Shift: A Novel

Dallas, TX

November 22, 1963

“Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!” BC yelled at himself as he ran onto the—splash!—wet balcony of his motel. This was the second time Chandler had given him the slip in three days. Why the hell hadn’t he handcuffed him to the bed?

The sky was clotted with clouds leaking gray drizzle; an oily puddle filled in the space where he’d parked last night, so Chandler’d been gone for a while. A young couple was loading suitcases into a pale bluish greenish Rambler and BC yelled down to them.

“Wait!”

“What’s the holdup?” The husband smiled brightly at BC as he ran up.

“FBI.” BC flashed a counterfeit badge he’d purchased for all of five dollars. “I’m commandeering this car for official business.” He’d backed out of the space before he noticed the baby in the seat beside him, handed it off to its startled-looking mother through the window.

There was no map in the car, so it took him the better part of an hour to find the first address Jarrell had written down. Thank God he’d committed them to memory—Chandler’d taken the list, even though he said his own memory had become virtually eidetic. The place was all the way out in north Dallas, a withered single-story ranch with a picture window veiled by wrinkled blinds. BC drove right past the house and parked the Rambler halfway down the block, then made his way to the house using a few stunted live oaks for cover. The rain had stopped by then, but the air was thick with moisture steaming off the ground in the rising heat. The brown lawn, though wet, was otherwise unwatered and unmown. Moreover, the strands of grass that had sprung from the cracks in the driveway were a good six inches long, which is to say: no one was using this driveway.

No one lived here.

Two scenarios sprang to BC’s mind. The first, unlikely, was that the house was a decoy to draw BC and Chandler away from Melchior’s real target. The second, more probable, was that it was a trap.

BC immediately ducked behind a straggly hedge that separated the house from its neighbor and made his way toward the back fence. He peered through a crack, saw nothing, vaulted the fence, and crept toward the corner of the house. The first window he came to was uncurtained, the room beyond empty save for a bare mattress and box spring, an open closet with a few bent hangers on the rod. He tried the sash. It was locked. He went to the second window. This one was narrow, opened onto a small bathroom. More to the point, the lock had been forced and the wet ground below was trampled with fresh footprints. Somehow BC knew: Chandler. His first thought was Thank God! and his second was I am going to kill you!

He had to take his jacket off to squeeze through the narrow aperture, and even so a button snapped off his shirt as he shimmied into the house. The little noise it made as it bounced off the linoleum sounded loud as a gunshot in BC’s ears, but the rest of the house remained quiet. The bathroom door stood open to the hall. Bedrooms to the left, living quarters to the right. It seemed unlikely that Melchior would be waiting in a bedroom. BC drew his gun and went right.

It was only three steps to the end of the hall—carpeted, so his feet made no sound. He peeked around the corner, and there he was. Not Chandler.

Melchior.

He sat with his back to BC in a wooden chair, facing the front door. Something lay across his lap, and in the shadows BC took it for a rifle at first, then realized it was just an umbrella. It seemed to be dry, which meant that he’d been here for a while. His breathing was slow and deep, but BC knew he wasn’t sleeping. He was waiting.

He leveled his gun at Melchior’s head and cocked it.

“Don’t move.”

Melchior didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch. He was so still that BC wondered if maybe he actually was sleeping, but then:

“Why, Beau-Christian Querrey. You got the drop on me. Congrats.”

“Put your hands in the air where I can see them.”

“Here?” Melchior extended his arms to either side like Christ on the cross. “Or here?” He pointed them straight up in the air like Superman.

“Get down on the floor. Keep your hands away from your body.”

“Stand up, sit down, lie down. I feel like I’m back in mass.” He stood up, and the umbrella on his lap fell to the floor. He stepped over it, his arms still raised, sank to one knee, then both, then lowered his upper body to the floor. The whole time he never looked back at BC. “From all the rigamarole, I’m betting you don’t have any handcuffs on you, do you? What are you going to do, use your tie?”

In fact, BC had been wondering just that, and, angrily, he reached for the knot and pulled it sharply.

Melchior moved at exactly the same moment. BC didn’t even know what he’d done, but suddenly the chair was flying toward him. It smacked the gun and a shot went off, slanting into the wall and blowing out a piece of plaster the size of his thigh, but BC managed to keep hold of his weapon. Melchior, meanwhile, had rolled to his knees and grabbed his umbrella and was holding it out like a sword.

BC couldn’t help but smile.

“What is that, some kind of—”

There was a pfft and something that felt like a linebacker’s helmet smashed into BC’s gut and he staggered backward. His back hit the wall behind him and the gun fell from his hand and then he fell forward onto his face.

He was dead before he hit the floor.

BC had no fewer than five addresses for Caspar. Five, and Chandler had no idea where any of them were. Thank God there was a map in BC’s rental car.

The first was way up in north Dallas. Chandler wasn’t sure what sort of dosage was in the blotter paper BC had procured from Richard Alpert, so he ripped it in half and downed the first part on the drive over; he pushed at the silent single-story ranch when he finally found it, but felt nothing. He broke in anyway. Circled around to the backyard and popped a half-rotted window frame out of its housing. His eyes only confirmed what his mind had already told him: the place was empty and, judging from the layer of dust that covered everything, long deserted.

The next address was on Marsalis Street. It was just after five when Chandler got there, but an old woman was already up, washing the breakfast dishes. Her tenants, she told him, worked first shift at the string bean factory in Fort Worth, had to be in by seven. She remembered Caspar vividly, although she knew him by another name. It was only because Chandler could see the face in her mind that he knew she was talking about the person he was looking for.

“Oh, sure, Lee Oswald. Troubled boy, what with all those Cuba pamphlets and that Communist wife. Pretty girl, though, when her face wasn’t so bruised you couldn’t see it.”

“He hit her?” Chandler couldn’t help but think of Naz.

“He’d fly into these rages,” she said matter-of-factly, as though describing the propensity of flies to work their way through a window screen. “I couldn’t tell you what brought ’em on. News stories usually. One day it was Castro, the next day the president. Then it was Khrushchev or some mob boss that that Kennedy brother was grilling on the TV. He was one of them people who have an opinion about anything and everything, but God help the poor soul who tried to make sense of ’em all.”

“Did he leave any word where he was going?”

“Well, his wife was in N’Orleans last I heard. He went after her, I guess to try to get her back.” She shuddered. “He’ll find her. He was a confused boy, but you could tell he was one of them who never stops till he gets what he wants.”

Chandler pushed then, just a little, to make sure she was telling the truth, and all of it. There was nothing else there. Caspar seemed hardly to have made an impression on her.

Beckley Street next. It was six thirty when he got there. The landlady confirmed Caspar lived there—she knew him as Lee as well, but he’d told her it was his surname and went by his initials, O.H. She told Chandler that Mr. Lee had spent last night with his wife out to Irving.

“Irving?” Chandler held out the piece of paper with the list of addresses on it. “This one here—2515 West Fifth?”

“Why, yes, I do believe—”

But Chandler had already turned and gone.

