“How many other girls have you done this to? In how many other cities? Do you have girls skulking around bars in Greenwich Village and Georgetown, too? Maybe a little West Coast action?”
“Most girls think it’s fun.” Logan’s voice was tight.
“Fun?!” Chandler’s knuckles were white on Logan’s lapels. “Your little bit of power’s gone to your head.”
“Nobody made Naz do anything she wasn’t already doing. Least of all me. Or did she leave that part out?”
“Let him go, Chandler.” Naz’s hand was on his shoulder, and it seemed to Chandler that she wanted him to let go of more than Logan. He held Eddie’s gaze for another moment, then released him. As soon as he stepped away, Naz put herself where he had been, and, though she didn’t touch Logan, her manner made Chandler’s seem benign by comparison.
“What did you do to us, Agent Logan? We have a right to know.”
The fury pouring off Naz was so palpable that Logan seemed to shrink against the wall. “Well now,” he said hoarsely. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”
Chandler put his hand on Naz’s elbow and drew her away from the wall. Logan relaxed visibly.
“Naz said there was some kind of drug in our drink.”
Logan took a moment to smooth his lapels with hands that were still shaking slightly. “Lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD for short. Or acid, as some of its more visionary users are starting to refer to it. That was the base of the concoction anyway. But the boys in Technical Services are like chefs—always adding a dash of this and a pinch of that. Only they know what the final formula was. Naz was only supposed to give it to you, but I guess she was feeling adventurous.”
“I don’t care what it’s called or what it’s made of. I want to know what it does.”
Logan shook his head. “The real question is, what happened with you and Naz? Because I’ve seen dozens of different reactions—”
Chandler harrumphed here, and Logan colored visibly.
“—but I’ve never seen two people just stare into each other’s eyes for nearly five hours as though they were reading each other’s minds.”
Naz and Chandler would have made bad spies: at Logan’s last phrase, they couldn’t help but look at each other, then look hurriedly away. For the first time since he’d arrived, Logan smiled.
“O the subtlety!”
Naz cleared her throat. “There was—”
“Naz, don’t!” Chandler stopped her. “You don’t know these people. Once they get their claws into you, they never let go.”
“Oh, I know, Chandler.” Naz’s bitterness was so strong that he had to step back from her. “But he’s all we’ve got.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Chandler nodded, and Naz turned back to Logan.
“There was a … connection. A mental connection.”
“Huh,” Logan said. “In spy school, they teach us that reluctant interviewees tend to understate the facts, often by eighty or ninety percent. If that statistic is true, then I’m guessing you guys experienced something like full-on telepathy.” He snorted at the absurdity of what he’d just said, but Naz didn’t snort, and neither did Chandler.
“Was that a possibility?” Chandler said in a level voice.
Logan just stared at him a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.
“It depends who you talk to. Talk to Joe Scheider, he’ll say don’t be crazy, we’re just trying to make a truth serum, a knockout potion, maybe our own Manchurian candidate. But talk to Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, that lot, they’ll tell you the sky’s the limit. Telepathy, the astral plane, naked walks on the rings of Saturn.” He looked between Naz and Chandler and shook his head again. “If you’d backed me into a corner and forced me to pick sides, I guess I’d’ve gone with the headshrinker. But there you go. Sometimes even the beatniks can be right.”
Chandler nodded. “What’s the Gate of Orpheus?”
Logan glanced at Chandler sharply.
“How did you—”
“I pulled it out of your head,” Chandler said coldly, “when you were jerking off on the other side of the mirror.”
Logan’s cheeks turned bright red. His mouth opened, then closed.
“Jesus Christ.” He shook his head incredulously. “Look, all I know—”
He broke off again, his jaw hanging open as the magnitude of what had happened settled into his brain. Nearly a minute passed before he took a deep breath and started speaking again.
“All I know is that some scientists have theorized the existence of a receptor in the brain. Just as certain people have unusually keen senses of smell or taste or rhythm, the hypothesis went, so other people might have retained some vestigial receptiveness to ergot alkaloids, which is what LSD is made from. Ergot’s a fungus that affects most grains. It’s one of those things like alcohol—its existence is so enmeshed with human civilization that most people have developed a genetic resistance to it. But, just as many Indians are especially susceptible to the effects of alcohol because they didn’t evolve with it, it seemed possible that there might also be a population, albeit a much smaller one, similarly sensitive to ergotism. Even its proponents admitted that the possibility was remote, but the consequences if it proved true were so profound that the Company couldn’t ignore it. We know the Soviets are conducting their own experiments, and we can’t risk falling behind.”
It was a moment before anyone spoke. Then Naz said:
“So how do we find out if Chandler possesses this receptor?”
Logan looked at Naz as if he’d forgotten she was in the room.
“We take a little road trip,” Logan said. “It’s time you two met LSD’s fairy godfather.”
Mount Vernon, VA
November 1, 1963
Melchior sat in the front seat of the battered Chevy he’d pulled from the garage beneath the Adams Morgan apartment. A hand-me-down from the Wiz, who’d driven it for half a dozen years, then passed it to his eldest son, then his youngest, then handed off what was left—rust held together by paint and prayers—to Melchior. You had to hand it to the good folks at General Motors: Melchior had hooked up the battery, and the jalopy started right up.
The radio was on. The speaker spat out angry white and defiant black voices calling one another names—nigger, redneck—in Bum Fuck, Alabama, or Shit Hole, Mississippi, the insults and epithets interrupted by hopeful or sentimental or otherwise naively wishful songs: “One Fine Day,” “Be My Baby,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” along with the indecipherable but infectious “Louie Louie.”
Outside the window, a big white house sat on the far side of a wide lawn. Picket fence, towering beeches, four Doric columns holding up the porch: the Wiz hadn’t missed a detail in his colonial fantasia. Revolutions had been planned behind those paneled doors, assassinations, infiltrations, arms sales to ex-Nazis and Muslim extremists, yet it was hard to imagine anything more coming through them than a smartly dressed housewife with her arms around a pair of well-coifed children, the beaming face of a Negro maid looking over their shoulders.
Something was coming through the door now. Something as far from that dream of domestic bliss as it was from the equally unreal world of international espionage and covert ops.
Melchior could only look at it in bits and pieces. A bathrobe. A cane. Licks of gray hair sticking out like antennas from a mostly bald head. The Negro servant was there, though. A man, not a woman, guiding the shaking figure like a parent teaching a toddler to walk. A toddler with a bottle of bourbon in his right hand and a dark patch in the middle of his half-open robe. Melchior had photographed the bodies of thirteen schoolchildren killed by an errant rocket in the mountains of rural Guatemala, had picked up the pieces of a Company agent after the man walked by a Saigon cafe just as a shrapnel bomb went off, but he couldn’t look at the Wiz. Not like this.