way you could’ve convinced him of that while it was going on. He’d been twelve years old again, Caspar was four, the Wiz was still compos mentis, and Doc Scheider was still looking for guinea pigs to turn into zombies. But at the same time he was still Melchior, the thirty-three-year-old field agent whose two decades of experience changing identities the way other people change clothes had made him able to see this history as just another illusion, just another legend. He’d watched himself with an unparseable combination of hope and hatred, unsure which were his feelings now and which the feelings of the boy in the orphanage. And even as he raised the slingshot and fired at the Wiz, he couldn’t decide if he was making the biggest mistake of his life. If he should have killed the man who stole his life—stole his life but gave him a new one in exchange—rather than impressing him with his marksmanship.

And now, like the Wiz, he’d made his own discovery. As assets go, Chandler was off the charts. There’d never been anything like him before, and if the information Melchior had gathered on Ultra and Orpheus was complete, there never would be again. It wasn’t some new drug that Joe Scheider had cooked up that had turned Chandler into Orpheus and could create a legion of similarly super-powered soldiers. Logan had given the same cocktail to too many people for that to be true. No, it was something inherent in Chandler. Call it a gene, call it a receptor, call it the Gate of Orpheus, but if anyone else out there possessed it, the chance of that person getting hold of the kind of pure LSD that Chandler had been given was virtually nonexistent. All Melchior had to do now was figure out how to control him—though he had a pretty good idea how to do that. Because all the time Chandler had been poking around in his brain, he’d been looking for something. For someone. Naz. Melchior was pretty sure he hadn’t found out what had happened to her, because if he had, he would have ripped Melchior’s mind apart. Four days he’d known her, and he’d apparently spent several of those in a delirium. Yet the immensity of his desire was such that Melchior knew that as long as he could keep Naz’s fate a secret, he could control Chandler. Melchior had bedded women on five continents, but he’d never felt a thousandth of what Chandler felt for Naz. She must have been