Read Online Shift: A Novel by Tim Kring and Dale Peck - Free Book Online Page B

if he’d imagined it on Helms’s face rather than some mid-level functionary’s. Indeed, he’d planned the whole meeting around it. Had resurrected the ridiculous suit and sandals Segundo had given him and chosen an especially fragrant pair of socks so that the paper in his shoe would acquire a healthy tang of foot stink.
    There was the look, just as he’d planned. The only problem was, it had nothing to do with Melchior’s attire, Melchior’s action, Melchior’s words, and everything to do with Melchior himself. Melchior’d seen the same expression on the faces of countless anti–Civil Rights demonstrators in the newspapers he’d been reading since he got back. It was the face of a primly dressed white girl as she threw a tomato at a black boy walking into her school in Georgia. It was the face of a uniformed police officer siccing his German shepherd on a black man attempting to use the whites-only entrance of a cafe in Mississippi. It was the face of George Wallace taking the oath of office as governor of Alabama: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Despite all the whispers referring to him as the Wiz’s pickaninny—whispers that started, he knew, with the Wiz himself—Melchior had always done his duty to Company and country, and even if he’d often felt like a second-class citizen, he’d never felt
black
. But now he knew: as far as CIA was concerned, he was just as much a nigger as Medgar Evers.
    His foot was still in the air, the sandal half off his heel. He let ithang there for one more moment, then reached down and slipped it back on, placed his foot firmly on the floor.
    Everton’s hands and face relaxed, and watery pink replaced greenish white as the blood flooded to his skin.
    “I want to be completely candid with you. Deputy Director Helms didn’t meet with you today because he was busy. He didn’t meet with you because you are not worth his time. You are the product of a failed experiment on the part of the former occupant of this office. You and your fellow ‘Wise Men.’”
    “Caspar,” Melchior said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Balthazar.”
    “I don’t care if your names are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Deputy Director Helms feels it’s time the Company got out of science fiction and secret wars and returned to the business of gathering intelligence. The Wiz Kids were the first of the Company’s ridiculous experiments 20 , from which sprang Bluebird, Artichoke, Ultra, and now Orpheus. It’s only fitting that the first should clean up the last.”
    Melchior’s eyes narrowed.
    “Orpheus?”
    Everton was silent a moment. Then: “Did you ever meet Cord Meyer’s ex-wife, Mary?”
    “Are you kidding? I never even met Cord.”
    “Oh, that’s right. The Wiz liked to keep you out of the spotlight. Or, who knows, maybe you kept yourself out of the spotlight.”
    “Who knows?” Melchior said. “So what’s the trouble with Mrs. Meyer?”
    “She’s sleeping with the president.”
    Melchior shrugged. “From what I heard, you could open a rival to the Rockettes with the girls Jack Kennedy’s bagged since he got in the White House.”
    “Be that as it may,” Everton said, “none of the other girls are slipping him LSD.” 18
    Melchior didn’t react for a moment. Then he leaned forward, retrieved his hat, and set it on his head.
    “None of the other girls
is
slipping him LSD,” he said, smiling beneath the brim of his hat. “None of the other girls
is.”

Cambridge, MA
November 1, 1963
    Chandler found it disconcerting to have to look up at Eddie Logan. The last time he’d seen him, Percy Logan’s little brother had been as short as a walking stick and almost as thin. Outwardly at least, he’d become a man.
    Logan attempted to keep a neutral look on his face, but a smirk flicked at the corner of his mouth.
    “Well well well,” he said as his eyes took in the whole of Chandler’s book-lined cave. “How the mighty have fallen.”
    It had been