The Ghost (23 page)

He ducked through the door and paused at the top of the steps, glancing around, smoothing down his hair. Amelia and I watched him from the interior of the plane. He was just as he was when I first saw him—still, out of habit, searching for an audience with whom he could connect, even though the windy, floodlit concourse was deserted, apart from the waiting bodyguards, and a ground technician in overalls, working late, no doubt eager to get home.

Lang must also have seen Ruth waiting at the window, because he suddenly raised his hand in acknowledgment, then set off down the steps, gracefully, like a dancer. He reached the tarmac and had gone about ten yards toward the terminal when the technician shouted out, “Adam!” and waved. The voice was English, and Lang must have recognized the accent of a fellow countryman because he suddenly broke away from his bodyguards and strode toward the man, his hand held out. And that is my final image of Lang: a man always with his hand held out. It is burned into my retinas—his yearning shadow against the expanding ball of bright white fire that suddenly engulfed him, and then there was only the flying debris, the stinging grit, the glass, the furnace heat, and the underwater silence of the explosion.

I SAW NOTHING MORE
after that initial flash of brilliant light; there was too much glass and blood in my eyes. The force of the blast flung us all backward. Amelia, I learned later, hit her head on the side of a seat and was knocked unconscious, while I lay across the aisle in darkness and silence for what could have been minutes or hours. I felt no pain, except when one of the terrified secretaries trod on my hand with her high heel in her desperation to get out of the plane. But I couldn’t see, and it was also to be several hours before I could hear properly. Even today I get an occasional buzzing in my ears. It cuts me off from the world, like radio interference. Eventually, I was lifted away and given a wonderful shot of morphine that burst like warm fireworks in my brain. Then I was airlifted by helicopter with all the other survivors to a hospital near Boston—an institution very close, it turned out, to the place where Emmett lived.

Did you ever do something secretly as a child that seemed really bad at the time, and for which you were sure you were going to be punished? I remember breaking a precious old long-playing gramophone record of my father’s and putting it away in its sleeve again and saying nothing about it. For days, I lived in a sweat of terror, convinced that retribution would arrive at any moment. But nothing was ever said. The next time I dared to look, the record had disappeared. He must have found it and thrown it away.

I had similar feelings following the assassination of Adam Lang. Throughout the next day or two, as I lay in my hospital room, my face bandaged, and with a policeman on guard in the corridor outside, I repeatedly ran over in my mind the events of the previous week, and it always seemed to me a certainty that I would never leave that place alive. If you stop to think of it, there’s nowhere easier to dispose of someone than in a hospital; I should imagine it’s almost routine. And who makes a better killer than a doctor?

But it turned out to be like the incident of my father’s broken record. Nothing happened. While I was still blinded, I was gently questioned by a Special Agent Murphy from the Boston office of the FBI about what I could remember. The next afternoon, when the bandages were removed from my eyes, Murphy returned. He looked like a muscular young priest in a fifties movie, and this time he was accompanied by a saturnine Englishman from the British Security Service, MI5, whose name I never quite caught—because, I assume, I was never quite meant to catch it.

They showed me a photograph. My vision was still bleary, but I was nevertheless able to identify the crazy man I had met in the bar of my hotel and who had staged that lonely vigil, with the biblical slogan, at the end of the track from the Rhinehart compound. His name, they said, was George Arthur Boxer, a former major in the British army, whose son had been killed in Iraq and whose wife had died six months later in a London suicide bombing. In his unhinged state, Major Boxer had held Adam Lang personally responsible, and had stalked him to Martha’s Vineyard just after McAra’s death had been reported in the papers. He had plenty of expertise in munitions and intelligence. He had studied tactics for suicide bombing on jihadist websites. He had rented a cottage in Oak Bluffs, brought in supplies of peroxide and weed killer, and turned it into a minor factory for the production of homemade explosives. And it would have been easy for him to know when Lang was returning from New York, because he would have seen the bombproof car heading to the airport to meet him. How he had got onto the airfield nobody was quite sure, but it was dark, there was a four-mile perimeter fence, and the experts had always assumed that four Special Branch men and an armored car were sufficient protection.

