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.