Shift: A Novel

Washington, DC

November 20, 1963

At first glance, it seemed that Charles Jarrell had acquired several new stacks of newspaper in the eleven days since BC’d seen him last. The foyer was barred by a wall of densely packed newsprint; to get into the rest of the house you had to veer into the living room, following a trail that led almost all the way to the far wall before doubling back into the front hall. Jarrell led BC through this maze into a room that had apparently once been a library or study: several thousand books still filled the built-in shelves, but they’d been turned spine in, so that all one saw was the different colored pages aligned in faded vertical strips like one of the abstract paintings in Peggy Hitchcock’s house.

Jarrell tipped his bottle of rye into the two glasses that sat on the stack of papers in front of the couch. BC was sure they were the same glasses from his last visit.

“Excuse the mess. You caught me in the middle of refiling.”

“Refiling?”

“Goddamn Company broke in here night before last. They break in pretty regularly, so I need to make sure they can’t find anything.” Even as he spoke, Jarrell grabbed two feet off the top of one of the stacks, moved it to another.

BC looked around the room. In addition to the stacks, loose papers lined the floor and snaked up the walls. He felt like he was inside a giant papier-mâché sculpture.

“The, uh, Company breaks in?”

“Once a month, sometimes more. They try to put things back, but I can always tell when they’ve been here.” Jarrell split a stack into a half dozen units, reshuffled them like cards, then moved the whole pile to a corner of the room. “Bureau probably comes half that often.”

“That just leaves KGB,” BC said, his voice light but tight.

“They’ve only been here once or twice.” Jarrell busied himself building what looked like a castle wall complete with gun emplacements. “That I know of.”

“I meant in New York. I, um, had a run-in with them.”

“I know.” Jarrell grunted now, continued moving paper. “In a mere eight weeks you’ve gone from being a COINTELPRO weasel to being a person of interest to both the Bureau and the Company, albeit they don’t know it’s you they’re looking for. But I gotta admit even I was surprised to hear that you took out Dmitri Tarkov.”

“You heard about that?”

“Heard that you caused a bit of a ruckus at Madam Song’s, too.” Jarrell paused to regard BC through his stacks of paper. “What have you stumbled into, Beau-Christian Querrey?”

“I had him,” BC said then. “I had him, and I let him get away.”

“Melchior?”

“Orpheus,” BC said. “Chandler. I had him. I had Naz, too, and I let them both get away.” He looked up at the crazy man spreading paper around with the frantic energy of a rat lining the walls of its cage. “I’m sorry I came back here, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve run out of leads.”

Jarrell met BC’s gaze, then looked away. He grabbed his glass, saw that it was empty, walked over to BC and picked up his drink, and drained it in a swallow.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said then. “Must be those puppy-dog eyes.”

“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.