“Hi, man,” he said. “Join me.” He opened his eyes fully, yawned, and put the back of his hand to his mouth. “Sorry.”
“Hello, Adam.”
I sat down. I had my bag in my lap. I fumbled to pull out my notebook, the minirecorder, and a spare disk. Wasn’t this what Rycart wanted? Tapes? Nervousness made me clumsy, and if Lang had so much as raised an eyebrow, I would have put the recorder away again. But he didn’t appear to notice. He must have gone through this ritual so many times at the end of some official visit the journalist conducted into his presence for a few minutes’ exclusive access, the tape machine nervously examined to make sure it works, the illusion of informality over the relaxing prime ministerial drink. In the recording you can hear the exhaustion in his voice.
“So,” he said, “how’s it going?”
“It’s going,” I said. “It’s certainly going.”
When I listen to the disk, my register’s so high from the anxiety, it sounds as I’ve been sucking helium.
“Found out anything interesting?”
There was a gleam of something in his eyes. Contempt? Amusement? I sensed he was playing with me.
“This and that. How was Washington?”
“Washington was great, actually.” There’s a rustling noise as he straightens slightly in his chair, drawing himself up to give one last performance before the theater closes for the night. “I got the most terrific support everywhere—on the Hill, of course, as you probably saw, but also the vice president and the secretary of state. They’re going to help me in every way they can.”
“And is the bottom line that you’ll be able to settle in America?”
“Oh, yes. If worst comes to worst, they’ll offer me asylum, certainly. Maybe even a job of some kind, as long as it doesn’t involve overseas travel. But it won’t get that far. They’re going to supply something much more valuable.”
“Really?”
Lang nodded. “Evidence.”
“Right.” I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
“Is that thing working?” he asked.
There is a deafening clunk as I pick up the recorder.
“Yes, I think so. Is that okay?”
With a thump, I replace it.
“Sure,” said Lang. “I just want to make sure you get this down, because I definitely think we can use this. This is important. We should keep it as an exclusive for the memoirs. It will do wonders for the serialization deal.” He leaned forward to emphasize his words. “Washington is prepared to provide sworn testimony that no United Kingdom personnel were directly involved in the capture of those four men in Pakistan.”
“Really?”Really? Really? I keep on parroting it, and I wince every time I hear the sycophancy in my voice. The fawning courtier. The self-effacing ghost.
“You bet. The director of the CIA himself will provide a deposition to the court in The Hague, saying that this was an entirely American covert operation, and if that doesn’t do the trick he’s prepared to let the actual officers who were running the mission provide evidence in camera.” Lang sat back and sipped his brandy. “That should give Rycart something to think about. How’s he going to make a charge of war crimes stick now?”
“But your memorandum to the Ministry of Defence—”
“That’s genuine,” he conceded with a shrug. “It’s true, I can’t deny that I urged the use of the SAS. And it’s true the British government can’t deny that our special forces were in Peshawar at the time of Operation Tempest. And we also can’t deny that it was our intelligence services that tracked down those men to the particular location where they were arrested. But there’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”
Lang smiled at me.
“But we did?”
“There’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”
“But if we did, surely that would be aiding and abetting—”
“There’s no proof that we passed that intelligence on to the CIA.”
He was still holding his smile, albeit now with just a crease of concentration in his brow, as a tenor might hold a note at the end of a difficult aria.
“Then how did it get to them?”
“That’s a difficult question. Not through any official channel, that’s for sure. And certainly it was nothing to do with me.” There was a long pause. His smile died. “Well,” he said. “What do you think?”
“It sounds a bit”—I tried to find some diplomatic way of saying it—“technical.”
“Meaning?”
My reply on the tape is so slippery, so sweaty with nervous circumlocutions, it’s enough to make one laugh out loud.
“Well…you know…you admit yourself you wanted the SAS to pick them up—no doubt for, you know, understandable reasons—and even if they didn’t actually do the job themselves, the Ministry of Defence—as I understand it—hasn’t really been able todeny they were involved, presumably because they were, in a way, even if…even if…they were only parked in a car around the corner. And apparently British, you know, intelligence gave the CIA the location where they could be picked up. And when they were tortured, you didn’t condemn it.”
