“Maybe he will. But the ancients thought exile a worse punishment than death—and boy, will Lang be an exile. He won’t be able to travel anywhere in the world, not even the handful of shitty little countries that don’t recognize the ICC, because there’ll always be a danger that his plane may have to put in somewhere with engine trouble or to refuel. And we’ll be waiting for him. And that’s when we’ll get him.”
I glanced at Rycart. He was staring straight ahead, nodding slightly.
“Or the political climate may change here one day,” he went on, “and there’ll be a public campaign
to hand him over to justice. I wonder if he’s thought of that. His life is going to be hell.”
“You almost make me feel sorry for him.”
Rycart gave me a sharp look. “He’s charmed you, hasn’t he? Charm! The English disease.”
“There are worse afflictions.”
We crossed the Triborough Bridge, the tires thumping on the joints in the road like a fast pulse.
“I feel as though I’m in a tumbril,” I said.
It took us a while to make the journey downtown. Each time the traffic came to a stop, I thought of opening the door and making a run for it. The trouble was, I could imagine the first part well enough—darting through the stationary cars and disappearing down one of the cross streets—but then it all became a blank. Where would I go? How would I pay for a hotel room if my own credit card, and presumably the false one I’d used earlier, were known to my pursuers? My reluctant conclusion, from whichever angle I examined my predicament, was that I was safer with Rycart. At least he knew how to survive in this alien world into which I had blundered.
“If you’re that worried, we can arrange to have a fail-safe signal,” said Rycart. “You can call me using the phone Frank gave you, let’s say at ten past every hour. We don’t have to speak. Just let it ring a couple of times.”
“What happens if I don’t make the call?”
“I won’t do anything if you miss the first time. If you miss a second, I’ll call Lang and tell him I hold him personally responsible for your safety.”
“Why is it that I don’t find that very reassuring?”
We were almost there. I could see ahead, on the opposite side of Park Avenue, a great, floodlit Stars and Stripes, and beside it, flanking the Waldorf’s entrance, a Union Jack. The area in front of the hotel was cordoned off by concrete blocks. I counted half a dozen police motorcycles waiting, four patrol cars, two large black limousines, a small crowd of cameramen, and a slightly larger one of curious onlookers. As I eyed it, my heart began to accelerate. I felt breathless.
Rycart squeezed my arm. “Courage, my friend. He’s already lost one ghost in suspicious circumstances. He can hardly afford to lose another.”
“This can’tall be for him, surely?” I said in amazement. “Anyone would think he was still prime minister.”
“It seems I’ve only made him even more of a celebrity,” said Rycart. “You people should be grateful to me. Okay, good luck. We’ll talk later. Pull over here, Frank.”
He turned up his collar and sank down in his seat, and there was pathos as well as absurdity in the precaution. Poor Rycart: I doubt if one person in ten thousand in New York would have known who he was. Frank pulled up briefly on the corner of East Fiftieth Street to let me out and then eased deftly back into the traffic, so that the last view I ever had of Rycart was of the back of his silvery head dwindling into the Manhattan evening.
I was on my own.
I crossed the great expanse of road, yellow with taxis, and made my way past the crowds and the police. None of the cops standing around challenged me; seeing my suitcase, they must have assumed I was just a guest checking in. I went through the art deco doors, up the grand marble staircase, and into the Babylonian splendor of the Waldorf’s lobby. Normally I would have used my mobile to contact Amelia, but even I had learned my lesson there. I went over to one of the concierges at the front desk and asked him to call her room.
There was no reply.
Frowning, he hung up. He was just starting to check his computer when a loud detonation sounded on Park Avenue. Several guests who were checking in ducked, only to straighten ruefully when the explosion turned into a cannonade of gunning motorcycle engines. From the interior of the hotel, across the immense expanse of the golden lobby, came a wedge of security men, Special Branch and Secret Service, with Lang enclosed among them, marching purposefully in his usual rolling, muscular way. Behind him walked Amelia and the two secretaries. Amelia was on the phone. I moved toward the group. Lang swept by me, his eyes fixed straight ahead, which was unlike him. Usually he liked to connect with people when he passed them: flash them a smile they’d remember always. As he began descending the staircase, Amelia saw me. She appeared flustered for once, a few blonde hairs actually out of place.
“I was just trying to call you,” she said as she went by. She didn’t break step. “There’s been a change of plan,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re flying back to Martha’s Vineyard now.”
