Shift: A Novel

by Tim Kring

  She couldn’t bring herself to say it. She had never said it, but now Morganthau said it for her.

  “He died.”

  Naz was silent a moment. She reached for the fizzy highball the waiter had just set in front of her. “Yes. Well. My preferred medication is rather more expensive than that, so I supplement my income with the generosity of men looking to relieve their loneliness for an hour or an evening.” She drank from her glass as though as it were water and she’d just wandered in from the desert. When only the ice and lime remained, she set it back down on the table and signaled to the waiter for another. “Did I leave anything out?”

  Morganthau was silent. Naz couldn’t tell how much of this he’d already known, but she could feel the effect her rendering had had on him. His grin faded, his eyes softened, and he’d begun compulsively straightening his silverware like a drill sergeant worrying a troop of raw recruits. Pity exuded from him like cheap cologne. A tepid feeling to be sure, but Naz knew how quickly its warmth could grow into a full-fledged fire. And, try as she might to resist this warmth, she could already feel the heat in her own body, the need to validate this man’s compassion, to be worthy of it. She thought about driving her knife into her chest but couldn’t, because she knew how much it would hurt the boy sitting across from her, and because the white silk blouse she was wearing was her last clean shirt.

  “Actually,” Agent Morganthau said finally, “I wanted to talk to you about MIT.”

  Naz squinted. “MIT?”

  “You participated in a pair of studies …”

  “I know what I did at MIT. What I want to know is why you care what I did at MIT.”

  Morganthau recoiled from the tone of Naz’s voice.

  “Perhaps I should step back a moment. I’m not here to hurt you, or punish you, or anything like that. To the contrary. I was assigned to look after you. Your father performed a valuable service for the Company, and it is my duty—my honor, I should say—to see that that debt is repaid.”

  Only someone as young and naive as the boy across from her could have made such a speech, and it was precisely that youth and naivete that made it ridiculous.

  “I can look after myself very well, thank you.”

  “Pardon me for being blunt, Miss Haverman, but you’re an alcoholic and a prostitute. If that’s what you call looking after yourself, I’d hate to see what you call neglect.”

  In answer, Naz turned her wrists upward, nudged the watch on the left and the bracelet on the right to reveal the thin pale scars beneath. She held them in the light for a moment, then turned them down again.

  “By my own standards,” she said quietly, “I’m doing great.”

  She saw his fingers tremble, felt him fight the urge to take her hand. It was too easy to imagine him sweeping her up in his arms, pressing her cheek against his hard flat chest and wrapping his strong arms around her. She could feel herself wanting this to happen, yet knew that in an hour or six, when she had given him more than he’d have ever dreamed of asking for, the urge to protect her would fade away, replaced by disgust.

  But right now there was just the heat.

  “I’m just curious,” Morganthau said huskily. “You seem to hate psychologists and hospitals and every other institution devoted to emotional and physical caretaking. So what made you volunteer for three different studies testing—what was the term? ‘psychic aptitude’?—over the course of six months?”

  Naz shrugged. “They paid.”

  “Ten dollars for a full day’s work. I would think a woman of your beauty makes more than that on a single date.”

  Now it was Naz’s turn to blush. “I have no doubt you know exactly how much I charge. You seem to know everything else about me.”

  “Actually, I don’t. And”—Morganthau raised his voice to speak over her—“I’d rather not. I find it tragic that any woman should have to resort to those means to support herself, but for a lady of your character, it’s maddening. I want to find every man who ever took advantage of you and cut his heart out.”

  They didn’t take advantage of me, Naz thought. I took advantage of them. Or I took advantage of myself—it amounts to the same thing. But she didn’t say it aloud.

