WE MADE OUR FINALapproach to Logan Airport at one in the afternoon, local time.
As we came in low over Boston Harbor, the sun we had been chasing all day seemed to travel over the water alongside us, striking the downtown skyscrapers one after the other: erupting columns of white and blue, gold and silver, a fireworks display in glass and steel. O my America, I thought, my new-found-land—my land where the book market is five times the size of the United Kingdom’s—shine thy light on me! As I queued for immigration I was practically humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Even the guy from the Department of Homeland Security—embodying the rule that the folksier an institution’s name, the more Stalinist its function—couldn’t dent my optimism. He sat frowning behind his glass screen at the very notion of anyone flying three thousand miles to spend a month on Martha’s Vineyard in midwinter. When he discovered I was a writer he couldn’t have treated me with greater suspicion if I had been wearing an orange jumpsuit.
“What kind of books you write?”
“Autobiographies.”
This obviously baffled him. He suspected mockery but wasn’t quite sure. “Autobiographies, huh? Don’t you have to be famous to do that?”
“Not anymore.”
He stared hard at me, then slowly shook his head, like a weary St. Peter at the pearly gates, confronted by yet another sinner trying to wheedle his way into paradise. “Not anymore,” he repeated, with an expression of infinite distaste. He picked up his metal stamp and punched it twice. He let me in for thirty days.
When I was through immigration, I turned on my phone. It showed a welcoming message from Lang’s personal assistant, someone named Amelia Bly, apologizing for not providing a driver to collect me from the airport. Instead she suggested I take a bus to the ferry terminal at Woods Hole and promised a car would meet me when I landed at Martha’s Vineyard. I bought theNew York Times and theBoston Globe and checked them while I waited for the bus to leave to see if they had the Lang story, but either it had broken too late for them or they weren’t interested.
The bus was almost empty, and I sat up front near the driver as we pushed south through the tangle of freeways, out of the city, and into open country. It was a few degrees below freezing and the sky was clear, but there had been snow not long before. It was piled in banks next to the road and clung to the higher branches in the forests that stretched away on either side in great rolling waves of white and green. New England is basically Old England on steroids—wider roads, bigger woods, larger spaces; even the sky seemed huge and glossy. I had a pleasing sense of gaining time, imagining a gloomy, wet Sunday night in London, in contrast to this sparkling afternoon winterland. But gradually it began to darken here as well. I guess it must have been almost six when we reached Woods Hole and pulled up at the ferry terminal, and by then there were a moon and stars.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I saw the sign for the ferry that I remembered to spare a thought for McAra. Not surprisingly, the dead-man’s-shoes aspect of the assignment wasn’t one I cared to dwell on, especially after my mugging. But as I wheeled my suitcase into the ticket office to pay my fare, and then stepped back out again into the bitter wind, it was only too easy to imagine my predecessor going through similar motions a mere three weeks earlier. He had been drunk, of course, which I wasn’t. I looked around. There were several bars just across the car park. Perhaps he had gone into one of those? I wouldn’t have minded a drink myself. But then I might sit on exactly the same bar stool as he had, and that would be ghoulish, I thought, like taking one of those tours of murder scenes in Hollywood. Instead I joined the passenger queue and tried to read theTimes Sunday magazine, turning to the wall for protection from the wind. There was a wooden board with painted lettering:CURRENT NATIONWIDE THREAT LEVEL IS ELEVATED . I could smell the sea but it was too dark to see it.
The trouble is, once you start thinking about a thing, you can’t always make yourself stop. Most of the cars waiting to board the ferry had their engines running so the drivers could use their heaters in the cold, and I found myself checking for a tan-colored Ford Escape SUV. Then, when I actually got on the boat, and climbed the clanging metal stairwell to the passenger deck, I wondered whether this was the way McAra had come. I told myself to leave it, that I was working myself up for nothing. But I suppose that ghosts and ghostwriters go naturally together. I sat in the fuggy passenger cabin and studied the plain, honest faces of my fellow travelers, and then, as the boat shuddered and cast off from the terminal, I folded my paper and went out onto the open top deck.
