Shift: A Novel

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 something else in the sack.

It was funny that he hadn’t seen what had happened to her though. He’d missed a few things, chief among them Melchior’s real name, and Caspar’s. Who knows, maybe it was because it’d been so long since he’d thought of himself as anything other than Melchior, or thought of Caspar as anything other than Caspar. Or maybe Chandler was so overwhelmed by his newfound abilities that he couldn’t fully control where they took him—if Melchior’s brain was a city, then it was a labyrinth on the order of Venice or Paris, and Chandler lacked a map and could only fumble about blindly, looking for beacons or signposts that stood out in the maze. That day in the orphanage was certainly a landmark. It was the day the Wiz gave him a chance at a life that mattered. But the name he’d had that day, that name hadn’t meant shit. If someone called it out on the street, he wouldn’t even turn around. Caspar, of course, still had to go by his real name, but it was a hollow symbol at this point, as unreflective of the man who bore it as the dog-eared copy of Marx he carried into boot camp.

The love, though. That had been real. Melchior had loved pale, pudgy, defenseless Caspar more than he’d ever loved himself, and, too, he knew Caspar’s first loyalty would always be to him, no matter how much Joe Scheider fucked with his head.

If all was going to plan, he should’ve been back in the States, an American “defector” having been “doubled” by the KGB. He wondered if Drew Everton or whoever the hell debriefed him would put any more stock in his intel than they had in Melchior’s, or if Caspar would end up out on his ass. In which case, who knows? Maybe the friendly ghost was looking for a new job.

The thought of Caspar reminded Melchior of BC. The two men shared a quality of naivete and misplaced trust in authority figures. He’d done his best to destroy Beau’s faith in men like J. Edgar Hoover and John F. Kennedy during their train ride, but he doubted he’d succeeded. The young FBI agent was simply too much of a momma’s boy, and it sounded like his mother had been a piece of work. But who knows what kind of effect Millbrook had had on him? Melchior couldn’t help but wonder if BC had found the ring he’d hidden in the cottage wall, and, if so, if he’d taken the bait. In a way, Melchior almost hoped he hadn’t, because if he did manage to track down Melchior, Melchior would have to kill him. BC may have been a suit without a soul, but he was no Drew Everton. Drew Everton was someone Melchior wouldn’t mind killing. Not at all.

Just then a stewardess came down the aisle. She refilled his drink and plumped a pillow behind his head, leaning so close that Melchior could’ve bitten her tit if he’d wanted to.

“Do you need anything else?” the stewardess asked, then, almost reluctantly, added, “Sir.”

“No thank you, darling,” Melchior said, and anyone looking at his smile would’ve thought he’d already banged her. “I’m pretty sure I got everything I need.”