  “I was curious,” she said instead, aware that it was the same word he’d used. “Dr. Calloway told me it was all in my head. My empathy. My inability to screen out others’ feelings. He meant that I was making it up, but I found myself wondering: what if it is in my head? Not in the way Calloway meant. What if there’s a biological or genetic or, I don’t know, magical cause for this torture I’ve had to endure every minute of every day of my whole life? These waves of emotion washing over me every time I come within ten feet of someone—love and hate, fear, anger, lust, greed, all pressing down on me the way raindrops fall on other people. At least then I’d have an explanation for what I’ve done, what I’ve felt. And, who knows, maybe a cure, as well.”

  “But the studies you participated in were testing for a different kind of psychic ability, weren’t they? Telepathy, prognostication, and remote viewing. None of these is exactly the condition you describe. Anyone can see that you’re special, Naz. Anyone.”

  Naz could feel the desperation beginning to grow in him. The need to convince himself—to convince her—that he could help her. No, she told herself. She didn’t feel it. She heard it in his voice, saw it in his hands, his eyes. The cues were physical, not mental.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but my results actually fell below statistical norms. Dr. Calloway was right. It is all in my head. The only emotions I feel are my own. And they are terrible, Agent Morganthau. Terrible.”

  His hand moved toward hers, but just then the waiter arrived with a second round of drinks. By the time the waiter left, Morganthau had regained some of his composure.

  “It’s funny. I initially thought of approaching you with this idea because I deduced from your file that you had some interest in the paranormal. I wouldn’t have guessed that your motivation was so …”

  “Weird?” Naz said. She too had calmed slightly. All hail the great god gin.

  “I was going to say ‘normal,’ actually,” Morganthau said. “I mean, it makes more sense to me when a person for whom all the usual channels of aid have failed turns to superstition. It’s when rational people get interested in this stuff that I get confused.”

  “The world is strange enough on its own, eh, Agent Morganthau?”

  “I’ll say,” he said, sounding for a moment even younger than he looked. He blushed and sipped at his drink. “So I asked you before if you’d ever heard of LSD.”

  “Actually, the clinician who ran the second study I participated in—the one on prognostication—mentioned it to me. He said several studies had shown that it proved beneficial to schizophrenics and other patients suffering from acute mental disorders. He even gave me the name of one working at Harvard—O’Reilly? O’Leary?—but when I went there, it turned out he’d left the institution.”

  “Leary,” Morganthau said. “He was asked to leave, actually. His methodology was a little too unorthodox for Harvard.”

  Naz’s eyes narrowed. “You sound like you know something about him.”

  “Just what I read in his file. His interest in LSD and the Company’s ran on tangential tracks.”

  “And what exactly is the Company’s interest in LSD?”

  Morganthau waved her question away with a smile. “‘Need-to-know basis,’ as they say.”

  “Then let’s return to our original subject: what is the Company’s interest in me?”

  “The Company’s only official interest in you is in a caretaker capacity, as befits the debt owed to your father. But the Company is also looking for people to assist in its LSD investigations, and I thought you might be interested in helping.”

  “You want me to take LSD?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Then what?”

  “I want you to administer it.”

  “To …”
Naz’s eyes suddenly went wide. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Morganthau refused to meet her gaze. “The Company requires a few things from its subjects. First, that they be completely ignorant of the fact that they’re being given the drug. And second, that they be unwilling to pursue the matter should the drug cause them any adverse effects.”

  “And who would be less likely to pursue matters than a man given the drugs by the prostitute he was sharing his evening with? And I assume the corollary is true as well? That if I refuse to help you, you’ll report my own illegal activities to the police?”

  Morganthau blushed yet again. It was clear Naz wasn’t the only intoxicated one at the table. “Before I met you, I would have said yes, that was the reasoning behind it. But, having spent an hour with you …”

  “Two, by the way I reckon these things.”

  Morganthau’s blush deepened. “After getting to know you, I would be hard-pressed to do anything that might cause you harm.”

  “But?”

  “But I’ve already included your name in my report. If I don’t recruit you, there will be questions. Repercussions. Though I wouldn’t turn you in, someone else in the Boston office surely would.”

  “So your hands are clean, is that it? It’s the Company that’s doing this to me, not you?”

