Shift: A Novel

Millbrook, NY

November 19, 1963

It was nearly one in the morning when BC arrived, but the Big House was ablaze with light. When he burst into the house he found a half dozen Castalians sprawled around the common rooms on the first floor. He counted twenty-two infractions of the law, along with eleven nipples (two were marble, on a statue of Dionysus, and five more were painted on canvas or the bare plaster of the walls), plus one completely naked baby.

No one noticed him at all.

He managed to track down Leary on the second floor in a round garret with a lighted chandelier and rugs draped from the ceiling. Leary sat on a pillow in the middle of the room, his legs folded into a painful-looking knot. BC had to call his name three times before the doctor opened his eyes.

“Is he here?” he demanded, although he knew it was a pointless question. Leary would not be contemplating his navel if Orpheus was on the premises.

“Agent Querrey?” BC was still wearing his hipster getup—was still stained with blood and ash for that matter—and Leary stared at him in confusion. “I would never have recognized you.”

After the circulation had come back to his knees, Leary led BC to his bedroom. A twelve-inch carpet of clothing and books and used dishes covered every square foot of floor space. In the center of this chaos rose a bed whose yellowing sheets reeked of a smell BC remembered from certain of his bunkmates’ cots in the academy: not just sweat, but something else. Something funky. Something …

Sex, BC told himself. Just say it.

“Sex,” he said out loud, and he still didn’t blush, though Leary glanced at him sharply.

“In the past two weeks, Dr. Leary,” BC began, “I’ve seen things that would surprise even you. Things that, for better or worse, have changed my life irrevocably. But this isn’t about me. It’s about a man named Chandler Forrestal and a girl named Nazanin Haverman and a third person—though I hesitate to give him that much humanity—whose real name might never be known, but who needs to be brought to justice.”

Fear added itself to the confusion on Leary’s face. “But I thought Chandler and the girl were—”

“Dead? That’s what Melchior wanted you to believe.”

“Melchior? He was the dark-complected man?” Leary shuddered. “There’s something off about him.”

BC paused to kick a pair of boxer shorts off the tip of his shoe.

“If you’d asked me two months ago, I would have told you the Bureau was my life. Was all I had, all I wanted even. Now I realize that’s not true. What I had was a desire to sort truth from lies—the kind of lies men like the ones who run the Central Intelligence Agency tell, but also, as it turns out, men like the ones who run the Federal Bureau of Investigation tell. Men who believe that truth is relative, or subjective, or the provenance of victor over vanquished. I do not believe that, Dr. Leary. I will never believe that. There are facts and there are falsehoods, and never the twain shall meet. Before, the Bureau served as the most natural outlet for me to express that belief. Now I just have myself. My faith, my desire. My will. What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I need you to tell me everything you know about Project Orpheus, not just for your sake, but for mine.”

Leary fiddled with a statuette that BC thought was a chess queen until he saw the bare breasts—all eight of them, which the doctor was running his finger over absently, like a little boy playing with the teeth on a comb.

“I told you the last time you were here, Agent Querrey. Agent Logan kept me out of the loop.”

BC stood up and stepped very close to Leary. Close enough for the doctor to see that the flesh beneath his strange new getup was every bit as real as the doctor’s. The bones. The muscles. The fists.

“You need to understand, I’m a desperate man, Dr. Leary. I’ve given up everything to get to the bottom of this story. My career. My home. My reputation. Don’t make me give up my morals as well.”

A faint smile curled the side of Leary’s mouth. “You said story.”

“What?”

“You said ‘the bottom of this story’ instead of ‘the bottom of this case.’”

BC wasn’t sure what Leary’s point was, but the doctor’s tone seemed to be softening, so he just stood there. After nearly a minute of silence, Leary nodded.

“There is one thing. I don’t think the CIA is aware of it. It concerns Miss Haverman. I did a little digging, and I discovered that before Logan drafted her, she’d been a subject in Project Artichoke, one of the precursors to Ultra and Orpheus.”

“Artichoke was about ESP, wasn’t it?”

Leary nodded. “Miss Haverman’s test results were, I don’t want to say extraordinary, but consistently above average. And the more emotionally fraught the context became, the better she scored. Over the course of her final experiment, she became sexually involved with one of the scientists administering it, and her apparent telepathic abilities increased dramatically as she became more intimate with her experimenter. He’d been instructed to conceal his participants’ results from them—they would all either ‘fail’ the tests or score just high enough above a statistical mean that they could go home thinking they were special. But anyone who scored over a certain percentage was to be sent to me on some pretext or other. In Miss Haverman’s case, it was the idea of LSD as a therapeutic agent for survivors of trauma. Unfortunately, I’d left Harvard by the time Naz tried to contact me, so we never connected until three and a half weeks ago.”

The whole time Leary spoke, BC was remembering the feeling in Madam Song’s. The hatred—the loathing—pouring from Naz like heat from the open door of a furnace. The way she’d haunted his thoughts ever since he’d laid eyes on her, so much more than Chandler.

“Are you telling me Chandler isn’t the real Orpheus?” he said now. “That it’s actually Naz?”

“I wish it were that simple. In chemical terms, I would call Naz a catalyst. I think it was some innate ability on her part that made it possible for LSD to change the way Chandler’s brain works. To make it possible for him to project his own hallucinations onto outsiders.”

“So you’re saying Naz is the key? That, in the right hands, she could be used to create a legion of Chandlers? Of Orpheuses?”

Leary shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“And what about her? Was she changed too?”

Again Leary shook his head. “I’m sorry, Agent Querrey. I just don’t know.”

“Did you write your suspicions down anywhere?”

“Yes. But after—after the incident, I caught Billy trying to find my notes, and I destroyed them.”

“So you’re the only person who knows the role Naz might have played in Chandler’s transformation?”

“Well, there’s you now.” Leary offered BC a weak smile. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

“I should,” BC said in a voice so cold that the doctor recoiled. “But as long as no one suspects you have secret knowledge, you should be fine.” He stood up abruptly. “You’d better pray no one followed me here however.”

“CIA—”

“Melchior’s not CIA,” BC said as he headed for the door. “Not anymore. And if he comes after you, you’re going to wish I had killed you.”