Shift: A Novel (29 page)

For a long time Chandler lay there, unsure if he was dead. The only minds he was able to feel were Joe Gonzalez’s, running more or less due east away from the station, and Wally O’Shea’s, the driver of the Ford that’d crashed into the pasture, who was hightailing it in the opposite direction.

He staggered to his feet. His head was throbbing and his body hurt almost as much. He felt like he’d just tried to stop the entire offensive line of the Yale Bulldogs, which wasn’t a particularly good football team (neither was Harvard’s when you got right down to it), but still. He was aching. He set off slowly down the road toward his car, spots dancing in front of his eyes as he struggled to keep them open. So much for the caffeine pills. He was so tired it was painful, but it was a bit of a blessing, too. Otherwise he’d have had to contemplate what he’d done.

He’d killed three people.

Not directly, maybe. But if he hadn’t been experimenting with his newfound abilities, there was no doubt they’d still be alive.

All his life he’d run in the opposite direction from his uncle’s world, his uncle’s wars, because he didn’t want anyone’s blood on his hands, and now three people were dead because of him. He was a soldier, willing or not, of the United States of America, which happened to be the enemy as well. His general was named Melchior, and so was his adversary. And Chandler was going to find him and kill him and rescue Naz, and then—

And then he was going to kill himself, and save the world—save himself—from whatever it was he’d become.

A knock, a rattled doorknob. The sound of a bolt thumping into
its housing. The door opened halfway, and Chul-moo bounded into the room.

“Miss Nancy? Where—”

The newel ball smashing into the side of Chul-moo’s head made a muffled crack like a tree branch breaking inside a thick shroud of ice. Even as the boy crumpled to the ground, the door smashed the rest of the way open. Naz, who’d been standing behind it, was sent flying. Her hand cracked against the wall and the ball fell from her fingers and disappeared beneath the bed. Garrison stepped over Chul-moo’s form, his revolver already drawn, then stopped when he saw who he faced.

“Nancy?”

His voice was confused, but then a light went on in his eyes. He whirled, just in time for BC to smash his own newel ball into Garrison’s forehead. The guard seemed to freeze in place, his fingers still holding his gun, until BC whaled him a second time, and he fell on top of Chul-moo.

BC dropped the ball, was reaching for Garrison’s weapon when a voice came from the hallway.

“Back away from the gun.”

He looked up. Song stood just outside the door, pistol in hand and aimed at his head. She advanced as he retreated, retrieved Garrison’s weapon and tucked it into the waistline of her skirt like a demurely dressed Annie Oakley. Before she could do anything else, though, Naz spoke.

“You
bitch.”

Loathing dripped from her voice like venom. BC could feel the hatred roiling off her in palpable waves. Song actually shuddered, as if she’d been struck.

“Nancy?” Song turned halfway, trying to look at Naz without losing sight of BC. “I don’t understand. You volunteered. You—you
insisted.”

BC couldn’t figure out what was happening. A despair as great as any he’d ever felt had gripped his brain and body. It was like his father’s death and mother’s death and his demotion from Behavioral Profiling to COINTELPRO had all been mixed with liquid nitrogen and poured into his veins, freezing him in place. If he’d had a knife in his hand, he would have stabbed himself, just to end the suffering. Just like—

Just like Eddie Logan.

He stared at Naz. Her hands were balled into fists, and she took tiny steps toward Song, heedless of the madam’s gun, which was trained directly, if unsteadily, in her direction. Despite the whiteness of her slip, she seemed like a demon from hell. Her hair had come loose and radiated out from her head in inky waves, and her eyes were two dark coals burning into Song’s body.

BC turned to the madam. Whatever he was feeling, it was obvious she was feeling something a hundred times worse. Her normally taut body had gone slack and the gun dangled from her twitching fingers. She pressed her left hand against her temple.

“Stop it,” she begged. “Stop it, please, stop it!”

In the depths of his own blackness, BC recognized what he was feeling as the same terror that had gripped him at Millbrook. He’d thought the fear had come from the disorienting hallucination radiating from Chandler’s brain, but now he realized the feelings, if not the images, had been coming from
Naz—

—who was trembling, he saw, nearly as much as Song. Sweat beaded her face, and she grabbed a chair back for support. Whatever she was doing, however she was doing it, it was costing her dearly. BC knew he had to act.