Morning traffic was starting to pick up, and it took another hour to get out there. Chandler could feel the juice trickling from his veins and knew time was running out. He was kind of surprised he still had any left actually. He’d taken the hit almost three hours ago. Massive hits seemed to jump-start his metabolism, racing through his body before leaving him exhausted, whereas small doses metered themselves out slowly, such that he was hardly aware there was any drug in him—save for the fact that he could pull images from people’s minds, of course, push other ones in their place.

The thirty-year-old woman who answered the door in Irving told him that Caspar had left to catch a ride to work with—

Chandler couldn’t wait. He pushed, and grabbed the name from the woman’s mind. Wesley Frazier. He lived right up the block. Chandler ran there. The door was answered by a young woman. Frazier’s sister.

“Wes and Lee have already gone—”

Chandler pushed so hard that Frazier’s sister stumbled backward. He saw Caspar putting a long brown-paper package into the backseat of Wesley’s ’59 Chevy and then get in the passenger seat.

Frazier’s sister was wavering back and forth in the doorway like a blade of grass in the wake of a speeding car. Chandler pushed more, saw Wesley telling his sister he’d got a job at Texas School Books a couple of months ago, saw his sister asking him if there was maybe another job there for Marina’s husband, Lee. “Although I heard her call him Alik once,” he saw Wesley’s sister saying. “You think maybe that’s Russian for Lee?”

Chandler pushed so hard that Frazier’s sister fell back on her sofa. She didn’t know the exact address of the School Book Depository, but she knew it was on Dealey Plaza. Something flickered in her mind, and with the last of his juice Chandler pulled it out of her. It turned out to be the cover of the newspaper. A map. The president’s motorcade route. He followed the arrows. Main. Houston. Elm.

“W-why, yes,” Frazier’s sister said absently, though Chandler hadn’t said anything. “That is where it’s at.”

“That’s handy,” Chandler said, and ran for his car.

Five minutes later Frazier’s sister blinked rapidly, noticed the open door.

“Durn pollen,” she said, getting up slowly and shuffling to the door. “Give me a helluva headache.”

Wesley kept up a steady patter as he drove them to work: the rain, the fact that his car battery was low, the president’s visit. In the passenger’s seat Caspar sat quietly, eyes forward, hands on thighs. The absurdity of it all, he thought. He’s a spy, for God’s sake. He’s worked for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America and the Committee for State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Has more aliases than the nitwit in the seat beside him has brain cells. A Wiz Kid, for Christ’s sake, yet here he is, hitching a ride to work because he can’t afford a car of his own, and doesn’t have a driver’s license either. Today was not the day to risk a moving violation.

“I heard the only reason he got in in ’60 was because Joe paid the mob to stuff the boxes in Chicago or some such,” Wesley was saying, “but I don’t think Johnson can give him Texas and Georgia this time around. Not with the Civil Rights Bill hanging over—”

The Chevy went over a bump and the paper-wrapped package in the backseat reverberated with a loud metal clank.

“Curtain rods,” Caspar said, even though Wesley didn’t ask. Even though he’d said it when he first got in the car, had said it yesterday, too, when he’d asked Wesley for a ride to work this morning. He’d told Wesley he was going to spend the night with Marina in Irving to see his daughters and pick up some curtain rods she’d bought for him so he could have some privacy in the rooming house he stayed in on Beckley Street.

“All the same I think I’ll go see him.” Wesley was prattling on. “The newspaper said the motorcade’s supposed to pass by work around noon, twelve thirty, so maybe I’ll eat lunch in the park and wave to him and Jackie when they go by. She’s a classy lady. Motorcade,” he added. “Mo-tor-cade. Kind of a strange word when you think about it.”

“I think it’s a combination of motor and parade,” Caspar said.

“But then it’d be motorade. It’s more like motor and arcade.”

“Arcade?”

“You know,” Wesley said. “A shooting gallery.”

When they got to work Caspar got out of the car almost before it stopped and grabbed the package from the backseat and tucked it up under his arm to make it as inconspicuous as possible. As soon as he did that, however, he thought that maybe it looked like he was trying to hide it, but at the same time he was afraid that if he rearranged the package it would draw too much attention to it, so he left it where it was and started off at a fast walk to the main building. Wesley stayed in the car gunning the engine to charge the battery, but he rolled down the window and asked if Caspar needed a ride home. Caspar said he wasn’t going back to Irving that night. Wesley didn’t ask why.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, DAMN it!”

Melchior stared at BC’s facedown body, the umbrella still quivering in his hand. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to have happened. Chandler was supposed to have come. The tranq was for him, not BC. Keller’d phoned him the new formula yesterday, and Melchior’d raced around town after he got out of jail, buying some ingredients here, stealing others there, but even so, he’d only been able to rig up a single shot. Keller was sure it would be enough to knock even Chandler out. Melchior’d asked how strong it was. “Don’t prick your finger” was all Keller said, “unless you want a chemical lobotomy.”

The fallen detective’s bladder had released, and a dark stain was spreading out in the dingy flat pile of the carpet. Melchior kicked BC over, did a cursory pulse check, but it was clear he was dead. The fat needle hung from his stomach. A button was missing from his shirt and the skin underneath was stained with a few drops of blood. It was the shirt that got Melchior. Not the blood, not the corpse itself. The goddamn shirt. Mercerized white cotton, with silk piping and French cuffs held closed with knots of silver. This wasn’t the same man Melchior’d met on the train three weeks ago. He’d remade himself entirely to pursue this thing. To pursue Melchior, and Chandler, and Naz. Remade himself first into a dandy, and now into a corpse.

“Aw, fuck it. Fuck you, BC Querrey. Fuck you.”

Melchior fell to his knees, careful to avoid the puddle of urine, ripped the man’s shirt open so violently that three more buttons flew across the room. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a flat zippered case, opened it. There were more syringes in there, including one with a three-inch needle, and a couple of vials, one of which was filled with epinephrine (there was also a Medaille d’Or tucked into a corner of the case, which Melchior planned on smoking after he got Chandler on Song’s plane). Keller had made Melchior carry the epinephrine in case the sedative cocktail proved too strong even for Chandler’s souped-up constitution. Melchior prepared the shot, then slammed it into BC’s chest so hard he heard a rib crack. BC’s body convulsed so violently that the needle on the syringe almost broke off inside his body, which really would have been the coup de grâce, but Melchior was able to jerk it out and step out of the way before BC coughed and choked and spewed a thin spray of vomit into the air.

Before BC was fully conscious, Melchior plopped him into the chair and duct-taped his wrists and ankles to it, making sure to pull the man’s sleeves and pants out of the way so the tape adhered directly to BC’s skin. He did this not out of any concern for BC’s expensive clothes but to make sure the detective wasn’t going to get himself free in a hurry. By now some semblance of awareness was coming back to BC’s eyes, but his limbs still seemed beyond his control. His head sagged on his shoulder, and he could only watch dully as Melchior tied him to the chair. He was so quiet that when he did finally speak Melchior almost jumped, because he’d almost forgotten BC was there.

“Why?”

Melchior didn’t answer. He’d secured BC’s thighs now, his upper arms, his chest.