The last line was delivered in a rush. Lang said coldly, “Sid Kroll was very pleased with the commitment he was given by the CIA. He believes the prosecutor may even have to drop the case.”
“Well, if Sid says that—”
“Butfuck it ,” said Lang suddenly. He banged his hand on the edge of the table. On the tape it sounds like an explosion. The dozing Special Branch man on the nearby sofa looked up sharply. “I don’t regret what happened to those four men. If we’d relied on the Pakistanis we’d never have got them. We had to grab them while we had the chance, and if we’d missed them, they’d have gone underground and the next time we’d have known anything about them would’ve been when they were killing our people.”
“You really don’t regret it?”
“No.”
“Not even the one who died under interrogation?”
“Oh, him,” said Lang dismissively. “He had a heart problem, an undiagnosed heart problem. He
could have died anytime. He could have died getting out of bed one morning.”
I said nothing. I pretended to make a note.
“Look,” said Lang, “I don’t condone torture, but let me just say this to you. First, it does actually produce results—I’ve seen the intelligence. Second, having power, in the end, is all about balancing evils, and when you think about it, what are a couple of minutes of suffering for a few individuals compared to the deaths—thedeaths , mark you—of thousands. Third, don’t try telling me this is something unique to the war on terror. Torture’s always been part of warfare. The only difference is that in the past there were no fucking media around to report it.”
“The men arrested in Pakistan claim they were innocent,” I pointed out.
“Of course they claim they were innocent! What else are they going to say?” Lang studied me
closely, as if seeing me properly for the first time. “I’m beginning to think you’re too na.ve for this job.”
I couldn’t resist it. “Unlike Mike McAra?”
“Mike!” Lang laughed and shook his head. “Mike was na.ve in a different way.”
The plane was beginning to descend quite rapidly now. The moon and stars had gone. We were
dropping through cloud. I could feel the pressure change in my ears, and I had to pinch my nose and swallow hard.
Amelia made her way down the aisle.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. She looked concerned. She must have heard Lang’s outburst of temper; everyone must have.
“We’re just doing some work on my memoirs,” said Lang. “I’m telling him what happened over Operation Tempest.”
“You’re taping it?” said Amelia.
“If that’s all right,” I said.
“You need to be careful,” she told Lang. “Remember what Sid Kroll said—”
“The tapes will be yours,” I interrupted, “not mine.”
“They could still be subpoenaed.”
“Stop treating me as though I’m a child,” said Lang abruptly. “I know what I want to say. Let’s deal with it once and for all.”
Amelia permitted herself a slight widening of her eyes and withdrew.
“Women!” muttered Lang. He took another gulp of brandy. The ice had melted, but the color of the liquid remained dark. It must have been a very full measure, and it occurred to me that our former prime minister was slightly drunk. I sensed this was my moment.
“In what way,” I asked, “was Mike McAra na.ve?”
“Never mind,” muttered Lang. He nursed his drink, his chin on his chest, brooding. He suddenly jerked up again. “I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I’d do if I were in power again? I’d say, okay then, we’ll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we’ll have queues to flights on which we’ve done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone’s precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we’ll have queues to the flights where we’ve done everything possible to
make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn’t that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world wouldreally choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down?”
“And Mike was like that?”
“Not at the beginning. But Mike, unfortunately, discovered idealism in his old age. I said to him—it was our last conversation, actually—I said, if our Lord Jesus Christ was unable to solve all the problems of the world when he came down to live among us—and he was the son of God!—wasn’t it a bit unreasonable of Mike to expect me to have sorted out everything in ten years?”
“Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?”
“Mike made certain wild accusations. I could hardly ignore them.”
“May I ask what kind of accusations?”
I could imagine Rycart and the special prosecutor sitting listening to the tape, straightening in their chairs at that. I had to swallow again. My voice sounded muffled in my ears, as if I was talking in a dream, or hailing myself from a great distance. On the tape, the pause that followed is quite short, but at the time it seemed endless, and Lang’s voice when it came was deadly quiet.
