The Ghost

claim they were innocent! What else are they going to say?” Lang studied me closely, as if seeing me properly for the first time. “I’m beginning to think you’re too naïve for this job.”
    I couldn’t resist it. “Unlike Mike McAra?”
    “Mike!” Lang laughed and shook his head. “Mike was naïve in a different way.”
    The plane was beginning to descend quite rapidly now. The moon and stars had gone. We were dropping through cloud. I could feel the pressure change in my ears, and I had to pinch my nose and swallow hard.
    Amelia made her way down the aisle.
    “Is everything all right?” she asked. She looked concerned. She must have heard Lang’s outburst of temper; everyone must have.
    “We’re just doing some work on my memoirs,” said Lang. “I’m telling him what happened over Operation Tempest.”
    “You’re taping it?” said Amelia.
    “If that’s all right,” I said.
    “You need to be careful,” she told Lang. “Remember what Sid Kroll said—”
    “The tapes will be yours,” I interrupted, “not mine.”
    “They could still be subpoenaed.”
    “Stop treating me as though I’m a child,” said Lang abruptly. “I know what I want to say. Let’s deal with it once and for all.”
    Amelia permitted herself a slight widening of her eyes and withdrew.
    “Women!” muttered Lang. He took another gulp of brandy. The ice had melted, but the color of the liquid remained dark. It must have been a very full measure, and it occurred to me that our former prime minister was slightly drunk. I sensed this was my moment.
    “In what way,” I asked, “was Mike McAra naïve?”
    “Never mind,” muttered Lang. He nursed his drink, his chin on his chest, brooding. He suddenly jerked up again. “I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I’d do if I were in power again? I’d say, okay then, we’ll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we’ll have queues to flights on which we’ve done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone’s precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we’ll have queues to the flights where we’ve done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn’t that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would really choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down?”
    “And Mike was like that?”
    “Not at the beginning. But Mike, unfortunately, discovered idealism in his old age. I said to him—it was our last conversation, actually—I said, if our Lord Jesus Christ was unable to solve all the problems of the world when he came down to live among us—and he was the son of God!—wasn’t it a bit unreasonable of Mike to expect me to have sorted out everything in ten years?”
    “Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?”
    “Mike made certain wild accusations. I could hardly ignore them.”
    “May I ask what kind of accusations?”
    I could imagine Rycart and the special prosecutor sitting listening to the tape, straightening in their chairs at that. I had to swallow again. My voice sounded muffled in my ears, as if I was talking in a dream, or hailing myself from a great distance. On the tape, the pause that followed is quite short, but at the time it seemed endless, and Lang’s voice when it came was deadly quiet.
    “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