The Ghost (21 page)

“Now?” I hurried after her. “It’s rather late, isn’t it?”

We started descending the stairs.

“Adam’s insisting. I’ve managed to find us a plane.”

“But why now?”

“I’ve no idea. Something’s come up. You’ll have to ask him.”

Lang was below and ahead of us. He’d already reached the grand entrance. The bodyguards opened the doors and his broad shoulders were suddenly framed by a halogen glow of light. The shouts of the reporters, the fusillade of camera shutters, the rumble of the Harley-Davidsons—it was as if someone had rolled back the doors to hell.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Get into the backup car. I expect Adam will want to talk to you on the plane.” She saw my look of panic. “You’re very odd. Is there something the matter?”

Now what am I supposed to do? I wondered. Faint? Plead a prior engagement? I seemed to be trapped on a moving walkway with no means of escape.

“Everything seems to be happening in a rush,” I said weakly.

“This is nothing. You should have been with us when he was prime minister.”

We emerged into the tumult of noise and light, and it was as if all the controversy generated by the war on terror, year after year of it, had briefly converged on one man and rendered him incandescent. The door to Lang’s stretch limousine was open. He paused to wave briefly at the crowd beyond the security cordon, then ducked inside. Amelia took my arm and propelled me toward the second car. “Go on!” she shouted. The motorbikes were already pulling away. “Don’t forget, we can’t stop if you’re left behind.”

She slipped in beside Lang, and I found myself stepping into the second limo, next to the secretaries. They shifted cheerfully along the bench seat to make room for me. A Special Branch man climbed in the front, next to the driver, and then we were away, with an accompanying
whoop whoop
from one of the motorbikes, ringing out like the cheerful whistle of a little tugboat escorting a big liner out to sea.

IN DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, I
would have relished that journey: my legs stretched out before me; the Harley-Davidsons gliding past us to hold back the traffic; the pale faces of the pedestrians, glimpsed through the smoked glass, turning to watch us as we hurtled by; the noise of the sirens; the vividness of the flashing lights; the speed; the
force
. I can think of only two categories of human being who are transported with such pomp and drama: world leaders and captured terrorists.

In my pocket, I surreptitiously fingered my new mobile phone. Ought I to alert Rycart to what was happening? I decided not. I didn’t want to call him in front of witnesses. I would have felt too uncomfortable, my guilt too obvious. Treachery needs privacy. I surrendered myself to events.

We flew over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge like gods, Alice and Lucy giggling with excitement, and when we reached LaGuardia a few minutes later we drove past the terminal building, through an open metal gate, and directly onto the tarmac, where a big private jet was being fueled. It was a Hallington plane, in its dark blue livery, with the corporate logo painted on its high tail: Earth with a circle girdling it, like the Colgate ring of confidence. Lang’s limousine swerved to a halt and he was the first to emerge. He dived through the doorway of the mobile body scanner and up the steps into the Gulfstream without a backward glance. A bodyguard hurried after him.

As I clambered out of the car I felt almost arthritic with anxiety. It took an effort simply to walk over to the steps where Amelia was standing. The night air was shaking with the noise of jets coming in to land. I could see them stacked five or six deep above the water, steps of light ascending through the darkness.

“Now that’s the way to travel,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “Is it always like that?”

“They want to show him they love him,” said Amelia. “And no doubt it helps to show everyone else how they treat their friends.
Pour encourager les autres.
”

Security men with metal wands were inspecting all the luggage. I added my suitcase to the pile.

“He says he has to get back to Ruth,” she continued, gazing up at the plane. The windows were bigger than on a normal aircraft. Lang’s profile was plainly visible toward the rear. “There’s something he needs to talk over with her.” Her voice was puzzled. She was almost talking to herself, as if I weren’t there. I wondered if they’d had a row during the drive to the airport.

One of the security men told me to open my suitcase. I unzipped it and held it up to him. He lifted out the manuscript to search underneath it. Amelia was so preoccupied, she didn’t even notice.

