Pop Goes the Weasel

by James Patterson

  “I have diplomatic immunity,” he said aloud, and smiled as he climbed into his Jag.

  Book Five

  ENDGAME

  Chapter 102

  SHAFER COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. He had made a very serious and perhaps irreversible mistake. The result wasn’t what he had expected, and now his whole world seemed to be falling apart. At times he thought it couldn’t have been any worse had he gone to prison for the cold-blooded murder of Patsy Hampton.

  Shafer knew that he wasn’t just being paranoid or mad. Several of the pathetic wankers inside the embassy watched him every bloody time he stepped out of his office. They seemed to resent and openly despise him, especially the women. Who had turned them against him? Somebody surely was responsible.

  He was the white, English O. J. Simpson. A weird, off-color joke to them. Guilty though proven innocent.

  So Shafer mostly stayed inside his office with the door closed, sometimes locked. He performed his few remaining duties with a growing sense of irritation and frustration, and a sense of the absurd. It was driving him mad to be trapped like this, to be a pathetic spectacle for the embassy staff.

  He idly played with his computer and waited for the game of the Four Horsemen to resume, but the other players had cut him off. They insisted that it was too dangerous to play, even to communicate, and not one of them understood why this was the perfect time to play.

  Shafer stared out onto Massachusetts Avenue for interminably long stretches during the day. He listened to call-in talk shows on the radio. He was getting angrier and angrier. He needed to play.

  Someone was knocking on the door of his office. He turned his head sharply and felt a spike of pain in the back of his neck. The phone had begun to ring. He picked up and heard the temp he’d been assigned. Ms. Wynne Hamerman was on the intercom.

  “Mr. Andrew Jones is here to see you,” she said.

  Andrew Jones? Shafer was shocked. Jones was a hot-shit director from the Security Service in London. Shafer hadn’t known he was in Washington. What the hell was this visit about? Andrew Jones was a high-level, very tough prick who wouldn’t just drop by for tea and biscuits. Mustn’t keep him waiting too long.

  Jones was standing there, and he looked impatient, almost furious. What was this about? His steely blue eyes were cold and hard; his face was as rigid as that of an English soldier posted in Belfast. In contrast, his brilliant red hair and mustache made him look benign, almost jolly. He was called Andrew the Red back in London.

  “Let’s go inside your office, shall we? Shut the door behind you,” Jones said in a low but commanding voice.

  Shafer was just getting past his initial surprise, but he was also starting to lose it. Who did this pompous asshole think he was to come barging into his office like this? By what right was he here? How dare he? The toad! The glorified lackey from London.

  “You can sit down, Shafer,” Jones said. Another imperious command. “I’ll be brief and to the point.”

  “Of course,” Shafer answered. He remained standing. “Please do be brief and get to the point. I’m sure we’re both busy.”

  Jones lit up a cigarette, took a long puff, then let the smoke out slowly.

  “That’s illegal here in Washington,” Shafer goaded him.

  “You’ll receive orders to return to England in thirty days’ time,” said Jones as he continued to puff on his cigarette. “You’re an embarrassment here in Washington, as you will be in London. Of course, over there the tabloids have recreated you as a martyr of the brutal and inefficient American police and judicial systems. They like to think of this as ‘D.C. Confidential,’ more evidence of wholesale corruption and naïveté in the States. Which we both know, in this case, is complete crap.”

  Shafer sneered. “How dare you come in here and talk to me like this, Jones? I was framed for a heinous crime I didn’t commit. I was acquitted by an American jury. Have you forgotten that?”

  Jones frowned and stared him down. “Only because crucial evidence wasn’t allowed in the trial. The blood on your trousers? That poor woman’s blood in the bathroom drain at your mistress’s?” He blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “We know everything, you pathetic fool. We know you’re a stonecold killing freak. So you’ll go back to London and stay there—until we catch you at something. Which we will, Shafer. We’ll make something up if we have to.

  “I feel sick to my stomach just being in the same room with you. Legally, you’ve escaped punishment this time, but we’re watching you so very closely now. We will get you somewhere, and someday soon.”