But one had to be realistic, said the man from MI5. There was a limit to what security could do, especially against a determined suicide bomber. He quoted Seneca, in the original Latin, and then helpfully translated: “Who scorns his own life is lord of yours.” I got the impression everyone was slightly relieved by the way things had worked out: the British, because Lang had been killed on American soil; the Americans, because he’d been blown up by a Brit; and both because there would now be no war crimes trial, no unseemly revelations, and no guest who has overstayed his welcome, drifting around the dinner tables of Georgetown for the next twenty years. You could almost say it was the special relationship in action.

Agent Murphy asked me about the flight from New York and whether Lang had expressed any worries about his personal security. I said truthfully that he hadn’t.

“Mrs. Bly,” said the MI5 man, “tells us you recorded an interview with him during the final part of the flight.”

“No, she’s wrong about that,” I said. “I had the machine in front of me, but I never actually switched it on. It wasn’t really an interview, in any case. It was more of a chat.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Go ahead.”

My shoulder bag was on the nightstand next to my bed. The MI5 man took out the minirecorder and ejected the disk. I watched him, dry-mouthed.

“Can I borrow this?”

“You can keep it,” I said. He started poking through the rest of my belongings. “How is Amelia, by the way?”

“She’s fine.” He put the disk into his briefcase. “Thanks.”

“Can I see her?”

“She flew back to London last night.” I guess my disappointment must have been evident, because the MI5 man added, with chilly pleasure, “It’s not surprising. She hasn’t seen her husband since before Christmas.”

“And what about Ruth?” I asked.

“She’s accompanying Mr. Lang’s body home right now,” said Murphy. “Your government sent a plane to fetch them.”

“He’ll get full military honors,” added the MI5 man. “A statue in the Palace of Westminster, and a funeral in the Abbey if she wants it. He’s never been more popular than since he died.”

“He should have done it years ago,” I said. They didn’t smile. “And is it really true that nobody else was killed?”

“Nobody,” said Murphy, “which was a miracle, believe me.”

“In fact,” said the man from MI5, “Mrs. Bly wonders if Mr. Lang didn’t actually recognize his assassin and deliberately head toward him, knowing that something like this might happen. Can you shed any light on that?”

“It sounds far-fetched,” I said. “I thought a fuel truck had exploded.”

“It was certainly quite a bang,” said Murphy, clicking his pen and slipping it into his inside pocket. “We eventually found the killer’s head on the terminal roof.”

I WATCHED LANG’S FUNERAL
on CNN two days later. My eyesight was more or less restored. I could see it was tastefully done: the queen, the prime minister, the U.S. vice president and half the leaders of Europe; the coffin draped in the Union Jack; the guard of honor; the solitary piper playing a lament. Ruth looked very good in black, I thought; it was definitely her color. I kept a lookout for Amelia, but I didn’t see her. During a lull in proceedings, there was even an interview with Richard Rycart. Naturally, he hadn’t been invited to the service, but he’d gone to the trouble of putting on a black tie and paid a very moving tribute from his office in the United Nations: a great colleague…a true patriot…we had our disagreements…remained friends…my heart goes out to Ruth and the family…as far as I’m concerned the whole chapter is closed.

I found the mobile phone he had given me and threw it out the window.

The next day, when I was due to be discharged from hospital, Rick came up from New York to say good-bye and take me to the airport.

“Do you want the good news or the good news?” he said.

“I’m not sure your idea of good news is the same as mine.”

“Sid Kroll just called. Ruth Lang still wants you to finish the memoirs, and Maddox will give you an extra month to work on the manuscript.”

“And the good news is?”

“Very cute. Listen, don’t be so goddamned snooty about it. This is a really hot book now. This is Adam Lang’s voice from the grave. You don’t have to work on it here anymore; you can finish it in London. You look terrible, by the way.”

“His ‘voice from the grave’?” I repeated incredulously. “So now I’m to be the ghost of a ghost?”

“Come on, the whole situation is rich with possibilities. Think about it. You can write what you like, within reason. Nobody’s going to stop you. And you liked him, didn’t you?”

I thought about that. In fact, I had been thinking about it ever since I came round from the sedative. Worse than the pain in my eyes and the buzzing in my ears, worse even than my fear that I would never emerge from the hospital, was my sense of guilt. That may seem odd, given what I’d learned, but I couldn’t work up any sense of self-justification or resentment against Lang. I was the one at fault. It wasn’t just that I’d betrayed my client, personally and professionally; it was the sequence of events my actions had set in motion. If I hadn’t gone to see Emmett, Emmett wouldn’t have contacted Lang to warn him about the photograph. Then maybe Lang wouldn’t have insisted on flying back to Martha’s Vineyard that night to see Ruth. Then I wouldn’t have had to tell him about Rycart. And then, and then…? It nagged away at me as I lay in the darkness. I just couldn’t erase the memory of how bleak he had looked on the plane at the very end.

