The Ghost

minister “a man of sincerity.” Moberly had suffered a stroke and was saying nothing. Streicher had been vocal in his support at the time Lang flew to Washington to pick up his Presidential Medal of Freedom. I was starting to weary of the whole procedure until I typed in Arthur Prussia. I got a one-year-old press release:
    LONDON—The Hallington Group is pleased to announce that Adam Lang, the former prime minister of Great Britain, will be joining the company as a strategic consultant.
    Mr. Lang’s position, which will not be full-time, will involve providing counsel and advice to senior Hallington investment professionals worldwide.
    Arthur Prussia, Hallington’s president and chief executive officer, said: “Adam Lang is one of the world’s most respected and experienced statesmen, and we are honoured to be able to draw on his well of experience.”
    Adam Lang said: “I welcome the challenge of working with a company of such global reach, commitment to democracy, and renowned integrity as the Hallington Group.”
    The Hallington Group rang only the faintest of bells, so I looked it up. Six hundred employees; twenty-four worldwide offices; a mere four hundred investors, mainly Saudi; and thirty-five billion dollars of funds at its disposal. The portfolio of companies it controlled looked as if it had been drawn up by Darth Vader. Hallington’s subsidiaries manufactured cluster bombs, mobile howitzers, interceptor missiles, tank-busting helicopters, swing-wing bombers, tanks, nuclear centrifuges, aircraft carriers. It owned a company that provided security for contractors in the Middle East, another that carried out surveillance operations and data checks within the United States and worldwide, and a construction company that specialized in building military bunkers and airstrips. Two members of its main board had been senior directors of the CIA.
    I know the internet is the stuff a paranoiac’s dreams are made of. I know it parcels up everything—Lee Harvey Oswald, Princess Diana, Opus Dei, Al Qaeda, Israel, MI6, crop circles—and with pretty blue ribbons of hyperlinks it ties them all into a single grand conspiracy. But I also know the wisdom of the old saying that a paranoiac is simply a person in full possession of the facts, and as I typed in “Arcadia Institution” + “Hallington Group” + “CIA,” I sensed that something was starting to emerge, like the lineaments of a ghost ship, out of the fog of data on the screen.
    washingtonpost.com: Hallington jet linked to CIA “torture flights”
    The company denied all knowledge of the CIA program of “extraordinary rendition”…member of the board of the prestigious Arcadia Institution has…
    www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27824-2007Dec26language= - Cached - Similar pages
    I clicked on the story and scrolled down to the relevant part:
    The Hallington Gulfstream Four was clandestinely photographed—minus its corporate logo—at the Stare Kiejkuty military base in Poland, where the CIA is believed to have maintained a secret detention center, on February 18.
    This was two days after four British citizens—Nasir Ashraf, Shakeel Qazi, Salim Khan, and Faruk Ahmed—were allegedly kidnapped by CIA operatives from Peshawar, Pakistan. Mr. Ashraf is reported to have died of heart failure after the interrogation procedure known as “water boarding.”
    Between February and July of that same year, the jet made 51 visits to Guantánamo and 82 visits to Washington Dulles International Airport as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital and the U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.
    The plane’s flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan, and the Czech Republic.
    The Hallington logo was visible in photographs taken at an air show in Schenectady, N.Y., on August 23, eight days after the Gulfstream returned to Washington from an around-the-world flight that included Anchorage, Osaka, Dubai, and Shannon.
    The logo was not visible when the Gulfstream was photographed during a fuel stop at Shannon on September 27. But when the plane turned up at Denver’s Centennial Airport in February of this year, a photo showed it was sporting not only the Hallington logo but also a new registration number.
    A spokesman for Hallington confirmed that the Gulfstream had been frequently leased to other operators but insisted the company had no knowledge of the uses to