‘But how will they know what I look like?’
‘They won’t. You’ll have to look out for them.’
There was a renewed burst of applause in the background. I started to raise a fresh objection but it was too late. He had hung up.
*
I drove out of Belmont without any clear idea of the route I was supposed to follow. I checked the rear-view mirror neurotically every few seconds, but if I was being followed, I couldn’t tell. Different cars appeared behind me, and none seemed to stay for longer than a couple of minutes. I kept my eyes open for signs to Boston, and eventually crossed a big river and joined the interstate, heading east.
It was not yet three in the afternoon but already the day was starting to darken. Away to my left, the downtown office blocks gleamed gold against a swollen Atlantic sky, while up ahead the lights of the big jets fell towards Logan like shooting stars. I maintained my usual cautious pace over the next couple of miles. Logan Airport, for those who have never had the pleasure, sits in the middle of Boston Harbor, approached from the south by a seemingly endless tunnel. As the road descended underground I asked myself whether I was really going to go through with this, and it was a good measure of my uncertainty that when – the best part of a mile later – I rose again into the deeper gloom of the afternoon, I still hadn’t decided.
I followed the signs to the long-term car park and was just reversing into a bay when my telephone rang. The incoming number was unfamiliar. I almost didn’t answer. When I did, a peremptory voice said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’
It was Ruth Lang. She had that presumption of beginning a conversation without first announcing who was calling: a lapse in manners I was sure her husband would never have been guilty of, even when he was prime minister.
‘Working,’ I said.
‘Really? You’re not at your hotel.’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘Well, are you? They told me you hadn’t even checked in.’
I flailed around for an adequate lie and hit on a partial truth. ‘I decided to go to New York.’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to see John Maddox, to talk about the structure of the book, in view of the’ – a tactful euphemism was needed, I decided – ‘the changed circumstances.’
‘I was worried about you,’ she said. ‘All day I’ve been walking up and down this fucking beach thinking about what we discussed last night—’
I interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t say anything about that on the phone.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m not a total fool. It’s just that the more I go over things, the more worried I get.’
‘Where’s Adam?’
‘Still in Washington, as far as I know. He keeps trying to call and I keep not answering. When will you be back?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Tonight?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Do, if you can.’ She lowered her voice: I imagined the bodyguard standing nearby. ‘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 goodbye.
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 towards 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 La Guardia.
*
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 apologised: 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 business people 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 to thank us again for our understanding.
We laboured 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 my seatbelt was fastened. It seemed to me that I had been unconscious for no more than a few seconds, but the pressure in my ears told me that already we were coming in to land at La Guardia. 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 recognised. The usual lugubrious line-up of drivers was waiting, holding the names of their passengers against their chests. They stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact, like suspects in an identity parade, 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 recognise the right person when I saw them, 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 colourless.
He was chewing gum. He nodded to my suitcase. ‘You okay with that.’ It was a statement, not a question, but I didn’t care. I’d never been more pleased to hear a New York accent in my life. He turned on his heel and I followed him across the hall and out into the pandemonium of the night: shrieks, whistles, slamming doors, the fight to grab a cab, sirens in the distance.
He brought round his car, wound down his window, and beckoned to me to get in quickly. As I struggled to get my case into the back seat, he stared straight ahead, his hands on the wheel, discouraging conversation. Not that there was much time to talk. Barely had we left the perimeter of the airport than we were pulling up in front of a big glass-fronted hotel and conference centre overlooking Grand Central Parkway. He grunted as he shifted
his heavy body round in his seat to address me. The car stank of his sweat and I had a moment of pure existential horror, staring beyond him, through the drizzle, to that bleak and anonymous building: what, in the name of God, was I doing?
‘If you need to make contact, use this,’ he said, giving me a brand-new cell phone, still in its polythene wrapper. ‘There’s a chip inside with twenty dollars’ worth of calls on it. Don’t use your old phone. The safest thing is to turn it off. You pay for your room in advance, with cash. Have you got enough? It’ll be about three hundred bucks.’
I nodded.