It’s amazing how cold and darkness conspire to alter everything. The Martha’s Vineyard ferry on a summer’s evening I imagine must be delightful. There’s a big stripy funnel straight out of a storybook, and rows of blue plastic seats facing outward, running the length of the deck, where families no doubt sit in their shorts and T-shirts, the teenagers looking bored, the dads jumping about with excitement. But on this January night the deck was deserted, and the north wind blowing down from Cape Cod sliced through my jacket and shirt and chilled my skin to gooseflesh. The lights of Woods Hole slipped away. We passed a marker buoy at the entrance to the channel swinging frantically this way and that as if trying to free itself from some underwater monster. Its bell tolled in time with the waves like a funeral chime and the spray flew as vile as witch’s spit.
I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck, and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side. The handrail was only waist-high, and for the first time I appreciated how easily McAra might have gone over. I actually had to brace myself to keep from slipping. Rick was right. The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without ever really making up your mind. The mere act of leaning out too far and imagining what it might be like could tip you over. You’d hit that heaving icy black water with a smack that would take you ten feet under, and by the time you came up the ship might be a hundred yards away. I hoped McAra had absorbed enough booze to blunt the horror, but I doubted if there was a drunk in the world who wouldn’t be sobered by total immersion in a sea only half a degree above freezing.
And nobody would have heard him fall! That was the other thing. The weather wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been three weeks earlier, and yet, as I glanced around, I could see not a soul on deck. I really started shivering then; my teeth were chattering like some fairground clockwork novelty.
I went down to the bar for a drink.
WE ROUNDED THE WESTChop Lighthouse and came into the ferry terminal at Vineyard Haven just before seven, docking with a rattle of chains and a thump that almost sent me flying down the stairs. I hadn’t been expecting a welcoming committee, which was fine, because I didn’t get one, just an elderly local taxi driver holding a torn-out page from a notebook on which my name was misspelled. As he heaved my suitcase into the back, the wind lifted a big sheet of clear plastic and sent it twisting and flapping over the ice sheets in the car park. The sky was packed white with stars.
I’d bought a guidebook to the island, so I had a vague idea of what I was in for. In summer the population is a hundred thousand, but when the vacationers have closed up their holiday homes and migrated west for the winter, it drops to fifteen thousand. These are the hardy, insular natives, the folks who call the mainland “America.” There are a couple of highways, one set of traffic lights, and dozens of long sandy tracks leading to places with names like Squibnocket Pond and Jobs Neck Cove. My driver didn’t utter a word the whole journey, just scrutinized me in the mirror. As my eyes met his rheumy glance for the twentieth time, I wondered if there was a reason why he resented picking me up. Perhaps I was keeping him from something. It was hard to imagine what. The streets around the ferry terminal were mostly deserted, and once we were out of Vineyard Haven and onto the main highway, there was nothing to see but darkness.
By then I’d been traveling for seventeen hours. I didn’t know where I was, or what landscape I was passing through, or even where I was going. All attempts at conversation had failed. I could see nothing except my reflection in the cold darkness of the window. I felt as though I’d come to the edge of the earth, like some seventeenth-century English explorer who was about to have his first encounter with the native Wampanoags. I gave a noisy yawn and quickly clamped the back of my hand to my mouth.
“Sorry,” I said to the disembodied eyes in the rearview mirror. “Where I come from it’s after midnight.”
He shook his head. At first I couldn’t make out whether he was sympathetic or disapproving; then I realized he was trying to tell me it was no use talking to him: he was deaf. I went back to staring out the window.
After a while we came to a crossroads and turned left into what I guessed must be Edgartown, a settlement of white clapboard houses with white picket fences, small gardens, and verandas, lit by ornate Victorian street lamps. Nine out of ten were dark, but in the few windows that shone with yellow light I glimpsed oil paintings of sailing ships and whiskered ancestors. At the bottom of the hill, past the Old Whaling Church, a big misty moon cast a silvery light over shingled roofs and silhouetted the masts in the harbor. Curls of wood smoke rose from a couple of chimneys. I felt as though I was driving onto a film set forMoby-Dick . The headlights picked out a sign to the Chappaquiddick ferry, and not long after that we pulled up outside the Lighthouse View Hotel.