“Why did you save me?”

Melchior pulled a long piece of tape from the roll.

“Spit.”

“Wha—”

Melchior slapped him in the face.

“Spit.”

BC spat a thin stream of blood, bile, and saliva onto his thighs, and then Melchior put the piece of tape over his mouth and wrapped it all the way around his head, twice. Only then did he answer BC’s question.

“I don’t know really,” he said, stepping back and looking at the trussed detective as though he were a mannequin being dressed for a window display. “Call it a hunch. An impluse. Everybody needs someone to keep him honest, and I guess that’s what you are for me. In case I ever forget what I’m doing is illegal, immoral, and entirely selfish. In case I start to confuse it with virtue or vision. I’m just a thug, Beau, and having you on my ass reminds me that that’s all I’ll ever be. Timor mortis exultat me,” he said. “The fear of death excites me.”

He leaned in close now, so close that BC could feel the heat radiating off his face.

“The way I see it,” he said quietly, “you didn’t really get into this fairly. Started off at a disadvantage, as it were, a pawn in somebody else’s fight. Hell, I thought you were completely incompetent when I first met you, but somehow you managed to survive, and learn, and look at you now: you came this close to taking me out this morning. So I’m going to give you a piece of advice: next time you see me, shoot first, ask questions later. Because that’s what I’ll do to you.”

He paused a moment, looking into BC’s eyes with equal parts contempt and curiosity. Sweat rolled out from beneath the wig he was wearing, and his exhalations were wet on BC’s skin.

“They’re going to say that what happened today changed things,” he whispered finally. “Don’t you believe them. The shift happened a long time ago, and it’s a lot bigger than you or me or Chandler or even Jack Kennedy. You should read that book the director gave you—or Fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or, hell, The Manchurian Candidate, the very novel that inspired Project Orpheus. The sci-fi guys have always known good and evil aren’t mutually exclusive, let alone capitalism and communism. That two opposing forces come to look more and more like each other the longer they fight. Up till now it’s been fiction. But after this it’ll be truth. The thing is, though, the truth will have turned into lies, because everything will be about ‘subjectivity,’ everything will be about ‘distrust of authority.’ It’ll be chaos masquerading as reason until someone or something comes along with the authority to lull people into believing that some truths really are incontrovertible: God, maybe, or country, or, who knows, maybe just selfishness as opposed to self-inspection and self-improvement. But no matter how it plays out, it translates into big profit for anyone willing to exploit people’s fears.” Melchior stepped back slightly. “Twenty years in intelligence and I never really got that,” he said, shaking his head. “Not till I met you—someone idealistic enough to actually believe everything his government told him, even though it resulted in his own persecution. And to show you how much I appreciate your gift, I want to give you something too.”

With grotesque intimacy, he leaned in again and put his mouth on BC’s, pressed hard enough that BC could feel his lips through two layers of tape. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t even feel like a kiss. But BC felt his stomach churn and had to fight the urge to vomit.

After what seemed like an eternity Melchior stood up. He smiled down at BC like a proud father, then brought his hand to the tip of BC’s nose to wipe away a drop of moisture. It could have been a bead of sweat or mucus or even a tear. Even BC didn’t know.

“Beau-Christian Querrey,” Melchior said in a voice whose solemnity was all the more oppressive for being genuine, even caring. “You are the burning boy. You—are—a—faggot.”

But he wasn’t finished. He stuck his fingers in BC’s pants pocket and wormed his hand over BC’s thigh. BC turned his face away, his eyes squeezed closed, his breath whistling out of his nostrils with drops of snot.

Suddenly the hand was gone. It was a moment before BC could open his eyes. Melchior was holding Naz’s ring up to the faint light.

“I don’t think you need this anymore, do you?”

Before he left he turned on the television.

“I know daytime TV’s for housewives,” he said as he headed for the door. “But keep your eyes peeled. There just might be something interesting on today.”

As soon as he left Wesley, Caspar went straight to the sixth floor. He wove his way through the dusty stacks of book boxes until he reached the southeast corner window, where he stood his package upright behind a stack of boxes. The tall parcel made a heavy metallic clunk as he set it on the bare concrete floor. He moved a few stacks of boxes to create a blind around the window, set three more underneath it to serve as a stand. He couldn’t bring himself to look out the window, but he did notice that the clouds were breaking up and the sunlight streamed into the little nest he’d made for himself. It was going to be a beautiful day. The park would probably be full of people at lunchtime, all waving at the president and First Lady as they drove by.

Chandler loitered in the shade of an oak on the eastern edge of Dealey Plaza, as far from the Book Depository as he could get without losing sight of the entrance. He’d waited to take the second half of the acid after he arrived, then maneuvered close enough to the six-story building that he was able to sift through the minds of the dozens of people inside. He didn’t have to look far. Caspar’s anxiety was like a beacon, and there, front and center in his thoughts, was Melchior. Melchior and President Kennedy and a rifle he’d hidden on the sixth floor, right by a corner window. What Chandler didn’t see was Melchior himself.

When he saw the gun—saw what Caspar planned to do with it—he was brought up short. If he confronted Caspar now or, God forbid, dragged the police in, he knew he was losing any chance he had to catch Melchior and extract Naz’s location from him. And he could see also that Caspar didn’t want to do it, and didn’t expect to. Melchior was supposed to make contact. Supposed to call it off before Caspar had to pull the trigger. Caspar seemed to think he was actually going to show up here. Chandler was inside Caspar’s head, so he knew the would-be assassin wasn’t lying to him—it was just a question of whether or not Melchior had lied to Caspar in the same way he’d lied to Song and Ivelitsch about sending Naz to Dallas. Chandler knew he was risking a lot—not just a man’s life, but the president’s and, who knows, the country’s. But the alternative was losing his last, best chance of finding Naz, and so he found the most sheltered spot he could and waited.

Searching Caspar’s mind from such a distance had used up a lot of his juice, however, and now there was the familiar fatigue. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’d been other times, but still, yawns were splitting his jaws, and he had to smack himself in the face to stay awake. He should’ve waited, he realized now, not taken the second hit until he saw Melchior.

“Excuse me,” he said, stopping a middle-aged black woman pushing a white baby in a stroller. “Do you know what time the president’s supposed to come by?”

“Why, you early, ain’t you? Didn’t the paper say he wasn’t supposed to get by here till half past noon? It’s only—”

“Ten forty-two,” Chandler said. He made a show of looking at his wrist, but since he wasn’t wearing a watch, it didn’t help. The woman frowned and pushed her charge away.

The thoughts of passersby flickered in and out of his head. It was amazing how banal the minds of most people were. Something to eat, something to drink, something to screw. God, I hate my boss/my wife/my husband/my parents. A man sat down on the retaining wall beside the little reflecting pond. He was waiting for his secretary, with whom he was having an affair, and when he said to himself, Could you take some dick-tation, Miss Clarkson, he and Chandler chuckled at the same time. The man peered at Chandler nervously, and Chandler quickly turned away. He realized that at some point over the past month this state had become natural to him. That the time he spent unaugmented had come to seem not only vulnerable but incomplete and, even worse, boring. The thought filled him with self-loathing, and the self-loathing filled him with fantasies of revenge. He would make Melchior pay for what he’d done to him, and then, if he couldn’t find a way to reverse the condition, he would take his own life to end this terrifying cycle of flight and violence. Once Naz was safe, he would bring it all to an end, one way or another.

