The Ghost (18 page)

Laboriously, I began entering their names, together with Adam Lang’s, into the search engine. Engler had praised Lang’s steadfast courage on the op-ed page of the
New York Times.
Leghorn had made a hand-wringing speech in the House of Lords, regretting the situation in the Middle East but calling the prime minister “a man of sincerity.” Moberly had suffered a stroke and was saying nothing. Streicher had been vocal in his support at the time Lang flew to Washington to pick up his Presidential Medal of Freedom. I was starting to weary of the whole procedure until I typed in Arthur Prussia. I got a one-year-old press release:

The Hallington Group rang only the faintest of bells, so I looked it up. Six hundred employees; twenty-four worldwide offices; a mere four hundred investors, mainly Saudi; and
thirty-five billion dollars
of funds at its disposal. The portfolio of companies it controlled looked as if it had been drawn up by Darth Vader. Hallington’s subsidiaries manufactured cluster bombs, mobile howitzers, interceptor missiles, tank-busting helicopters, swing-wing bombers, tanks, nuclear centrifuges, aircraft carriers. It owned a company that provided security for contractors in the Middle East, another that carried out surveillance operations and data checks within the United States and worldwide, and a construction company that specialized in building military bunkers and airstrips. Two members of its main board had been senior directors of the CIA.

I know the internet is the stuff a paranoiac’s dreams are made of. I know it parcels up everything—Lee Harvey Oswald, Princess Diana, Opus Dei, Al Qaeda, Israel, MI6, crop circles—and with pretty blue ribbons of hyperlinks it ties them all into a single grand conspiracy. But I also know the wisdom of the old saying that a paranoiac is simply a person in full possession of the facts, and as I typed in “Arcadia Institution” + “Hallington Group” + “CIA,” I sensed that something was starting to emerge, like the lineaments of a ghost ship, out of the fog of data on the screen.

I clicked on the story and scrolled down to the relevant part:

Water boarding? I had never heard of it. It sounded harmless enough, a kind of healthy outdoor sport, a cross between windsurfing and white-water rafting. I looked it up on a website.

There was an illustration, from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, of a man bound by his wrists and ankles to a sloping table, lying on his back, upside down. His head was in a sack. His face was being saturated by a man holding a watering can. In another photograph, a Viet-cong suspect, pinioned to the ground, was being given similar treatment by three GIs using water from a drinking bottle. The soldier pouring the water was grinning. The man sitting on the prisoner’s chest had a cigarette held casually between the second and third fingers of his right hand.

I sat back in my chair and thought of various things. I thought, especially, of Emmett’s comment about McAra’s death—that drowning wasn’t painless but agonizing. It had struck me at the time as an odd thing for a professor to say. Flexing my fingers, like a concert pianist preparing to play a challenging final movement, I typed a fresh request into the search engine: “Paul Emmett” + “CIA.”

Immediately, the screen filled with results, all of them, at first sight, dross: articles and book reviews by Emmett that happened to mention the CIA; articles by others about the CIA that also contained references to Emmett; articles about the Arcadia Institution in which the words “CIA” and “Emmett” had featured. I must have gone through thirty or forty in all, until I came to one which sounded promising.

The web page was headed “Who Did Frank Have in Mind???” and started with a quote from Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee report on the CIA, published in 1976:

Beneath it, in alphabetical order, was a hyperlinked list of about twenty names, among them Emmett’s, and when I clicked on it, I felt as though I had fallen through a trapdoor.

“Oh no,” I said quietly. “No, no. That can’t be right.”

I must have stared at the screen for a full minute, until a sudden crash of breaking crockery snapped me out of my reverie and I looked round to see that one of the kids playing under the nearby table had tipped the whole thing over. As a waitress hurried across with a dustpan and brush, and as the nannies (or mothers) scolded the children, I noticed that the two short-haired men at the counter weren’t taking any notice of this little drama: they were staring hard at me. One had a cell phone to his ear.

Fairly calmly—more calmly, I hoped, than I felt—I turned off the computer and pretended to take a final sip of coffee. The liquid had gone cold while I’d been working and was freezing and bitter on my lips. Then I picked up my suitcase and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Already I was thinking that if something happened to me, the harassed waitress would surely remember the solitary Englishman who took the table farthest from the window and absurdly overtipped. What good this would have done me, I have no idea, but it seemed clever at the time. I made sure I didn’t look at the short-haired pair as I passed them.

