Typhoon (19 page)

“Isn’t that reason enough?” he said. “Do you have any concept of what it’s like to grow up through your twenties living a lie to all but four or five people in the world?”

“Joe, I . . .”

Just as quickly, his anger abated and his face regained its tranquillity, as if he had subjected himself to a private admonition. “Forget I said that,” he insisted, waving a hand at me. “That’s not what I meant.” It was only the second time that Joe had ever voiced a complaint in my company about working under deep cover. On both occasions he had immediately retracted the grievance. After all, nobody had forced him to work for MI6; it was nobody’s fault but his own if he occasionally found the demands of the secret life overwhelming. The last thing Joe Lennox ever wanted was for people to feel sorry for him. “Everything about her was intoxicating to me,” he said, trying to return to the original subject. “Every day she said or did something that took my breath away. We were
connected
.” He stopped momentarily, as if trying to remember something. “There are some lines in T. S. Eliot. ‘We think the same thoughts without need of speech. And babble the same speech without need of meaning.’ Does that make sense? When I think back to it, there was a kind of perfect relaxation between us, an effortless timing. It’s very hard to explain. And I knew that I would never meet anybody who made me feel that way again.” He gestured at the walls of the kitchen in the Brook Green flat, as if they contained actual physical evidence of this theory. “So far that’s proved true,” he said.

“I guess what interests me is the timing,” I said. “You had the meeting with Waterfield about a month before the handover, right? Isabella wasn’t planning to leave Hong Kong. She had the job with the French television company, but there was no risk of her going to Paris or elsewhere. You were living together, you were getting on. Why the hurry?”

Joe picked up on the subtext of the question. “What’s relevant about the job?” he asked. “What are you getting at?”

I hesitated, because once again I was venturing into treacherous waters. Both of us reached for a packet of cigarettes that Joe had placed on the table in front of him. He got there first, offered one to me, and repeated the question.

“What do you mean?”

I poured the Guinness into a pint glass and waited for it to settle. “My theory about marriage is this,” I said.

Joe shuffled back in his chair, folded his arms and smiled. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”

I struggled on. “I think part of the reason why men finally decide to cash in their chips and settle down, apart from love and convention and pressure, is proprietorial.”

“Proprietorial in what sense?” He was frowning.

“In the sense that you want to take your girlfriend off the market. You want to make sure, once and for all, that nobody else can fuck her.”

This produced a deservedly contemptuous laugh. “Are you serious?
Ownership
? Isn’t that a bit passé, Will?” Then Joe saw my expression and realized what I was getting at.

“I suppose I am serious.” I looked at the clean white stripe at the head of my Guinness and risked it. “It always struck me that you must have been worried about Miles, even if it was only in an intuitive way. Deep in your heart, you must have known that your relationship with Isabella was doomed.”

This is how
rumours get around, on a small island, among spies.

David Waterfield held a meeting with Kenneth Lenan in his office in the House of a Thousand Arseholes five days after talking with Joe in the Mongkok bird market. Lenan had been in Thailand on a week-long holiday and was sporting one of his characteristically deep suntans. Waterfield was running a light tropical fever and looked as though he needed to spend three days in bed.

“So we not only have eight thousand journalists showing up on June the 30th, Prince Charles, the all-new, all-smiling British Prime Minister, the US Secretary of State, the right-on, Right Honourable Mr. Robin Cook, most of the outgoing Tory cabinet, half of the Chinese Politburo and probably Sir Cliff Richard as well. We now have the added problem that RUN wants to propose to his bloody girlfriend.”

“At the handover ceremony?” Lenan asked.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”

Lenan didn’t smile much but he smiled at that one. “He wants her to know he’s a NOC?”

“Absolutely.”

Lenan frowned. “He wants her to know that for the past two years he’s been lying to her morning, noon and night?”

“That would appear to be the scenario, yes.” In the corridor outside Waterfield’s office, one of the secretaries sneezed. “Joe and I had a chat in Mongkok. He actually said he wanted the Office’s help in making it happen.”

“Our
help
?”

