‘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 towards him. He flicked through the first four very quickly, paused over the fifth – the one that showed him and Emmett on stage – 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 co-pilot 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 river bank 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 leaned forward and grabbed my forearm.
‘If you mean what happened to Mike, then let me tell you I was absolutely appalled by that.’ His gaze was fixed on me unwaveringly: 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, that 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 travelling 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 on to 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 forwards 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 of 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 disc from the mini-recorder 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, trance-like, to obey, gazing vacantly towards 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?’
And 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 towards the exit, preceded by his fourth bodyguard, Amelia at his back. I quickly stuffed my disc recorder and the photographs into my shoulder bag and followed them. The pilot had come out of the cockpit to say goodbye and I saw Lang visibly square his shoulders and advance to meet him, his hand outstretched.
‘That was great,’ said Lang vaguely, ‘as usual. My favourite airline.’ He shook the pilot’s hand, then leaned past him to greet the co-pilot 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 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.’
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 acknowledgement, then set off down the steps, gracefully, like a dancer. He reached the tarmac and had gone about ten yards towards the terminal when the technician shouted out, ‘Adam!’ and waved. The voice was English, and Lang must have recognised the accent of a fellow countryman because he suddenly broke away from his bodyguards and strode towards 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 retina – 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.
Sixteen
* * *
If you are going to be the least bit upset not to see your name credited or not to be invited to the launch party then you are going to have a miserable time ghosting altogether.
Ghostwriting
* * *
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 backwards. 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 weedkiller, 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 bomb-proof car heading to the airport to meet him. How he had got on to 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 armoured car was 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 cupboard next to my bed. The MI5 man took out the mini-recorder and ejected the disc. 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 disc 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 honours,’ 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 recognise his assassin and deliberately head towards 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 t
he terminal roof.’
*
I watched Lang’s funeral on CNN two day later. My eyesight was more or less restored. I could see it was tastefully done: the Queen, the prime minister, the US vice president and half the leaders of Europe; the coffin draped in the Union Jack; the guard of honour; the solitary piper, playing a lament. Ruth looked very good in black, I thought: it was definitely her colour. 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 of the window.
The next day, when I was due to be discharged from hospital, Rick came up from New York to say goodbye 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?’
‘Oh, 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 any more: 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.