“I’d prefer not to repeat them.”
“Were they to do with the CIA?”
“But surely you already know,” said Lang bitterly, “if you’ve been to see Paul Emmett?”
And this time the pause is as long on the recording as it is in my memory.
Delivered of his bombshell, Lang gazed out of the window and sipped his drink. A few isolated lights had begun to appear beneath us. I think they must have been ships. I looked at him and I saw that the years had caught up even with him at last. It was in the droop of the flesh around his eyes and in the loose skin beneath his jaw. Or perhaps it wasn’t age. Perhaps he was simply exhausted. I doubt he could have had much sleep for weeks, probably not since McAra had confronted him. Certainly, when at last he turned back to me, there wasn’t anger in his expression, merely a great weariness.
“I want you to understand,” he said with heavy emphasis, “that everything I did, both as party leader and as prime minister—everything—I did out of conviction, because I believed it was right.”
I mumbled a reply. I was in a state of shock.
“Emmett claims you showed him some photographs. Is that true? May I see?”
My hands shook slightly as I removed them from the envelope and pushed them across the table toward him. He flicked through the first four very quickly, paused over the fifth—the one that showed him and Emmett onstage—then went back to the beginning and started looking at them again, lingering over each image.
He said, without raising his eyes from the pictures, “Where did you get them?”
“McAra ordered them up from the archive. I found them in his room.”
Over the intercom, the copilot asked us to fasten our seat belts.
“Odd,” murmured Lang. “Odd the way we’ve all changed so much and yet also stayed exactly the same. Mike never mentioned anything to me about photographs. Oh, that bloody archive!” He squinted closely at one of the riverbank pictures. It was the girls, I noticed, rather than himself or Emmett, who seemed to fascinate him the most. “I remember her,” he said, tapping the picture. “And her. She wrote to me once, when I was prime minister. Ruth was not pleased. Oh, God,” he said, and passed his hand across his face. “Ruth.” For a moment, I thought he was about to break down, but when he looked at me his eyes were dry. “What happens next? Is there a procedure in your line of work to deal with this sort of situation?”
Patterns of light were very clear in the window now. I could see the headlamps of a car on a road.
“The client always has the last word about what goes in a book,” I said. “Always. But, obviously, in this case, given what happened—”
On the tape, my voice trails away, and then there is a loud clunk, as Lang leans forward and grabs my forearm.
“If you mean what happened to Mike, then let me tell you I was absolutely appalled by that.” His gaze was fixed unwaveringly on me; he was putting everything he had left within him into the task of convincing me, and I’ll freely confess, despite everything I’d discovered, he succeeded: to this day, I’m sure he was telling the truth. “If you believe nothing else, you must please believe that his death had nothing to do with me, and I shall carry that image of Mike in the morgue until my own dying day. I’m sure it was an accident. But okay, let’s say, for the sake of argument, it wasn’t.” He tightened his grip on my arm. “What was he thinking of, driving up to Boston to confront Emmett? He’d been around politics long enough to know that you don’t do something like that, not when the stakes are this high. You know,
in a way, he did kill himself. It was a suicidal act.”
“That’s what worries me,” I said.
“You can’t seriously think,” said Lang, “that the same thing could happen to you?”
“It has crossed my mind.”
“You need have no fears on that score. I can guarantee it.” I guess my disbelief must have been
obvious. “Oh, come on, man!” he said urgently. Again, the fingers clenched on my flesh. “There are four policemen traveling on this plane with us right now! What kind of people do you think we are?”
“Well, that’s just it,” I said. “What kind of peopleare you?”
We were coming in low over the treetops. The lights of the Gulfstream gleamed across dark waves of foliage.
I tried to pull my arm away. “Excuse me,” I said.
Lang reluctantly let go of me and I fastened my seat belt. He did the same. He glanced out of the window at the terminal, then back at me, appalled, as we dipped gracefully onto the runway.
“My God, you’ve already told someone, haven’t you?”
I could feel myself turning scarlet. “No,” I said.
“You have.”
“I haven’t.” On the tape I sound as feeble as a child caught red-handed.
