Shafer hoisted up four-year-old twins Tricia and Erica, one in each arm. Two mirror images of their mother. He’d have sold the twins for the price of a postage stamp. He hugged the girls and laughed like the good papa he always pretended to be.

Then he formally shook twelve-year-old Robert’s hand. The debate being waged in the house was over whether Robert should be sent back to England for boarding school, perhaps to Winchester, where his grandfather had gone. Shafer gave his son a crisp military salute. Once upon a time, Colonel Geoffrey Shafer had been a soldier. Only Robert seemed to remember that part of his father’s life now.

“I’m only going away to London for a few days, and this is work, not a holiday. I’m not planning to spend my nights at the Athenaeum or anything like that,” he told his family. He was smiling jovially, the way they expected him to be.

“Try to have some fun while you’re away, Dad. Have some laughs. God knows, you deserve it,” Robert said, talking in the lower-octave man-to-man’s voice that he seemed to be adopting lately.

“Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy,” the twins chorused shrilly, making Shafer want to throw them against the walls.

“Bye, Erica-san. Bye, Tricia-san.”

“Remember Orc’s Nest,” Robert said with sudden urgency. “Dragon and The Duelist.” Orc’s Nest was a store that sold role-playing books and gaming equipment. It was located on Earlham, just off Cambridge Circus in London. Dragon and The Duelist were currently the two hot-shit British magazines covering role-playing games.

Unfortunately for Robert, Shafer wasn’t actually going to London. He had a much better plan for the weekend. He was going to play his fantasy game right here in Washington.

Chapter 4

HE SPED DUE EAST, rather than toward Washington’s Dulles Airport, feeling as if a tremendously burdensome weight had been lifted. God, he hated his perfect English family, and even more, their claustrophobic life here in America.