But where was Melchior?

All morning long he had the intermittent sense that someone was peering over his shoulder. He’d whipped his head around so many times that one of his coworkers said he was acting jumpier than a man in his marriage bed with another woman. Finally, at a couple minutes before noon, he stood up from his desk.

“Guess I’ll take lunch,” he said. His manager waved at him without looking up.

He walked to the stairwell slowly, but as soon as the door was closed he bounded up the stairs to the sixth floor. As he was walking past the elevator it opened, and Charlie Givens stepped out and asked him if he was going downstairs to eat.

“No, sir,” Caspar said. He just stared at Givens, and after a moment Givens shrugged, picked up the pack of cigarettes he’d left on top of a stack of boxes, and got back in the elevator. Caspar waited until the doors closed before he headed to the southeast corner of the building. He passed a plate with some chicken bones on it, but saw no sign of anyone else. The faint sound of motorcycles floated through open windows.

He retrieved his package from behind a wall of boxes, ripped it open as quietly as possible. He assembled the Carcano quickly, rested it on the short stack of boxes beneath the window, and then, for the first time that day, looked outside.

“Fuck.”

A line of live oaks blocked his view of this end of Houston Street, as well as the beginning of Elm. He’d seen the trees dozens of times before, of course, but never really noticed just how much they shaded the street in front of the depository—it wasn’t the kind of thing you would notice unless you were planning to shoot someone from an upper-story window. He would have to wait until the motorcade turned on Elm and was directly below the building and moving away from him—and he would have to lean halfway out the window to get a clear shot to boot. Someone in Dealey Plaza would almost certainly see him and shout, warning the president’s guards.

Not that he would do it. But Melchior had said he had to play it straight. Right to the end.

There were dozens of people in the park already. Caspar put his eye to the scope of his rifle and moved it from face to face.

Where the hell was Melchior?

Traffic had thickened in the past hour, and the lunchtime rush was backed up for blocks around the motorcade route. Melchior was coming in from the north, so he missed most of the tie-up, but still it slowed him down, and it was after noon when he finally reached Dealey Plaza. He abandoned BC’s Rambler behind the depository and made his way around the west side of the building, figuring that if Chandler was already at the scene he’d most likely take cover in the park itself—probably in the line of trees that skirted the park’s eastern edge. It had turned into a warm, humid day, and, what with the wig Song had packed for him, he was sweating buckets. It was almost like being back in Cuba. Fucking Cuba, where this had all started. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been a month. Four fucking weeks.

But four weeks, four months, four years, four centuries, it didn’t matter, it could all come to an end in the next four minutes if he didn’t figure out what he was going to do now. Why in the hell had BC shown up at the house without Chandler? And how had the detective gotten the drop on Melchior, forcing him to use the tranq meant for Orpheus—who, presumably, had followed what was otherwise a pretty obvious trail of bread crumbs leading straight to the Book Depository. All Melchior had now was a vial of acid and the Thorazine-phenmetrazine combo that protected his brain from Chandler’s when the latter’s was souped up. Oh, and the dart-shooting umbrella Ivelitsch’s techies had cooked up for him. He had that, too. He was going to have to wing it.

As he came around the side of the depository he saw that a substantial crowd had gathered in Dealey Plaza. Spectators sat on a grassy ridge this side of Elm, and more stood along both curbs. At least a hundred people were in Dealey Plaza itself. Dozens of them had cameras out, and Melchior saw one man with an eight-millimeter movie camera aimed at the gap between the two courthouses at the top of the park. That’s what he should have had Ivelitsch rig up. Not a ridiculous umbrella that managed to shoot a single dart at a time, but a bullet-shooting camera. Something that would give you a chance to fight your way out, if it came to that. Oh well. Next time.

He slipped a beret from his pocket and pulled it low on his forehead, added a pair of glasses with thick black rims, then eased himself into the crowd. He was conscious of the Book Depository on his left, row upon row of open windows looking straight down on him. For the next several minutes he was wide open. It was all up to Caspar. Either he was loyal to Melchior, and he would wait for the president to show, or someone had supplanted him in Caspar’s esteem—Scheider, the Wiz, Giancana, who knows, maybe even Ivelitsch himself—in which case Melchior was dead to rights. Here’s hoping Caspar’s marksmanship hadn’t improved in the last few years.

“All right, Chandler,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”

Chandler wasn’t sure how long the void had been there before he felt it. Two minutes? Ten? It crept up on him like white noise until suddenly it was all he could hear.

Melchior.

But where was he? It was hard to pinpoint a silence, especially in the midst of so much commotion. He barely had any juice left and didn’t want to waste it. He did his best to ignore his brain, searched the crowd with his eyes instead. The feeling came from the north, toward the depository, and he began to make his way in that direction as stealthily as he could.

It was hard to see people’s faces because everyone was turned toward the eastern edge of the park, waiting for the first sign of the president’s motorcade. (Funny word, motorcade, he thought as he walked past a young black man sitting on the grass eating a sandwich. Probably supposed to be a combination of motor and parade, but it sounded more like a combination of motor and arcade—a shooting gallery—which didn’t make any sense when you thought about it.) He searched the sides of people’s faces, their physical profiles, anyone big enough to be Melchior. He found himself staring at a lot of plump women with beehives—what more unexpected disguise could there be for a man as aggressively masculine as Melchior? But unless he’d found a way to alter the shape of his face, none of the women was him.

Suddenly it came to him. Cavalcade. That’s where the cade in motorcade came from.

Jesus Christ, Chandler, he said to himself. That’s really not important right now. Focus.

He made his way closer to Elm. On the far side of the street, on the edge of a grassy embankment, a large man carrying a closed umbrella¹⁵ caught his attention. The man was staring right at him, holding his umbrella in the middle so that it pointed out from his abdomen, and Chandler mistook it for a gun at first. He started to look away, then glanced back at the man’s face. A black beret was pulled down over a dense cap of stiff, straight black hair, and the rims of the man’s glasses were nearly as thick as a raccoon’s mask. Chandler had been looking for an elaborate disguise, but now he saw that the simplest could be just as effective: he wasn’t 100 percent positive it was Melchior until the rogue spy smiled at him.

Chandler kept his eyes on Melchior’s hands as he crossed the street, but the big man merely stood there with that smile on his face. He heard motorcycles a few blocks away, a sputtering rumble punctuated by frequent backfires pulsing out of the canyon of Main Street. People strained to see the president and First Lady. Their thoughts flitted through Chandler’s head like whispers from a hidden PA system. Almost here, he heard, and I wonder if she’s as pretty in real life, and He may be a Yankee and a papist, but he’s still the president, and then, louder than all these other thoughts, more desperate:

Where are you, Tommy?

