Pop Goes the Weasel (26 page)

“Colonel Shafer, as you will hear, is a valued and decorated member of the British intelligence community. He is a former
soldier with a fine record.

“Colonel Shafer was clearly set up for this murder charge because the Washington police
needed
this terrible crime to be solved. This I will prove to you, and you will have no doubt of it. Mr. Shafer was framed because
a particular homicide detective was going through some bad personal times and lost control of the situation.

“Finally—and this is the most essential thing for you to remember—Colonel Shafer
wants
to be here. He isn’t here because he has to be; he has diplomatic immunity. Geoffrey Shafer is here to clear his good name.”

Shafer nearly stood up in the courtroom and cheered.

I PURPOSELY, and probably wisely, skipped the first day, then the second and the third day, of the courtroom circus. I didn’t
want to face the world press, or the public, any more than I had to. I felt like I was on trial, too.

A cold-blooded murderer was on trial, but the investigation continued more feverishly than ever for me. I still had the Jane
Does to solve, and the disappearance of Christine, if I could open up any new leads. I wanted to make certain that Shafer
would not walk away a free man, and most important, I desperately wanted finally to know the truth about Christine’s disappearance.
I had to know. My greatest frustration was that because of the diplomatic shenanigans, I had never gotten to question Shafer.
I would have given anything for a few hours with him.

I turned the southern end of our attic into a war room. There was an excess of unused space up there, anyway. I moved an old
mahogany dining table out from the shadows. I rewired an ancient window fan, which made the attic space almost bearable most
days—especially early in the morning and late in the evening, when I did my best work up there—in my hermitage.

I set up my laptop on the table, and I pinned different-colored index cards to the walls, to keep what I considered the most
important pieces of the case before me at all times. Inside several bulky and misshapen cardboard boxes, I had all the rest
of it: every scrap of evidence on Christine’s abduction, and everything I could find on the Jane Does.

The murder cases formed a maddening puzzle created over several years, one that was not given to easy solutions. I was trying
to play a complex game against a skillful opponent, but I didn’t know the rules of his game, or how it was played. That was
Shafer’s unfair advantage.

I had found some useful notes in Patsy Hampton’s detective logs, and they led me to interview the teenage boy, Michael Ormson,
who’d chatted on-line with Shafer about the Four Horsemen. I continued to work closely with Chuck Hufstedler of the FBI. Chuck
felt guilty about giving Patsy Hampton the original lead, especially since I’d come to him first. I used his guilt.

Both the Bureau and Interpol were doing an active search of the game on the Internet. I’d visited countless chatrooms myself,
but had encountered no one, other than young Ormson, who was aware of the mysterious game. It was only because Shafer had
taken a chance and gone into the chatroom that he’d been discovered. I wondered what other chances he’d taken.

Following Shafer’s arrest at the Farragut, we did a little search on his Jaguar, and I’d also spent nearly an hour at his
home—before his lawyers knew I was there. I spoke to his wife, Lucy, and his son, Robert, who confirmed that he played a
game called the Four Horsemen. He had been playing for seven or eight years.

Neither the wife nor the son knew any of the other players, or anything about them. They didn’t believe that Geoffrey Shafer
had done anything wrong.

The son called his father the “straight arrow of straight arrows.” Lucy Shafer called him a good man, and she seemed to believe
it.

I found role-playing game magazines as well as dozens of sets of game dice in Shafer’s den, but no other physical evidence
relating to his game. Shafer was careful; he covered his tracks well. He was in intelligence, after all. I couldn’t imagine
him throwing dice to select his victims, but maybe that helped to account for the irregular pattern of the Jane Does.

His attorney Jules Halpern complained loudly and vigorously about the invasion of Shafer’s home, and had I uncovered any useful
evidence, it would certainly have been suppressed. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time, and Shafer was too clever to
keep anything incriminating in his house, anyway. He’d made one big mistake; he wasn’t likely to make another. Was he?

Sometimes, very late at night, as I worked in the attic, I would stop for a while and remember something about Christine.
The memories were painful and sad, but also soothing to me. I began to look forward to these times when I could think about
her without any interruption. Some nights, I would wander down to the piano in the sun porch and play songs that had been
important to us—“Unforgettable,” “Moonglow,” “’S Wonderful.” I could still remember how she’d looked, especially when I
visited at her place—faded jeans, bare feet, T-shirt or maybe her favorite yellow crewneck sweater, a tortoiseshell comb
in her long hair that always smelled of shampoo.

I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself, but I just couldn’t help feeling miserably bad. I was caught in limbo, not knowing
one way or the other what had really happened to Christine. I couldn’t let her go.

It was paralyzing me, crippling me, making me feel so damn sad and empty. I knew I needed to move on with my life, but I couldn’t
do it. I needed answers, at least a few of them.
Is Christine part of the game?
I kept wondering. I was obsessed with the game.

Am
I
part of it?

I believed I was. And in a way, I hoped she was, too. It was my only hope that she might still be alive.

