The Ghost Read online

  He seemed to realise he was starting on a speech he’d already made too many times before, and checked himself. He took a sip of water. ‘Anyway, rhetoric is one thing and evidence is another thing entirely. I could sense the political climate changing: that was helpful. Every time a bomb went off, every time another soldier was killed, every time it became a little bit clearer we’d started another Hundred Years War without a clue how to end it, things shifted further my way. It was no longer inconceivable that a western leader could wind up in the dock. The worse the mess he’d left behind him got, the more people were willing to see it – wanted to see it. What I needed was just one piece of evidence that would meet the legal standard of proof – a single document with his name on it would have been enough – and I didn’t have it.

  ‘And then suddenly, just before Christmas, there it was. I had it in my hands. It just came through the post. Not even a covering letter. “Top Secret: Memorandum from the Prime Minister to the Secretary of State for Defence.” It was five years old, written back in the days when I was still Foreign Secretary, but I’d no idea it even existed. A smoking gun if ever there was one – Christ, the barrel was still hot! A directive from the British prime minister that these four poor bastards should be snatched off the streets in Pakistan by the SAS and handed over to the CIA.’

  ‘A war crime,’ I said.

  ‘A war crime,’ he agreed. ‘A minor one, okay. But so what? In the end, they could only get Al Capone for tax evasion. It didn’t mean Capone wasn’t a gangster. I carried out a few discreet checks to make sure the memo was authentic, then I took it to The Hague in person.’

  ‘You’d no idea who it came from?’

  ‘No. Not until my anonymous source called and told me. And just you wait till Lang hears who it was. This is going to be the worst thing of all.’ He leaned in close to me. ‘Mike McAra!’

  Looking back, I suppose I already knew it. But suspicion is one thing, confirmation another, and to see Rycart’s exultation at that moment was to appreciate the scale of McAra’s treachery.

  ‘He called me! Can you believe that? If anyone had predicted I’d ever be given help by Mike McAra, of all people, I’d have laughed at them.’

  ‘When did he call?’

  ‘About three weeks after I first got the document. The eighth of January? The ninth? Something like that. “Hello, Richard. Did you get the present I sent you?” I almost had a heart attack. Then I had to shut him up quickly. Because of course you know that the phone lines at the UN are all bugged?’

  ‘Are they?’ I was still trying to absorb everything.

  ‘Oh, completely. The National Security Agency monitors every word that’s transmitted in the western hemisphere. Every syllable you ever utter on a phone, every email you ever send, every credit card transaction you ever make – it’s all recorded and stored. The only problem is sorting through it. At the UN, we’re briefed that the easiest way to get round the eavesdropping is to use disposable mobile phones, try to avoid mentioning specifics, and change our numbers as often as possible – that way we can at least keep a bit ahead of them. So I told Mike to stop right there. Then I gave him a brand-new number I’d never used before, and asked him to call me straight back.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see.’ And I could. I could visualise it perfectly. McAra with his phone wedged between shoulder and ear, grabbing his cheap blue biro. ‘He must have scribbled the number on the back of the photograph he was holding at the time.’

  ‘And then he called me,’ said Rycart. He had stopped pacing and was looking at himself in the mirror above the chest of drawers. He put both hands to his forehead and smoothed his hair back over his ears. ‘Christ, I’m shattered,’ he said. ‘Look at me. I was never like this when I was in government, even when I was working eighteen hours a day. You know, people get it all wrong. It isn’t having power that’s exhausting – it’s not having it that wears you out.’

  ‘What did he say when he called? McAra?’

  ‘The first thing that struck me was that he didn’t sound his usual self at all. You were asking me what he was like. Well, he was a pretty tough operator, which of course is what Adam liked about him: he knew he could always rely on Mike to do the dirty work. He was sharp, businesslike. You could almost say he was brutal, especially on the phone. My private office used to call him McHorror: “The McHorror just rang for you, Foreign Secretary …” But that day, I remember, his voice was completely flat. He sounded broken, actually. He said he’d just spent the past year in the archives in Cambridge, working on Adam’s memoirs, going over our whole time in government, and just getting more and more disillusioned with it all. He said that that was where he’d found the memorandum about Operation Tempest. But the real reason he was calling, he said, was that that was only the tip of the iceberg. He said he’d just discovered something much more important – something that made sense of everything that had gone wrong while we were in power.’

  I could hardly breathe.

  ‘What was it?’

  Rycart laughed. ‘Well, oddly enough, I did ask him that, but he wouldn’t tell me over the phone. He said he wanted to meet me to discuss it face to face: it was that big. The only thing he would say was that the key to it could be found in Lang’s autobiography, if anyone bothered to check – that it was all there in the beginning.’

  ‘Those were his exact words?’

  ‘Pretty much. I made a note as he was talking. And that was it. He said he’d call me in a day or two to fix a meeting. But I heard nothing, and then about a week later it was in the press that he was dead. And nobody else ever called me on that phone, because nobody else had that number. So you can imagine why I was so excited when it suddenly started ringing again. And so here we are,’ he said, gesturing to the room, ‘the perfect place to spend a Thursday night. And now I think you should tell me exactly what the hell is going on.’

