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

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.