The cry was so urgent that Chandler looked up at the School Book Depository. The anguish was like a beacon drawing his eyes to the sixth floor. The southeast corner. The window. He saw an outline low above the sill, as if someone was kneeling just behind it. He couldn’t see the face, though, because it was concealed behind a—

He heard the pfft and tried to jump to the left, but it was too late. Something punched his abdomen just below the ribs, hard enough to knock the wind from him. Spots danced in front of his eyes and he braced himself for the numbing effect. Instead the spots danced faster, gained size, intensity, color, and he realized Melchior hadn’t shot him with a tranq. He’d shot him with LSD—a lot of LSD. Chandler fought to get control of the trip, but the world got brighter and brighter and louder and louder. Jesus, he thought. Melchior must have injected him with thousands of hits. He’d never felt anything like this before.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up in confusion to find Melchior beside him.

“Come on, old buddy. Let’s get you out of the street.”

“What did you …” He couldn’t get the words out. The ground was churning beneath him and it was hard to stay upright. He clutched Melchior’s arm for support. People’s thoughts knifed through his brain, a thousand Technicolor razor blades cutting his mind to mush. Someone was thinking of the case of Ken-L Ration he needed to get on the way home, and someone else was wondering how to tell her boyfriend she was pregnant. An eleven-year-old boy was dreaming of being the first black superhero and a forty-seven-year-old woman was wondering what would happen if she put a little dill in the mashed potato salad, or a little ground glass.

But none of the minds was more potent than Caspar’s. Chandler saw him in the orphanage again, looking up at Melchior adoringly, saw him as a little boy in his home in New Orleans with his mother and stepfather and brothers, nervously sitting apart from the group, knowing he was different from them. Saw him as a thirteen-year-old in New York City facing a truant officer, a seventeen-year-old enlisting in the Marines, saw him in California, Japan, Russia, England, Finland, America again, rafting through the South like a latter-day Huck Finn until he ended up in Dallas, dressed all in black with a rifle in his hand, telling Marina to hurry up and take the picture. So much travel for such a young soul! He’d seen half the world before most men had finished college. And everywhere he went, he was looking for someone to love him, and someone to kill.

And still there was more: Caspar in Mexico at the Soviet Embassy. Caspar in a Dallas hospital looking down on his newborn daughter. Caspar looking through the scope of a rifle at Melchior at this very moment and not knowing it was Melchior.

“Here you go, Chandler.”

He felt something in his hand, looked down to see Melchior wrapping his fingers around the handle of a cane. No, not a cane: the umbrella. Despite the fact that it came from Melchior, he leaned on it gratefully. There were red spots on Melchior’s fingers and he focused on these. If he could just make these spots go away, he told himself, he could get control of the trip. But a moment later he realized the world had in fact stopped spinning, that the voices and pictures slicing through his brain had subsided to an indistinct murmur. He was in control, or at least as much in control as a mahout astride a seven-ton bull elephant. But still the stains remained on Melchior’s fingers.

He looked up at his enemy’s face.

“What have you done?”

Melchior peered into his eyes. “Don’t you know?” His eyes opened wide then, and for a moment it seemed his mind did as well. Chandler saw Melchior standing in front of a sharply dressed bald man sitting behind a highly polished desk, saw Caspar on his knees in front of Melchior, saw BC fall on the floor at Melchior’s feet, saw Melchior stab him in the heart and drag the body—

“C’mon, Chandler,” Melchior said. “Push.”

Chandler pushed, harder than he’d ever done. Melchior staggered, took a step back. His eyes closed, but his mind opened wider. Chandler had seen the beginning of his incarnation as Melchior. Now he would see the end.

He beat Song to the airstrip in north Dallas, parked BC’s Rambler in the hangar she’d rented, and paced the concrete for the next ninety minutes. Just after nine, Song’s Gulfstream finally taxied through the wide-open doors. Melchior couldn’t help but be amazed. A little more than a decade ago, Song had been a homeless runaway in Korea, caught in the middle of a proxy war fought by the newly christened superpowers, with 500 million Red Chinese thrown in for good measure. Now she ruled her own empire, not just of girls, but of intelligence services and a series of shrewd investments that had boosted her net worth to millions of dollars. Ivelitsch had told him: she was worth a lot more than a few compromising pictures or a roll in the hay. She could bankroll them for years, until their own schemes began to pay off. But now Melchior had to ask himself: was it worth the price?

Chul-moo killed the engines and the hangar went silent. The hatch opened and a staircase descended from the fuselage with a nearly silent whine of hydraulics. The fur collar on Song’s jacket was more suited to DC than Dallas at this time of year, and she pulled at it as she descended into the stale air of the hangar. By way of greeting, all she said was:

“Have you heard from Pavel?”

“He docked at No Name Key about twenty minutes ago. They’re in the process of moving the bomb from Giancana’s boat to ours. They should be ready to head north by ten.”

“And Naz is with Garza?”

Melchior nodded. “What about Everton?”

Song’s smile was tired but, underneath that, mischievous. “Like I told you: second and fourth Thursday of every month.” Then, more seriously: “How did your meeting with Caspar go?”

Melchior was silent a moment. “Don’t worry,” he said finally. “He’ll play his part.”

She was on the ground now. She reached up and adjusted Melchior’s wig slightly, let her hands sit on his lapels while she inspected his appearance like a mother about to send her child off to his first day of school.

“The whole world’s going to be looking for you.”

Melchior shook his head. “I don’t exist anymore. With Everton and Jarrell out of the picture, Caspar’s the only person who could ID me, and he’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Gone?”

“Giancana’s going to call in a favor.”

“You think he’ll do that after he finds out you double-crossed him in Cuba?”

“He has to. There are enough bread crumbs between him and Caspar that he’ll face indictment as an accomplice if he doesn’t shut Caspar up.”

“Melchior.” Song’s voice softened, but only slightly. “It’s Caspar.”

He shook his head. “There’s no Caspar. There never was. There was just Lee, and there’s not much of him left anymore. I’ll be doing him a favor.”

Song took this in. Then, hardening again: “What about the Wiz?”

“Scheider took care of him for us. His brain is fried. He doesn’t know himself anymore, let alone anyone else. Trust me, he’s not long for this world.”

Again Song paused, studying Melchior. There was something different about him. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, but she didn’t like it.

“I don’t understand why we have to go through with it if you’re not actually planning to work with Giancana. We’ve got Orpheus. We’ve got the bomb. What does killing—”

But Melchior was shaking his head.

“We’re not going to kill him.”

“I don’t understand. You just said Caspar was in play.”

“Like you said: it’s Caspar. He couldn’t make this shot with a bazooka, and I’ve seen his rifle. It’s a goddamn mail-order antique. Plus there’s a tree blocking his view of the road. He’ll fire, he’ll miss, he’ll be taken into custody, Giancana will have him taken care of. End of story.”

Song shook her head incredulously. “You’re betting a lot on a bad shot. Never mind the fact that a man’s life is at stake. If Giancana doesn’t take Caspar out, if the Bureau finds out about his CIA connections, this could start a scandal that brings down the government. Why don’t you just call the cops and get him picked up?”

