The Ghost

or something. Why don’t you come?” she added to me. “He’s keen to meet you.”
    Score one to the wife, I thought. But no: in the finest traditions of the British civil service, Amelia bounced off the ropes and came back punching. “Then I’ll travel in the backup car,” she said, snapping her cell phone shut and smiling sweetly. “I can do my nails in there.”
    Jeff opened one of the Jaguar’s rear doors for Ruth, while I went round and nearly broke my arm tugging at the other. I slid into the leather seat and the door closed behind me with a gaseous thump.
    “She’s armored, sir,” said Jeff into the rearview mirror as we pulled away. “Weighs two and a half tons. Yet she’ll still do a hundred with all four tires shot out.”
    “Oh, do shut up, Jeff,” said Ruth, good-humoredly. “He doesn’t want to hear all that.”
    “The windows are an inch thick and don’t open, in case you were thinking of trying. She’s airtight against chemical and biological attack, with oxygen for an hour. Makes you think, doesn’t it? At this precise moment, sir, you’re probably safer than you’ve ever been in your life, or ever will be again.”
    Ruth laughed again and made a face. “Boys with their toys!”
    The outside world seemed muffled, distant. The forest track ran smooth and quiet as rubber. Perhaps this is what it feels like being carried in the womb, I thought: this wonderful feeling of complete security. We ran over the dead skunk, and the big car didn’t register the slightest tremor.
    “Nervous?” asked Ruth.
    “No. Why? Should I be?”
    “Not at all. He’s the most charming man you’ll ever meet. My own Prince Charming!” And she gave her deep-throated, mannish laugh again. “God,” she said, staring out of the window, “will I be glad to see the back of these trees. It’s like living in an enchanted wood.”
    I glanced over my shoulder at the unmarked minivan following close behind. I could see how this was addictive. I was getting used to it already. Being forced to give it up after it had become a habit would be like letting go of mommy. But thanks to terrorism, Lang would never have to give it up—never have to stand in line for public transport, never even drive himself. He was as pampered and cocooned as a Romanov before the revolution.
    We came out of the forest onto the main road, turned left, and almost immediately swung right through the airport perimeter. I stared out of the window in surprise at the big runway.
    “We’re here already?”
    “In summer Marty likes to leave his office in Manhattan at four,” said Ruth, “and be on the beach by six.”
    “I suppose he has a private jet,” I said in an attempt at knowingness.
    “Of course he has a private jet.”
    She gave me a look that made me feel like a hick who’d just used his fish knife to butter his roll. Of course he has a private jet. You don’t own a thirty-million-dollar house and travel to it by bus. The man must have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti’s. I realized then that just about everybody the Langs knew these days had a private jet. Indeed, here came Lang himself, in a corporate Gulfstream, dropping out of the darkening sky and skimming in low over the gloomy pines. Jeff put his foot down and a minute later we pulled up outside the little terminal. There was a self-important cannonade of slamming doors as we piled inside—me, Ruth, Amelia, Jeff, and one of the protection officers. Inside, a patrolman from the Edgartown police force was already waiting. Behind him on the wall I could see a faded photograph of Bill and Hillary Clinton being greeted on the tarmac at the start of some scandal-shrouded presidential vacation.
    The private jet taxied in from the runway. It was painted dark blue and had HALLINGTON written in gold letters by the door. It looked bigger than the usual CEO’s phallic symbol, with a high tail and six windows either side, and when it came to a stop and the engines were cut the silence over the deserted airfield was unexpectedly profound.
    The door opened, the steps were lowered, and out came a couple of Special Branch men. One headed straight for the terminal. The other waited at the foot of the steps, going through the motions of checking the empty tarmac, glancing up and around and behind him. Lang himself seemed in no hurry to disembark. I could just about make him out in the shadows of the interior, shaking hands with the pilot and a male steward, then