“Here!” he yelled, staggering to his feet. He needed to draw Song’s aim. She jerked in his direction, squinting in an effort to concentrate, but BC was faster. He knocked her wrist to the side as she squeezed the trigger and a hole appeared in the floor.

BC fixed Song in the eye. “I apologize, ma’am,” he said, then decked her with an elbow to the—

But Song wasn’t there. In the half second it had taken BC to move, she’d recovered, ducked, and now he felt her heel in the small of his back. He went reeling forward and sprawled on his stomach. He rolled over to see Song bringing the gun up to aim.

“No!”

BC and Song whirled in Naz’s direction, just in time to see Naz’s arm flash. The wooden newel ball was a blur in the air until it slammed into Song’s temple and she fell to the floor.

Sounds of commotion were coming from the rest of the house, but Naz’s screams were louder, as she fell on Song and began beating her with her fists.

“If he’s dead, I’ll come back for you! I’ll make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine!”

“Miss Haverman!” BC pushed through the waves of fury rolling off her to grab one of her wrists. “We need to go.”

Naz looked up wildly, her teeth bared in a snarl, and BC fell backward as if he’d been struck. Then Naz’s eyes cleared and her face softened.

“Agent Querrey?” She seemed surprised to see him in the room, in his underwear. Especially
that
underwear.

BC shook his head. “It’s just Mr. Querrey now.”

Naz shook her head dazedly. “I’ll get your pants.”

They dressed quickly. BC checked the hall for the third guard, but all he saw was an open door to one of the bedrooms. A half-naked man peeked out, saw the gun BC had taken from Song, and ducked back inside. BC motioned to Naz, and they went for the stairs.

He heard Naz’s “Oh!” just before a blow caught him squarely between the shoulders. He slammed against the spindly banister, which broke beneath the impact, and he fell half a floor to the stair treads and rolled the rest of the way down. He had the presence of mind to hold on to his pistol, which turned out to be a mistake—he squeezed so tightly that it went off and a bullet whizzed by his ear. He dropped the gun just as he smashed into a pedestal table at the bottom of the stairs. An enormous vase flew into the air, narrowly missing BC’s head before smashing into the floor.

His attacker was on him before he’d stopped moving. Like Chul-moo, he was Asian, but full grown: tall, muscular, and very, very fast. He seemed to fly down the stairs, grabbing a pair of broken banister railings as he went and brandishing them like swords.

BC felt a momentary surge of relief—at least the man didn’t have a gun. Then the guard began hitting him with the railings—in the legs,
the torso, the arms, each blow stinging as sharply as a whiplash. The guard caught him with a blow to the side of the head and then a foot slammed into BC’s ribs, sending him flying back over the table.

The guard leapt after him, but slipped on the pieces of broken vase all over the floor. It was the closest thing to a break BC had caught. He grabbed the fallen table by its central leg and held it in front of him like a shield. It vibrated beneath the guard’s blows as BC attempted to shoo him back like a matador facing down a bull.

Suddenly the guard dropped the pair of railings and grabbed the edges of the tabletop. BC braced himself, expecting the man to push, but instead the guard spun it so rapidly that the feet at the base of the table spun like propeller blades, smashing him on the chin. Stars flashed in BC’s eyes and he went down hard on the ceramic-covered floor. The guard kicked at his ribs, and BC barely managed to roll out of the way. He felt ceramic shards cutting into his suit, and for some reason this made him angrier than anything else.

“Do you
know
”—he panted, rolling down the hall to avoid the guard’s kicks—“how much I
paid
”—still rolling—“for this
suit?”
His fingers clutched at the shards, and finally he managed to grab one. He flung out his arm to stop himself, braced himself for impact, and felt the guard’s foot slam into his abdomen. A bolt of lightning stabbed through his body. As the air rushed out of his lungs he threw everything he could into a single blow, jamming the shard into the guard’s femoral artery.

The guard staggered backward, the piece of ceramic protruding from his thigh. At first BC wasn’t sure he’d managed to stab deeply enough, but then a dark stain plastered the man’s trouser leg to his skin. Within seconds blood was seeping from beneath the man’s cuff and pooling around his shoe.