“I call the cops and they know it’s a conspiracy, they’ll dig that much harder. Caspar’s got to fuck this up on his own.”

“Melchior, think this through. Caspar’s Company connections are bad enough. But if his ties to KGB come to light, this could kick off World War Three, for God’s sake.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Melchior’s voice went up a notch, and Song had to work to keep her face calm. “I have no doubt Caspar’s past is going to come out. It’s there for anyone to see. I mean, Jesus Christ. A teenager running around spouting a Communist line about the coming revolution, but still joining the Civil Air Patrol and the Marines. A recruit whose boot camp nickname is Oswaldkovitch, who gets posted to the base of the U2, the single most valuable weapon in the U.S. espionage arsenal. A soldier who announces his intention to defect and provide military secrets to the Soviet Union, who formally renounces his citizenship yet conveniently forgets to bring his passport when he does so, who’s set up in a luxury apartment in the Soviet Union and marries a girl he’s known for barely a month and is allowed by the Soviet authorities to return to America, where, after a hey-how’s-it-going interview with the FBI, he’s left free to run around taking potshots at retired generals and skip across the border to Mexico to get a visa to knock off Fidel Castro. An idiot might try to chalk this up to a broken personality, but anyone with half a brain can see the lifelong construction of a cover—a boy with the outward appearance of a Marxist, but who’s really the Company’s attempt to get a sleeper inside KGB, and who might well have been doubled by them. Do you really think I’m so stupid I didn’t think anyone would notice all—of—that?”

Melchior’s voice grew louder and louder as he spoke, until Song was genuinely disturbed. Where was all this anger coming from, and at whom was it directed?

“Calm down, Melchior. I didn’t mean—”

“They’ll find it, Song! Every last bit of evidence revealing Caspar’s ties to U.S. and Russian intelligence—real things, plus a lot of stuff that’s probably totally innocent but that’ll come to seem suspicious in hindsight. Someone—a G-man, a Company agent who’s never heard of the Wiz Kids, a nosy reporter—somebody’ll root out everything and bring it to light, and the government will either suppress it or deny it because, like you said, the scandal could bring down administrations or kick off a nuclear war. Do you understand what I’m saying, Song? We don’t have to cover anything up, because the goddamn government of the United States of America will do it for us.”

Melchior’s hands were balled in fists and his face had gone beet red. The sweat rolling out from beneath the wig had thickened into streams that stained his collar.

“But Melchior,” Song said, grabbing his left hand. “What if he makes the sh—”

She stopped. Turning Melchior’s hand over, she opened his fingers, saw something that looked like a handful of seeds. He spread his fingers and the seeds fell open in a long oval, revealing themselves to be a string of beads. No, not beads.

Skulls.

Song looked up at Melchior, her confusion giving way to genuine horror. Not fear, but a sense of betrayal so profound that she couldn’t find words for it.

“Then he makes the shot,” Melchior said, and he slipped the necklace over Song’s head while she just stood there, frozen in place.

“A gift,” he said. “From Caspar.”

“Melchior?” Song’s right hand touched the beads on her chest. “No.”

“Don’t you understand, Song? History doesn’t care about individuals, let alone individual actions. It only cares about symbols. It’s not the shot that matters. It’s not who pulls the trigger, or who it hits, or even if it hits. It’s what we can make it mean.”

Song blinked her eyes as if she was coming out of a trance. “My God. You want him to make it. You want him to kill the president.” She started to say something else, but then her eyes saw the knife in Melchior’s hand. “You—you can’t be serious.”

“I’m sorry, Song. Your entire career has been built around your ability to play one side off against the other. A thousand intelligence agents could identify you, and who knows how many more have bedded you.”

Song tugged at the skulls around her neck, but it was as if the cord that held them together was made of piano wire. She stepped backward, but the staircase was directly behind her. She stumbled and the long string of skulls clacked against the metal treads with a sound like knucklebones shaking in a rattle, then she caught herself and stood on the bottom step.

“I don’t understand. The whole thing—the partnership between you and Ivelitsch, going rogue, it was all my idea.”

Melchior nodded. “It was. I can’t deny it. And my career in intelligence was the Wiz’s creation. But if I’m going to make this thing work, I’ve got to start making decisions on my own.”

Song took another step up and back.

“Pavel was right about you. Your motivations are too complex. Too messy.”

“Don’t be naive, Song. Pavel wanted you out of the picture long before I did. Triumvirates never work, especially when two of them are alpha males and the third’s a beautiful woman.”

“Melchior, please,” she said as she climbed backward up the staircase. “I have money. Connections. Resources. This plane. Houses in—”

“Pavel’s made me aware of all your assets.” Melchior shook his head. “You should have made a will, Song. As it is, all your property will pass to your brother.”

“My—” Song whirled around, only to bounce off something barring the door. She stumbled backward, barely managing to catch herself from falling over the rail. She looked back at the door, at the figure standing there. Her face was pale with confusion and fear.

“Chul-moo? You’re not—” She turned back to Melchior. “He’s not my brother.”

Melchior shrugged. “Identity, like property, or history for that matter, is just a matter of the right documents. Chul-moo is as much your brother as the boy who died in Korea.”

Chul-moo pulled a gun from his jacket but Melchior put up his hand.

“I have to do this myself,” he said. He reached his hand down to Song, and, as if in a spell, she took it. “I owe you that much,” he said, then added, “Balthazar,” and drove the point home.

But even as the blade was piercing fabric and flesh, the scene seemed to melt. First the airplane disappeared, then the hangar and the airport and Dallas, and in its place there were palms and mangroves, a whitesand beach and the roar of surf. Chandler felt the blood rushing over Melchior’s fingers, but they weren’t Melchior’s fingers—they were his. He looked up into Song’s face, but it wasn’t Song.

It was Naz.

Her dark eyes bore into his, and the worst thing of all was that there was no surprise there.

“I always knew you would do this to me,” she said. “You pretended you were different from the rest of them, but I always knew you were just the same.”

And then she died in his arms.

A gunshot brought Chandler back.

No, not a gunshot: the backfire of a motorcycle. The motorcade’s escort had arrived, was turning onto Elm Street.

Chandler staggered backward. Only the umbrella he was leaning on kept him from falling over. His senses were still screwed up, and instead of throwing himself at Melchior, he almost fell on him. The people around them took a few steps away, their hands shielding their eyes as they looked at the approaching vehicles. A thousand versions of There he is! flashed in Chandler’s mind.

He leaned on the umbrella heavily. “Where is she?” he demanded.

Melchior’s smile was a sickening parody of innocence. “What do you mean, where is she? You’re Orpheus. That means she’s in hell.”

Another image of Naz’s dying face flashed in his mind, and Chandler shook his head to clear it. That was a mistake: again Melchior had to grab him to keep him from falling over. Chandler shook him off roughly, doing his best to steady himself as the acid continued to flood his system.

“You—you added something to the LSD.”

