The Ghost

the night.
    I was woken by the bedside telephone. The harsh metallic tone seemed to vibrate my eyeballs in their dusty sockets, and when I rolled over to answer it I felt my stomach keep on rolling, wobbling away from me across the mattress and onto the floor like a taut balloon full of some noxious, viscous liquid. The revolving room was very hot; the air-conditioning turned up to maximum. I realized I’d gone to sleep fully dressed and had left all the lights burning.
    “You need to check out of your hotel immediately,” said Amelia. “Things have changed.” Her voice pierced my skull like a knitting needle. “There’s a car on its way.”
    That was all she said. I didn’t argue; I couldn’t. She’d gone.
    I once read that the ancient Egyptians used to prepare a pharaoh for mummification by drawing his brain out through his nose with a hook. At some point in the night a similar procedure had seemingly been performed on me. I shuffled across the carpet and pulled back the curtains to unveil a sky and sea as gray as death. Nothing was stirring. The silence was absolute, unbroken even by the cry of a gull. A storm was coming in all right; even I could tell that.
    But then, just as I was about to turn away, I heard the distant sound of an engine. I squinted down at the street beneath my window and saw a couple of cars pull up. The doors of the first opened and two men got out—young, fit looking, wearing ski jackets, jeans, and boots. The driver stared up at my window and instinctively I took a step backward. By the time I risked a second look, he had opened the rear of the car and was bent over it. When he straightened he took out what at first, in my paranoid state, I took to be a machine gun. Actually it was a television camera.
    I started to move quickly then, or at least as quickly as my condition would allow. I opened the window wide to let in a blast of freezing air. I undressed, showered in lukewarm water, and shaved. I put on clean clothes and packed. By the time I got down to reception it was eight forty-five—an hour after the first ferry from the mainland had docked at Vineyard Haven—and the hotel looked as though it was staging an international media convention. Whatever you might say against Adam Lang, he was certainly doing wonders for the local economy: Edgartown hadn’t been this busy since Chappaquiddick. There must have been thirty people hanging around, drinking coffee, swapping stories in half a dozen languages, talking on their mobiles, checking equipment. I’d spent enough time around reporters to be able to tell one type from another. The television correspondents were dressed as though they were going to a funeral; the news agency hacks were the ones who looked like gravediggers.
    I bought a copy of the New York Times and went into the restaurant, where I drank three glasses of orange juice straight off, before turning my attention to the paper. Lang wasn’t buried in the international section any longer. He was right up there on the front page:

    WAR CRIMES COURT
    TO RULE ON BRITISH
    EX-PM
    ~
    ANNOUNCEMENT
    DUE TODAY
    ~
    Former Foreign Sec.
    Alleges Lang OK’d
    Use of Torture by CIA

    Lang had issued a “robust” statement, it said (I felt a thrill of pride). He was “embattled,” “coping with one blow after another”—beginning with “the accidental drowning of a close aide earlier in the year.” The affair was “an embarrassment” for the British and American governments. “A senior administration official” insisted, however, that the White House remained loyal to a man who was formerly its closest ally. “He was there for us and we’ll be there for him,” the official added, speaking only after a guarantee of anonymity.
    But it was the final paragraph that really made me choke into my coffee:
    The publication of Mr. Lang’s memoirs, which had been scheduled for June, has been brought forward to the end of April. John Maddox, chief executive of Rhinehart Publishing Inc., which is reported to have paid $10 million for the book, said that the finishing touches were now being put to the manuscript. “This is going to be a world publishing event,” Mr. Maddox told The New York Times in a telephone interview yesterday. “Adam Lang will be giving the first full inside scoop by a leader on the West’s war on terror.”
    I rose, folded the newspaper, and walked with dignity through the lobby, carefully stepping around the camera bags, the two-foot zoom