  “You have to understand, Miss Haverman, there are goals here that are bigger than you or me.”

  “Is that what Kermit Roosevelt told my father? Because if he did, he was right. What my father did for the Company not only got him killed, my mother, and my aunt, and three housemaids, and how many hundreds, thousands, of other innocents. Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve always known, on some level. Whatever, you don’t need to persuade me. I know a losing battle when I see one. But I want compensation.”

  “Of course.”

  “Five hundred dollars per ‘subject.’” She said the word as lewdly as possible. “And I want protection. I’ve heard people do some crazy stuff on this drug, and I don’t want someone acting his Jack the Ripper fantasies out on me for the sake of science or national security.”

  “I’ll be in the next room the whole time, Miss Haverman.”

  “The next room?”

  “Watching,” Agent Morganthau said. “For the sake of science, of course. And national security.”

  Three days later, Naz walked into another bar. The King’s Head. Other than the name, everything was the same—the gray dress, the dim lighting, the need for a drink. Even Morganthau was there, tucked into a back corner, his face lost beneath the shadow of his fedora. There were the girls and the men, the choking press of desperation and lust, and of course the bartender; the cold glass in her fingers, the soothing chill of gin sliding down her throat, the nod yes, get me another. The only thing different was the tiny glassine in her pocket, the even tinier stamp of paper inside it.

  “Stamp” was the right term, for the paper was embossed with a profile of Thomas Edison. “Big fan of cocaine,” Morganthau had told her; and then, when she didn’t laugh: “Kind of an inside joke.”

  But she had more than that. She had a mark too. “Although I suppose you’d call him a john,” Morganthau had said, his cheeks turning red even as he forced a laugh.

  “John, Mark, what’s the difference?” Naz had answered, her cheeks coloring almost as much as Morganthau’s. “It’s all Tom, Dick, and Harry to me.”

  Morganthau had given her a photograph but not a name. “You need to be surprised when he speaks to you.” He told her nothing about the man. Not why CIA was interested in him nor what the Company hoped the “experiment” would prove. Instead, the agent told her about himself.

  He’d been recruited while still at Yale. It was no secret the Company was thick with the university’s alumni, and he knew he was a prime candidate: president of the College Republicans, possessed of a trust fund sizable enough to cover the shortcomings of a government salary, and a track star to boot (javelin and high jump, although how these skills would serve him as a spy was unclear). He was passionately patriotic—had had to be talked out of going to West Point but then signed up for ROTC without his parents’ knowledge—but his desire to join CIA was motivated by more than mere love of his country: he believed it was a moral imperative for the United States to deliver freedom and democracy to the enslaved populace of the Soviet Union. The world stood at a precipice. Forget what Khrushchev said about burying us. The United States and its allies possessed a clear military advantage with both conventional and nuclear weapons. Western economies were humming along while Eastern Bloc nations were having a hard time keeping the lights on. Now was the time to make a concerted push into Red Europe, with propaganda, with money, and with arms if need be. Forget South America for the moment, forget Africa and Asia; these were just distractions from the real battle. As Hungary had shown a few years ago, the citizens of Russia’s satellite states were ready to revolt, and if the United States backed them in that uprising, there’d be NATO troops in Moscow before John F. Kennedy stood for reelection. The worst possible outcome was that he might win a second term.