Out on the street, in the cold gray light, with the green-canopied Starbucks a few doors down and the slowly passing traffic (“Baby on Board: Please Drive Carefully”) and the elderly pedestrians in their fur hats and gloves, it was briefly possible to imagine that I’d spent the past hour playing some homemade virtual reality game. But then the door of the café opened behind me and the two men came out. I walked briskly up the street toward the Ford, and once I was behind the wheel I locked myself in. When I checked the mirrors I couldn’t see either of my fellow diners.

I didn’t move for a while. It felt safer simply sitting there. I fantasized that perhaps if I stayed put long enough, I could somehow be absorbed by osmosis into the peaceful, prosperous life of Belmont. I could go and do what all these retired folk were bent on doing—playing a hand of bridge, maybe, or watching an afternoon movie, or wandering along to the local library to read the papers and shake their heads at the way the world was all going to hell now that my callow and cosseted generation was in charge of it. I watched the newly coiffed ladies emerge from the salon and lightly pat their hair. The young couple who had been holding hands in the café were inspecting rings in the window of the jeweler.

And I? I experienced a twinge of self-pity. I was as separate from all this normality as if I were in a bubble of glass.

I took out the photographs again and flicked through them until I came to the one of Lang and Emmett onstage together. A future prime minister and an alleged CIA officer, prancing around wearing gloves and hats in a comic revue? It seemed not so much improbable as grotesque, but here was the evidence in my hand. I turned the picture over and considered the number scrawled on the back, and the more I considered it, the more obvious it seemed that there was only one course of action open to me. The fact that I would, once again, be trailing along in the footsteps of McAra could not be helped.

I waited until the young lovers had gone into the jewelry store and then took out my mobile phone. I scrolled down to where the number was stored and called Richard Rycart.

THIS TIME, HE ANSWERED
within a few seconds.

“So you rang back,” he said quietly, in that nasal, singsong voice of his. “Somehow I had a feeling you would, whoever you are. Not many people have this number.” He waited for me to reply. I could hear a man talking in the background—delivering a speech, it sounded like. “Well, my friend, are you going to stay on the line this time?”

“Yes,” I said.

He waited again, but I didn’t know how to begin. I kept thinking of Lang, of what he would think if he could see me talking to his would-be nemesis. I was breaking every rule in the ghosting guidebook. I was in breach of the confidentiality agreement I’d signed with Rhinehart. It was professional suicide.

“I tried to call you back a couple of times,” he continued. I detected a hint of reproach.

Across the street, the young lovers had come out of the jewelry store and were strolling toward me.

“I know,” I said, finding my voice at last. “I’m sorry. I found your number written down somewhere. I didn’t know whose it was. I called it on the off chance. It didn’t seem right to be talking to you.”

“Why not?”

The couple passed by. I followed their progress in the mirror. They had their hands in one another’s back pockets, like pickpockets on a blind date.

I took the plunge. “I’m working for Adam Lang. I—”

“Don’t tell me your name,” he said quickly. “Don’t use any names. Keep everything nonspecific. Where exactly did you find my number?”

His urgency unnerved me.

“On the back of a photograph.”

“What sort of photograph?”

“Of my client’s days at university. My predecessor had it.”

“Did he, by God?” Now it was Rycart’s turn to pause. I could hear people clapping at the other end of the line.

“You sound shocked,” I said.

“Yes, well, it ties in with something he said to me.”

“I’ve been to see one of the people in the photograph. I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Why don’t you talk to your employer?”

“He’s away.”

“Of course he is.” He had a satisfied smile in his voice. “And where are you? Without being too specific?”

“In New England.”

“Can you get to the city where I am, right away? You know where I am, I take it? Where I work?”

“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully. “I have a car. I could drive.”

“No, don’t drive. Flying’s safer than the roads.”

“That’s what the airlines say.”

“Listen, my friend,” whispered Rycart fiercely, “if I was in your position, I wouldn’t joke. Go to the nearest airport. Catch the first available plane. Text me the flight number, nothing else. I’ll arrange for someone to collect you when you land.”

“But how will they know what I look like?”

“They won’t. You’ll have to look out for them.”

There was a renewed burst of applause in the background. I started to raise a fresh objection, but it was too late. He had hung up.

I DROVE OUT OF
Belmont without any clear idea of the route I was supposed to take. I checked the rearview mirror neurotically every few seconds, but if I was being followed, I couldn’t tell. Different cars appeared behind me, and none seemed to stay for longer than a couple of minutes. I kept my eyes open for signs to Boston and eventually crossed a big river and joined the interstate, heading east.