“Mmmm.” Waterfield began coughing and spat something into his handkerchief. “Not exactly sure what he meant by that.” He looked out across Victoria Harbour, following the progress of a distant junk. “Does he want us to tell her we
made
him do it? That he was perfectly happy in the shipping business until SIS came along?” The joke went nowhere so he became more serious. “This is a tough life we have chosen, Kenneth. Hard on marriages. Even harder when you bring children into the frame. You’ve been sensible. Kept yourself unattached. I just hope to God Joe knows what he’s doing.”

Forty-eight hours later Lenan had dinner with Miles Coolidge in a quiet corner of his favourite Indian restaurant in Hong Kong, situated a few blocks south of Kowloon Park on the third floor of the Ashley Centre. Both men had ordered chicken dhansak and several plates of unnecessary vegetable dishes. Above their heads, an ageing air-conditioning unit hummed, threatening to drip water onto the carpet. Towards ten o’clock, when most of their fellow diners had left for the evening, Miles ordered a bowl of ice cream and instigated a conversation about TYPHOON.

“Any word from your buddy?”

“Back in Urumqi,” Lenan replied flatly. “Classes begin on Monday morning.”

“And there were no problems? Nobody asked where he’d been to?”

SIS had developed a support agent in Urumqi, a salesman with a British passport who worked for a large German car manufacturer. Codenamed TRABANT, he was initially the first point of contact between Wang and Lenan, and would in due course be replaced by Lenan himself.

“No. Nobody asked. He told them he’d been on holiday in Guangdong and that was that.”

Miles was halfway through a glass of iced Sprite. It was an idiosyncrasy of his relationship with Lenan that he rarely drank alcohol in his presence. “This whole thing has happened pretty fast,” he said.

Lenan reacted to the doubt implicit in Miles’s comment by taking his napkin off his lap and balling it up on the table. “Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s still not clear to some of my guys back home, even after everything that’s gone down, why he risked the swim.”

“Is it at least clear to you?”

Miles rotated the Sprite on the tablecloth and lifted a shard of poppadom into his mouth. He had spun the lie so confidently to Joe in Samba’s and the Wan Chai nightclub partly because he had always possessed private doubts about Wang’s credentials. “Sure. It’s totally clear to me. But I had Josh Pinnegar on the phone for an hour and a half earlier this week wanting to go over every detail of the initial interrogations one more time, the transfer to Taiwan, the means by which you were able to get him back into Xinjiang. He told me there’s a feeling back home that this whole thing might have been played by the MSS.”

“A
feeling
?” Lenan became impatient. “What does that mean? Who is experiencing these
feelings
? Isn’t it a bit late in the day for all this? Is a plug about to be pulled, Miles?”

“Shit no. It’s just background. The professor’s a fifty-year-old guy, for Chrissakes. He could have drowned. You can see why people might ask questions.”

Kenneth Lenan panned his narrow, impassive eyes around the room, settling them on a distant waiter. As always, he looked enormously bored and enormously frustrated by the intellectual limitations of inferior men. “Well, the next time anybody brings the subject up, it’s quite simple. You tell them to see it from a Chinese perspective. If Beijing wanted to play one of their top agents into Hong Kong and drop him into the lap of British intelligence so that we all broke out the bubbly, they’d hardly risk putting him on a makeshift raft at three o’clock in the morning on the off-chance he might wash up on a beach in Dapeng Bay. Far more likely they’d give him papers to come across from Shenzhen and allow him to present himself as a walk-in.”

Miles’s customary mood in the presence of Lenan was not dissimilar to Joe’s. He felt generally inferior and second rate in his company, a consequence of the older man’s nerveless self-confidence. “You’re right, Kenneth,” he said, crunching another poppadom. “Of course you’re right.” He decided, right then and there, to go for a hand job at Lily’s after dinner. Miles always wanted sex when he was put under pressure; it was a way of reasserting his authority.

“What about Macklinson’s end of things?” Lenan asked. Miles’s pudding arrived, a bright red cocktail cherry perched on the summit of four enormous balls of vanilla ice cream. “Are they having doubts as well?”

