Shift: A Novel (34 page)

BC turned back to the first agent. His eyes traveled up and down the gray suit disdainfully.

“You could have at least dressed the part.”

Melchior was sitting on a bench in Fort Washington Park when
Song’s Cadillac pulled up, a newspaper flapping in his hands in the breeze coming off the Potomac. He looked up with a tired smile on his face as the whiplash form of Chul-moo opened the back door, then frowned when he saw Ivelitsch step from the car. The Russian scanned the surroundings, then pulled his hat lower on his head and reached back to hand Song out of the car with a familiar air Melchior didn’t like
at all
.

“What is this, the prom? Jesus Christ, Song, why don’t you just pick him up at the Soviet Embassy next time?”

Song turned up the fur collar of her coat against the breeze. “Relax. We made sure we weren’t followed.”

“I’m kind of surprised to see
you
here actually,” Ivelitsch said.

“You don’t sound happy about it,” Melchior replied. “
Actually.”

“I don’t know why you went in in the first place. The Company suspects you of murdering three agents, after all.”

“It was the only way to divert suspicion,” Melchior said.

“You must have an amazing amount of confidence in your ability to bullshit. Especially with someone like James Jesus Angleton.”

“It was just Everton,” Melchior said, glaring at the Russian’s smug, well-rested face. “Mother was out of town. I’ve never had the privilege of meeting him, which he’ll thank me for one day.” He held up his hand when Ivelitsch started to speak again. “Look, I don’t have the time or energy for chitchat. It’s been more than a week since Chandler escaped, and he’s bound to show up soon. I want to know where Naz is. Without her, we have no way of controlling him, and without him our ace in the hole is gone.”

Ivelitsch glanced at Song before speaking. “I have men watching Millbrook and the Hitchcock woman’s apartment in New York City. If he shows up, we’ll handle him. I’m beginning to think Orpheus is a distraction. We have bigger fish to fry.”

“I’ll have Keller give you a test flight when we get him back. Good luck to your men, by the way.”

“If he’s as powerful as you say, what’s to stop him from plucking the secret of Naz’s whereabouts from your mind? Isn’t it safer if I
don’t
tell you where she is?”

“I have to agree with Pavel,” Song said, a little too quickly for Melchior’s taste. “The fewer people who know Naz’s location, the better. And she needs to be far enough away that if Orpheus does manage to ferret out her location, we’ll be able to move her before he can get there.”

Melchior looked between the two of them with suspicious, tired eyes. “How far,
Pavel?
Russia?”

“It would be difficult to get an unwilling girl on a plane to Moscow, at least in Washington. Perhaps from another city. If we could get her on a boat to Cuba, we could handle the transfer from there much more easily.”

“I have contacts in a few coastal cities,” Song added. “Miami, New Orleans, Houston …”

“Jesus Christ, I wasn’t
serious
. You really want to send Naz to the fucking Soviet
Union?”

This time it was Song who looked at Ivelitsch before answering. “We should at least get her away from Washington. Then, if we decide we need to move her out of the country, we can.”

“In the meantime, we have something else to deal with—namely, the real reason why you were released last night. It’s not because you managed to explain your way out of trouble. Everton let slip on his last visit to Song’s that you’re going to be sent to Dallas to retrieve an agent—”

“It’s Caspar,” Song cut in.

“Caspar?
What the hell is he—no, wait.” Melchior turned back to Song. “I thought you said Everton came in on the second Thursday of the month. That was almost a week ago.”

“The Company decided to send you when they found Rip’s body,” Ivelitsch said smoothly. “Angleton’s pretty sure you killed him. He thinks Raúl doubled you in Cuba.”

“If he believed that, why didn’t he have Everton hold me when I went in last night?”

Ivelitsch sighed as though he were trying to explain quantum mechanics to a three-year-old, or a German shepherd. “Are you familiar with Anatoliy Golitsyn?”

“The KGB officer who defected in ’61? What about him?”

“Mother was convinced he was a KGB plant, and he was a little, shall we say, zealous in his attempts to get him to confess. If Golitsyn went public with the details of what was done to him, it would be very embarrassing to the Company, especially on top of the flak it’s taken over the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. He apparently commanded a healthy settlement as hush money, and Drew Everton doesn’t want something like that happening on his watch. So rather than do anything excessive in-house—”

“They want Caspar to kill you,” Song said.