“Now?” I hurried after her. “It’s rather late, isn’t it?”
We started descending the stairs.
“Adam’s insisting. I’ve managed to find us a plane.”
“But why now?”
“I’ve no idea. Something’s come up. You’ll have to ask him.”
Lang was below and ahead of us. He’d already reached the grand entrance. The bodyguards opened the doors and his broad shoulders were suddenly framed by a halogen glow of light. The shouts of the reporters, the fusillade of camera shutters, the rumble of the Harley-Davidsons—it was as if someone had rolled back the doors to hell.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Get into the backup car. I expect Adam will want to talk to you on the plane.” She saw my look of panic. “You’re very odd. Is there something the matter?”
Now what am I supposed to do? I wondered. Faint? Plead a prior engagement? I seemed to be trapped on a moving walkway with no means of escape.
“Everything seems to be happening in a rush,” I said weakly.
“This is nothing. You should have been with us when he was prime minister.”
We emerged into the tumult of noise and light, and it was as if all the controversy generated by the war on terror, year after year of it, had briefly converged on one man and rendered him incandescent. The door to Lang’s stretch limousine was open. He paused to wave briefly at the crowd beyond the security cordon, then ducked inside. Amelia took my arm and propelled me toward the second car. “Go on!” she shouted. The motorbikes were already pulling away. “Don’t forget, we can’t stop if you’re left behind.”
She slipped in beside Lang, and I found myself stepping into the second limo, next to the secretaries. They shifted cheerfully along the bench seat to make room for me. A Special Branch man climbed in the front, next to the driver, and then we were away, with an accompanyingwhoop whoop from one of the motorbikes, ringing out like the cheerful whistle of a little tugboat escorting a big liner out to sea.
IN DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, Iwould have relished that journey: my legs stretched out before me; the Harley-Davidsons gliding past us to hold back the traffic; the pale faces of the pedestrians, glimpsed through the smoked glass, turning to watch us as we hurtled by; the noise of the sirens; the vividness of the flashing lights; the speed; theforce . I can think of only two categories of human being who are transported with such pomp and drama: world leaders and captured terrorists.
In my pocket, I surreptitiously fingered my new mobile phone. Ought I to alert Rycart to what was happening? I decided not. I didn’t want to call him in front of witnesses. I would have felt too uncomfortable, my guilt too obvious. Treachery needs privacy. I surrendered myself to events.
We flew over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge like gods, Alice and Lucy giggling with excitement, and when we reached LaGuardia a few minutes later we drove past the terminal building, through an open metal gate, and directly onto the tarmac, where a big private jet was being fueled. It was a Hallington plane, in its dark blue livery, with the corporate logo painted on its high tail: Earth with a circle girdling it, like the Colgate ring of confidence. Lang’s limousine swerved to a halt and he was the first to emerge. He dived through the doorway of the mobile body scanner and up the steps into the Gulfstream without a backward glance. A bodyguard hurried after him.
As I clambered out of the car I felt almost arthritic with anxiety. It took an effort simply to walk over to the steps where Amelia was standing. The night air was shaking with the noise of jets coming in to land. I could see them stacked five or six deep above the water, steps of light ascending through the darkness.
“Now that’s the way to travel,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “Is it always like that?”
“They want to show him they love him,” said Amelia. “And no doubt it helps to show everyone else how they treat their friends.Pour encourager les autres. ”
Security men with metal wands were inspecting all the luggage. I added my suitcase to the pile.
“He says he has to get back to Ruth,” she continued, gazing up at the plane. The windows were bigger than on a normal aircraft. Lang’s profile was plainly visible toward the rear. “There’s something he needs to talk over with her.” Her voice was puzzled. She was almost talking to herself, as if I weren’t there. I wondered if they’d had a row during the drive to the airport.
One of the security men told me to open my suitcase. I unzipped it and held it up to him. He lifted out the manuscript to search underneath it. Amelia was so preoccupied, she didn’t even notice.
“It’s odd,” she said, “because Washington went so well.” She stared vacantly toward the lights of the runway.
“Your shoulder bag,” said the security man.
I handed it to him. He took out the package of photographs, and for a moment I thought he was going to open it, but he was more interested in my laptop. I felt the need to keep talking.
“Perhaps he’s heard something from The Hague,” I suggested.
