The Ghost

mission to save the planet. We had survived footballers whose monosyllabic grunts would make a silverback gorilla sound as if he were reciting Shakespeare. We had put up with soon-to-be-forgotten actors who had egos the size of a Roman emperor’s, and entourages to match. I gave the machine a comradely pat. Its once shiny metal case was scratched and dented: the honorable wounds of a dozen campaigns. We had got through those. We would somehow get through even this.
    I hooked it up to the hotel telephone, dialed my internet service provider, and, while the connection was going through, went into the bathroom for a glass of water. The face that stared back at me from the mirror was a deterioration even on the specter of the previous evening. I pulled down my lower eyelids and examined the yolky whites of my eyes, before moving on to the graying teeth and hair, and the red filigrees of my cheeks and nose. Martha’s Vineyard in midwinter seemed to be aging me. It was Shangri-La in reverse.
    From the other room I heard the familiar announcement: “You have email.”
    I saw at once that something was wrong. There was the usual queue of a dozen junk messages, offering me everything from penis enlargement to the Wall Street Journal , plus an email from Rick’s office confirming the payment of the first part of the advance. Just about the only thing that wasn’t listed was the email I had sent myself that afternoon.
    For a few moments, I stared stupidly at the screen, then I opened the separate filing cabinet on the laptop’s hard drive that automatically stores every piece of email, incoming and outgoing. And there, sure enough, to my immense relief, at the top of the “Email you have sent” queue was one titled “no subject,” to which I had attached the manuscript of Adam Lang’s memoirs. But when I opened the blank email and clicked on the box labeled “download,” all I received was a message saying, “That file is not currently available.” I tried a few more times, always with the same result.
    I took out my mobile and called the internet company.
    I shall spare you a full account of the sweaty half hour that followed—the endless selecting from lists of options, the queuing, the listening to Muzak, the increasingly panicky conversation with the company’s representative in Uttar Pradesh or wherever the hell he was speaking from.
    The bottom line was that the manuscript had vanished, and the company had no record of its ever having existed.
    I lay down on the bed.
    I am not very technically minded, but even I was beginning to grasp what must have happened. Somehow, Lang’s manuscript had been wiped from the memory of my internet service provider’s computers, for which there were two possible explanations. One was that it hadn’t been uploaded properly in the first place, but that couldn’t be right, because I had received those two messages while I was still in the office: “Your file has been transferred” and “You have email.” The other was that the file had since been deleted. But how could that have happened? Deletion would imply that someone had direct access to the computers of one of the world’s biggest internet conglomerates and was able to cover his tracks at will. It would also imply—had to imply—that my emails were all being monitored.
    Rick’s voice floated into my mind— “Wow. This must’ve been some operation. Too big for a newspaper. This must’ve been a government”—followed swiftly by Amelia’s— “You do realize how serious this is getting, don’t you?”
    “But the book is crap!” I cried out loud, despairingly, at the portrait of the Victorian whaling master hanging opposite the bed. “There’s nothing in it that’s worth all this trouble!”
    The stern old Victorian sea dog stared back at me, unmoved. I had broken my promise, his expression seemed to say, and something out there—some nameless force—knew it.

EIGHT
    Authors are often busy people and hard to get hold of; sometimes they are temperamental. The publishers consequently rely on the ghosts to make the process of publication as smooth as possible.
    Ghostwriting
    THERE WAS NO QUESTION of my doing any more work that night. I didn’t even turn on the television. Oblivion was all I craved. I switched off my mobile, went down to the bar, and, when that closed, sat up in my room emptying a bottle of scotch until long past midnight, which no doubt explains why for once I slept right through