The Ghost

have consistently refused even to acknowledge the existence of Operation Tempest. I therefore feel I have no alternative except to present the evidence in my possession to the ICC.”
    “The little shit,” whispered Amelia.
    The telephone on the desk started ringing. Then another on a small table beside the door chimed in. Nobody moved. Lucy and Alice looked at Amelia for instructions, and as they did, Amelia’s own mobile, which she had in a little leather pouch on her belt, set up its own electronic warble. For the briefest of moments I saw her panic—it must have been one of the very few occasions in her life when she didn’t know what to do—and in the absence of any guidance, Lucy started reaching for the phone on the desk.
    “Don’t!” shouted Amelia, then added, more calmly: “Leave it. We need to work out a line to take.” By now a couple of other phones were trilling away in the recesses of the house. It was like noon in a clock factory. She took out her mobile and examined the incoming number. “The pack is on the move,” she said and turned it off. For a few seconds she drummed her fingertips on the desk. “Right. Unplug all the phones,” she instructed Alice, with something of her old confidence back in her voice, “then start surfing the main news sites on the web to see if you can discover anything else Rycart is saying. Lucy, find a television and monitor all the news channels.” She looked at her watch. “Is Ruth still out walking? Shit! She is, isn’t she?”
    She grabbed her black-and-red book and clattered off down the corridor on her high heels. Unsure of what I was supposed to do, or even exactly what was happening, I decided I’d better follow her. She was calling for one of the Special Branch men. “Barry! Barry!” He stuck his head out of the kitchen. “Barry, please find Mrs. Lang and get her back here as soon as you can.” She started climbing the stairs to the living room.
    Once again, Lang was sitting motionless, exactly where I had left him. The only difference was that he had his own small mobile phone in his hand. He snapped it shut as we came in.
    “I take it from all the telephone calls that he’s issued his statement,” he said.
    Amelia spread her hands wide in exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Tell you before I’d told Ruth? I don’t think that would have been very good politics, do you? Besides, I felt like keeping it to myself for a while. Sorry,” he said to me, “for losing my temper.”
    I was touched by his apology. That was grace in adversity, I thought. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
    “And have you?” asked Amelia. “Told her?”
    “I wanted to break it to her face-to-face. Obviously, that’s no longer an option, so I just called her.”
    “And how did she take it?”
    “How do you think?”
    “The little shit,” repeated Amelia.
    “She should be back any minute.”
    Lang got to his feet and stood looking out of the window with his hands on his hips. I smelled again the sharp tang of his sweat. It made me think of an animal at bay. “He wanted very much to let me know there was nothing personal,” said Lang, with his back to us. “He wanted very very much to tell me that it was only because of his well-known stand on human rights that he felt he couldn’t keep quiet any longer.” He snorted at his own reflection. “His ‘well-known stand on human rights’…Dear God.”
    Amelia said, “Do you think he was taping the call?”
    “Who knows? Probably. Probably he’s going to broadcast it. Anything’s possible with him. I just said, ‘Thank you very much, Richard, for letting me know,’ and hung up.” He turned round, frowning. “It’s gone unnervingly quiet down there.”
    “I’ve had the phones unplugged. We need to work out what we’re going to say.”
    “What did we say at the weekend?”
    “That we hadn’t seen what was in the Sunday Times and had no plans to comment.”
    “Well, at least we now know where they got their story.” Lang shook his head. His expression was almost admiring. “He really is after me, isn’t he? A leak to the press on Sunday, preparing the ground for a statement on Tuesday. Three days of coverage instead of one, building up to a climax. This is straight out of the textbook.”
    “Your textbook.”
    Lang acknowledged the compliment with a slight nod and returned his gaze to the window. “Ah,” he said. “Here comes trouble.”
    A small and determined