Shift: A Novel

“What?” BC demanded.

“Melchior got called into Langley day before yesterday about a little dustup at Union Station.”

“The gunfight? I read about that in the, uh, paper.”

“He said he’d been contacted by a Soviet agent with a cipher no one’d ever heard of, wanted to ask him some questions about Cuba, then pulled a gun on him when he wouldn’t talk. Story had more holes in it than a loaf of bread after a mouse has been at it, but instead of keeping him locked up until they got to the bottom of it, Angleton and Everton sent him to Dallas instead. They want him to retrieve an agent known as Caspar.”

“One of the other Wise Men?”

“He just got back from almost two years in the Soviet Union. Angleton thinks he might’ve been doubled by KGB, told Melchior he wants him brought in for more debriefing.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“I took the liberty of looking that up, just in case.” Jarrell reached into a stack of papers. It was impossible to conceive that he could find anything amid the thousands and thousands of sheets of paper, but he had to sift through only a couple of pages before he pulled out a copy of the Dallas Times Herald. The front page was covered with hatch marks—no, not hatch marks, but a series of red and black X’s and O’s drawn around single letters. Jarrell scanned them a moment, then began copying out an address a letter at a time.

“I meant to ask you about that,” BC said. “The X’s and O’s.”

“Old cipher system from OSS days,” Jarrell said, moving on to a second address. “Computers made it pretty much obsolete, but I still use it. Keeps my mind sharp.” He was on to a third address, a fourth.

“Good lord,” BC said.

“Guy seems to move around a lot,” Jarrell said, although BC had been referring to the fact that somehow Jarrell had managed to encode four different addresses on the front page of a newspaper that had come out only that morning.

“This is the most recent address Everton had,” Jarrell said, tapping the first, “but they gave him these others too. This is the wife, who lives in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. The Bureau’s sent men out there a couple of times, but apparently he’s only around on the weekends.”

BC nodded absently. His eyes had been caught by the two-line headline that stretched almost all the way across the page.

PLEA FOR SPACE PLAN

KICKS OFF JFK TOUR

“BC?” Jarrell said.

“Melchior isn’t the only one going to Dallas, is he?”

Below the headline was a map of the president’s motorcade route. BC and Jarrell stared at the diagram—Main Street, Houston, Elm, and on to the Trade Mart—and then Jarrell wrote down a fifth address on the page, labeled it “Texas School Book Depository.”

“What’s that?” BC said.

“It’s where Caspar works.”

“Why are you—”

“Because it’s right there,” Jarrell said, circling the intersection of Houston and Elm on the motorcade map. “Right across from—”

“From Dealey Plaza,” BC finished for him, and reached for Jarrell’s bottle.

Dallas, TX

November 20, 1963

He was on his hands and knees. He had no idea how long he’d been—

A foot caught him in the side of the head and he went sprawling.

“I’m starting to wonder why I’ve invested so much energy in you,” Melchior said. “I mean, if you’re this easy to take out, what good are you?”

It felt like ice water was flowing through Chandler’s veins. His hands and feet were numb, his head a sodden pillow, save for the sharp pain where Melchior’s shoe had made contact.

Melchior kicked him again, and Chandler’s shoulder slammed against the wall. He slumped there, too heavy to move, head hanging, eyes staring at the dart dangling from his chest.

“What’s in the dart?” he said weakly.

“I believe the preferred term is flechette.” Melchior giggled. “Thorazine mostly. Keller figured out that it protects our minds from you, although we have to chew amphetamines like vitamins to counteract the sedative effects. Between that and the other downers flowing in your veins, you should be out cold. I’ve been wondering for a while if whatever Logan gave you did more than change your brain. Now it looks like the answer is yes. Fortunately, however—”

Melchior popped another dart into the gun, leveled it at Chandler.

The numbness seemed to have peaked. Chandler felt that if he could just stay conscious for a few more seconds, he could figure out how to fight it.

“Why do you want me?” he said, stalling for time.

“Duh. You can do things no one else can. You could walk right up to Nikita Khrushchev in front of the Politburo and kill him with no one the wiser. You could kill anyone else for that matter, from the president of the United States to some two-bit guerrilla that someone was willing to pay five or ten grand to have knocked off. No facility