Melchior’s smirk grew wider. “Several somethings in fact. Among others: psilocybin to increase the hallucinogenic power, sodium pentathol to render you open to suggestion, and a heaping spoonful of methamphetamine just to make you crazy.”

“Yeah, well, crazy or not, I’m going to rip your brain apart.”

“I don’t think so,” Melchior said. “I may play fast and loose sometimes, but I never make mistakes.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty pill bottle. “While you went fishing in my brain, I took another pill. You won’t be getting back in for a while.”

Chandler pushed—pushed hard—but it was like trying to get the water out of a sponge with a needle. It would take ten thousand pricks before he accomplished anything. Melchior’s nose wrinkled. It was obvious he was feeling something, but not enough to really hurt him.

“I’ll save you the effort,” he said. “She’s in Cuba. Trust me,” he threw in, when it looked like Chandler might turn and run. “I can have her killed a dozen different ways before you could get out of the country, let alone into Cuba. Listen to me,” he hissed, stepping closer to Chandler. “I know you know Caspar’s in the building behind me. I know you know he’s got a rifle, and I know you know he’s going to shoot the president. I want you to help him.”

Chandler was fighting a fresh wave of dizziness, and he barely heard what Melchior said. “Help him?”

“Caspar never was the best marksman. Help him find his target. Steady his hand. Pull the trigger for him if you have to.”

“Help him?” Chandler said again, but even as he spoke Chandler’s brain was reaching out. It was like Melchior’s words were a map, guiding Chandler to Caspar’s brain.

“But … but why?” he said, trying to fight the connection, feeling it grow stronger instead.

“Why? Because at any point in the past two weeks you could have gone to the police, and you refused to. Because all you could think about was getting your girlfriend back—a girl you spent less than a week with, who you slept with all of one time. For her you were willing to sacrifice your duty not just to your country but to your beliefs. It’s time you learned that there are consequences for putting yourself ahead of everyone else. This morning I killed the only woman I might have ever loved—and now you and everyone else are going to learn what it means to cross me. Now, help Caspar make his shot or I swear to God I’ll pull the top of Naz’s skull off with my bare hands and eat her brains for dinner.”

The whole time Melchior spoke, the connection to Caspar grew more and more palpable. Chandler felt the gun as if it were in his own hands, smelled the dust from thousands and thousands of boxed books. The concrete was hard under his knees, and he had to fight the urge to fidget. No, Chandler told himself. Caspar’s knees. Caspar was fighting the urge to fidget, not Chandler. Caspar was looking desperately for Melchior, the scope of his rifle ignoring the motorcade as it moved from one face in the crowd to the next. Chandler could see the faces through the crosshairs. Male and female, black and white, their attention focused on the long line of motorcycles and limousines, their hands shading their eyes from the death pointing down at them from sixty feet above, and as he looked at one innocent face after another he had an idea. He pushed deeper into Caspar’s mind, found what he was looking for, pulled it out, and put it before Caspar’s eyes. The gun angled to the left.

The few seconds it took the motorcade to complete its left turn onto Elm and enter the shelter of the live oaks growing in front of the depository seemed to take all of Caspar’s life.

He stopped looking through the crowd for Melchior and instead angled the rifle just past the last oak and waited. Melchior had told him he had to play it straight right up until the end.

Suddenly a thought flickered through his head and he jerked the gun a few inches to the left. The view through the scope blurred, settled, and there he was.

Melchior.

He stood on the edge of the street, casually talking to a second man who leaned on an umbrella. He never once looked up at the window.

He hates you.

The thought seemed to come out of the ether, and Caspar twitched so hard he nearly pulled the trigger.

He’ll sacrifice you to his game.

Caspar took his eye from the scope, shook his head to clear it. KGB had said things like that to him, when they were trying to turn him. Had said the Wiz sent him behind enemy lines to be slaughtered, just like he’d done with all those poor boys in the Ukraine and Korea. Caspar could almost believe that about the Wiz. But Melchior? Melchior was his friend.

You’re just his patsy.

Caspar leaned forward, looked through the scope again. Melchior was still right there. He could do it. Do what the Company had asked him, and maybe then he could be Lee again. Just Lee. But in order to do that he would have to kill Tommy. But—but Tommy was already dead. Melchior had said so. Just like he’d said Lee was dead. There was just Melchior now. Melchior and Caspar. If Caspar killed him, he’d be all alone.

Do it, the voice hissed in his ear. Do it!

A tap on the shoulder brought Chandler’s attention back to the street. Melchior’s smile hadn’t faded, but his voice was deadly serious.

“I should tell you that if I don’t check in at exactly 1 p.m., Naz will be killed anyway. Just in case you’re getting any crazy ideas about having Caspar shoot me instead of the president.”

Chandler glared at him. If pure hatred could have killed Melchior, he’d have burst into flames. But all he did was return Chandler’s gaze with that implacable smile on his face. Chandler pushed at Melchior’s brain again, but all he got was that spongy nothingness.

“Not me,” Melchior said, shaking his head. “The president.”

The president. Chandler looked up. He could see him now. His car had just made the turn off Houston onto Elm. In a minute or two he’d pass through the Triple Underpass and get on the freeway and be away, safe to lead America to a new era of peace and tolerance, to Africa and Asia and all the way to the goddamned moon. His smile was as bright as the noon sun.

In desperation Chandler cast his mind wider, looking for someone in the crowd who could help him. But who? If he tipped off one of the policemen or Secret Service agents and got Melchior arrested, he was as good as killing Naz. If he started some kind of mass panic like he had in Texas, who knew how many people might die.

He found himself thinking of the burning boy. Even though the figure was nothing more than a figment of his imagination—his mixed with BC’s and all the other minds he’d come into contact with—he somehow felt that it would know what to do. A part of him willed the flaming angel to make an appearance, but it refused to come.

“It’s now or never, Chandler,” Melchior said. “Do it. Or Naz dies.”

Not knowing what else to do, Chandler reached out to the only other mind he could think of: the president’s. He felt the ache in the man’s arm as he waved at the crowd, in his jaw as he flashed that famous smile. The ache that throbbed in his lower back beneath his brace despite all the painkillers and other drugs that flowed through his veins. In the past week alone he’d taken Demerol, Ritalin, Librium, thyroid hormone, testosterone, and gamma globulin, and before he consented to get in the car this morning he’d had two injections of procaine to ease the pain in his back. Good lord, Chandler thought, the president of the United States was on more drugs than he was!

As he smiled and waved at the last of the spectators, Jack Kennedy suddenly found himself thinking about Mary Meyer. How funny to think about her now! He glanced over at Jackie guiltily, then looked away again. It wasn’t the fact that he’d slept with her that made him feel guilty—he and Jackie had worked out that part of their marriage a long time ago. It was the fact that she’d given him marijuana and LSD several times, and in the White House to boot. Jackie would’ve flipped if she’d found out about that—she had enough trouble covering up his affairs and his illnesses. Jack hadn’t cared much for the hallucinatory aspects of LSD—he saw enough unbelieveable things in his daily security briefing—but the euphoria was the best painkiller he’d ever experienced. For twelve blissful hours the pain in his back had been like a glob of Silly Putty he could knead and play with. God, that’d be nice right now. Here it was just after noon and his back was killing him, and instead of relief he had to face an interminable luncheon at the Trade Mart, all for the sake of securing a half dozen votes that probably wouldn’t make any difference at all next November.

