Patterson, James - Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel

'I told Geoff he has to leave Washington. How do you think he'll take it?' Jones asked. '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. Oliver Highsmith stays in touch, 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 seen. And I also have no doubt that eventually he's going down.'

I nodded my head. 'I agree,' I said, 'about everything you just said. But especially the homicidal maniac part.'

?CHAPTER One Hundred and Four

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, he knew. 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, six fireplaces, long-ago-dead flowers, unread books in gold and brown leather binding, 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; 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. Thorazine was for acute anxiety, which was fucking bloody real as well. 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 for the Xanax, Com-pazine, 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, 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 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 habits to the press, which he would have, and 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 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 was more room for advancement in MI6.

His first posting had been Bangkok, which was where he met James Whitehead, George Bayer, and eventually Oliver Highsmith. Whitehead and Bayer spent several weeks working on him, recruiting Shafer 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 DC police patrol car eased down the street toward him. God damn 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-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 7-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 bastard. 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. '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 One Hundred and Five

Andrew Jones sat in the quiet, semi-darkened front seat of the Porsche with me. 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.'