“It’s odd,” she said, “because Washington went so well.” She stared vacantly toward the lights of the runway.

“Your shoulder bag,” said the security man.

I handed it to him. He took out the package of photographs, and for a moment I thought he was going to open it, but he was more interested in my laptop. I felt the need to keep talking.

“Perhaps he’s heard something from The Hague,” I suggested.

“No. It’s nothing to do with that. He would have told me.”

“Okay, you’re clear to board,” said the guard.

“Don’t go near him just yet,” she warned, as I moved to pass through the scanner. “Not in his present mood. I’ll take you back to him if he wants to talk.”

I climbed the steps.

Lang was seated in the very end seat, nearest to the tail, his chin in his hand, gazing out of the window. (The security people always liked him to sit in the last row, I discovered later; it meant no one could get behind him.) The cabin was configured to take ten passengers, two each on a couple of sofas that ran along the side of the fuselage, and the rest in six big armchairs. The armchairs faced one another in pairs, with a stowaway table between them. It looked like an extension of the Waldorf’s lobby: gold fittings, polished walnut, and padded, creamy leather. Lang was in one of the armchairs. The Special Branch man sat on a nearby sofa. A steward in a white jacket was bending over the former prime minister. I couldn’t see what drink he was being served, but I could hear it. Your favorite sound might be a pair of nightingales in a summer dusk, or a peal of village church bells. Mine is the clink of ice against cut glass. Of this I am a connoisseur. And it sounded distinctly to me as if Lang had given up tea in favor of a stiff whiskey.

The steward saw me staring and came down the gangway toward me. “Can I get you something, sir?”

“Thanks. Yes. I’ll have whatever Mr. Lang is having.”

I was wrong: it was brandy.

By the time the door was closed, there were twelve of us on board: three crew (the pilot, copilot, and steward), and nine passengers—two secretaries, four bodyguards, Amelia, Adam Lang, and me. I sat with my back to the cockpit so that I could keep an eye on my client. Amelia was directly opposite him, and as the engines started to whine it was all I could do not to hurl myself at the door and wrench it open. That flight felt doomed to me from the start. The Gulfstream shuddered slightly, and slowly the terminal building seemed to drift away. I could see Amelia’s hand making emphatic gestures, as if she were explaining something, but Lang just continued to stare out at the airfield.

Someone touched my arm. “Do you know how much one of these things costs?”

It was the policeman who’d been in my car on the drive from the Waldorf. He was in the seat across the aisle.

“I don’t, no.”

“Have a guess.”

“I genuinely have no idea.”

“Go on. Try.”

I shrugged. “Ten million dollars?”

“
Forty
million dollars.” He was triumphant, as if knowing the price somehow implied he was involved in the ownership. “Hollington has
five
.”

“Makes you wonder what they can possibly use them all for.”

“They lease them out when they don’t need them.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” I said. “I’d heard that.”

The noise of the engines increased and we began our charge down the runway. I imagined the terrorist suspects, handcuffed and hooded, strapped into their luxurious leather armchairs as they lifted off from some red-dusted military airstrip near the Afghan border, bound for the pine forests of eastern Poland. The plane seemed to spring into the air, and I watched over the edge of my glass as the lights of Manhattan spread to fill the window, then slid and tilted, and finally flickered into darkness as we rose into the low cloud. It felt as though we were climbing blindly for a long time in our vulnerable metal tube, but then the gauze fell away and we came up into a bright night. The clouds were as massive and solid as alps, and the moon appeared occasionally from behind the peaks, lighting valleys and glaciers and ravines.

Some time after the plane leveled off, Amelia rose and came down the aisle toward me. Her hips swayed, involuntarily seductive, with the motion of the cabin.

“All right,” she said, “he’s ready to have a word. But go easy on him, okay? He’s had a hell of a couple of days.”

He and I both, I thought.

“Will do,” I said.

I fished out my shoulder bag from beside my seat and began to squeeze past her. She caught my arm.

“You haven’t got long,” she warned. “This flight’s only a hop. We’ll be starting to descend any minute.”