AND SO I FOUND MYSELF a player in a truly bizarre game that was habit-forming for all the wrong reasons. I began to make up
my own rules. I brought in new players. I was in this game to win.

Chuck Hufstedler from the FBI offices in D.C. continued to be helpful. The more I talked to him, the more I realized that
he’d had a serious crush on Detective Hampton. His loss, and mine with Christine, united us.

I climbed up to the attic late Friday night after watching
The Mask of Zorro
with Damon, Jannie, Nana, and Rosie the cat. I had a few more facts to check before going to bed.

I booted up the computer, logged on, and heard the familiar message:
You have mail
. Ever since that night in Bermuda, those words had given me a terrible fright, a chill that tightened my body from head to
toe.

Sandy Greenberg from Interpol was replying to one of my e-mails. She and I had worked together on the Mr. Smith case and had
become friends. I’d asked her to check on several things for me.

I called Sandy in Europe, and she picked up after the second ring. “Alex? I think we’ve found one of them. It was your bloody
idea that worked. Shafer was playing a game with at least one of his old cronies from MI-Six. You were spot on.”

“Are you sure it’s one of the game players?” I asked her.

“Pretty sure,” she shot back. “I’m sitting here now staring at a copy of Dürer’s
Four Horsemen
, on my Mac. As you know, the Horsemen are Conqueror, Famine, War, and Death. What a creepy bunch. Anyway, I did what you
asked. I talked to some contacts from MI-Six, who found out that Shafer and this one chap regularly keep in touch on the computer.
I have all your notes, too, and they’re very good. I can’t believe how much you figured out from back there in the colonies.
You’re a very sick puppy, too.”

“Thanks,” I said. I let Sandy ramble on for a few minutes. A while back I’d recognized that she was a lonely person, and that
even though she sometimes put up a cantankerous front, she craved company.

“The name this chap uses in the game is Conqueror. Conqueror lives in Dorking, Surrey, in England,” Sandy told me. “His name
is Oliver Highsmith, and he’s retired from MI-Six. Alex, he was running several agents in Asia at the same time Shafer was
there. Shafer worked under him. It’s eight in the morning over here.
Why don’t you call the bastard?
” Sandy suggested. “Or send him an e-mail. I have an address for him, Alex.”

I started to wonder about the other players in the Four Horsemen game. Were there really four of them, or was that just the
name of the game? Who were these players? How was the game actually played? Did all, or indeed any, of them act out their
fantasies in real life?

My message to Conqueror was simple and straightforward and not too threatening, I hoped. I didn’t see how he could resist
answering me.

I WAS SURPRISED when a message came right back. Oliver Highsmith—Conqueror—must have been on-line when my e-mail went
through.

I read the message, then reread it.
“Much luck in your search?”
Was that as loaded a line as it sounded?

And was I now a player—the fifth Horseman?

I WENT TO COURT EVERY DAY the following week, and like so many other people, I got hooked on the trial. Jules Halpern was
the most impressive orator I had ever watched in a courtroom, but Catherine Fitzgibbon was effective as well. The verdict
would depend on whom the jury believed more. It was all theater, a game. I remembered that as a kid I used to regularly watch
a courtroom drama with Nana, called
The Defenders
. Every show began with a deep-voiced narrator’s saying something to the effect of, “The American justice system is far from
perfect, but it is still the very best justice system in the world.”

That may be true, but as I sat in the courtroom in Washington, I couldn’t help thinking that the murder trial, the judge,
the jury, the lawyers, and all the rules were just another elaborate game, and that Geoffrey Shafer was already planning his
next foray, savoring every move that the prosecution made against him.

He was still in control of the game board. He was the gamemaster. He knew it, and so did I.

I watched Jules Halpern conduct smooth examinations that were designed to give the impression that his monstrous, psychopathic
client was as innocent as a newborn baby. Actually, it was easy to drift off during the lengthy cross-examinations. I never
really missed anything, though, since all the important points were repeated over and over, ad nauseam.

“Alex Cross…”

I heard my name mentioned and refocused my attention on Jules Halpern. He produced a blown-up photograph that had appeared
in the
Post
on the day after the murder. The photo had been taken by another tenant at the Farragut and sold to the newspaper.

Halpern leaned in close to the witness on the stand, a man named Carmine Lopes, a night doorman at the apartment building
where Patsy Hampton had been murdered.

“Mr. Lopes, I show you Defendant’s Exhibit J, a photograph of my client and Detective Alex Cross. It was taken in the tenthfloor
hallway soon after the discovery of Detective Hampton’s body.”

The blowup was large enough for me to see most of the detail from where I was sitting in the fourth row. The photo had always
been a shocker to me.

In it, Shafer looked as if he had just stepped out of the pages of
GQ
. In comparison, my clothes were tattered and dirty. I had just come off my crazy marathon run from the zoo, and I had been
down in the garage with poor Patsy’s body. My fists were clenched tightly, and I seemed to be roaring out anger at Shafer.
Pictures
do
lie. We know that. The photograph was highly inflammatory, and I felt it could instill prejudice in the minds of the jurors.