The Ghost Read online

  She wasn’t in the office, where the secretaries were still fielding calls, or the passage, or the kitchen. To my surprise, one of the policemen told me she was outside. It must have been after four by now, and getting cold. She was standing in the turning circle in front of the house. In the January gloom, the tip of her cigarette glowed bright red as she inhaled, then faded to nothing.

  ‘I wouldn’t have guessed you were a smoker,’ I said.

  ‘I only ever allow myself one. And then only at times of great stress or great contentment.’

  ‘Which is this?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  She had buttoned her jacket against the chilly dusk, and was smoking in that curious noli me tangere way that a certain kind of woman does, with one arm held loosely against her waist and the other – the one with the hand holding the cigarette – slanted across her breast. The fragrant smell of the burning tobacco in the open air made me crave a cigarette myself. It would have been my first in more than a decade, and it would have started me back on forty a day for sure – but still, at that moment, if she’d offered me one, I would have taken it.

  She didn’t.

  ‘John Maddox just called,’ I said. ‘Now he wants the book in two weeks instead of four.’

  ‘Christ. Good luck.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s the faintest chance of my sitting down with Adam for another interview today, is there?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘In that case, could I have a lift back to my hotel? I’ll do some work there instead.’

  She exhaled smoke through her nose and studied me. ‘You’re not planning to take that manuscript out of here, are you?’

  ‘Of course not!’ My voice always rises an octave when I tell a lie. I could never have become a politician: I’d have sounded like Donald Duck. ‘I just want to write up what we did today, that’s all.’

  ‘Because you do realise how serious this is getting, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. You can check my laptop if you want.’

  She paused just long enough to convey her suspicion. ‘All right,’ she said, finishing her cigarette. ‘I’ll trust you.’ She dropped the stub on to the drive and extinguished it delicately with the pointed toe of her shoe, then stooped and retrieved it. I imagined her at school, similarly removing the evidence: the head girl who was never caught smoking. ‘Collect your stuff. I’ll get one of the boys to take you into Edgartown.’

  We walked back into the house and parted in the corridor. She headed back to the ringing telephones. I climbed the stairs to the study, and as I came closer I could hear Ruth and Adam Lang shouting at one another. Their voices were muffled, and the only words I heard distinctly came at the tail-end of her final rant: ‘Spending the rest of my bloody life here!’ The door was ajar. I hesitated. I didn’t want to interrupt, but on the other hand I didn’t want to hang around and be caught looking as if I were eavesdropping. In the end I knocked lightly, and after a pause I heard Lang say wearily, ‘Come.’

  He was sitting at the desk. His wife was at the other end of the room. They were both breathing heavily, and I sensed that something momentous – some long-pent-up explosion – had just occurred. I could understand now why Amelia had fled outside to smoke.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ I said, gesturing towards my belongings. ‘I wanted to …’

  ‘Fine,’ said Lang.

  ‘I’m going to call the children,’ said Ruth bitterly. ‘Unless of course you’ve already done it.’

  Lang didn’t look at her: he looked at me. And, oh, what layers of meaning there were to be read in those glaucous eyes! He invited me, in that long instant, to see what had become of him: stripped of his power, abused by his enemies, hunted, homesick, trapped between his wife and his mistress. You could write a hundred pages about that one brief look, and still not get to the end of it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Ruth, and pushed past me quite roughly, her small, hard body banging into mine. At the same moment, Amelia appeared in the doorway, holding a telephone.

  ‘Adam,’ she said, ‘it’s the White House. They have the President of the United States on the line for you.’ She smiled at me and ushered me towards the door. ‘Would you mind? We need the room.’

  *

  It was pretty well dark by the time I got back to the hotel. There was just enough light in the sky to show up the big black storm clouds massing over Chappaquiddick, rolling in from the Atlantic. The girl in reception, in her little lace mob cap, said there was a run of bad weather on the way.

