The Ghost

statement he put out against me the day before yesterday—‘The international struggle against terror is too important to be used for the purposes of domestic political revenge.’ Wow.” He shuddered admiringly. “Vicious.”
    I squirmed slightly in my chair, but Rycart didn’t notice. He’d gone back to inspecting himself in the mirror. “Besides,” he said, sticking out his chin, “I thought it was accepted that Mike had killed himself, either because he was depressed, or drunk, or both. I’d only have confirmed what they already knew. He was certainly in a poor state when he rang me.”
    “And I can tell you why,” I said. “What he’d just found out was that one of the men in that picture with Lang at Cambridge—the picture McAra had in his hand when he spoke to you—was an officer in the CIA.”
    Rycart had been checking his profile. He stopped. His brow corrugated. And then, with great slowness, he turned his face toward me.
    “He was what ?”
    “His name is Paul Emmett.” Suddenly I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. I was desperate to unburden myself—to share it—to let someone else try to make sense of it. “He later became a professor at Harvard. Then he went on to run something called the Arcadia Institution. Have you heard of it?”
    “I’ve heard of it—of course I’ve heard of it, and I’ve always steered well clear of it, precisely because I’ve always thought it had CIA written all over it.” Rycart sat down. He seemed stunned.
    “But is that really plausible?” I asked. “I don’t know how these things work. Would someone join the CIA and then immediately be sent off to do postgraduate research in another country?”
    “I’d say that’s highly plausible. What better cover could you want? And where better than a university to spot the future best and the brightest?” He held out his hand. “Show me the photograph again. Which one is Emmett?”
    “It may all be balls,” I warned, pointing Emmett out. “I’ve no proof. I just found his name on one of those paranoid websites. They said he joined the CIA after he left Yale, which must have been about three years before this was taken.”
    “Oh, I can believe it,” said Rycart, studying him intently. “In fact, now you mention it, I think I did hear some gossip once. But then that whole international conference circuit world is crawling with them. I call them the military-industrial-academic complex.” He smiled at his own wit, then looked serious again. “What’s really suspicious is that he should have known Lang.”
    “No,” I said, “what’s really suspicious is that a matter of hours after McAra tracked down Emmett to his house near Boston, he was found washed up dead on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard.”

    AFTER THAT I TOLD him everything I’d discovered. I told him the story about the tides and the flashlights on the beach at Lambert’s Cove, and the curious way the police investigation had been handled. I told him about Ruth’s description of McAra’s argument with Lang on the eve of his death, and about Lang’s reluctance to discuss his Cambridge years, and the way he’d tried to conceal the fact that he’d become politically active immediately after leaving university rather than two years later. I described how McAra, with his typical dogged thoroughness, had discovered all this, turning up detail after detail that gradually destroyed Lang’s account of his early years. That was presumably what he meant when he said that the key to everything was in the beginning of Lang’s autobiography. I told him about the satellite navigation system in the Ford and how it had taken me to Emmett’s doorstep, and how strangely Emmett had behaved.
    And, of course, the more I talked, the more excited Rycart became. I guess it must have been like Christmas for him.
    “Just suppose,” he said, pacing up and down again, “that it was Emmett who originally suggested to Lang that he should think about a career in politics. Let’s face it, someone must have put the idea into his pretty little head. I’d been a junior member of the party since I was fourteen. What year did Lang join?”
    “Nineteen seventy-five.”
    “Seventy-five! You see, that would make perfect sense. Do you remember what Britain was like in seventy-five? The security services were out of control, spying on the prime minister. Retired generals were forming private armies. The economy was collapsing. There were strikes,