“No. It’s nothing to do with that. He would have told me.”
“Okay, you’re clear to board,” said the guard.
“Don’t go near him just yet,” she warned, as I moved to pass through the scanner. “Not in his present mood. I’ll take you back to him if he wants to talk.”
I climbed the steps.
Lang was seated in the very end seat, nearest to the tail, his chin in his hand, gazing out of the window. (The security people always liked him to sit in the last row, I discovered later; it meant no one could get behind him.) The cabin was configured to take ten passengers, two each on a couple of sofas that ran along the side of the fuselage, and the rest in six big armchairs. The armchairs faced one another in pairs, with a stowaway table between them. It looked like an extension of the Waldorf’s lobby: gold fittings, polished walnut, and padded, creamy leather. Lang was in one of the armchairs. The Special Branch man sat on a nearby sofa. A steward in a white jacket was bending over the former prime minister. I couldn’t see what drink he was being served, but I could hear it. Your favorite sound might be a pair of nightingales in a summer dusk, or a peal of village church bells. Mine is the clink of ice against cut glass. Of this I am a connoisseur. And it sounded distinctly to me as if Lang had given up tea in favor of a stiff whiskey.
The steward saw me staring and came down the gangway toward me. “Can I get you something, sir?”
“Thanks. Yes. I’ll have whatever Mr. Lang is having.”
I was wrong: it was brandy.
By the time the door was closed, there were twelve of us on board: three crew (the pilot, copilot, and steward), and nine passengers—two secretaries, four bodyguards, Amelia, Adam Lang, and me. I sat with my back to the cockpit so that I could keep an eye on my client. Amelia was directly opposite him, and as the engines started to whine it was all I could do not to hurl myself at the door and wrench it open. That flight felt doomed to me from the start. The Gulfstream shuddered slightly, and slowly the terminal building seemed to drift away. I could see Amelia’s hand making emphatic gestures, as if she were explaining something, but Lang just continued to stare out at the airfield.
Someone touched my arm. “Do you know how much one of these things costs?”
It was the policeman who’d been in my car on the drive from the Waldorf. He was in the seat across the aisle.
“I don’t, no.”
“Have a guess.”
“I genuinely have no idea.”
“Go on. Try.”
I shrugged. “Ten million dollars?”
“Fortymillion dollars.” He was triumphant, as if knowing the price somehow implied he was involved in the ownership. “Hollington hasfive .”
“Makes you wonder what they can possibly use them all for.”
“They lease them out when they don’t need them.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” I said. “I’d heard that.”
The noise of the engines increased and we began our charge down the runway. I imagined the terrorist suspects, handcuffed and hooded, strapped into their luxurious leather armchairs as they lifted off from some red-dusted military airstrip near the Afghan border, bound for the pine forests of eastern Poland. The plane seemed to spring into the air, and I watched over the edge of my glass as the lights of Manhattan spread to fill the window, then slid and tilted, and finally flickered into darkness as we rose into the low cloud. It felt as though we were climbing blindly for a long time in our vulnerable metal tube, but then the gauze fell away and we came up into a bright night. The clouds were as massive and solid as alps, and the moon appeared occasionally from behind the peaks, lighting valleys and glaciers and ravines.
Some time after the plane leveled off, Amelia rose and came down the aisle toward me. Her hips swayed, involuntarily seductive, with the motion of the cabin.
“All right,” she said, “he’s ready to have a word. But go easy on him, okay? He’s had a hell of a couple of days.”
He and I both, I thought.
“Will do,” I said.
I fished out my shoulder bag from beside my seat and began to squeeze past her. She caught my arm.
“You haven’t got long,” she warned. “This flight’s only a hop. We’ll be starting to descend any minute.”
IT CERTAINLY WAS Ahop. I checked afterward. Only two hundred and sixty miles separate New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, and the cruising speed of a Gulfstream G450 is five hundred and twenty-eight miles per hour. The conjunction of these two facts explains why the tape of my conversation with Lang lasts a mere eleven minutes. We were probably already losing altitude even as I approached him.
His eyes were closed, his glass still held in his outstretched hand. He had removed his jacket and tie and eased off his shoes, and was sprawled back in his seat like a starfish, as if someone had pushed him into it. At first I thought he’d fallen asleep, but then I realized his eyes were narrowed to slits and he was watching me closely. He gestured vaguely with his drink toward the seat opposite him.