  ‘I will. Just one more thing, though. Why didn’t you tell the police?’

  ‘You are joking, are you? Discussions at The Hague were at a very delicate stage. If I’d told the police that McAra had been in contact with me, naturally they’d have wanted to know why. Then it would have been bound to get back to Lang, and he would have been able to make some kind of pre-emptive move against the war crimes court. He’s still a hell of an operator, you know. That statement he put out against me the day before yesterday – “The international struggle against terror is too important to be used for the purposes of domestic political revenge.” Wow.’ He shuddered admiringly. ‘Vicious.’

  I squirmed slightly in my chair, but Rycart didn’t notice. He’d gone back to inspecting himself in the mirror. ‘Besides,’ he said, sticking out his chin, ‘I thought it was accepted that Mike had killed himself, either because he was depressed, or drunk, or both. I’d only have confirmed what they already knew. He was certainly in a poor state when he rang me.’

  ‘And I can tell you why,’ I said. ‘What he’d just found out was that one of the men in that picture with Lang at Cambridge – the picture McAra had in his hand when he spoke to you – was an officer in the CIA.’

  Rycart had been checking his profile. He stopped. His brow corrugated. And then, with great slowness, he turned his face towards me.

  ‘He was what?’

  ‘His name is Paul Emmett.’ Suddenly I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. I was desperate to unburden myself – to share it – to let someone else try to make sense of it. ‘He later became a professor at Harvard. Then he went on to run something called the Arcadia Institution. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it – of course I’ve heard of it – and I’ve always steered well clear of it, precisely because I’ve always thought it had CIA written all over it.’ Rycart sat down. He seemed stunned.

  ‘But is that really plausible?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know how these things work. Would someone join the CIA and then immediately be sent off to do postgraduate research in another country?’

&
nbsp; ‘I’d say that’s highly plausible. What better cover could you want? And where better than a university to spot the future brightest and best?’ He held out his hand. ‘Show me the photograph again. Which one is Emmett?’

  ‘It may all be balls,’ I warned, pointing Emmett out. ‘I’ve no proof. I just found his name on one of these paranoid websites. They said he joined the CIA after he left Yale, which must have been about three years before this was taken.’

  ‘Oh, I can believe it,’ said Rycart, studying him intently. ‘In fact, now you mention it, I think I did hear some gossip once. But then that whole international conference-circuit world is crawling with them. I call them “the military-industrial-academic complex”.’ He smiled at his own wit, then looked serious again. ‘What’s really suspicious is that he should have known Lang.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘what’s really suspicious is that a matter of hours after McAra tracked down Emmett to his house near Boston, he was found washed up dead on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard.’

  *

  After that I told him everything I’d discovered. I told him the story about the tides and the flashlights on the beach at Lambert’s Cove, and the curious way the police investigation had been handled. I told him about Ruth’s description of McAra’s argument with Lang on the eve of his death, and about Lang’s reluctance to discuss his Cambridge years, and the way he’d tried to conceal the fact that he’d become politically active immediately after leaving university rather than two years later. I described how McAra, with his typical, dogged thoroughness, had discovered all this, turning up detail after detail that gradually destroyed Lang’s account of his early years: that was presumably what he meant when he said that the key to everything was in the beginning of Lang’s autobiography. I told him about the satellite navigation system in the Ford and how it had taken me to Emmett’s doorstep, and how strangely Emmett had behaved.

  And, of course, the more I talked, the more excited Rycart became. I guess it must have been like Christmas for him.

  ‘Just suppose,’ he said, pacing up and down again, ‘that it was Emmett who originally suggested to Lang that he should think about a career in politics. Let’s face it, someone must have put the idea into his pretty little head. I’d been a junior member of the party since I was fourteen. What year did Lang join?’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-five.’

  ‘Seventy-five! You see, that would make perfect sense. Do you remember what Britain was like in seventy-five? The security services were out of control, spying on the prime minister. Retired generals were forming private armies. The economy was collapsing. There were strikes, riots. It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if the CIA had decided to recruit a few bright young things and had encouraged them to make their careers in useful places – the civil service, the media, politics. It’s what they do everywhere else, after all.’

  ‘But not in Britain, surely,’ I said. ‘We’re an ally.’

  Rycart looked at me with contempt.

  ‘The CIA was spying on American students back then. Do you really think they’d have been squeamish about spying on ours? Of course they were active in Britain! They still are. They have a Head of Station in London and a huge staff. I could name you half a dozen MPs right now who are in regular contact with the CIA. In fact …’ He stopped pacing and clicked his fingers. ‘That’s a thought!’ He whirled round to look at me. ‘Does the name Reg Giffen mean anything to you?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Reg Giffen – Sir Reginald Giffen, later Lord Giffen, now dead Giffen, thank God – spent so long making speeches in the House of Commons on behalf of the Americans, we used to call him the Member for Michigan. He announced his resignation as an MP in the first week of the nineteen-eighty-three general election campaign, and it caught everyone by surprise, apart from one very enterprising and photogenic young party member, who just happened to have moved into his constituency six months earlier.’

