The Ghost (19 page)

“It’s me,” said Rycart. “Have you settled in?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Open the door, then.”

He was standing in the corridor, his phone to his ear. Beside him was the driver who had met me at LaGuardia.

“All right, Frank,” said Rycart to his minder. “I’ll take it from here. You keep an eye out in the lobby.”

Rycart slipped his phone into the pocket of his overcoat as Frank plodded back toward the elevators. He was what my mother would have called “handsome, and knows it”: a striking profile, narrowly set bright blue eyes accentuated by an orangey tan, and that swept-back waterfall of hair the cartoonists loved so much. He looked a lot younger than sixty. He nodded at the empty bottle in my hand. “Tough day?”

“You could say that.”

He came into the room without waiting for an invitation and went straight over to the window and drew the curtains. I closed the door.

“My apologies for the location,” he said, “but I tend to be recognized in Manhattan. Especially after yesterday. Did Frank look after you all right?”

“I’ve rarely had a warmer welcome.”

“I know what you mean, but he’s a useful guy. Ex-NYPD. He handles logistics and security for me. I’m not the most popular kid on the block right now, as you can imagine.”

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Water would be fine.”

He prowled around the room while I poured him a glass. He checked the bathroom, even the closet.

“What is it?” I said. “Do you think this is a trap?”

“It crossed my mind.” He unbuttoned his coat and laid it carefully on the bed. I guessed his Armani suit cost about twice the annual income of a small African village. “Let’s face it, you do work for Lang.”

“I met him for the first time on Monday,” I said. “I don’t even know him.”

Rycart laughed. “Who does? If you met him on Monday you probably know him as well as anyone. I worked with him for fifteen years, and I certainly don’t have a clue where he’s coming from. Mike McAra didn’t, either, and he was with him from the beginning.”

“His wife said more or less the same thing to me.”

“Well, there you go. If someone as sharp as Ruth doesn’t get him—and she’s married to him, for God’s sake—what hope do the rest of us have? The man’s a mystery. Thanks.” Rycart took the water. He sipped it thoughtfully, studying me. “But you sound as though you’re starting to unravel him.”

“I feel as though I’m the one who’s unraveling, quite frankly.”

“Let’s sit down,” said Rycart, patting my shoulder, “and you can tell me all about it.”

The gesture reminded me of Lang. A great man’s charm. They made me feel like a minnow swimming between sharks. I would need to be on my guard. I sat down carefully in one of the two small armchairs—it was beige, like the walls. Rycart sat opposite me.

“So,” he said. “How do we begin? You know who I am. Who are you?”

“I’m a professional ghostwriter,” I said. “I was brought in to rewrite Adam Lang’s memoirs after Mike McAra died. I know nothing about politics. It’s as if I’ve stepped through the looking glass.”

“Tell me what you’ve found out.”

Even I was too canny for that. I hemmed and hawed.

“Perhaps you could tell me about McAra first,” I said.

“If you like.” Rycart shrugged. “What can I say? Mike was the consummate professional. If you’d pinned a rosette to that suitcase over there and told him it was the party leader, he’d have followed it. Everyone expected Lang would fire him when he became leader and bring in his own man. But Mike was too useful. He knew the party inside out. What else do you want to know?”

“What was he like, as a person?”

“What was he like
as a person?
” Rycart gave me a strange look, as if it were the oddest question he’d ever heard. “Well, he had no life outside politics, if that’s what you mean, so you could say that Lang was everything to him—wife, kids, friends. What else? He was obsessive, a detail man. Almost everything Adam wasn’t, Mike was. Maybe that was why he stayed on, right through Downing Street and all the way out again, long after the others had all cashed in and gone to make some money. No fancy corporate jobs for our Mike. He was very loyal to Adam.”

“Not that loyal,” I said. “Not if he was in touch with you.”

“Ah, but that was only right at the very end. You mentioned a photograph. Can I see it?”

When I fetched the envelope, his face had the same greedy expression as Emmett’s, but when he saw the picture, he couldn’t hide his disappointment.

“Is this it?” he said. “Just a bunch of privileged white kids doing a song-and-dance act?”

“It’s a bit more interesting than that,” I said. “For a start, why’s your number on the back of it?”

Rycart gave me a sly look. “Why exactly should I help you?”

“Why exactly should
I
help
you
?”

We stared at one another. Eventually he grinned, showing large, polished white teeth.

“You should have been a politician,” he said.

“I’m learning from the best.”

He bowed modestly, thinking I meant him, but actually it was Lang I had in mind. Vanity, that was his weakness, I realized. I could imagine how deftly Lang would have flattered him, and what a blow his sacking must have been to his ego. And now, with his lean face and his prow of a nose and those piercing eyes, he was as hell-bent on revenge as any discarded lover. He got to his feet and went over to the door. He checked the corridor up and down. When he returned he loomed over me, pointing a tanned finger directly at my face.

“If you double-cross me,” he said, “you’ll pay for it. And if you doubt my willingness to hold a grudge and eventually settle the score, ask Adam Lang.”

“Fine,” I said.

He was too agitated now to sit still, and that was something else I only realized at that moment: the pressure he was under. You had to hand it to Rycart. It did take a certain nerve to drag your former party leader and prime minister in front of a war crimes tribunal.

“This ICC business,” he said, patrolling up and down in front of the bed, “it’s only hit the headlines in the past week, but let me tell you I’ve been pursuing this thing behind the scenes for
years
. Iraq, rendition, torture, Guantánamo—what’s been done in this so-called war on terror is illegal under international law, just as much as anything that happened in Kosovo or Liberia. The only difference is we’re the ones doing it. The hypocrisy is nauseating.”

He seemed to realize 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 farther 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 him.”

“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 visualize it perfectly. McAra with his phone wedged between shoulder and ear, grabbing his cheap blue Bic. “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 just 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 preemptive 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 toward 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.