Again, I could picture the scene in summer: buckets and spades and fishing nets piled up on the veranda, rope sandals left by the door, a dusting of white sand trailed up from the beach, that kind of thing. But out of season the big old wooden hotel creaked and banged in the wind like a sailing boat stuck on a reef. I suppose the management must have been waiting till spring to strip the blistered paintwork and wash the crust of salt off the windows. The sea was pounding away nearby in the darkness. I stood with my suitcase on the wooden deck and watched the lights of the taxi disappear around the corner with something close to nostalgia.
Inside the lobby, a girl dressed up as a Victorian maid with a white lace mobcap handed me a message from Lang’s office. I would be picked up at ten the next morning and should bring my passport to show to security. I was starting to feel like a man on a mystery tour: as soon as I reached one location, I was given a fresh set of instructions to proceed to the next. The hotel was empty, the restaurant dark. I was told I could have my choice of rooms, so I picked one on the second floor with a desk I could work at and photographs of Old Edgartown on the wall: John Coffin House, circa 1890; the whale ship Splendid at Osborn wharf, circa 1870. After the receptionist had gone, I put my laptop, list of questions, and the stories I had torn out of the Sunday newspapers on the desk and then stretched out on the bed.
I fell asleep at once and didn’t wake until two in the morning, when my body clock, still on London time, went off like Big Ben. I spent ten minutes searching for a minibar before realizing there wasn’t one. On impulse, I called Kate’s home number in London. What exactly I was going to say to her I had no idea. In any case there was no answer. I meant to hang up but instead found myself rambling to her answering machine. She must have left for work very early. Either that, or she hadn’t come home the night before. That was something to think about, and I duly thought about it. The fact that I had no one to blame but myself didn’t make me feel any better. I took a shower and afterward I got back into bed, turned off the lamp, and pulled the damp sheets up under my chin. Every few seconds the slow pulse of the lighthouse filled the room with a faint red glow. I must have lain there for hours, eyes wide open, fully awake and yet disembodied, and in this way passed my first night on Martha’s Vineyard.
THE LANDSCAPE THAT DISSOLVEDout of the dawn the next morning was flat and alluvial. Across the road beneath my window was a creek, then reed beds, and beyond those a beach and the sea. A pretty Victorian lighthouse with a bell-shaped roof and a wrought-iron balcony looked across the straits to a long, low spit of land about a mile away. That, I realized, must be Chappaquiddick. A squadron of hundreds of tiny white seabirds, in a formation as tight as a school of fish, soared and flicked and dived above the shallow waves.
I went downstairs and ordered a huge breakfast. From the little shop next to reception I bought a copy of theNew York Times . The story I was looking for was entombed deep in the world news section and then reinterred to ensure maximum obscurity far down the page:
LONDON (AP)—Former British prime minister Adam Lang authorized the illegal use of British special forces troops to seize four suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and then hand them over for interrogation by the CIA, according to newspaper reports here Sunday.
The men—Nasir Ashraf, Shakeel Qazi, Salim Khan, and Faruk Ahmed—all British citizens, were seized in the Pakistani city of Peshawar five years ago. All four were allegedly transferred out of the country to a secret location and tortured. Mr. Ashraf is reported to have died under interrogation. Mr. Qazi, Mr. Khan, and Mr. Ahmed were subsequently detained at Guantánamo for three years. Only Mr. Ahmed remains in U.S. custody.
According to documents obtained by the LondonSunday Times , Mr. Lang personally endorsed “Operation Tempest,” a secret mission to kidnap the four men by the UK’s elite Special Air Services. Such an operation would have been illegal under both UK and international law.
The British Ministry of Defence last night refused to comment on either the authenticity of the documents or the existence of “Operation Tempest.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Lang said that he had no plans to issue a statement.
I read it through three times. It didn’t seem to add up to much. Or did it? It was hard to tell anymore. One’s moral bearings were no longer as fixed as they used to be. Methods my father’s generation would have considered beyond the pale, even when fighting the Nazis—torture, for example—were now apparently acceptable civilized behavior. I decided that the ten percent of the population who worry about these things would be appalled by the report, assuming they ever managed to locate it; the remaining ninety would probably just shrug. We had been told that the free world was taking a walk on the dark side. What did people expect?