Wincing as he struggled for breath, BC leaned heavily against the wall and pushed himself to his feet. He lifted his arms, and another bolt of lightning sliced through his chest. He didn’t know if he had the strength to hold his arms up, let alone throw a punch, but the guard was still standing. BC had no choice. Warily, wheezingly, he advanced.

The guard took his own halting step in BC’s direction, but it was clear that his injured leg wasn’t going to hold his weight. For a moment
the two men just stared each other down. Then the guard shrugged and reached into his jacket and pulled out a long knife.

He smiled, not so much wickedly as triumphantly, as he raised it above his head to throw.

Before he could, however, a shot rang out, and he pitched forward. BC looked up the stairs as Naz descended. There was a spot of blood on her lip, but otherwise she seemed unhurt. Unhurt, but exhausted. She clutched the banister, and on the penultimate step she stumbled. If BC hadn’t stepped forward to catch her—the pain in his ribs was as bad as when the guard had kicked him—she would have fallen to the floor. For three long breaths she leaned heavily on him, then recovered enough to stand on her own.

“That—upstairs,” BC said, taking the gun from her trembling fingers. “Is that what happened at Millbrook? To Eddie Logan?”

Again he felt that sudden connection, not of sex or rage this time, but an empty sorrow, as of a bucket striking the bottom of a well whose water has long since dried up.

“Everyone who knows me ends up dead or gone,” Naz said in a muted voice. “My parents, Agent Logan, Chandler. I hope you fare better, Mr. Querrey.”

BC did his best to smile. “I have something for you.” He reached into his pocket for the ring he’d been carrying around for the past ten days, then stopped when Naz’s eyes went wide with horror. She grabbed BC’s arm and pulled herself right next to him.

“Tell Chandler,” she hissed just before BC’s head exploded in a shower of sparks. “I’m
pregnant.”

Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch
exchanged the brass lamp he’d hit BC with for a pen he pulled from his pocket, which, when uncapped, revealed not a nib but a needle.

“Everyone seems quite interested in you,” he said, pressing the needle against Naz’s suddenly pliant arm. “I think it’s time we found out
how
interested.”

“I don’t understand how you let this happen!”

Melchior’s growl practically rattled the paintings off the walls of Song’s office. Although maybe it was just his feet: the shoes he’d taken from Rip came down so heavily on the small Persian carpet that it seemed he was trying to grind it to dust.

Song sat at her desk, rubbing a knot on the side of her head. Melchior could tell from her pout that she was pressing hard enough for it to hurt.

“I suspected the man was KGB. Now I know.”

“And this one’s FBI.” Melchior jerked a thumb at BC. “I thought you said your establishment was secure, yet somehow you’ve managed to run afoul of the three largest intelligence and law-enforcement agencies in the world in the space of a single night.”

“Maybe if you’d told me what I was dealing with—”

“A mentally unstable twenty-three-year-old prostitute with a drinking problem? I thought you were supposed to be able to handle things like that.”

“Nancy—”

“Naz.”
BC spoke for the first time since Melchior had shown up. He lifted his head slowly, a lump the size of a dumpling visible through his high-and-tight. “Her name is Naz.”

“Another thing you didn’t tell me,” Song said to Melchior.

“What other thing?” Melchior demanded again. “
What
didn’t I tell you?”

“She … did something. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Yes, you do,” BC said.

Song and Melchior both turned to him.

“She made you feel bad,” BC said. “So bad you wanted to kill yourself.” BC looked up at Melchior. “Just like Eddie Logan did.”

“Who’s Eddie Logan?” Song asked.

“He was a CIA agent,” BC said.

“If you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’m going to—” Melchior broke off, walked the two steps to BC’s chair, and backhanded him across his bruised skull. “Shut up.”

“You sent a fugitive from CIA here without telling me? Good God. I almost set her up with Drew Everton. It’s amazing KGB got her before the entire Company came down on this place. What the hell were you
thinking?”

Melchior glared at BC for a moment before turning back to Song.

“I was thinking …” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking. My stateside contacts are thin. You were all I had.”