‘You’re staying one night. You have a reservation.’ He wriggled his fat wallet out from his back pocket. ‘This is the card you use to guarantee the extras. The name on the card is the name you register under. Use an address in the United Kingdom that isn’t your own. If there are any extras, make sure you pay for them in cash. This is the telephone number you use to make contact in future.’
‘You used to be a cop,’ I said. I took the credit card and a torn-out strip of paper with a number written on it in a childish hand. The paper and plastic were warm from the heat of his body.
‘Don’t use the internet. Don’t speak to strangers. And especially avoid any women who might try to come on to you.’
‘You sound like my mother.’
His face didn’t flicker. We sat there for a few seconds. ‘Well,’ he said impatiently. He waved a meaty hand at me. ‘That’s it.’
Once I was through the revolving glass door and inside the lobby I checked the name on the card. Clive Dixon. A big conference had just ended. Scores of delegates wearing black suits with bright yellow lapel badges were pouring across the wide expanse of white marble, chattering to one another like a flight of crows. They looked eager, purposeful, motivated, newly fired up to meet their corporate targets and personal goals. I saw from their badges they belonged to a church. Above our heads, great glass globes of light hung from a ceiling a hundred feet high and shimmered on walls of chrome. I wasn’t just out of my depth any more; I was out of sight of land.
‘I have a reservation, I believe,’ I said to the clerk at the desk, ‘in the name of Dixon.’
It’s not an alias I’d have chosen. I don’t think of myself as a Dixon, whatever a Dixon is. But the receptionist was untroubled by my embarrassment. I was on his computer, that was all that mattered to him, and my card was good. The room rate was $275. I filled out the reservation form and gave as my false address the number of Kate’s small terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush and the street of Rick’s London club. When I said I wanted to pay in cash, he took the notes between his finger and thumb as if they were the strangest things he had ever seen. Cash? If I’d tied a mule to his desk and offered to pay him in animal skins and sticks that I’d spent the winter carving, he couldn’t have looked more nonplussed.
I declined to be assisted with my bags, took the elevator to the sixth floor, and stuck the electronic key card into the door. My room was beige and softly lit by table lamps, with a view across Grand Central Parkway to La Guardia and the unfathomable blackness of the East River. The TV was playing ‘I’ll Take Manhattan’ over a caption that read ‘Welcome to New York, Mr Nixon’. I turned it off and opened the minibar. I didn’t even bother to find a glass. I unscrewed the cap and drank straight from the miniature bottle.
It must have been about twenty minutes and a second miniature later that my new telephone suddenly glowed blue and began to emit a faintly ominous electronic purr. I left my post at the window to answer it.
‘It’s me,’ said Rycart. ‘Have you settled in?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Open the door then.’
He was standing in the corridor, his phone to his ear. Beside him was the driver who had met me at La Guardia.
‘All right, Frank,’ said Rycart to his minder. ‘I’ll take it from here. You keep an eye out in the lobby.’
Rycart slipped his phone into the pocket of his overcoat as Frank plodded back towards the elevators. He was what my mother would have called ‘handsome, and knows it’: a striking profile, narrowly set bright blue eyes accentuated by an orangey tan, and that swept-back waterfall of hair the cartoonists loved so much. He looked a lot younger than sixty. He nodded at the empty bottle in my hand. ‘Tough day?’
‘You could say that.’
He came into the room without waiting for an invitation, went straight over to the window and drew the curtains. I closed the door.
‘My apologies for the location,’ he said, ‘but I tend to be recognised in Manhattan. Especially after yesterday. Did Frank look after you all right?’
‘I’ve rarely had a warmer welcome.’
‘I know what you mean, but he’s a useful guy. Ex-NYPD. He handles logistics and security for me. I’m not the most popular kid on the block right now, as you can imagine.’
‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Water would be fine.’
He prowled around the room while I poured him a glass. He checked the bathroom, even the closet.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Do you think this is a trap?’
‘It crossed my mind.’ He unbuttoned his coat and laid it carefully on the bed. I guessed his Armani suit would have cost about twice the annual income of a small African village. ‘Let’s face it, you do work for Lang.’
‘I only met him for the first time on Monday,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know him.’