  I went up to my room and stood in the shadows for a while, listening to the creaking of the old inn sign and the relentless boom-and-hiss, boom-and-hiss of the surf beyond the empty road. The lighthouse switched itself on at the precise moment when the beam was pointing directly at the hotel and the sudden eruption of red into the room jerked me out of my reverie. I turned on the desk lamp and took my laptop out of my shoulder bag. We had travelled a long way together, that laptop and I. We had endured rock stars who believed themselves messiahs with a mission to save the planet. We had survived footballers whose monosyllabic grunts would make a silverback gorilla sound as if he were reciting Shakespeare. We had put up with soon-to-be-forgotten actors who had egos the size of a Roman emperor’s, and entourages to match. I gave the machine a comradely pat. Its once shiny metal case was scratched and dented: the honourable wounds of a dozen campaigns. We had got through those. We would somehow get through even this.

  I hooked it up to the hotel telephone, dialled my internet service provider and, while the connection was going through, went into the bathroom for a glass of water. The face that stared back at me from the mirror was a deterioration even on the spectre of the previous evening. I pulled down my lower eyelids and examined the yolky whites of my eyes, before moving on to the greying teeth and hair, and the red filigrees of my cheeks and nose. Martha’s Vineyard in midwinter seemed to be ageing me. It was Shangri-La in reverse.

  From the other room I heard the familiar announcement: ‘You have email.’

  I saw at once that something was wrong. There was the usual queue of a dozen junk messages, offering me everything from penis enlargement to The Wall Street Journal, plus an email from Rick’s office confirming the payment of the first part of the advance. Just about the only thing that wasn’t listed was the email I had sent myself that afternoon.

  For a few moments, I stared stupidly at the screen, then I opened the separate filing cabinet on the laptop’s hard drive which automatically stores every piece of email, incoming and outgoing. And there, sure enough, to my immense relief, at the top of the ‘Email you have sent’ queue was one entitled ‘No subject’, to which I had attached the manuscript of Adam Lang’s memoirs. But when I opened the blank email and clicked on the box labelled ‘download’, all I received was a message saying, ‘That file is not currently available’. I tried a few more times, always with the same result.

  I took out my mobile and called the internet company.

  I shall spare you a full account of the sweaty half-hour that followed – the endless selecting from lists of options, the queuing, the listening to muzak, the increasingly panicky conversation with the company’s representative in Uttar Pradesh, or wherever the hell he was speaking from.

  The bottom line was that the manuscript had vanished, and the company had no record of its ever having existed.

  I lay down on the bed.

  I am not very technically minded, but even I was beginning to grasp what must have happened. Somehow, Lang’s manuscript had been wiped from the memory of my internet service provider’s computers. For which there were two possible explanations. One was that it hadn’t been uploaded properly in the first place – but that couldn’t be right, because I had received those two messages while I was still in the office: ‘Your file has been transferred’ and ‘You have email’. The other was that the file had since been deleted. But how could that have happened? Deletion would imply that someone had d
irect access to the computers of one of the world’s biggest internet conglomerates, and was able to cover their tracks at will. It would also imply – had to imply – that my emails were all being monitored.

  Rick’s voice floated into my mind – ‘Wow. This must’ve been some operation. Too big for a newspaper. This must’ve been a government’ – followed swiftly by Amelia’s – ‘You do realise how serious this is getting, don’t you?’

  ‘But the book is crap!’ I cried out loud, despairingly, at the portrait of the Victorian whaling master hanging opposite the bed. ‘There’s nothing in it that’s worth all this trouble!’

  The stern old Victorian seadog stared back at me, unmoved. I had broken my promise, his expression seemed to say, and something out there – some nameless force – knew it.

  Eight

  * * *

  Authors are often busy people and hard to get hold of; sometimes they are temperamental. The publishers consequently rely on the ghosts to make the process of publication as smooth as possible.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO question of my doing any more work that night. I didn’t even turn on the television. Oblivion was all I craved. I switched off my mobile, went down to the bar and, when that closed, sat up in my room emptying a bottle of Scotch until long past midnight, which no doubt explains why for once I slept right through the night.