Maybe it was because he was so tired—that pinhead Everton had kept a light shining in his face for twelve straight hours—but Melchior’s mind filled with an image of Caspar at four years old, looking up at him with trust—love—in his eyes. He saw Caspar at six, eight, ten, twelve, the love steadily replaced by a dead smirk as he attempted to maintain some sense of self while the Company put him through the wringer. Finally Caspar at eighteen, on leave from the Marines. “They’re sending me to Japan,” Melchior remembered him saying, both hands wrapped around a glass to keep them from shaking. “I guess it’s finally starting.”

“Melchior?” Song’s voice cut into his thoughts.

Melchior shook himself. “Last I heard, the Company’d got Caspar stationed at Atsugi. The idea was that he would stage a defection, then buy his way into KGB with secrets about the U2 program. Although, after Powers, the cat was pretty much out of the bag.”

“That was four years ago,” Ivelitsch said. “Caspar arrived in Moscow in October 1959. Of course we suspected him of being a Company operative. Who in his right mind wants to move to the Soviet Union? We spent months trying to crack him, but he proved intractable. This seemed less due to any fortitude than simple instability. Caspar”—Melchior found it telling that Ivelitsch chose not to use Caspar’s real name, since neither he nor Song had—“suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur and general confusion about who he was and what he believed
in. He started calling himself Alik for some reason—his wife didn’t even know his real name until after they were married.”

“He got
married?”

“A whirlwind romance,” Ivelitsch said wryly. “Less than two months passed from the day they met until their nuptials.”

“Hmph,” Melchior said. “That doesn’t sound convenient
at all.”

Ivelitsch didn’t respond to Melchior’s innuendo. “When Marina became pregnant, Caspar requested to return to the United States. He said he was ‘disillusioned’ by Communism.”

“If everyone who felt that way was allowed to leave the Soviet Union, the country’d have fewer living inhabitants than Pompeii after Vesuvius blew its top. Lemme guess, you let him take the wife, too? Because she was pregnant.”

“Ultimately we decided it was easier letting him leave than watching him all the time. As soon as he got back here, he immediately resumed his pro-Communist persona, and became a very visible supporter of the revolution in Cuba—even as, behind the scenes, he made connections with several persons involved with CIA’s program to assassinate Castro, including some associates of Sam Giancana.”

“Giancana, huh?”

“Do you know him?”

“Let’s just say his name keeps coming up.”

“Melchior,” Song said, “Caspar wouldn’t—couldn’t—kill you, could he? After all you’ve been through?”

Melchior shook his head. “I dunno. It’s been a long time.”

“CIA feels Caspar’s behavior has become alarmingly erratic,” Ivelitsch said. “Angleton suspects we might have doubled him even.”

“Golitsyn, me, Caspar. Is there anyone Angleton
doesn’t
think is a double agent?”

“Yes. Kim Philby.” Ivelitsch chuckled, then went on. “At any rate, Caspar’s involvement with Giancana is entirely self-initiated. Last month he even tried to get a visa to Cuba, presumably to make an attempt on Castro’s life. And the Company’s pretty sure he was the person who took a shot at William Walker back in April.”

“Walker’s a fascist, Castro’s a Commie,” Melchior said. “And Kim Philby’s in Russia.”

“Scheider thinks Caspar—” Ivelitsch broke off. “What?”

“I said, Kim Philby’s in Russia.”

“What’s your point?” Ivelitsch said coldly.

“My point is, you said yesterday that Philby was your mole inside CIA. But he’s been in Russia since January, which means there’s no way Angleton could have told him he wanted Caspar to kill me. Which means you got the info from someone else. I’m guessing it was Caspar himself.”

“Pavel?” Song said. “What’s he talking about? Did you turn Caspar?”

“Yes,
Pavel,”
Melchior sneered. “Did you double him? Or is he playing you? Because if the Company’s got a file on you, then this partnership is
over.”

Ivelitsch didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “You’ll have to ask him that yourself. When you see him in Dallas.”

“Cut the bullshit, comrade. I need to know the truth before I see Caspar. Has he been in regular contact with KGB since he came back from Russia?”

