The Ghost (22 page)

“Then how did it get to them?”

“That’s a difficult question. Not through any official channel, that’s for sure. And certainly it was nothing to do with me.” There was a long pause. His smile died. “Well,” he said. “What do you think?”

“It sounds a bit”—I tried to find some diplomatic way of saying it—“technical.”

“Meaning?”

My reply on the tape is so slippery, so sweaty with nervous circumlocutions, it’s enough to make one laugh out loud.

“Well…you know…you admit yourself you wanted the SAS to pick them up—no doubt for, you know, understandable reasons—and even if they didn’t actually do the job themselves, the Ministry of Defence—as I understand it—hasn’t really been able to
deny
they were involved, presumably because they were, in a way, even if…even if…they were only parked in a car around the corner. And apparently British, you know, intelligence gave the CIA the location where they could be picked up. And when they were tortured, you didn’t condemn it.”

The last line was delivered in a rush. Lang said coldly, “Sid Kroll was very pleased with the commitment he was given by the CIA. He believes the prosecutor may even have to drop the case.”

“Well, if Sid says that—”

“But
fuck it
,” said Lang suddenly. He banged his hand on the edge of the table. On the tape it sounds like an explosion. The dozing Special Branch man on the nearby sofa looked up sharply. “I don’t regret what happened to those four men. If we’d relied on the Pakistanis we’d never have got them. We had to grab them while we had the chance, and if we’d missed them, they’d have gone underground and the next time we’d have known anything about them would’ve been when they were killing our people.”

“You really don’t regret it?”

“No.”

“Not even the one who died under interrogation?”

“Oh, him,” said Lang dismissively. “He had a heart problem, an undiagnosed heart problem. He could have died anytime. He could have died getting out of bed one morning.”

I said nothing. I pretended to make a note.

“Look,” said Lang, “I don’t condone torture, but let me just say this to you. First, it does actually produce results—I’ve seen the intelligence. Second, having power, in the end, is all about balancing evils, and when you think about it, what are a couple of minutes of suffering for a few individuals compared to the deaths—the
deaths
, mark you—of thousands. Third, don’t try telling me this is something unique to the war on terror. Torture’s always been part of warfare. The only difference is that in the past there were no fucking media around to report it.”

“The men arrested in Pakistan claim they were innocent,” I pointed out.

“Of course they claim they were innocent! What else are they going to say?” Lang studied me closely, as if seeing me properly for the first time. “I’m beginning to think you’re too naïve for this job.”

I couldn’t resist it. “Unlike Mike McAra?”

“Mike!” Lang laughed and shook his head. “Mike was naïve in a different way.”

The plane was beginning to descend quite rapidly now. The moon and stars had gone. We were dropping through cloud. I could feel the pressure change in my ears, and I had to pinch my nose and swallow hard.

Amelia made her way down the aisle.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. She looked concerned. She must have heard Lang’s outburst of temper; everyone must have.

“We’re just doing some work on my memoirs,” said Lang. “I’m telling him what happened over Operation Tempest.”

“You’re taping it?” said Amelia.

“If that’s all right,” I said.

“You need to be careful,” she told Lang. “Remember what Sid Kroll said—”

“The tapes will be yours,” I interrupted, “not mine.”

“They could still be subpoenaed.”

“Stop treating me as though I’m a child,” said Lang abruptly. “I know what I want to say. Let’s deal with it once and for all.”

Amelia permitted herself a slight widening of her eyes and withdrew.

“Women!” muttered Lang. He took another gulp of brandy. The ice had melted, but the color of the liquid remained dark. It must have been a very full measure, and it occurred to me that our former prime minister was slightly drunk. I sensed this was my moment.

“In what way,” I asked, “was Mike McAra naïve?”

“Never mind,” muttered Lang. He nursed his drink, his chin on his chest, brooding. He suddenly jerked up again. “I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I’d do if I were in power again? I’d say, okay then, we’ll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we’ll have queues to flights on which we’ve done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone’s precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we’ll have queues to the flights where we’ve done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn’t that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would
really
choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down?”