  I was woken by the bedside telephone. The harsh metallic tone seemed to vibrate my eyeballs in their dusty sockets, and when I rolled over to answer it I felt my stomach keep on rolling, wobbling away from me across the mattress and on to the floor like a balloon taut full of some noxious, viscous liquid. The revolving room was very hot; the air-conditioning turned up to maximum. I realised I’d gone to sleep fully dressed, and had left all the lights burning.

  ‘You need to check out of your hotel immediately,’ said Amelia. ‘Things have changed.’ Her voice pierced my skull like a knitting needle. ‘There’s a car on its way.’

  That was all she said. I didn’t argue; I couldn’t. She’d gone.

  I once read that the ancient Egyptians used to prepare a pharaoh for mummification by drawing his brain out through his nose with a hook. At some point in the night a similar procedure had seemingly been performed on me. I shuffled across the carpet and pulled back the curtains to unveil a sky and sea as grey as death. Nothing was stirring. The silence was absolute, unbroken even by the cry of a gull. A storm was coming in all right: even I could tell that.

  But then, just as I was about to turn away, I heard the distant sound of an engine. I squinted down at the street beneath my window and saw a couple of cars pull up. The doors of the first opened and two men got out – young, fit-looking, wearing ski jackets, jeans and boots. The driver stared up at my window and instinctively I took a step backwards. By the time I risked a second look he had opened the rear of the car and was bent over it. When he straightened he was holding what at first, in my paranoid state, I took to be a machine gun. Actually it was a television camera.

  I started to move quickly then, or at least as quickly as my condition would allow. I opened the window wide to let in a blast of freezing air. I undressed, showered in lukewarm water, and shaved. I put on clean clothes and packed. By the time I got down to reception it was eight forty-five – an hour after the first ferry from the mainland had docked at Vineyard Haven – and the hotel looked as though it was staging an international media convention. Whatever you might say against Adam Lang, he was certainly doing wonders for the local economy: Edgartown hadn’t been this busy since Chappaquiddick. There must have been thirty people hanging around, drinking coffee, swapping stories in half a dozen languages, talking on their mobiles, checking equipment. I’d spent enough time around reporters to be able to tell one type from another. The television correspondents were dressed as though they were going to a funeral; the news agency hacks were the ones who looked like gravediggers.

  I bought a copy of The New York Times and went into the restaurant, where I drank three glasses of orange juice straight off, before turning my attention to the paper. Lang wasn’t buried in the international section any longer. He was right up there on the front page:

  WAR CRIMES COURT

  TO RULE ON BRITISH

  EX-PREMIER

  ~

  ANNOUNCEMENT

  DUE TODAY

  ~

  Former Foreign Sec.

  Alleges Lang OK’d

  Use of Torture by CIA

  Lang had issued a ‘robust’ statement, it said (I felt a thrill of pride). He was ‘embattled’, ‘coping with one blow after another’ – beginning with ‘the accidental drowning of a close aide earlier in the year’. The affair was ‘an embarrassment’ for the British and American governments. ‘A senior administration official insisted, however, that the White House remained loyal to a man who was formerly its closest ally. “He was there for us and we’ll be there for him,” the official added, speaking only after a guarantee of anonymity.’

  But it was the final paragraph that really made me choke into my coffee:

  The publication of Mr Lang’s memoirs, which had been scheduled for June, has been brought forward to the end of April. John Maddox, chief executive of Rhinehart Publishing Inc., which is reported to have paid $10 million for the book, said that the finishing touches were now being put to the manuscript. “This is going to be a world publishing event,” Mr Maddox told The New York Times in a telephone interview yesterday. “Adam Lang will be giving the first full inside scoop by a leader on the west’s War on Terror.”

