Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

He stayed behind in the court law library and firmed up book-deal details with Jules Halpern and representatives from the Bertelsmann Group, now the most powerful book-publishing conglomerate in the world. He had assured them that they would get his story, but of course they weren’t going to get anything close to the truth. Wasn’t that the way with the so-called tell-all, bare-all nonfiction published these days? The Bertelsmann people knew this, and still they’d paid him dearly.

After the meeting, he took the slow-riding lift down to the court’s indoor car park. He was still feeling incredibly high, which could be dangerous. A set of twenty-sided dice was burning a hole in the pocket of his suit trousers.

He desperately wanted to play the game. Now! The Four Horsemen. Or better yet, Solipsis—his version of the game. He wouldn’t give in to that urge, though, not yet. It was too dangerous, even for him.

Since the beginning of the trial, he had been parking the Jaguar in the same spot; he did have his patterns, after all. He’d never bothered to put coins in the meter, not once. Every day there was a pile of five-dollar tickets under the windshield wiper.

Today was no exception.

He grabbed the absurd parking tickets off the windshield and crumpled them into a ball in his fist. Then he dropped the wad of paper onto the oil-stained concrete floor.

“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.”