  Shafer looked amused. He couldn’t hold back a smile. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t resist the play. “You can try, you insufferable, sanctimonious shit. You can certainly try. But get in line. And now, if you please, I have work to do.”

  Andrew Jones shook his head. “Well, actually, you don’t have any work to do, Shafer. But I am happy to leave. The stench in here is absolutely overpowering. When was the last time you bathed?” He laughed contemptuously. “Christ, you’ve completely lost it.”

  Chapter 103

  THAT AFTERNOON, I met with Jones and three of his agents at the Willard Hotel, near the White House. I had called the meeting. Sampson was there, too. He’d been reinstated in the department, but that didn’t stop him from doing what had originally gotten him into trouble.

  “I believe he’s crazy,” Jones said of Shafer. “He smells like a commode at boot camp. He’s definitely going down for the count. What’s your take on his mental state?”

  I knew Geoffrey Shafer inside and out by now. I’d read about his family: his brothers, his long-suffering mother, his domineering father. Their travels from military base to military base until he was twelve. “Here’s what I think. It started with a serious bipolar disorder, what used to be called manic depression. He had it when he was a kid. Now he’s strung out on pharmaceutical drugs: Xanax, Benadryl, Haldol, Ativan, Valium, Librium, several others. It’s quite a cocktail. Available from local doctors for the right price. I’m surprised he can function at all. But he survives. He doesn’t go down. He always wins.”

  “I told Geoff he has to leave Washington. How do you think he’ll take it?” Jones asked me. “I swear his office smelled as if a dead body had been festering there for a couple of days.”

  “Actually, his disorder can involve an accompanying odor, but it’s usually steely, like metal—very pungent, sticks to your nostrils. He probably isn’t bathing. But his instincts for playing the game, for winning and surviving, are amazing,” I said. “He won’t stop.”

  “What’s happening with the other players?” Sampson inquired. “The so-called Horsemen?”

  “They claim that the game is over, and that it was only a fantasy game for them,” Jones told him. “Oliver Highsmith stays in touch, mostly to keep tabs on us, I’m sure. He’s actually a scary bastard in his own right. Says he’s saddened by the murder of Detective Hampton. He’s still not a hundred percent sure that Shafer is the killer. Urges me to keep my mind open on that one.”

  “Is your mind open on it?” I asked, looking around the room at the others.

  Jones didn’t hesitate. “I have no doubt that Geoffrey Shafer is a multiple murderer. We’ve seen enough and heard enough from you. He is quite possibly a homicidal maniac beyond anything we’ve ever known. And I also have no doubt that eventually he’s going down.”

  I nodded my head. “I agree,” I said, “with everything you just said. But especially the homicidal-maniac part.”

  Chapter 104

  SHAFER WAS TALKING TO HIMSELF again that night. He couldn’t help it, and the more he tried to stop, the worse it became; the more he fretted, the more he talked to himself.

  “They can all bugger off—Jones, Cross, Lucy and the kids, Boo Cassady the other spineless players. Screw them all. There was a reason behind the Four Horsemen. It wasn’t just a game. There was more to it than simple horseplay.”

  The house at Kalorama was empty, much too
quiet at night. It was huge and ridiculous as only an American house can be. The “original” architectural detail, the double living room, the six fireplaces, the long-ago dead flowers from Aster florist, the unread books in gold and brown leather bindings, Lucy’s marmite. It was driving him up the twelve-foot-high walls.

  He spent the next hour or so trying to convince himself that he wasn’t crazy—more specifically, that he wasn’t an addict. Recently, he’d added another doctor in Maryland to his sources for the drugs. Unfortunately, the illegal prescriptions cost him a fortune. He couldn’t keep it up forever. The lithium and Haldol were to control his mood swings, which were very real. The Thorazine was for acute anxiety, which was fucking bloody real as well. The Narcan had also been prescribed for his mood swings. The multiple injections of Loradol were for something else, some pain from he couldn’t remember when. He knew there were good reasons, too, for the Xanax, the Compazine, the Benadryl.