“And Mike was like that?”

“Not at the beginning. But Mike, unfortunately, discovered idealism in his old age. I said to him—it was our last conversation, actually—I said, if our Lord Jesus Christ was unable to solve all the problems of the world when he came down to live among us—and he was the son of God!—wasn’t it a bit unreasonable of Mike to expect me to have sorted out everything in ten years?”

“Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?”

“Mike made certain wild accusations. I could hardly ignore them.”

“May I ask what kind of accusations?”

I could imagine Rycart and the special prosecutor sitting listening to the tape, straightening in their chairs at that. I had to swallow again. My voice sounded muffled in my ears, as if I was talking in a dream, or hailing myself from a great distance. On the tape, the pause that followed is quite short, but at the time it seemed endless, and Lang’s voice when it came was deadly quiet.

“I’d prefer not to repeat them.”

“Were they to do with the CIA?”

“But surely you already know,” said Lang bitterly, “if you’ve been to see Paul Emmett?”

And this time the pause is as long on the recording as it is in my memory.

Delivered of his bombshell, Lang gazed out of the window and sipped his drink. A few isolated lights had begun to appear beneath us. I think they must have been ships. I looked at him and I saw that the years had caught up even with him at last. It was in the droop of the flesh around his eyes and in the loose skin beneath his jaw. Or perhaps it wasn’t age. Perhaps he was simply exhausted. I doubt he could have had much sleep for weeks, probably not since McAra had confronted him. Certainly, when at last he turned back to me, there wasn’t anger in his expression, merely a great weariness.

“I want you to understand,” he said with heavy emphasis, “that everything I did, both as party leader and as prime minister—everything—I did out of conviction, because I believed it was right.”

I mumbled a reply. I was in a state of shock.

“Emmett claims you showed him some photographs. Is that true? May I see?”

My hands shook slightly as I removed them from the envelope and pushed them across the table toward him. He flicked through the first four very quickly, paused over the fifth—the one that showed him and Emmett onstage—then went back to the beginning and started looking at them again, lingering over each image.

He said, without raising his eyes from the pictures, “Where did you get them?”

“McAra ordered them up from the archive. I found them in his room.”

Over the intercom, the copilot asked us to fasten our seat belts.

“Odd,” murmured Lang. “Odd the way we’ve all changed so much and yet also stayed exactly the same. Mike never mentioned anything to me about photographs. Oh, that bloody archive!” He squinted closely at one of the riverbank pictures. It was the girls, I noticed, rather than himself or Emmett, who seemed to fascinate him the most. “I remember her,” he said, tapping the picture. “And her. She wrote to me once, when I was prime minister. Ruth was not pleased. Oh, God,” he said, and passed his hand across his face. “Ruth.” For a moment, I thought he was about to break down, but when he looked at me his eyes were dry. “What happens next? Is there a procedure in your line of work to deal with this sort of situation?”

Patterns of light were very clear in the window now. I could see the headlamps of a car on a road.

“The client always has the last word about what goes in a book,” I said. “Always. But, obviously, in this case, given what happened—”

On the tape, my voice trails away, and then there is a loud clunk, as Lang leans forward and grabs my forearm.

“If you mean what happened to Mike, then let me tell you I was absolutely appalled by that.” His gaze was fixed unwaveringly on me; he was putting everything he had left within him into the task of convincing me, and I’ll freely confess, despite everything I’d discovered, he succeeded: to this day, I’m sure he was telling the truth. “If you believe nothing else, you must please believe that his death had nothing to do with me, and I shall carry that image of Mike in the morgue until my own dying day. I’m sure it was an accident. But okay, let’s say, for the sake of argument, it wasn’t.” He tightened his grip on my arm. “What was he thinking of, driving up to Boston to confront Emmett? He’d been around politics long enough to know that you don’t do something like that, not when the stakes are this high. You know, in a way, he did kill himself. It was a suicidal act.”

