Shift: A Novel

Dallas called Addison. Use that one instead of Love Field.”

“After what? And what’s wrong with Love?”

“Jesus Christ, Song, are you out of your fucking mind! Air Force One is gonna be at Love. The place’ll be crawling with Secret Service.”

“Melchior? What the hell are you planning?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Now, get your ass to Dallas. Just you, Chulmoo, Nancy, and the plane. Got it?”

“I can’t just close up shop for a couple of days to ferry—”

Melchior banged the receiver against the side of the booth.

“Are you fucking listening to me, Song? If this works, you’re going to be closing permanently. Now, call Ruby, tell him you’re sending Nancy to Dallas, and get your ass down there!”

The phone was silent so long that Melchior wondered if he’d broken it when he smashed the receiver. Then:

“Jesus Christ, Melchior.” Song’s voice was hushed. Not frightened, but awed. “They’ll send an army after you. You’ll be running for the rest of your life.”

“I already am running. But once this is over, they won’t know who they’re chasing.”

A crackly voice in the background called Melchior’s flight to Dallas.

“Listen to me, Song. Don’t lose faith in me. This was your idea, remember? This whole damn thing was your idea. Believe in it. Believe in me. Now, put Pavel on the phone.”

“I’ve been on the whole time.”

“Of course you have, you eavesdropping fuck. I need you to send a couple of telegrams. One to Cuba. The other to Dallas.”

“Ah.” There was a pause. “To whom should I address the second one?”

Ivelitsch’s voice was flat. Incurious. Unimpassioned. Melchior remembered what he’d said in Union Station yesterday afternoon, just before he’d shot one of his own men and forced Melchior to kill two Company agents. Everyone who knows you has to die. It was all in a day’s work to him.

“Send it to Alik. Alik Hidell.”

“And what do I tell—”

“Tell him it’s time. Time to do what you trained him to do in Russia.”

Washington, DC

November 19, 1963

In the house on Newport Place, Song and Ivelitsch sat in her office, their conversation punctuated by an occasional whip crack from the second floor, where Chul-moo was helping one of the girls with a prominent lobbyist for the tobacco industry. The lobbyist had just seen a draft of the Surgeon General’s impending report on smoking and health and felt he needed to atone for the sins of his profession.

“The idea of the sleeper took hold in American intelligence right after Stalin detonated his first bomb,” Song told Ivelitsch. “Suddenly it was undeniably clear that the Soviets were way ahead in the spy game. The Americans lacked experience. What they did have was dollars, and a willingness to try just about anything. Joe Scheider, who was then little more than a hyper-patriotic postdoctoral student with degrees in psychiatry and chemistry, floated the idea of trolling orphanages in search of bright kids who could essentially be raised by the Company as intelligence agents, placed in situ as children, and activated when and if they were needed. There were any number of problems with this plan, but chief among them was the fact that Caspar, Scheider’s star recruit, turned out not to be an orphan. His mother left him at the orphanage Monday through Friday, but took him home weekends. Most weekends anyway. Scheider refused to give up, however. He directed Frank Wisdom to act as a paternal surrogate—Caspar’s own father had died before he was born—and, although Caspar was raised by his mother and a couple of stepfathers, the Wiz and other Company men had frequent contact with him through various extracurricular activities. They helped him develop a dual identity. Publicly he was an outspoken socialist, carting around copies of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, but privately he was training to become a double agent inside the KGB, joining the Civil Air Patrol in his early teens, then dropping out of high school to enlist in the Marines when he turned seventeen. But, as you saw in Russia, juggling both identities proved too much for him. Caspar wasn’t sure if he hated America or loved it, if he was working for the triumph of the proletariat or trying to expose the duplicities of the Communist paradise. The only thing that never wavered was his loyalty. Not to the Company or the Wiz or Scheider. To Melchior. I can’t believe he’d ever shoot him.”

Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch listened to Song’s lecture respectfully, smiling when the tobacco lobbyist moaned particularly loudly. He didn’t understand masochism. The world was full of people trying to lord it over you—why pay someone to add to that? He’d much rather be the one holding the whip. Now he looked at Song pointedly.

“Would it be such a bad thing if he did?”

Song’s eyes narrowed. “You think we can go it alone?”

“I think Melchior’s ambivalence could be our undoing. His loyalty to the Company is essentially mercenary, but his loyalty to the Wiz is, like Caspar’s loyalty to him, personal, and considerable.”

“But with the Wiz gone, Melchior knows there’s no place left for him in the Company. They already sent Rip Robertson to kill him, and now they’re trying to get Caspar to do it. He’s got no one else to turn to except us.”

“For our sake, I hope you’re right.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what just happened on the phone.”

“What do you mean?”