The Ghost

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 weed killer, 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 bombproof car heading to the airport to meet him. How he had got onto 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 armored car were 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