“That’s what worries me,” I said.

“You can’t seriously think,” said Lang, “that the same thing could happen to you?”

“It has crossed my mind.”

“You need have no fears on that score. I can guarantee it.” I guess my disbelief must have been obvious. “Oh, come on, man!” he said urgently. Again, the fingers clenched on my flesh. “There are four policemen traveling on this plane with us right now! What kind of people do you think we are?”

“Well, that’s just it,” I said. “What kind of people
are
you?”

We were coming in low over the treetops. The lights of the Gulfstream gleamed across dark waves of foliage.

I tried to pull my arm away. “Excuse me,” I said.

Lang reluctantly let go of me and I fastened my seat belt. He did the same. He glanced out of the window at the terminal, then back at me, appalled, as we dipped gracefully onto the runway.

“My God, you’ve already told someone, haven’t you?”

I could feel myself turning scarlet. “No,” I said.

“You have.”

“I haven’t.” On the tape I sound as feeble as a child caught red-handed.

He leaned forward again. “Who have you told?”

Looking out at the dark forest beyond the perimeter of the airport, where anything could be lurking, it seemed like the only insurance policy I had.

“Richard Rycart,” I said.

That must have been a devastating blow to him. He must have known then that it was the end of everything. In my mind’s eye I see him still, like one those once grand but now condemned apartment blocks, moments after the demolition charges have been exploded: for a few seconds, the façade remains bizarrely intact, before slowly beginning to slide. That was Lang. He gave me a long blank look and then subsided back into his seat.

The plane came to a halt in front of the terminal building. The engines died.

AT THIS POINT, AT
long last, I did something smart.

As Lang sat contemplating his ruin, and as Amelia came hurrying down the aisle to discover what I’d said, I had the presence of mind to eject the disk from the minirecorder and slip it into my pocket. In its place I inserted the blank. Lang was too stunned to care and Amelia too fixated on him to notice.

“All right,” she said firmly, “that’s enough for tonight.” She lifted the empty glass from his unresisting hand and gave it to the steward. “We need to get you home, Adam. Ruth’s waiting at the gate.” She reached over and unfastened his seat belt and then removed his suit jacket from the back of his seat. She held it out ready for him to slip into, and shook it slightly, like a matador with a cloak, but her voice was very tender. “Adam?”

He rose, trancelike, to obey, gazing vacantly toward the cockpit as she guided his arms into the sleeves. She glared at me over his shoulder, and mouthed, furiously and very distinctly, and with her customarily precise diction, “What the fuck are you doing?”

It was a good question. What the fuck
was
I doing? At the front of the plane, the door had opened and three of the Special Branch men were disembarking. A blast of cold air ran down the cabin. Lang began to walk toward the exit, preceded by his fourth bodyguard, Amelia at his back. I quickly stuffed my recorder and the photographs into my shoulder bag and followed them. The pilot had come out of the cockpit to say good-bye and I saw Lang square his shoulders and advance to meet him, his hand outstretched.

“That was great,” said Lang vaguely, “as usual. My favorite airline.” He shook the pilot’s hand, then leaned past him to greet the copilot and the waiting steward. “Thanks. Thanks so much.” He turned to us, still smiling his professional smile, but it faded fast; he looked stricken. The last bodyguard was already halfway down the steps. There was just Amelia, me, and the two secretaries waiting to follow him off the plane. Standing in the lighted glass window of the terminal I could just make out the figure of Ruth. She was too far away for me to judge her expression. “Would you mind just hanging back a minute?” he said to Amelia. “And you, too?” he added to me. “I need to have a private word with my wife.”

“Is everything all right, Adam?” asked Amelia. She had been with him too long, and I suppose she loved him too much, not to know that something was terribly wrong.

“It’ll be fine,” said Lang. He touched her elbow lightly, then gave us all, including me and the plane crew, a slight bow. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night.”