As Chandler absorbed all of this he stared at the president’s retreating form. So Jack Kennedy was one of the chosen few who’d been turned on to LSD. Who’d’ve guessed?

Then, with a start, he realized someone else was looking at Kennedy, his gaze doubly focused through the sights of his rifle and Chandler’s own attention. Chandler felt Caspar’s finger on the trigger, realized it was starting to squeeze, and, not knowing what else to do, he pushed at Caspar’s mind, and at the same time snapped open his umbrella.

“What the—!” Standing on the edge of Dealey Plaza, James Tague jerked his head as something stung his cheek. At the same time, he heard a loud pop from off to his right.

“Oh no, no, no!” John Connally said in the seat in front of the president’s. Chandler heard him clearly. He knew that the governor of Texas had recognized the sound of a gunshot, unlike the president and his wife and most of the security detail—including the limo driver, who, mistaking the sound for a blowout, stepped on the brakes instead of the gas. At least Caspar had missed. But he was getting ready to fire again, and this time it was Kennedy Chandler pushed. Duck! he screamed into the president’s mind, and the president leaned forward. But it was too late. Chandler felt the bullet slam into the base of Kennedy’s neck, nick his spine, and spit out of his throat just below his Adam’s apple. Somehow, though—a miracle!—it missed hitting any vital organs, even as it ripped its way through Governor Connally’s abdomen and wrist.

But the gun was still in Caspar’s hands. He wasn’t thinking about Melchior now, or why he was doing what he was doing. His Marine training had kicked in, and he’d shot the bolt on his rifle and re-aimed. His attention was focused squarely and solely on the president. It was as if the two were linked by a high-tension wire.

Desperate now, Chandler dove deep into Caspar’s mind, trying to find someone Caspar could never shoot. But it seemed that Caspar wanted to shoot everyone. The president’s visage gave way to Castro’s first, then Khrushchev’s, and then to the man with the pointed beard who’d plucked him from the orphanage with the Wiz all those years ago, and then Frank Wisdom himself, beery, bloated, and bellicose. Then Melchior. Not Melchior as he was now but Melchior as a teenager: thin, scrappy, defiant, adaptable. A survivor, unlike Caspar. Unlike Lee. And then that image faded away before another, wavering, indistinct, two-dimensional—a black-and-white photograph that Chandler was only able to flesh out with the greatest effort of will.

“Lee,” Robert Edward Lee Oswald said. “Son, what are you doing?”

“Daddy?” Caspar peered through the scope.

“Put down the gun,” Robert Oswald said. “Come on, Lee. That’s not how your mother raised you.”

Melchior stared at the retreating limousine. A dozen cops and agents had drawn their guns, and people were starting to yell and point in every direction. A Secret Service agent was jumping onto the trunk of Kennedy’s limo. In another second he would throw himself over the president’s body and the opportunity would be gone.

Melchior pushed Chandler’s umbrella down with one hand, reached into his pocket with the other.

“She’s pregnant,” Melchior said. “It won’t be just her who dies.” And then, opening his hand, he showed him what he’d pulled from his pocket.

Chandler looked down at Melchior’s hand. At first he thought Melchior was holding a ball of blood. A ball of blood connected to a silver loop of tissue. But then he realized the ball was actually a ruby—Naz’s ruby—and the loop was the ring on which it was mounted, and the ring was still on—still on—

It was still on her finger.

“This is just a taste of what I’ll do to her,” Melchior said. “Now, shoot him.”

Chandler stared at the finger. Sixty feet above him, Caspar saw it—saw a finger stained with blood at any rate, and knew it to be his own. He looked down at his father in the limousine.

“Lee’s dead,” he whispered. “He died when you did.” And then his severed finger squeezed the trigger.

Chandler felt Caspar’s finger pull the trigger. The president’s thoughts vanished from Chandler’s brain like light disappearing from a shattered bulb. A thousand other minds rushed in to fill the vacuum. The First Lady’s, and the agents in the car, and the sheriffs on their motorcycles, and the hundreds and hundreds of spectators all staring with horror at the fleeing limousine, but over it all came Melchior’s voice.

“Good job, son. I knew I could count on you.”

Chandler whirled on him. He was about to throw himself on him but he was overcome by a fit of dizziness and almost fell over.

“Why don’t you sit down for a spell?” Melchior said as everyone began running—after the limousine, away from the shots, toward anything that would pass for cover. Everywhere Chandler looked he saw open mouths, but the roar of the gunning motorcycles drowned out all the other sounds, so it seemed that the people around him were screaming silently. On the trunk of the president’s car Jackie was crawling toward something that looked like a bloody toupee.

Melchior pulled a small zippered case from his pants. He held it up to his face for a moment as though it were a walkie-talkie, but when he took it back down Chandler saw a man running past him, a camera stuck to his eye. Melchior unzipped the case, and Chandler saw that it was empty save for a single cigar, which Melchior pulled out and unwrapped casually, as though he were in a drawing room rather than at the scene of an assassination.

The familiar exhaustion was setting in now. An immense tiredness that seemed to leech the marrow from Chandler’s bones, leaving him as helpless as a marionette whose strings have been cut off.

“What—what is that?”

“This?” Melchior brought the cigar to his lips, lit it with a series of lip-smacking puffs. “As Dr. Freud says, Chandler, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

He stood up then, glanced at the Triple Underpass through which the last of the motorcade had disappeared, then reached down and pulled Chandler to his feet.

“You—you killed him.”

Melchior puffed ruminatively at his cigar. “Who can say who really killed JFK? Was it me? Was it Caspar? Was it you? Was it that guy up on that grassy knoll?”

Melchior pointed. Chandler looked. He didn’t see anything, but Jean Hill and Tom Tilson and Ed Hoffman did. The figure was blurry and disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. Who knows, maybe their own minds made it up, but they would all swear till their dying day that they’d seen a man with a gun there.

The two men started walking up the grassy slope toward the rear parking lot where Melchior had parked BC’s Rambler. After only a few steps, though, Melchior stopped. He was staring at a small russet-haired man walking quickly out the front entrance of the depository. His hands were clenched in fists and his small, nearly lipless mouth was set in a hard line; it was obvious he was doing his best not to run. He looked neither left nor right but Chandler thought he saw his eyes flicker in their direction, a glance filled with a combination of fear and confusion and pride. His face, too, winked across Dealey Plaza. For most people, it merged with the image that showed up on their televisions later that night, but for some—for Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig especially—it would haunt them for years. Craig swore he saw a man matching the description of Lee Harvey Oswald¹⁴ get into a car on the far side of the grassy knoll, a light green Nash Rambler driven by a dark-complected man.¹⁵

“Where are you taking me?” Chandler said as he slumped in the car.

“Into the future,” Melchior said as he climbed behind the wheel. “Into the brave new world that you and I made together.”