  ‘And who then got the nomination to become the party’s candidate, with Giffen’s support,’ I said, ‘and who then won one of the safest seats in the country when he was still only thirty.’ The story was legendary. It was the start of Lang’s rise to national prominence. ‘But you can’t really think that the CIA asked Giffen to help fix it so that Lang could get into parliament? That sounds very far-fetched.’

  ‘Oh, come on! Use your imagination! Imagine you’re Professor Emmett, now back in Harvard, writing unreadable bilge about the alliance of the English-speaking peoples and the need to combat the communist menace. Haven’t you got potentially the most amazing agent in history on your hands? A man who’s already starting to be talked about as a future party leader? A possible prime minister? Aren’t you going to persuade the powers-that-be at the Agency to do everything they can to further this man’s career? I was already in parliament myself when Lang arrived. I watched him come from nowhere, and streak past all of us.’ He scowled at the memory. ‘Of course he had help. He had no real connection with the party at all. We couldn’t begin to understand what made him tick.’

  ‘Surely that’s the point of him,’ I said. ‘He didn’t have an ideology.’

  ‘He may not have had an ideology, but he sure as hell had an agenda.’ Rycart sat down again. He leaned towards me. ‘Okay. Here’s a quiz for you. Name me one decision that Adam Lang took as prime minister that wasn’t in the interests of the United States of America.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not a trick question. Just name me one thing he did that Washington wouldn’t have approved of. Let’s think.’ He held up his thumb. ‘One: deployment of British troops to the Middle East, against the advice of just about every senior commander in our armed forces and all of our ambassadors who know the region. Two’ – up went his right index finger – ‘complete failure to demand any kind of quid pro quo from the White House in terms of reconstruction contracts for British firms, or anything else. Three: unwavering support for US foreign policy in the Middle East, even when it’s patently crazy for us to set ourselves against the entire Arab world. Four: the stationing of an American missile defence system on British soil that does absolutely nothing for our security – in fact, the complete opposite: it makes us a more obvious target for a first strike – and can only provide protection for the US. Five: the purchase, for fifty billion dollars, of an American nuclear missile system, that we call “independent” but which we wouldn’t even be able to fire without US approval, thus binding his successors to another twenty years of subservience to Washington over defence policy. Six: a treaty that allows the US to extradite our citizens to stand trial in America, but doesn’t allow us to do the same to theirs. Seven: collusion in the illegal kidnapping, torture, imprisonment and even murder of our own citizens. Eight: a consistent record of sacking any minister – I speak with experience here – who is less than one hundred per cent supportive of the alliance with the United States. Nine—’

  ‘All right,’ I said, holding up my hand. ‘I get the message.’

  ‘I have friends in Washington who just can’t believe the way that Lang ran British foreign policy. I mean, they were embarrassed about how much support he gave and how little he got in return. And where has it got us? Stuck fighting a so-called war we can’t possibly win, colluding in methods we didn’t use even when we were up against the Nazis!’ Rycart laughed ruefully and shook his head. ‘You know, in a way, I’m almost relieved to discover there might be a rational explanation for what we got up to in government while he was prime minister. If you think about it, the alternative’s actually worse. At least if he was working for the CIA it makes sense. So now,’ he said, patting my knee, ‘the question is: what are we going to do about it?’

  I didn’t like the sound of that first person plural.

  ‘Well,’ I said, wincing slightly, ‘I’m in a tricky position. I’m supposed to be helping him with his memoirs. I have a legal obligation not to divulge to a third party anything I hear in the course
of my work.’

  ‘It’s too late to stop now.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that, either.

  ‘We don’t actually have any proof,’ I pointed out. ‘We don’t even know for sure that Emmett was in the CIA, let alone that he recruited Lang. I mean – how is this relationship supposed to have worked after Lang got into Number Ten? Did he have a secret radio transmitter hidden in the attic, or what?’

  ‘This isn’t a joke, my friend,’ said Rycart. ‘I know something of how these things are done from when I was at the Foreign Office. Contact can be managed easily enough. For a start, Emmett was always coming to London, because of Arcadia. It was the perfect front. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole institution wasn’t set up as part of the covert operation to run Lang. The timing would fit. They could have used intermediaries.’

  ‘But there’s still no proof,’ I repeated, ‘and short of Lang confessing, or Emmett confessing, or the CIA opening their files, there never will be.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to get some proof,’ said Rycart flatly.

  ‘What?’ My mouth sagged; my everything sagged.

  ‘You’re in the perfect position,’ Rycart went on. ‘He trusts you. He lets you ask him whatever you like. He even allows you to tape his answers. You can put words in his mouth. We’ll have to devise a series of questions that gradually entrap him, and then finally you can confront him with the allegation, and let’s see how he reacts. He’ll deny it, but that won’t matter. The mere fact that you’re laying the evidence in front of him will put the story on the record.’

  ‘No it won’t. The tapes are his property.’

  ‘Yes it will. The tapes can be subpoenaed by the war crimes court, as evidence of his direct complicity with the CIA rendition programme.’