  Lucy had already fled home to London, and she’d taken the traitorous children with her. They’d left exactly one week after the trial ended. Her father was the real cause. He’d come to Washington and spoken to Lucy for less than an hour, and she’d packed up and left like the Goody Two-shoes she’d always been. Before she departed, Lucy had the nerve to tell Shafer she’d stood by him for the sake of the children and her father, but now her “duty” was over. She didn’t believe he was a murderer, as her father did, but she knew he was an adulterer, and that, she couldn’t take for one moment longer.

  God, how he despised his little wifey. Before Lucy left, he made it clear to her that the real reason she’d performed her “duty” was so he wouldn’t reveal her unsavory drug habit to the press, which he would have done and still might do, anyway.

  At eleven o’clock he had to go out for a drive, his nightly “constitutional.” He was feeling unbearably jittery and claustrophobic. He wondered if he could control himself for another night, another minute. His skin was crawling, and he had dozens of irritating little tics. He couldn’t stop tapping his goddamn foot!

  The dice were burning a bloody hole in his trouser pocket. His mind was racing in a dozen haphazard directions, all of them very bad. He wanted to, needed to, kill somebody. It had been this way with him for a long time, and that had been his dirty little secret. The other Horsemen knew the story; they even knew how it had begun. Shafer had been a decent English soldier, but ultimately too ambitious to remain in the army. He had transferred into MI6 with the help of Lucy’s father. He thought there would be more room for advancement in MI6.

  His first posting was Bangkok, which was where he met James Whitehead, George Bayer, and eventually Oliver Highsmith. Whitehead and Bayer spent several weeks working on Shafer, recruiting him for a specialized job: he would be an assassin, their own personal hit man for the worst sort of wet work. Over the next two years, he did three sanctions in Asia, and found that he truly loved the feeling of power that killing gave him. Oliver Highsmith, who ran both Bayer and Whitehead from London, once told him to depersonalize the act, to think of it as a game, and that was what he did. He had never stopped being an assassin.

  Shafer turned on the CD in the Jag. Loud, to drown out the multiple voices raging in his head. The old-age-home rockers Jimmy Page and Robert Plant began a duet inside the cockpit of his car.

  He backed out of the drive and headed down Tracy Place. He gunned the car and had it up close to sixty in the block between his house and Twenty-fourth Street. Time for another suicidal drive? he wondered.

  Red lights flashed on the side of Twenty-fourth Street. Shafer cursed as a D.C. police patrol car eased down the street toward him. Goddamn it!

  He pulled the Jag over to the curb and waited. His brain was screaming. “Assholes. Bloody impertinent assholes! And you’re an asshole, too!” he told himself in a loud whisper. “Show some self-control, Geoff. Get yourself under control. Shape up. Right now!”

  The Metro patrol car pulled up behind him, almost door to door. He could see two cops lurking inside.

  One of them got out slowly and walked over to the Jag’s driver’s-side window. The cop swaggered like a hot-shit all-American cinema hero. Shafer wanted to blow him away. Knew he could do it. He had a hot semiautomatic under the seat. He touched the grip, and God, it felt good.

  “License and registration, sir,” the cop said, looking unbearably smug. A distorted voice inside Shafer’s head screeched, Shoot him now. It will blow everybody’s mind if you kill another policeman.

  He handed over the requested identification, though, and managed a wanker’s sheepish grin. “We’re out of Pampers at home. Trip to the Seven-Eleven was in order. I know I was going too fast, and I’m sorry, Officer. Blame it on baby-brain. You have any kids?”

  The patrolman didn’t say a word; not an ounce of civility in the prick. He wrote out a speeding ticket. Took his sweet time about it.

  “There you go, Mr. Shafer.” The patrol officer handed him the speeding ticket and said, “Oh, and by the way, we’re watching you, shithead. We’re all over you, man. You didn’t get away with murdering Patsy Hampton. You just think you did.”

  A set of car lights blinked on and off, on and off, on the side street where the patrol car had been sitting a few moments earlier.

