The Ghost

believe that? If anyone had predicted I’d ever be given help by Mike McAra, of all people, I’d have laughed at him.”
    “When did he call?”
    “About three weeks after I first got the document. The eighth of January? The ninth? Something like that. ‘Hello, Richard. Did you get the present I sent you?’ I almost had a heart attack. Then I had to shut him up quickly. Because of course you know that the phone lines at the UN are all bugged?”
    “Are they?” I was still trying to absorb everything.
    “Oh, completely. The National Security Agency monitors every word that’s transmitted in the western hemisphere. Every syllable you ever utter on a phone, every email you ever send, every credit card transaction you ever make—it’s all recorded and stored. The only problem is sorting through it. At the UN, we’re briefed that the easiest way to get round the eavesdropping is to use disposable mobile phones, try to avoid mentioning specifics, and change our numbers as often as possible—that way we can at least keep a bit ahead of them. So I told Mike to stop right there. Then I gave him a brand-new number I’d never used before and asked him to call me straight back.”
    “Ah,” I said. “I see.” And I could. I could visualize it perfectly. McAra with his phone wedged between shoulder and ear, grabbing his cheap blue Bic. “He must have scribbled the number on the back of the photograph he was holding at the time.”
    “And then he called me,” said Rycart. He had stopped pacing and was looking at himself in the mirror above the chest of drawers. He put both hands to his forehead and smoothed his hair back over his ears. “Christ, I’m shattered,” he said. “Look at me. I was never like this when I was in government, even when I was working eighteen hours a day. You know, people get it all wrong. It isn’t having power that’s exhausting—it’s not having it that wears you out.”
    “What did he say when he called? McAra?”
    “The first thing that struck me was that he didn’t sound his usual self at all. You were asking me what he was like. Well, he was a pretty tough operator, which of course is what Adam liked about him: he knew he could always rely on Mike to do the dirty work. He was sharp, businesslike. You could almost say he was brutal, especially on the phone. My private office used to call him McHorror: ‘The McHorror just rang for you, Foreign Secretary…’ But that day, I remember, his voice was completely flat. He sounded broken, actually. He said he’d just spent the past year in the archives in Cambridge, working on Adam’s memoirs, going over our whole time in government, and just getting more and more disillusioned with it all. He said that that was where he’d found the memorandum about Operation Tempest. But the real reason he was calling, he said, was that that was just the tip of the iceberg. He said he’d just discovered something much more important, something that made sense of everything that had gone wrong while we were in power.”
    I could hardly breathe. “What was it?”
    Rycart laughed. “Well, oddly enough, I did ask him that, but he wouldn’t tell me over the phone. He said he wanted to meet me to discuss it face-to-face: it was that big. The only thing he would say was that the key to it could be found in Lang’s autobiography, if anyone bothered to check, that it was all there in the beginning.”
    “Those were his exact words?”
    “Pretty much. I made a note as he was talking. And that was it. He said he’d call me in a day or two to fix a meeting. But I heard nothing, and then about a week later it was in the press that he was dead. And nobody else ever called me on that phone, because nobody else had that number. So you can imagine why I was so excited when it suddenly started ringing again. And so here we are,” he said, gesturing to the room, “the perfect place to spend a Thursday night. And now I think you should tell me exactly what the hell is going on.”
    “I will. Just one more thing, though. Why didn’t you tell the police?”
    “You are joking, are you? Discussions at The Hague were at a very delicate stage. If I’d told the police that McAra had been in contact with me, naturally they’d have wanted to know why. Then it would have been bound to get back to Lang, and he would have been able to make some kind of preemptive move against the war crimes court. He’s still a hell of an operator, you know. That