The Ghost

priority was to get clear of those trees.
    Turn around where possible.
    I stopped the Ford, grabbed the navigation system in both hands, and twisted and yanked it at the same time. It came away from the front panel with a satisfying twang of breaking cables, and I tossed it into the foot well on the passenger’s side. At the same time I became aware of a large black car with bright headlights coming up close behind me. It overtook the Ford too quickly for me to see who was driving, accelerated up to the junction, and disappeared. When I looked back, the country lane was once again deserted.
    It’s curious how the processes of fear work. If I’d been asked a week earlier to predict what I might do in such a situation, I’d have said that I’d drive straight back to Martha’s Vineyard and try to put the whole business out of my mind. In fact, I discovered, Nature mingles an unexpected element of anger in with fear, presumably to encourage the survival of the species. Like a caveman confronted by a tiger, my instinct at that moment was not to run; it was somehow to get back at the supercilious Emmett—the sort of crazy, atavistic response that leads otherwise sane householders to chase armed burglars down the street, usually with disastrous results.
    So instead of sensibly trying to find my way back to the interstate, I followed the road signs to Belmont. It’s a sprawling, leafy, wealthy town of terrifying cleanliness and orderliness—the sort of place where you need a license just to keep a cat. The neat streets, with their flagpoles and their four-by-fours, slipped by, seemingly identical. I cruised along the wide boulevards, unable to get my bearings, until at last I came to something that seemed to resemble the middle of town. This time, when I parked my car, I took my suitcase with me.
    I was on a road called Leonard Street, a curve of pretty shops with colored canopies set against a backdrop of big bare trees. One building was pink. A coating of snow, melted at the edges, covered the gray roofs. It could have been a ski resort. It offered me various things I didn’t need—a real estate agent, a jeweler, a hairdresser—and one thing I did: an internet café. I ordered coffee and a bagel and took a seat as far away from the window as I could. I put my case on the chair opposite, to discourage anyone from joining me, sipped my coffee, took a bite out of my bagel, clicked on Google, typed in “Paul Emmett” + “Arcadia Institution,” and leaned toward the screen.

    ACCORDING TO WWW.ARCADIAINSTITUTION.ORG, the Arcadia Institution was founded in August 1991 on the fiftieth anniversary of the first summit meeting between Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland. There was a photograph of Roosevelt on the deck of a U.S. battleship, wearing a smart gray suit, receiving Churchill, who was about a head shorter and dressed in some peculiar rumpled, dark blue naval outfit, complete with a cap. He looked like a crafty head gardener paying his respects to a local squire.
    The aim of the institution, the website said, was “to further Anglo-American relations and foster the timeless ideals of democracy and free speech for which our two nations have always stood in times of peace and war.” This was to be achieved “through seminars, policy programs, conferences, and leadership development initiatives,” as well as through the publication of a biannual journal, the Arcadian Review, and the funding of ten Arcadia Scholarships, awarded annually, for postgraduate research into “cultural, political, and strategic subjects of mutual interest to Great Britain and the United States.” The Arcadia Institution had offices in St. James’s Square, London, and in Washington, and the names of its board of trustees—ex-ambassadors, corporate CEOs, university professors—read like the guest list for the dullest dinner party you would ever endure in your life.
    Paul Emmett was the institution’s first president and CEO, and the website usefully offered his life in a paragraph: born Chicago 1949; graduate of Yale University and St. John’s College, Cambridge (Rhodes scholar); lecturer in international affairs at Harvard University, 1975–79, and subsequently Howard T. Polk III Professor of Foreign Relations, 1979–91; thereafter the founding head of the Arcadia Institution; president emeritus since 2007; publications: Whither Thou Goest: The Special