It was not yet three in the afternoon, but already the day was starting to darken. Away to my right, the downtown office blocks gleamed gold against a swollen Atlantic sky, while up ahead the lights of the big jets fell toward Logan like shooting stars. I maintained my usual cautious pace over the next couple of miles. Logan Airport, for those who have never had the pleasure, sits in the middle of Boston Harbor, approached from the south by a long tunnel. As the road descended underground, I asked myself whether I was really going to go through with this, and it was a good measure of my uncertainty that when—a mile later—I rose again into the deeper gloom of the afternoon, I still hadn’t decided.

I followed the signs to the long-term car park and was just reversing into a bay when my telephone rang. The incoming number was unfamiliar. I almost didn’t answer. When I did, a peremptory voice said, “What on earth are you doing?”

It was Ruth Lang. She had that presumption of beginning a conversation without first announcing who was calling, a lapse in manners I was sure her husband would never have been guilty of, even when he was prime minister.

“Working,” I said.

“Really? You’re not at your hotel.”

“Aren’t I?”

“Well, are you? They told me you hadn’t even checked in.”

I flailed around for an adequate lie and hit on a partial truth. “I decided to go to New York.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see John Maddox, to talk about the structure of the book, in view of the”—a tactful euphemism was needed, I decided—“the changed circumstances.”

“I was worried about you,” she said. “All day I’ve been walking up and down this fucking beach thinking about what we discussed last night—”

I interrupted. “I wouldn’t say anything about that on the phone.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m not a total fool. It’s just that the more I go over things, the more worried I get.”

“Where’s Adam?”

“Still in Washington, as far as I know. He keeps trying to call and I keep not answering. When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Tonight?”

“I’ll try.”

“Do, if you can.” She lowered her voice; I imagined the bodyguard standing nearby. “It’s Dep’s night off. I’ll cook.”

“Is that supposed to be an incentive?”

“You rude man,” she said and laughed. She rang off as abruptly as she had called, without saying good-bye.

I tapped my phone against my teeth. The prospect of a confiding fireside talk with Ruth, perhaps to be followed by a second round in her vigorous embrace, was not without its attractions. I could call Rycart and tell him I’d changed my mind. Undecided, I took my case out of the car and wheeled it through the puddles toward the waiting bus. Once I was aboard, I cradled it next to me and studied the airport map. At that point yet another choice presented itself. Terminal B—the shuttle to New York and Rycart—or terminal E—international departures and an evening flight back to London? I hadn’t considered that before. I had my passport, everything. I could simply walk away.

B or E? I seriously weighed them. I was like an unusually dim lab rat in a maze, endlessly confronted with alternatives, endlessly picking the wrong one.

The bus doors opened with a heavy sigh.

I got off at B, bought my ticket, sent a text message to Rycart, and caught the US Airways Shuttle to LaGuardia.

FOR SOME REASON OUR
plane was delayed on the tarmac. We taxied out on schedule but then stopped just short of the runway, pulling aside in a gentlemanly fashion to let the queue of jets behind us go ahead. It began to rain. I looked out of the porthole at the flattened grass and the welded sheets of sea and sky. Clear veins of water pulsed across the glass. Every time a plane took off, the thin skin of the cabin shook and the veins broke and reformed. The pilot came over the intercom and apologized: there was some problem with our security clearance, he said. The Department of Homeland Security had just raised its threat assessment from yellow (elevated) to orange (high) and our patience was appreciated. Among the businesspeople around me, agitation grew. The man sitting next to me caught my eye above the edge of his pink paper and shook his head.

“It just gets worse,” he said.

He folded his
Financial Times
, placed it on his lap, and closed his eyes. The headline was “Lang wins US support,” and there was that grin again. Ruth had been right. He shouldn’t have smiled. It had gone round the world.

My small suitcase was in the luggage compartment above my head; my feet were resting on the shoulder bag beneath the seat in front of me. All was in order. But I couldn’t relax. I felt guilty, even though I had done nothing wrong. I half expected the FBI to storm the plane and drag me away. After about forty-five minutes, the engines suddenly started to roar again and the pilot broke radio silence to announce that we had finally been given permission to take off, and thank you again for your understanding.

We labored along the runway and up into the clouds, and such was my exhaustion that, despite my anxiety—or perhaps because of it—I actually drifted into sleep. I came awake with a jerk when I felt someone leaning across me, but it was only the cabin attendant, checking that my seat belt was fastened. It seemed to me that I had been unconscious no more than a few seconds, but the pressure in my ears told me that already we were coming in to land at LaGuardia. We touched down at six minutes past six—I remember the time exactly: I checked my watch—and by twenty past I was avoiding the impatient crowds around the baggage carousel and heading out of the gate into the arrivals hall.

