The Ghost

did…Chapter Four. Studying the failures of my predecessors, I resolved to be different…Chapter Five. In retrospect, our general election victory seems inevitable, but at the time…Chapter Six. Seventy-six separate agencies oversaw social security…Chapter Seven. Was ever a land so haunted by history as Northern Ireland…Chapter Eight. Recruited from all walks of life, I was proud of our candidates in the European elections…Chapter Nine. As a rule, nations pursue self-interest in their foreign policy…Chapter Ten. A major problem facing the new government…Chapter Eleven. CIA assessments of the terrorist threat…Chapter Twelve. Agent reports from Afghanistan…Chapter Thirteen. In deciding to launch an attack on civilian areas, I knew…Chapter Fourteen. America needs allies who are prepared…Chapter Fifteen. By the time of the annual party conference, demands for my resignation…Chapter Sixteen. Professor Paul Emmett of Harvard University has written of the importance…”
    I took all sixteen chapter openings and laid them out across the desk in sequence.
    “The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography—it’s all there at the beginning.”
    The beginning or the beginnings ?
    I was never any good at puzzles. But when I went through the pages and circled the first word of each chapter, even I couldn’t help but see it—the sentence that McAra, fearful for his safety, had embedded in the manuscript, like a message from the grave: “Langs Wife Ruth Studying In Seventy-six Was Recruited As A CIA Agent In America By Professor Paul Emmett of Harvard University.”

SEVENTEEN
    A ghost must expect no glory.
    Ghostwriting
    I LEFT MY FLAT that night, never to return. Since then a month has passed. As far as know, I haven’t been missed. There were times, especially in the first week, sitting alone in my scruffy hotel room—I’ve stayed in four by now—when I was sure I had gone mad. I ought to ring Rick, I told myself, and get the name of his shrink. I was suffering from delusions. But then, about three weeks ago, after a hard day’s writing, just as I was falling asleep, I heard on the midnight news that the former foreign secretary Richard Rycart had been killed in a car accident in New York City, along with his driver. It was the fourth headline, I’m afraid. There’s nothing more ex than an ex-politician. Rycart would not have been pleased.
    I knew after that there was no going back.
    Although I’ve done nothing but write and think about what happened, I still can’t tell you precisely how McAra uncovered the truth. I presume it must have started back in the archives, when he came across Operation Tempest. He was already disillusioned with Lang’s years in power, unable to understand why something that had started with such high promise had ended in such a bloody mess. When, in his dogged way, researching the Cambridge years, he stumbled on those photographs, it must have seemed like the key to the mystery. Certainly, if Rycart had heard rumors of Emmett’s CIA links, it’s reasonable to assume that McAra must have done so, too.
    But McAra knew other things as well. He would have known that Ruth was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes on the internet to discover that Emmett was teaching her specialist subject on the campus in the midseventies. He also knew better than anyone that Lang rarely made a decision without consulting his wife. Adam was the brilliant political salesman, Ruth the strategist. If you had to pick which of them would have had the brains, the nerve, and the ruthlessness to be an ideological recruit, there could only be one choice. McAra can’t have known for sure, but I believe he’d put together enough of the picture to blurt out his suspicions to Lang during that heated argument on the night before he went off to confront Emmett.
    I try to imagine what Lang must have felt when he heard the accusation. Dismissive, I’m sure; furious also. But a day or two afterward, when a body was washed up, and he went to the morgue to identify McAra—what did he think then?
    Most days I have listened to the tape of my final conversation with Lang. The key to everything is there, I’m sure, but always the whole story remains just tantalizingly out of reach. Our voices are thin but recognizable. In the background is the rumble of the jet’s engines.
    ME: Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?
    LANG: