The Ghost

suppose the management must have been waiting till spring to strip the blistered paintwork and wash the crust of salt off the windows. The sea was pounding away nearby in the darkness. I stood with my suitcase on the wooden deck and watched the lights of the taxi disappear around the corner with something close to nostalgia.
    Inside the lobby, a girl dressed up as a Victorian maid with a white lace mobcap handed me a message from Lang’s office. I would be picked up at ten the next morning and should bring my passport to show to security. I was starting to feel like a man on a mystery tour: as soon as I reached one location, I was given a fresh set of instructions to proceed to the next. The hotel was empty, the restaurant dark. I was told I could have my choice of rooms, so I picked one on the second floor with a desk I could work at and photographs of Old Edgartown on the wall: John Coffin House, circa 1890; the whale ship Splendid at Osborn wharf, circa 1870. After the receptionist had gone, I put my laptop, list of questions, and the stories I had torn out of the Sunday newspapers on the desk and then stretched out on the bed.
    I fell asleep at once and didn’t wake until two in the morning, when my body clock, still on London time, went off like Big Ben. I spent ten minutes searching for a minibar before realizing there wasn’t one. On impulse, I called Kate’s home number in London. What exactly I was going to say to her I had no idea. In any case there was no answer. I meant to hang up but instead found myself rambling to her answering machine. She must have left for work very early. Either that, or she hadn’t come home the night before. That was something to think about, and I duly thought about it. The fact that I had no one to blame but myself didn’t make me feel any better. I took a shower and afterward I got back into bed, turned off the lamp, and pulled the damp sheets up under my chin. Every few seconds the slow pulse of the lighthouse filled the room with a faint red glow. I must have lain there for hours, eyes wide open, fully awake and yet disembodied, and in this way passed my first night on Martha’s Vineyard.

    THE LANDSCAPE THAT DISSOLVED out of the dawn the next morning was flat and alluvial. Across the road beneath my window was a creek, then reed beds, and beyond those a beach and the sea. A pretty Victorian lighthouse with a bell-shaped roof and a wrought-iron balcony looked across the straits to a long, low spit of land about a mile away. That, I realized, must be Chappaquiddick. A squadron of hundreds of tiny white seabirds, in a formation as tight as a school of fish, soared and flicked and dived above the shallow waves.
    I went downstairs and ordered a huge breakfast. From the little shop next to reception I bought a copy of the New York Times . The story I was looking for was entombed deep in the world news section and then reinterred to ensure maximum obscurity far down the page:
    LONDON (AP)—Former British prime minister Adam Lang authorized the illegal use of British special forces troops to seize four suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and then hand them over for interrogation by the CIA, according to newspaper reports here Sunday.
    The men—Nasir Ashraf, Shakeel Qazi, Salim Khan, and Faruk Ahmed—all British citizens, were seized in the Pakistani city of Peshawar five years ago. All four were allegedly transferred out of the country to a secret location and tortured. Mr. Ashraf is reported to have died under interrogation. Mr. Qazi, Mr. Khan, and Mr. Ahmed were subsequently detained at Guantánamo for three years. Only Mr. Ahmed remains in U.S. custody.
    According to documents obtained by the London Sunday Times , Mr. Lang personally endorsed “Operation Tempest,” a secret mission to kidnap the four men by the UK’s elite Special Air Services. Such an operation would have been illegal under both UK and international law.
    The British Ministry of Defence last night refused to comment on either the authenticity of the documents or the existence of “Operation Tempest.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Lang said that he had no plans to issue a statement.
    I read it through three times. It didn’t seem to add up to much. Or did it? It was hard to tell anymore. One’s moral bearings were no longer as fixed as they used to be. Methods my father’s generation would have considered beyond the pale, even when fighting the Nazis—torture, for example—were now apparently