The Ghost

big gunmetal filing cabinet, from which she withdrew a box file.
    “This is not to be removed from this room,” she said, laying it on the desk. “It is not to be copied. You can make notes, but I must remind you that you’ve signed a confidentiality agreement. You have six hours to read it before Adam gets in from New York. I’ll have a sandwich sent up to you for lunch. Alice, come on. We don’t want to cause him any distractions, do we?”
    After they’d gone, I sat down in the leather swivel chair, took out my laptop, switched it on, and created a document titled “Lang ms.” Then I loosened my tie and unfastened my wristwatch and laid it on the desk beside the file. For a few moments I allowed myself to swing back and forth in Rhinehart’s chair, savoring the ocean view and the general sensation of being world dictator. Then I flipped open the lid of the file, pulled out the manuscript, and started to read.

    ALL GOOD BOOKS ARE different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books—books so bad they aren’t even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
    And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don’t ring true. I’m not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you’re reading it. A publishing friend of mine calls it the seaplane test, after a movie he once saw about people in the City of London that opened with the hero arriving for work in a seaplane he landed on the Thames. From then on, my friend said, there was no point in watching.
    Adam Lang’s memoir failed the seaplane test.
    It wasn’t that the facts in it were wrong—I wasn’t in a position to judge at that stage—it was rather that the whole book somehow felt false, as if there was a hollow at its center. It consisted of sixteen chapters, arranged chronologically: “Early Years,” “Into Politics,” “Challenge for the Leadership,” “Changing the Party,” “Victory at the Polls,” “Reforming Government,” “Northern Ireland,” “Europe,” “The Special Relationship,” “Second Term,” “The Challenge of Terror,” “The War on Terror,” “Sticking the Course,” “Never Surrender,” “Time to Go,” and “A Future of Hope.” Each chapter was between ten and twenty thousand words long and hadn’t been written so much as cobbled together from speeches, official minutes, communiqués, memoranda, interview transcripts, office diaries, party manifestos, and newspaper articles. Occasionally, Lang permitted himself a private emotion (“I was overjoyed when our third child was born”) or a personal observation (“the American president was much taller than I had expected”) or a sharp remark (“as foreign secretary, Richard Rycart often seemed to prefer presenting the foreigners’ case to Britain rather than the other way round”) but not very often, and not to any great effect. And where was his wife? She was barely mentioned.
    “A crock of shit,” Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing. It was strictly accurate and yet overall it was a lie—it had to be, I thought. No human being could pass through life and feel so little. Especially Adam Lang, whose political stock-in-trade was emotional empathy. I skipped ahead to the chapter called “The War on Terror.” If there was going to be anything to interest American readers it must surely be here. I skimmed it, searching for words like “rendition,” “torture,” “CIA.” I found nothing, and certainly no mention of Operation Tempest. What about the war in the Middle East? Surely some mild criticism here of the U.S. president, or the defense secretary, or the secretary of state; some hint of betrayal or letdown; some behind-the-scenes scoop or previously classified document? No. Nowhere. Nothing. I took a gulp, literally and metaphorically, and began reading again from the top.
    At some point the secretary, Alice, must have brought me in a tuna sandwich and a bottle of mineral water, because later in the afternoon I noticed them at the end of the desk. But I was too busy to stop, and besides I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I was beginning to feel nauseous as I shuffled those sixteen chapters, scanning the sheer white cliff face of featureless prose for any tiny