It was busy, early evening, and people were in a hurry to get downtown or home for dinner. I scanned the bewildering array of faces, wondering if Rycart himself had turned out to greet me, but there was no one I recognized. The usual lugubrious drivers were waiting, holding the names of their passengers against their chests. They stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact, like suspects in a police lineup, while I, in the manner of a nervous witness, walked along in front of them, checking each carefully, not wanting to make a mistake. Rycart had implied I’d recognize the right person when I saw him, and I did, and my heart almost stopped. He was standing apart from the others, in his own patch of space—wan faced, dark haired, tall, heavyset, early fifties, in a badly fitting chain-store suit—and he was holding a small blackboard on which was chalked “Mike McAra.” Even his eyes were as I had imagined McAra’s to be: crafty and colorless.

He was chewing gum. He nodded to my suitcase. “You okay with that.” It was a statement, not a question, but I didn’t care. I’d never been more pleased to hear a New York accent in my life. He turned on his heel and I followed him across the hall and out into the pandemonium of the night: shrieks, whistles, slamming doors, the fight to grab a cab, sirens in the distance.

He brought round his car, wound down his window, and beckoned to me to get in quickly. As I struggled to get my case into the backseat, he stared straight ahead, his hands on the wheel, discouraging conversation. Not that there was much time to talk. Barely had we left the perimeter of the airport than we were pulling up in front of a big, glass-fronted hotel and conference center overlooking Grand Central Parkway. He grunted as he shifted his heavy body round in his seat to address me. The car stank of his sweat and I had a moment of pure existential horror, staring beyond him, through the drizzle, to that bleak and anonymous building: what, in the name of God, was I doing?

“If you need to make contact, use this,” he said, giving me a brand-new cell phone, still in its plastic wrapper. “There’s a chip inside with twenty dollars’ worth of calls on it. Don’t use your old phone. The safest thing is to turn it off. You pay for your room in advance, with cash. Have you got enough? It’ll be about three hundred bucks.”

I nodded.

“You’re staying one night. You have a reservation.” He wriggled his fat wallet out from his back pocket. “This is the card you use to guarantee the extras. The name on the card is the name you register under. Use an address in the United Kingdom that isn’t your own. If there
are
any extras, make sure you pay for them in cash. This is the telephone number you use to make contact in future.”

“You used to be a cop,” I said. I took the credit card and a torn-out strip of paper with a number written on it in a childish hand. The paper and plastic were warm from the heat of his body.

“Don’t use the internet. Don’t speak to strangers. And especially avoid any women who might try to come on to you.”

“You sound like my mother.”

His face didn’t flicker. We sat there for a few seconds. “Well,” he said impatiently. He waved a meaty hand at me. “That’s it.”

Once I was through the revolving glass door and inside the lobby, I checked the name on the card. Clive Dixon. A big conference had just ended. Scores of delegates wearing black suits with bright yellow lapel badges were pouring across the wide expanse of white marble, chattering to one another like a flight of crows. They looked eager, purposeful, motivated, newly fired up to meet their corporate targets and personal goals. I saw from their badges they belonged to a church. Above our heads, great glass globes of light hung from a ceiling a hundred feet high and shimmered on walls of chrome. I wasn’t just out of my depth anymore; I was out of sight of land.

“I have a reservation, I believe,” I said to the clerk at the desk, “in the name of Dixon.”

It’s not an alias I’d have chosen. I don’t think of myself as a Dixon, whatever a Dixon is. But the receptionist was untroubled by my embarrassment. I was on his computer, that was all that mattered to him, and my card was good. The room rate was two hundred and seventy-five dollars. I filled out the reservation form and gave as my false address the number of Kate’s small terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush and the street of Rick’s London club. When I said I wanted to pay in cash, he took the notes between his finger and thumb as if they were the strangest things he had ever seen.
Cash?
If I’d tied a mule to his desk and offered to pay him in animal skins and sticks that I’d spent the winter carving, he couldn’t have looked more nonplussed.

I declined to be assisted with my bags, took the elevator to the sixth floor, and stuck the electronic key card into the door. My room was beige and softly lit by table lamps, with a view across Grand Central Parkway to LaGuardia and the unfathomable blackness of the East River. The TV was playing “I’ll Take Manhattan” over a caption that read “Welcome to New York Mr. Nixon.” I turned it off and opened the minibar. I didn’t even bother to find a glass. I unscrewed the cap and drank straight from the miniature bottle.

It must have been about twenty minutes and a second miniature later that my new telephone suddenly glowed blue and began to emit a faintly ominous electronic purr. I left my post at the window to answer it.