“Don’t be horrible. Of course I’ve taken my medications. I am rushed. I am high. On the ceiling, as a matter of fact. I’m calling between blasted staff meetings. Oh hell, I miss you, Boo. I want to be inside you, deep inside. I want to do your pussy, your ass, your throat. I’m thinking about it right now. Christ, I’m as hard as a rock here in my government-issue office. Have to beat it down with a stick. Cane it. That’s how we British handle such things.”

She laughed, and he almost changed his mind about standing her up. “Go back to work. I’ll be at home, if you finish early,” she said. “I could use a little finishing myself.”

“I love you, Boo. You’re so kind to me.”

“I am, and I could probably get into a little caning, too.”

He hung up and drove to the hideaway in Eckington. He parked the Jag next to the purple and blue taxi in the garage. He bounded upstairs to change for the game. God, he loved this, his secret life, his nights away from everything and everyone he loathed.

He was taking too many chances now, but he didn’t care.

Chapter 21

SHAFER WAS TOTALLY PUMPED UP for a night on the town. The Four Horsemen was on. Anything could happen tonight. Yet he found that he was introspective and pensive. He could flip from manic to depressive in the blink of an eye.

He watched himself as if he were an observer in a dream. He had been an English intelligence agent, but now that the Cold War had ended, there was little use for his talents. It was only the influence of Lucy’s father that had kept him in his job. Duncan Cousins had been a general in the army and now was chairman of a packaged-goods conglomerate specializing in the sale of detergents, soaps, and drugstore perfumes. He liked to call Shafer “the Colonel,” rubbing in his “rise to mediocrity.” The General also loved to talk about the glowing successes of Shafer’s two brothers, both of whom had made millions in business.

Shafer shifted his thoughts back to the present. He was doing that a lot lately, fading in and out like a radio with a bad connection. He took a settling breath, then pulled the taxi out of the garage. Moments later, he turned onto Rhode Island Avenue. It was beginning to rain again, a light mist that made the passing traffic lights blurry and impressionistic.

Shafer drifted over to the curb and stopped for a tall, slender black man. He looked like a drug dealer, something Shafer had no use for. Maybe he would just shoot the bastard, then dump the body. That felt good enough for tonight’s action. A sleazebag dope dealer whom nobody would miss.