Pop Goes the Weasel

to sweat. He was feeling manic again. Playing the game had made him too excited.
    Shafer held his head for a moment. He wanted to laugh and scream at the top of his lungs. He leaned against a wooden post on the path leading up from the beach, and tried to catch his breath. He knew he was crashing, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
    “Everything all right, sir?” a hotel waiter stopped to ask him.
    “Oh, couldn’t be better,” Shafer said, waving the man away. “I’m in heaven, can’t you tell?”
    He started walking toward the White Suite again. He realized that he was feeling the same way he had that morning last year when he nearly crashed his car in Washington. He was in serious trouble again. He could lose the game right now, lose everything. That required a change of strategy, didn’t it? He had to be more daring, even more aggressive. He had to act, not think too much. The odds against him were still two to one.
    At the far end of the courtyard, he spotted a man and a woman in evening clothes. They were loitering near a white stucco portico strewn with flowers. He decided they were Jones’s people. They had staked out the hotel, after all. They were here for him, and he was honored.
    The man glanced his way, and Shafer abruptly lowered his head. There was nothing they could do to stop or detain him. He’d committed no crime they could prove. He wasn’t wanted by the police. No, he was a free man.
    So Shafer walked toward them at a leisurely pace, as if he hadn’t seen them. He whistled “Yellowbird.”
    He looked up when he was a few yards away from the pair. “I’m the one you’re waiting for. I’m Geoffrey Shafer. Welcome to the game.”
    He pulled out his Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semi-automatic and fired twice.
    The woman cried out and grabbed the left side of her chest. Bright-red blood was already staining her sea-green dress. Her eyes showed confusion and shock before rolling back into her forehead.
    The male agent had a dark hole where his left eye had been. Shafer knew the man was dead even before his head struck the courtyard floor with a loud, satisfying smack.
    He hadn’t lost anything over the years. Shafer hurried toward the White Suite and Conqueror.
    The gunshots certainly would have been heard. They wouldn’t expect him to run straight into the trap they’d set. But here he was.
    Two maids were pushing a squeaking cleanup cart out of the White Suite. Had they just turned down Conqueror’s bed? Left the fat man a box of chocolate mints to nibble?
    “Get the hell out of here!” he yelled, and raised his gun. “Go on, now! Run for your lives!” The Jamaican maids took off as if they had just seen the devil himself, and later they would tell their children they had.
    Shafer burst in the front door of the suite, and there was Oliver Highsmith freewheeling his chair across the freshly scrubbed floor.
    “Oliver, it’s you,” Shafer said. “I do believe I’ve caught the dreaded Covent Garden killer. You did those killings, didn’t you? Fancy that. Game’s over, Oliver.”
    At the same time, Shafer thought, Watch him closely. Be careful with Conqueror .
    Oliver Highsmith stopped moving, then slowly but rather nimbly turned his wheelchair to face Shafer. A face-to-face meeting. This was good. The best. Highsmith had controlled Bayer and Whitehead from London when they were all agents. The original game, the Four Horsemen, had been his idea, a diversion as he eased into retirement. “Our silly little fantasy game,” he always called it.
    He studied Shafer, cold-eyed and measuring. He was bright — an egghead, but a genius, or so Bayer and Whitehead claimed.
    “My dear fellow, we’re your friends. The only ones you have now. We understand your problem. Let’s talk things through, Geoffrey.”
    Shafer laughed at the fat man’s pathetic lies, his superior and condescending attitude, his nerve. “That’s not what Georgie Bayer told me. Why, he said you were going to murder me! Hell of a way to treat a friend.”
    Highsmith didn’t blink, didn’t falter. “We’re not alone here, Geoff. They’re at the hotel. The Security Service team is on the grounds. They must have followed you.”
    “And you , and Bayer , and Whitehead! I know all that, Oliver. I met a couple of crackerjack agents down the hall. Shot ’em dead. That’s why I have to hurry up, can’t tarry. The game’s on a clock now. Lots of ways to lose.”
    “We have to talk,