The Ghost

mine.
    “That’s fifty thousand dollars paid weekly for the next four weeks,” said Rick, “plus a bonus of fifty if you get the job done on time. They’ll take care of airfares and accommodation. And you’ll get a collaborator credit.”
    “On the title page?”
    “Do me a favor! In the acknowledgments. But it’ll still be noticed in the trade press. I’ll see to that. Although for now your involvement is strictly confidential. They were very firm about that.” I could hear him chuckling down the phone and imagined him tilting back in his chair. “Oh, yes, a whole new wide world is opening up for you, my boy!”
    He was right there.

THREE
    If you are painfully shy or find it hard to get others into a relaxed and confident state, then ghosting might not be for you.
    Ghostwriting
    AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 109 was due to leave Heathrow for Boston at ten-thirty on Sunday morning. Rhinehart biked round a one-way business-class ticket on Saturday afternoon, along with a contract and the privacy agreement. I had to sign both while the messenger waited. I trusted Rick to have got the contract straight and didn’t even bother to read it; the nondisclosure undertaking I scanned quickly in the hall. It’s almost funny in retrospect: “I shall treat all confidential information as being strictly private and confidential, and shall take all steps necessary to prevent it from being disclosed or made public to any third party or relevant person…I shall not use or disclose or permit the disclosure by any person of the confidential information for the benefit of any third party…Neither I nor the relevant persons shall by any means copy or part with possession of the whole or any part of the confidential information without prior permission of the Owner…” I signed without a qualm.
    I’ve always liked to be able to disappear quickly. It used to take me about five minutes to put my London life into cold storage. All my bills were paid by direct debit. There were no deliveries to cancel—no milk, no papers. My cleaner, whom I hardly ever saw in any case, would look in twice a week and retrieve all the mail from downstairs. I had cleared my desk of work. I had no appointments. My neighbors I had never spoken to. Kate had likely gone for good. Most of my friends had long since entered the kingdom of family life, from whose distant shores, in my experience, no traveler e’er returned. My parents were dead. I had no siblings. I could have died myself and, as far as the world was concerned, my life would have gone on as normal. I packed one suitcase with a week’s change of clothes, a sweater, and a spare pair of shoes. I put my laptop and mini–disk recorder into my shoulder bag. I would use the hotel laundry. Anything else I needed I would buy on arrival.
    I spent the rest of the day and all that evening up in my study, reading through my books on Adam Lang and making a list of questions. I don’t want to sound too Jekyll and Hyde about this, but as the day faded—as the lights came up in the big tower blocks across the railway marshaling yard, and the red, white, and green stars winked and fell toward the airport—I could feel myself beginning to get into Lang’s skin. He was a few years older, but apart from that our backgrounds were similar. The resemblances hadn’t struck me before: an only child, born in the Midlands, educated at the local grammar school, a degree from Cambridge, a passion for student drama, a complete lack of interest in student politics.
    I went back to look at the photographs. “Lang’s hysterical performance as a chicken in charge of a battery farm for humans at the 1972 Cambridge Footlights Revue earned him plaudits.” I could imagine us both chasing the same girls, taking a bad show to the Edinburgh Fringe in the back of some beat-up Volkswagen van, sharing digs, getting stoned. And yet somehow, metaphorically speaking, I had stayed a chicken, while he had gone on to become prime minister. This was the point at which my normal powers of empathy deserted me, for there seemed nothing in his first twenty-five years that could explain his second. But there would be time enough, I reasoned, to find his voice.
    I double-locked the door before I went to bed that night and dreamed I was following Adam Lang through a maze of rainy, redbrick streets. When I got into a minicab and the driver turned round to ask me where I wanted to go, he had McAra’s lugubrious face.

    HEATHROW THE