“Mrs. Bly wonders if Mr. Lang didn’t actually recognize his assassin and deliberately head toward him, knowing that something like this might happen…”

“Yes,” I said to Rick. “Yes, I did like him.”

“Well, there you go. You owe it to him. And besides, there’s another consideration.”

“Which is what?”

“Sid Kroll says that if you don’t fulfill your contractual obligations and finish the book, they’ll sue your ass off.”

AND SO I RETURNED
to London, and for the next six weeks I barely emerged from my flat, except once, early on, to go out for dinner with Kate. We met in a restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, midway between our homes—territory as neutral as Switzerland and about as expensive. The manner of Adam Lang’s death seemed to have silenced even her hostility, and I suppose a kind of glamour attached to me as an eyewitness. I had turned down a score of requests to give interviews, so that she was the first person, apart from the FBI and MI5, to whom I described what had happened. I desperately wanted to tell her about my final conversation with Lang. I would have done, too. But in the way of these things, just as I was about to broach it, the waiter came over to discuss dessert, and when he left she announced she had something she wanted to tell me, first.

She was engaged to be married.

I confess it was a shock. I didn’t like the other man. You’d know him if I mentioned his name: craggy, handsome, soulful. He specializes in flying briefly into the world’s worst trouble spots and flying out again with moving descriptions of human suffering, usually his own.

“Congratulations,” I said.

We skipped dessert. Our affair, our relationship—our
thing
—whatever it was—ended ten minutes later with a peck on the cheek on the pavement outside the restaurant.

“You were going to tell me something,” she said, just before she got into her taxi. “I’m sorry I cut you off. I only didn’t want you to say anything, you know…too personal…without telling you first about how things were with me and—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Are you sure you’re all right? You seem…different.”

“I’m fine.”

“If you ever need me, I’ll always be there for you.”

“There?” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m here. Where’s there?”

I held open the door of her cab for her. I couldn’t help overhearing that the address she gave the driver wasn’t hers.

After that, I withdrew from the world. I spent my every waking hour with Lang, and now that he was dead, I found I suddenly had his voice. It was more a Ouija board than a keyboard that I sat down to every morning. If my fingers typed out a sentence that sounded wrong, I could almost physically feel them being drawn to the Delete key. I was like a screenwriter producing lines with a particularly demanding star in mind: I knew he might say this, but not that; might do this scene, never that.

The basic structure of the story remained McAra’s sixteen chapters. My method was to work always with his manuscript on my left, to retype it completely, and in the process of passing it through my brain and fingers and on to my computer, to strain it of my predecessor’s lumpy clichés. I made no mention of Emmett, of course, cutting even the anodyne quote of his that had opened the final chapter. The image of Adam Lang that I presented to the world was very much the character he’d always chosen to play: the regular guy who fell into politics almost by accident and who rose to power because he was neither tribal nor ideological. I reconciled this with the chronology by taking up Ruth’s suggestion that Lang had turned to politics as solace for his depression when he first arrived in London. I didn’t really need to play up the misery here. Lang was dead, after all, his whole memoir suffused by the reader’s knowledge of what was to come. That ought to be sufficient, I reckoned, to keep the ghouls happy. But it was still useful to have a page or two of heroic struggle against inner demons, etc., etc.

In my telling of his story, Lang’s political involvement really got going only when Ruth came knocking at his door two years later. It sounded plausible. Who knows? It might even have been true.

I started writing
Memoirs by Adam Lang
on February the tenth and promised Maddox I’d have the whole thing done, all one hundred and sixty thousand words, by the end of March. That meant I had to produce thirty-four hundred words a day, every day. I had a chart on the wall and marked it up each morning. I was like Captain Scott returning from the South Pole: I had to make those daily distances, or I’d fall irrevocably behind and perish in a white wilderness of blank pages. It was a hard slog, especially as almost no lines of McAra’s were salvageable, except, curiously, the very last one in the manuscript, which had made me groan aloud when I read it on Martha’s Vineyard:
“Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold.”
Read that, you bastards, I thought, as I typed it in on the evening of the thirtieth of March: read that, and close this book without a catch in your throat.