  I folded the newspaper, rose and walked with dignity through the lobby, carefully stepping around the camera bags, the two-foot zoom lenses and the hand-held mikes in their woolly grey windproof prophylactics. Between the members of the Fourth Estate, a cheerful, almost a party atmosphere prevailed, as might have existed among eighteenth-century gentlefolk off for a good day out at a hanging.

  ‘The news room says the press conference in The Hague is now at ten o’clock Eastern,’ someone shouted.

  I passed unnoticed and went out on to the veranda where I put a call through to my agent. His assistant answered – Brad, or Brett, or Brat: I forget his name; Rick changed staff almost as quickly as he changed his wives.

  I asked to speak to Mr Riccardelli.

  ‘He’s away from the office right now.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘On a fishing trip.’

  ‘Fishing?’

  ‘He’ll be calling in occasionally to check his messages.’

  ‘That’s nice. Where is he?’

  ‘The Bouma National Heritage Rainforest Park.’

  ‘Christ. Where’s that?’

  ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing—’

  ‘Where is it?’

  Brad, or Brett, or Brat hesitated.

  ‘Fiji.’

  *

  The minivan took me up the hill out of Edgartown, past the bookshop and the little cinema and the whaling church. When we reached the edge of town we followed the signs left to West Tisbury rather than right to Vineyard Haven, which at least implied that I was being taken back to the house, rather than to be deported for breaching the Official Secrets Act. I sat behind the police driver, my suitcase on the seat beside me. He was one of the younger ones, dressed in their standard non-uniform uniform of grey zippered jacket and black tie. His eyes sought mine in the mirror and he observed that it was all a very bad business. I replied briefly that it was, indeed, a bad business, and then pointedly stared out of the window to avoid having to talk.

  We were quickly into the flat countryside. A deserted cycle track ran beside the road. Beyond it stretched the drab forest. My frail body might be on Martha’s Vineyard but my mind was in the South Pacific. I was thinking of Rick in Fiji, and all the elaborate and humiliating ways I could fire him when he got back. The rational part of me knew I would never do it – why shouldn’t he go fishing? – but the irrational was to the for
e that morning. I suppose I was afraid, and fear distorts one’s judgement even more than alcohol and exhaustion. I felt duped, abandoned, aggrieved.

  ‘After I’ve dropped you off, sir,’ said the policeman, undeterred by my silence, ‘I’ve got to pick up Mr Kroll from the airport. You can always tell it’s a bad business when the lawyers start turning up.’ He broke off and leaned in close to the windscreen. ‘Oh fuck, here we go again.’

  Up ahead it looked as though there had been a traffic accident. The vivid blue lights of a couple of patrol cars flashed dramatically in the gloomy morning, illuminating the nearby trees like sheet lightning in a Wagner opera. As we came closer I could see a dozen or more cars and vans pulled up on either side of the road. People were standing around aimlessly, and I assumed, in that lazy way the brain sometimes assembles information, that they had been in a pileup. But as the minivan slowed and indicated to turn left, the bystanders started grabbing things from beside the road and came running at us. ‘Lang! Lang! Lang!’ a woman shouted over a bullhorn. ‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’ Images of Lang in an orange jumpsuit, gripping prison bars with bloodied hands, danced in front of the windscreen: ‘WANTED! WAR CRIMINAL! ADAM LANG!’

  The Edgartown police had blocked the track down to the Rhinehart compound with traffic cones and quickly pulled them out of the way to let us through, but not before we’d come to a stop. Demonstrators surrounded us and a fusillade of thumps and kicks raked the side of the van. I glimpsed a brilliant arc of white light illuminating a figure – a man, cowled like a monk. He turned away from his interviewer to stare at us and I recognised him dimly from somewhere. But then he vanished behind a gauntlet of contorted faces, pounding hands, and dripping spit.

  ‘They’re always the really violent bastards,’ said my driver, ‘peace protesters.’ He put his foot down, the rear tyres slithered uselessly, then bit, and we shot forwards into the silent woods.