“I told you, he’s slick. He is. People say he looks like the young Muhammad Ali. I think he likes to play the part sometimes: dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” She laughed again — and so did he.

“We’re going to nail Cross,” Pittman said. “We’ll send him flying back to private practice. Wait and see. You’re going to help get it done. You get things done. Right, Detective Hampton? You see the bigger picture. That’s what I like about you.”

She smiled again. “That’s what I like about me, too.”

Chapter 16

THE BRITISH EMBASSY is a plain, Federal-style building located at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue. Its immediate neighbors are the vice president’s house and the Observatory. The ambassador’s residence is a stately Georgian building with tall, flowing white columns; the Chancery is the actual office building.

Geoffrey Shafer sat behind his small mahogany desk at the embassy and stared out onto Massachusetts Avenue. The embassy staff currently counted 415 people — soon to be cut to 414, he was thinking to himself. The staff included defense experts, foreign-policy specialists, trade, public affairs, clerks, and secretaries.

Although the United States and Britain have an agreement not to spy on each other, Geoffrey Shafer was nonetheless a spy. He was one of eleven men and women from the Security Service, formerly known as MI6, who worked at the embassy in Washington. These eleven in turn ran agents attached to the consulates general in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

He was feeling restless as hell today, getting up from his desk frequently, pacing back and forth across the carpet that covered the creaking parquet floors. He made phone calls he didn’t need to make, tried to get some work done, thought about how much he despised his job and the everyday details of life.

He was supposed to be working on a truly silly communiqué about the government’s absurd ongoing commitment to human rights. The foreign secretary had rather bombastically proclaimed that Britain would support the international condemnation of regimes that violate human rights; support international bodies involved in the cause; and denounce human-rights abuses, blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam.

He glanced through a few of the computer games he enjoyed when he was uptight like this — Riven, MechCommander, Unreal, TOCA, Ultimate Soccer Manager. None of them appealed to him right now; nothing did.

He was starting to crash, and he knew the feeling. I’m going down, and there is only one certain way to stop it: play the Four Horsemen.

To make matters worse, it was raining and woefully grayskied outside. The city of Washington, and also the surrounding countryside, looked forlorn and depressing. It sucked. Christ, he was in a bad mood, even for him.