Shift: A Novel

CIA, but had never actually been in one before.

“Sit your fucking ass 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 lowballs and his right hand was wrapped around a bottle of rye. He filled the two glasses 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 ass-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 Fuck!” Jarrell looked around as though someone might be hiding behind a stack of newspapers. “It’s Parker! Virgil 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 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 shit. But then he thought better of it, sent me undercover.” He waved a hand. “Enough background. What the hell 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? 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 fucking Vault? Sweet mother of God, you’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. So look, CB—”

“BC actually.”

“Yeah, I don’t give a fuck. 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 fuck 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—fuck—ing—Bu—reau. 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 fuck happened?”

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

“That is the craziest bunch of horseshit I ever heard—and I’ve heard some crazy horseshit 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 classifieds 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 fuck.” He wadded the paper and tossed it on the floor. “You had yourself a run-in with one of the Wise Men.”