“Of course we tried to recruit him,” Ivelitsch said exasperatedly. “But Caspar’s so confused that he can no longer distinguish between legend and reality. He may well think he’s working for KGB. For all I know, he’ll tell you we have dinner once a week. But the simple truth is that he’s too crazy, even for us.”

“So what you’re saying is that I should believe Caspar if he tells me what you want me to believe, but if he contradicts you, it’s just a delusion. You’ll understand me if I find that unsatisfactory.”

“I’d worry less about who he’s working for than if he’s going to shoot you. After his failure in the Soviet Union, he needs to do something that’ll prove his worth to the Company—it doesn’t matter if he’s doing it out of loyalty to the U.S. or the Soviet Union. You’ll still be dead.”

“And so will he,” Song said. “The Company will tip off FBI, who’ll pick him up for murder, and six months later he’ll end up in the electric chair. And that’s the end of the Wiz Kids.”

Melchior glanced at Song, but he was thinking about Caspar again. About the last time he’d seen him, in a geisha bar outside the naval air base in Atsugi. Just before they parted, Caspar had pulled Melchior aside. “Promise me you’ll get me out if they brainwash me.”

“Get you out—”

“Take
me out,” Caspar corrected him. “I don’t want them to turn me into something I’m not.” Such a statement begged the question: what was Caspar? But Melchior hadn’t had the heart to ask it. “Promise?” Caspar had said. “I promise,” Melchior had said, and somehow they both knew he was going to break it.

“Melchior?” This time it was Ivelitsch who pulled him from his reverie. Melchior shook his head to clear it, but Caspar’s face refused to go away. He stood up so abruptly that his newspaper fell to the ground and a few pages fluttered away in the breeze.

“I have to go to Chicago. We’ll deal with Chandler and Naz later.”

“Chicago?” Ivelitsch called after Melchior’s retreating form.

“You want the bomb to come to America,” Melchior called back. “I’m going to get it here, and take care of Caspar at the same time.”

Ivelitsch turned to Song. “I don’t understand.”

Song put a hand on Ivelitsch’s knee to keep him from getting up. “I don’t either,” she said, staring after Melchior. “But Chicago is Giancana’s home base.”

“Ah,” Ivelitsch said.

Song pointed to the dateline on the paper, and for the first time Ivelitsch noticed that it was the
Dallas Morning News
. It took him a second to figure it out.

“He already knew, didn’t he? He was just pumping us for information, making sure we were telling the truth.”

“I told you,” Song said. “He’s good.”

Ivelitsch picked up the front page, which was covered with a series of red and black X’s and O’s.

“What’s this?”

Song peered at it. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s an old cipher system dating from the forties. It’s hugely complicated. You take your message and the particular page of newsprint you’re using and create an algorithm that encodes the former onto the latter. There are only a handful of agents who can break it without a computer.”

“Huh.” Ivelitsch was about to say something else, but, twenty feet away, Melchior had turned to look back at him.

“Did you double him?”

A little smirk played over Ivelitsch’s lips. “I’ll tell you in fifty years, if we’re both still alive.”

Melchior nodded, turned back around. “Song keeps petting you like that,” he muttered, “I’m pretty sure you’ll be dead long before then.”

The men flanked him, the smaller one ahead, the bigger one
behind, as they descended the staircase and made their way toward the front door. They spoke to each other in Russian, more or less confirming BC’s earlier suspicion. This was a bad sign. It was one thing for Melchior to go rogue. It was quite another for him to cross to the other side. Or had word of Orpheus simply crossed international channels? Still, for some reason he wasn’t afraid. He was already bucking the FBI and CIA, after all. What was one more acronymed agency?

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the first man turned back to him. “We know you are traveling with Orpheus. You will take us to him, or Nazanin Haverman will die.”

“Of course,” BC said. “If you’ll go get me a pen and, uh”—a glance over his shoulder—“your partner tracks down some paper, I’d be glad to write down the address.”

The lead agent smiled at BC’s attempt at a joke. “We are strangers in the city. We would be very appreciative if you took us to him yourself.”

BC shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat.”

The second man pressed so close as they made their way through the thronged front hall that BC could feel the man’s belly pressed against the small of his back. He couldn’t resist.