  His idealism and zeal had impressed his higher-ups, but, no surprise, they hadn’t decided to change the course of Company policy based on the theories of one Yale poli-sci major, even if he had been graduated summa cum laude. After a brief training period—munitions, hand-to-hand combat, and the “utter boredom” of ciphers and cryptography, he’d been sent to “cut his teeth” in the Boston station before eventual reassignment (he was fluent in German, and hoped for a place in the Berlin station). Although what he was supposed to cut his teeth on was a mystery. Boston hadn’t been a center of intrigue since the Tea Party. Morganthau thought there might be some action at the docks—contraband, human smuggling, something like that—but most of his job consisted of taking meetings in spindly old colonial houses with spindly old colonials who, after cucumber sandwiches or shortbread, would produce wads of cash (none of them trusted banks, and one man, who didn’t even trust paper money, pulled out a bag of gold coins) and talked about “funneling” it to anti-Communist forces in Chile or Vietnam (their choice of words made Morganthau think of a pneumatic tube running under Nob Hill all the way to Santiago or Saigon). One of them had asked point-blank why we didn’t just shoot “Uncle Joe” already (this was the man with the gold); when Morganthau pointed out that Uncle Joe had been dead for almost a decade, his host had looked confused for a moment, then winked knowingly. “Still a secret, eh? Well, mum’s the word, old boy, mum’s the word,” and he had gesturally locked his lips and thrown away the key.

  Probably his most interesting assignment had been chaperoning the activities of a half-cocked Harvard psychiatrist named Timothy Leary, who was conducting experiments with a powerful hallucinogen called lysergic acid diethylamide. Technical Services hoped the drug might have military applications. Apparently it was so powerful that the municipal water supply of a city the size of Boston could be tainted with just a few quarts of the stuff, leaving it susceptible to invasion or even the illusion of invasion—all you’d have to do is tell the citizens that the tanks were on the way, and their amplified imaginations would take care of the rest. In his eighteen months in Beantown—Beantown! even the nickname is boring!—the boy had often thought of dumping acid in Boston’s water supply, just to break the monotony. To make things worse, he had been instructed to watch Leary’s work from afar; photographs of Leary’s notes were brought to him by someone who worked in the office of the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Morganthau had argued that Leary’s experiments could prove much more informative to the Company if they were actually directed, and had argued for a chance to speak to the psychiatrist directly, but before approval was granted Leary was fired by Harvard, who found his experiments rather less interesting than CIA.

  That left him with Naz. The assignment had come from none other than James Jesus Angleton, who felt that Naz had the potential to be recruited either by the enemy abroad or by pro-Communist forces work
ing in this country. Her father had been killed working for CIA; her mother had been collateral damage, and along the way she lost her country and her family. Her emotional fragility was well known, and it was easy to imagine a scenario in which her resentment was stoked until she turned against the country that had taken her in. Morganthau had chafed against the surveillance at first—it seemed prurient, if not simply voyeuristic—but that had all changed when he saw her for the first time. Saw the haunted look she seemed always to wear on her proud, beautiful face. Saw the way she gulped her drinks down in an obvious—and obviously futile—effort to numb the pain. And saw the way she degraded herself with men who weren’t worthy of opening a door for her, let alone opening her blouse, her skirt, her . …

  He had watched a lot. And, though he didn’t say it aloud, it was clear he wanted to see more.

  Our Man in Havana

  After languishing in a Havana prison for more than three months, he’d been dragged out of his cell one morning, into a courtyard whose western wall was stained darkly with the blood of previous executions. His guards stripped him, handed him a sliver of soap, told him to clean himself up. It was his first time in direct sunlight in three months, and he had to squint to see. Rubbing only seemed to spread the dirt across his skin, until finally his weakened eyes realized it wasn’t dirt he was massaging into the sallow flesh of his arms and legs, but bruises. Naked and dripping, he was brought to a barber, who shaved his head with an electric clipper, then took a straight razor to his beard, chest, underarms, and the rest of his body. Prickly as a poorly plucked chicken, he was handed a thick tube of anti-lice cream, then given a piss-elegant suit in midnight blue linen—brass buttons, silk lining, and two carefully mended bullet holes under the left lapel—and a pair of rather dainty leather sandals for his sockless feet. Gussied up like a scarecrow on his way to the yacht club, he was hustled into the back of a van and driven through the sweltering maze of Havana’s Old City until, just over three hours after he thought he was being taken to his death, he was instead escorted into the office of none other than the brother of the revolution, El Segundo himself, Raúl Castro.