“None,” Miles told him, though he had spoken to neither Michael Lambert nor Bill Marston for several days. “Nobody is having any doubts, Ken. Everything at Macklinson is under control. Shipments are being arranged, personnel prepared. All you have responsibility for is Professor Wang.”

Lenan shuddered, both at the explicit mention of Wang’s name and at Miles’s curt dismissal of his responsibilities. His involvement in TYPHOON was, of course, a closely guarded secret. Nobody on the British side knew that the CIA was, in effect, employing one of their best men on a subcontractual basis. Why was Lenan doing it? Why did he risk everything to go off-piste with Miles Coolidge? He was being paid, certainly, and may have believed that there would be long-term benefits in cosying up to the Cousins. But I think his desire to play a central role in TYPHOON was born chiefly out of frustration.

“Let me tell you something about the British mindset,” he had told Miles when the American had first suggested using British know-how and infrastructure to spirit Wang out of Hong Kong and to return him as an agent to Urumqi. “If I go to David Waterfield with what you’re proposing, the answer is going to be ‘No.’ The Office will want him back in Sha Tau Kok by sunset. Why? Because as a nation we’re
small
, risk averse. We lack the imagination to do anything that might actually
change
things. If there’s a reason not to do something, you can guarantee that the British will find it. Added to that is the small problem of the handover. Nobody wants to ruffle any Chinese feathers just at present.”

Miles had performed a quick calculation. As TYPHOON accelerated over the next few years, his own responsibilities would also quicken and multiply. Lenan would be a useful ally, both as an experienced hand and as a window onto secret British thinking. They were standing in the bedroom of the safe house where Joe, just a few hours earlier, had been exhaustively interrogating Wang. Right there and then, with a wild decisiveness born of instinct and pressure, Miles agreed to Lenan’s request “to keep SIS out of it” and to pay him as an asset of the CIA. For the next four years, $50,000 a month made its way into a Luxembourg bank account that Vauxhall Cross couldn’t have traced to one of their own if they’d spent fifty years looking. Lenan was therefore nominally answerable to Miles, although a fellow diner at the Indian restaurant, observing the manner and body language of both men, would have assumed that Coolidge was very much the junior partner.

“So I have something else I need to tell you, Ken.”

“You do? What’s that?”

“Our people need somebody on the mainland to co-ordinate things. A focal point. A leader. The task force we’re putting together is ultimately going to stretch to maybe twenty or thirty agents, the majority of whom are currently stationed all over the Far East. When Bill’s shipments start rolling in, somebody is going to have to pull all those disparate elements together.”

Lenan reacted as though Miles were being unnecessarily oblique. “You’re telling me that you’ve been promoted,” he said. “You’ll shortly be leaving Hong Kong for bigger and better things.”

It was characteristic of Lenan that he should manage to puncture any sense of pride that Miles might have felt in his achievement. To control an operation on the scale of TYPHOON at this stage in his career was a significant feather in his cap.

“You got it,” he replied flatly. He wanted to fling a neat white ball of vanilla ice cream across the table into Lenan’s smug, tanned face. Yet he also craved the Englishman’s respect. Miles spent the next seven years of his life trying to reconcile these two conflicting positions. “Langley wants me to pack my bags and settle there by Christmas,” he said. “That means I’ll be leaving Hong Kong in the fall.”

So many consequences flowed from this statement that Lenan’s initial response might have been construed as flippant.

“You’ll miss the wedding, then,” he said.

Miles’s head jerked up. “What wedding?”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Joe and Isabella are getting engaged.”

Miles Coolidge possessed many attributes as a spy—tenacity, self-confidence, a bold if sometimes reckless imagination—but a poker face was not chief among them. All of the tautness and the colour in his expression slipped down like a collapsing building. It was a sight that filled Kenneth Lenan with a profound if childish satisfaction, for he had long suspected Miles of harbouring a secret desire for Isabella. He took a sip of water from a glass on the table and watched the American scramble for answers.