  Shafer stared, squinted back into the darkness. He recognized the car, a black Porsche.

  Cross was there, watching. Alex Cross wouldn’t go away.

  Chapter 105

  ANDREW JONES SAT NEXT TO ME in the quiet, semi-darkened cockpit of the Porsche. We’d been working closely together for almost two weeks. Jones and the Security Service were intent on stopping Shafer before he committed another murder. They were also tracking War, Famine, and Conqueror.

  We watched silently as Geoffrey Shafer slowly turned the Jaguar around and drove back toward his house.

  “He saw us. He knows my car,” I said. “Good.”

  I couldn’t see Shafer’s face in the darkness, but I could almost feel the heat rising from the top of his head. I knew he was crazed. The words “homicidal maniac” kept drifting through my mind. Jones and I were looking at one, and he was still running free. He’d already gotten away with one murder—several murders.

  “Alex, aren’t you concerned about possibly putting him into a rage state?” Jones asked as the Jaguar eased to a stop in front of the Georgian-style house. There were no lights on in the driveway area, so we wouldn’t be able to see Geoffrey Shafer for the next few seconds. We couldn’t tell if he’d gone inside.

  “He’s already in a rage state. He’s lost his job, his wife, the children, the game he lives for. Worst of all, his freedom to come and go has been curtailed. Shafer doesn’t like having limitations put on him, hates to be boxed in. He can’t stand to lose.”

  “So you think he’ll do something rash.”

  “Not rash, he’s too clever. But he’ll make a move. It’s how the game is played.”

  “And then we’ll mess with his head yet again?”

  “Yes, we will. Absolutely.”

  Late that night, as I was driving home, I decided to stop at St. Anthony’s. The church is unusual in this day and age in that it’s open at night. Monsignor John Kelliher believes that’s the way it should be, and he’s willing to live with the vandalism and the petty theft. Mostly, though, the people in the neighborhood watch over St. Anthony’s.

  A couple of worshipers were inside the candlelit church when I entered, around midnight. There are usually a few “parishioners” inside. Homeless people aren’t allowed to sleep there, but they wander in and out all through the night.

  I sat watching the familiar red votive lamps flicker and blink. I sucked in the thick smell of incense from Benediction. I stared up at the large gold-plated crucifix and the beautiful stained-glass windows that I’ve loved since I was a boy.

  I lit a candle for Christine, and I hoped that somehow, someway, she might still be alive. It didn’t seem likely. My memory of her was fading a little bit, and I hated that. A
column of pain went from my stomach to my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. It has been this way since the night she’d disappeared, almost a year ago.

  And then, for the first time, I admitted to myself that she was gone. I would never see her again. The thought caught like a shard of glass in my throat. Tears welled in my eyes. “I love you,” I whispered to no one. “I love you so much, and I miss you terribly.”

  I said a few more prayers, then I finally rose from the long wooden pew and silently made my way toward the doors of the vestibule. I didn’t see the woman crouching in a side row. She startled me with a sudden movement.

  I recognized her from the soup kitchen. Her name was Magnolia. That was all I knew about her, just an odd first name, maybe a made-up one. She called out to me in a loud voice, “Hey Peanut Butter Man, now you know what it’s like.”

  Chapter 106

  JONES AND SANDY GREENBERG from Interpol had helped get the other three Horsemen under surveillance. The net being cast was large, as the catch could be if we succeeded.

  The huge potential scandal in England was being carefully watched and monitored by the Security Service. If four English agents turned out to be murderers involved in a bizarre “game,” the fallout would be widespread and devastating for the intelligence community.

  Shafer dutifully went to the embassy on Wednesday and Thursday. He arrived just before nine and left promptly at five. Once inside, he stayed out of sight in his small office, not even venturing out for lunch. He spent hours on America Online, which we monitored.

  Both days, he wore the same gray slacks and a double-breasted blue blazer. His clothes were uncharacteristically wrinkled and unkempt. His thick blond hair was combed back; it looked dirty and greasy, and resisted the high winds flowing through Washington. He looked pale, seemed nervous and fidgety.