Read The Ghost for Free Online

siblings. I could have died myself and, as far as the world was concerned, my life would have gone on as normal. I packed one suitcase with a week’s change of clothes, a sweater, and a spare pair of shoes. I put my laptop and mini–disk recorder into my shoulder bag. I would use the hotel laundry. Anything else I needed I would buy on arrival.
    I spent the rest of the day and all that evening up in my study, reading through my books on Adam Lang and making a list of questions. I don’t want to sound too Jekyll and Hyde about this, but as the day faded—as the lights came up in the big tower blocks across the railway marshaling yard, and the red, white, and green stars winked and fell toward the airport—I could feel myself beginning to get into Lang’s skin. He was a few years older, but apart from that our backgrounds were similar. The resemblances hadn’t struck me before: an only child, born in the Midlands, educated at the local grammar school, a degree from Cambridge, a passion for student drama, a complete lack of interest in student politics.
    I went back to look at the photographs. “Lang’s hysterical performance as a chicken in charge of a battery farm for humans at the 1972 Cambridge Footlights Revue earned him plaudits.” I could imagine us both chasing the same girls, taking a bad show to the Edinburgh Fringe in the back of some beat-up Volkswagen van, sharing digs, getting stoned. And yet somehow, metaphorically speaking, I had stayed a chicken, while he had gone on to become prime minister. This was the point at which my normal powers of empathy deserted me, for there seemed nothing in his first twenty-five years that could explain his second. But there would be time enough, I reasoned, to find his voice.
    I double-locked the door before I went to bed that night and dreamed I was following Adam Lang through a maze of rainy, redbrick streets. When I got into a minicab and the driver turned round to ask me where I wanted to go, he had McAra’s lugubrious face.

    HEATHROW THE NEXT MORNING looked like one of those bad science fiction movies “set in the near future” after the security forces have taken over the state. Two armored personnel carriers were parked outside the terminal. A dozen men with Rambo machine guns and bad haircuts patrolled inside. Vast lines of passengers queued to be frisked and X-rayed, carrying their shoes in one hand and their pathetic toiletries in a clear plastic bag in the other. Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they’ll manage the next holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they’ll simply issue us with air tickets and we’ll do whatever we’re told.
    Once I was through security, I headed across the fragrant halls of duty-free toward the American Airlines lounge, intent only on a courtesy cup of coffee and the Sunday morning sports pages. A satellite news channel was burbling away in the corner. No one was watching. I fixed myself a double espresso and was just turning to the football reports in one of the tabloids when I heard the words “Adam Lang.” Three days earlier, like everyone else in the lounge, I would have taken no notice, but now it was if my own name was being called out. I went and stood in front of the screen and tried to make sense of the story.
    To begin with, it didn’t seem that important. It sounded like old news. Four British citizens had been picked up in Pakistan a few years back—“kidnapped by the CIA,” according to their lawyer—taken to a secret military installation in eastern Europe, and tortured. One had died under interrogation, the other three had been imprisoned in Guantánamo. The new twist, apparently, was that a Sunday paper had obtained a leaked Ministry of Defence document that seemed to suggest that Lang had ordered a Special Air Services unit to seize the men and hand them over to the CIA. Various expressions of outrage followed, from a human rights