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.