Rycart laughed. ‘Who does? If you met him on Monday you probably know him as well as anyone. I worked with him for fifteen years, and I certainly don’t have a clue where he’s coming from. Mike McAra didn’t, either, and he was with him from the beginning.’
‘His wife implied more or less the same thing to me.’
‘Well, there you go. If someone as sharp as Ruth doesn’t get him – and she’s married to him, for God’s sake – what hope do the rest of us have? The man’s a mystery. Thanks.’ Rycart took the water. He sipped it thoughtfully, studying me. ‘But you sound as though you’re starting to unravel him.’
‘I feel as though I’m the one who’s unravelling, quite frankly.’
‘Let’s sit down,’ said Rycart, patting my shoulder, ‘and you can tell me all about it.’
The gesture reminded me of Lang. A great man’s charm. They made me feel like a minnow, swimming between sharks. I would need to be on my guard. I sat down carefully in one of the two small armchairs – it was beige, like the walls. Rycart sat opposite me.
‘So,’ he said. ‘How do we begin? You know who I am. Who are you?’
‘I’m a professional ghostwriter,’ I said. ‘I was brought in to rewrite Adam Lang’s memoirs after Mike McAra died. I know nothing about politics. It’s as if I’ve stepped through the looking-glass.’
‘Tell me what you’ve found out.’
Even I was too canny for that. I hummed and hawed.
‘Perhaps you could tell me about McAra first,’ I said.
‘If you like.’ Rycart shrugged. ‘What can I say? Mike was the consummate professional. If you’d pinned a rosette to that suitcase over there and told him it was the party leader, he’d have followed it. Everyone expected Lang would fire him when he became leader, and bring in his own man. But Mike was too useful. He knew the party inside out. What else do you want to know?’
‘What was he like, as a person?’
‘What was he like as a person?’ Rycart gave me a strange look, as if it were the oddest question he’d ever heard. ‘Well, he had no life outside politics, if that’s what you mean, so you could say that Lang was everything to him – wife, kids, friends. What else? He was obsessive, a detail man. Almost everything Adam wasn’t, Mike was. Maybe that was why he stayed on, right the way through Downing Street and all the way out again, long after the others had all cashed in and gone to make some money. No fancy corporate jobs for our Mike. He was very loyal to Adam.’
&n
bsp; ‘Not that loyal,’ I said. ‘Not if he was in touch with you.’
‘Ah, but that was only right at the very end. You mentioned a photograph. Can I see it?’
When I fetched the envelope, his face had the same greedy expression as Emmett’s, but when he saw the picture, he couldn’t hide his disappointment.
‘Is this it?’ he said. ‘Just a bunch of privileged white kids doing a song-and-dance act?’
‘It’s a bit more interesting than that,’ I said. ‘For a start, why’s your number on the back of it?’
Rycart gave me a sly look. ‘Why exactly should I help you?’
‘Why exactly should I help you?’
We stared at one another. Eventually he grinned, showing large, polished white teeth.
‘You should have been a politician,’ he said.
‘I’m learning from the best.’
He bowed modestly, thinking I meant him, but actually it was Lang I had in mind. Vanity, that was his weakness, I realised. I could imagine how deftly Lang would have flattered him, and what a blow his sacking must have been to his ego. And now, with his lean face and his prow of a nose and those piercing eyes, he was as hell-bent on revenge as any discarded lover. He got to his feet and went over to the door. He checked the corridor up and down. When he returned he loomed over me, pointing a tanned finger directly at my face.
‘If you double-cross me,’ he said, ‘you’ll pay for it. And if you doubt my willingness to hold a grudge and eventually settle the score, ask Adam Lang.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
He was too agitated now to sit still, and that was something else I only realised at that moment: the pressure he was under. You had to hand it to Rycart. It did take a certain nerve to drag your former party leader and prime minister in front of a war crimes tribunal.
‘This ICC business,’ he said, patrolling up and down in front of the bed, ‘it’s only hit the headlines in the past week, but let me tell you I’ve been pursuing this thing behind the scenes for years. Iraq, rendition, torture, Guantanamo – what’s been done in this so-called War on Terror is illegal under international law, just as much as anything that’s happened in Kosovo or Liberia. The only difference is: we’re the ones doing it. The hypocrisy is nauseating.’