IT CERTAINLY WAS A
hop. I checked afterward. Only two hundred and sixty miles separate New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, and the cruising speed of a Gulfstream G450 is five hundred and twenty-eight miles per hour. The conjunction of these two facts explains why the tape of my conversation with Lang lasts a mere eleven minutes. We were probably already losing altitude even as I approached him.

His eyes were closed, his glass still held in his outstretched hand. He had removed his jacket and tie and eased off his shoes, and was sprawled back in his seat like a starfish, as if someone had pushed him into it. At first I thought he’d fallen asleep, but then I realized his eyes were narrowed to slits and he was watching me closely. He gestured vaguely with his drink toward the seat opposite him.

“Hi, man,” he said. “Join me.” He opened his eyes fully, yawned, and put the back of his hand to his mouth. “Sorry.”

“Hello, Adam.”

I sat down. I had my bag in my lap. I fumbled to pull out my notebook, the minirecorder, and a spare disk. Wasn’t this what Rycart wanted? Tapes? Nervousness made me clumsy, and if Lang had so much as raised an eyebrow, I would have put the recorder away again. But he didn’t appear to notice. He must have gone through this ritual so many times at the end of some official visit the journalist conducted into his presence for a few minutes’ exclusive access, the tape machine nervously examined to make sure it works, the illusion of informality over the relaxing prime ministerial drink. In the recording you can hear the exhaustion in his voice.

“So,” he said, “how’s it going?”

“It’s going,” I said. “It’s certainly going.”

When I listen to the disk, my register’s so high from the anxiety, it sounds as I’ve been sucking helium.

“Found out anything interesting?”

There was a gleam of something in his eyes. Contempt? Amusement? I sensed he was playing with me.

“This and that. How was Washington?”

“Washington was great, actually.” There’s a rustling noise as he straightens slightly in his chair, drawing himself up to give one last performance before the theater closes for the night. “I got the most terrific support everywhere—on the Hill, of course, as you probably saw, but also the vice president and the secretary of state. They’re going to help me in every way they can.”

“And is the bottom line that you’ll be able to settle in America?”

“Oh, yes. If worst comes to worst, they’ll offer me asylum, certainly. Maybe even a job of some kind, as long as it doesn’t involve overseas travel. But it won’t get that far. They’re going to supply something much more valuable.”

“Really?”

Lang nodded. “Evidence.”

“Right.” I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

“Is that thing working?” he asked.

There is a deafening clunk as I pick up the recorder.

“Yes, I think so. Is that okay?”

With a thump, I replace it.

“Sure,” said Lang. “I just want to make sure you get this down, because I definitely think we can use this. This is important. We should keep it as an exclusive for the memoirs. It will do wonders for the serialization deal.” He leaned forward to emphasize his words. “Washington is prepared to provide sworn testimony that no United Kingdom personnel were directly involved in the capture of those four men in Pakistan.”

“Really?”
Really? Really?
I keep on parroting it, and I wince every time I hear the sycophancy in my voice. The fawning courtier. The self-effacing ghost.

“You bet. The director of the CIA himself will provide a deposition to the court in The Hague, saying that this was an entirely American covert operation, and if that doesn’t do the trick he’s prepared to let the actual officers who were running the mission provide evidence in camera.” Lang sat back and sipped his brandy. “That should give Rycart something to think about. How’s he going to make a charge of war crimes stick now?”

“But your memorandum to the Ministry of Defence—”

“That’s genuine,” he conceded with a shrug. “It’s true, I can’t deny that I urged the use of the SAS. And it’s true the British government can’t deny that our special forces were in Peshawar at the time of Operation Tempest. And we also can’t deny that it was our intelligence services that tracked down those men to the particular location where they were arrested. But there’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”

Lang smiled at me.

“But we did?”

“There’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”

“But if we did, surely that would be aiding and abetting—”

“There’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”

He was still holding his smile, albeit now with just a crease of concentration in his brow, as a tenor might hold a note at the end of a difficult aria.