The Ghost

“It’s Dep’s night off. I’ll cook.”
    “Is that supposed to be an incentive?”
    “You rude man,” she said and laughed. She rang off as abruptly as she had called, without saying good-bye.
    I tapped my phone against my teeth. The prospect of a confiding fireside talk with Ruth, perhaps to be followed by a second round in her vigorous embrace, was not without its attractions. I could call Rycart and tell him I’d changed my mind. Undecided, I took my case out of the car and wheeled it through the puddles toward the waiting bus. Once I was aboard, I cradled it next to me and studied the airport map. At that point yet another choice presented itself. Terminal B—the shuttle to New York and Rycart—or terminal E—international departures and an evening flight back to London? I hadn’t considered that before. I had my passport, everything. I could simply walk away.
    B or E? I seriously weighed them. I was like an unusually dim lab rat in a maze, endlessly confronted with alternatives, endlessly picking the wrong one.
    The bus doors opened with a heavy sigh.
    I got off at B, bought my ticket, sent a text message to Rycart, and caught the US Airways Shuttle to LaGuardia.

    FOR SOME REASON OUR plane was delayed on the tarmac. We taxied out on schedule but then stopped just short of the runway, pulling aside in a gentlemanly fashion to let the queue of jets behind us go ahead. It began to rain. I looked out of the porthole at the flattened grass and the welded sheets of sea and sky. Clear veins of water pulsed across the glass. Every time a plane took off, the thin skin of the cabin shook and the veins broke and reformed. The pilot came over the intercom and apologized: there was some problem with our security clearance, he said. The Department of Homeland Security had just raised its threat assessment from yellow (elevated) to orange (high) and our patience was appreciated. Among the businesspeople around me, agitation grew. The man sitting next to me caught my eye above the edge of his pink paper and shook his head.
    “It just gets worse,” he said.
    He folded his Financial Times , placed it on his lap, and closed his eyes. The headline was “Lang wins US support,” and there was that grin again. Ruth had been right. He shouldn’t have smiled. It had gone round the world.
    My small suitcase was in the luggage compartment above my head; my feet were resting on the shoulder bag beneath the seat in front of me. All was in order. But I couldn’t relax. I felt guilty, even though I had done nothing wrong. I half expected the FBI to storm the plane and drag me away. After about forty-five minutes, the engines suddenly started to roar again and the pilot broke radio silence to announce that we had finally been given permission to take off, and thank you again for your understanding.
    We labored along the runway and up into the clouds, and such was my exhaustion that, despite my anxiety—or perhaps because of it—I actually drifted into sleep. I came awake with a jerk when I felt someone leaning across me, but it was only the cabin attendant, checking that my seat belt was fastened. It seemed to me that I had been unconscious no more than a few seconds, but the pressure in my ears told me that already we were coming in to land at LaGuardia. We touched down at six minutes past six—I remember the time exactly: I checked my watch—and by twenty past I was avoiding the impatient crowds around the baggage carousel and heading out of the gate into the arrivals hall.
    It was busy, early evening, and people were in a hurry to get downtown or home for dinner. I scanned the bewildering array of faces, wondering if Rycart himself had turned out to greet me, but there was no one I recognized. The usual lugubrious drivers were waiting, holding the names of their passengers against their chests. They stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact, like suspects in a police lineup, while I, in the manner of a nervous witness, walked along in front of them, checking each carefully, not wanting to make a mistake. Rycart had implied I’d recognize the right person when I saw him, and I did, and my heart almost stopped. He was standing apart from the others, in his own patch of space—wan faced, dark haired, tall, heavyset, early fifties, in a badly fitting chain-store suit—and he was holding a small blackboard on which was chalked “Mike McAra.” Even his eyes were as I had imagined McAra’s to be: crafty and