Typhoon (28 page)

The key to
his approach was the deliberate absence of subterfuge. From the moment he passed through customs at Pudong International Airport, travelling on his own passport and a thirty-day tourist visa, Joe Lennox was just another Western businessman dipping his toes in the waters of China’s most vibrant city. His cover was to assume the behaviour of a wide-eyed European, a role which required little or no effort on Joe’s part because he was only too keen to visit every nook and cranny of the city. In the airport terminal, for example, he did what most inquisitive Brits would have done and bought a ticket for the Maglev, the German-engineered electromagnetic train which hums between the airport and downtown Pudong at over 300mph. As the flat, humid marshlands ripped past, Joe’s first glimpse of Shanghai was a forest of distant skyscrapers obscured by smog. He had left London less than fifteen hours earlier, yet already he felt the thrilling anonymity of being at large in Asia.

Under different circumstances, an undercover SIS officer might have booked himself into one of the smaller hotels in Shanghai, in order to keep a low profile. But Joe had reasoned that a businessman in his thirties on an expense account, recently released from a decade in the Civil Service, might want to splash out on some high living. To that end he had arranged for Quayler to book him into the Portman Ritz-Carlton on Nanjing Lu, a five-star high rise with a spa roughly the size of Kowloon, where Joe’s room set the bean-counters at Vauxhall Cross back more than $300 a night. The other luxury hotel which had caught his eye was the Grand Hyatt, situated on the top thirty-four floors of the Jin Mao Tower in Pudong, but Joe had been reliably informed that it was a mistake to be based on the eastern side of the Huangpu: all of the action in Shanghai took place to the west of the river, in the area known as Puxi. There was also an added operational advantage to being registered at one of the city’s top hotels. Every night a list of foreign residents was obtained by the PLA. If Joe was “Beijing Red”—that is to say, if his identity as an MI6 officer had ever been uncovered by Chinese intelligence—his presence as a guest at the Ritz-Carlton would be flagged up. Thereafter he would be subjected to round-the-clock surveillance which would not let up for the duration of his stay in China. In the event of that happening, Joe would be obliged to leave the country and to abandon the operation against Miles.

Joe’s first few days in Shanghai were a magical release from what he described as “the straitjacket of London.” Armed only with a small rucksack containing his wallet, a camera and the
Rough Guide to China
, he set out to familiarize himself with the geography of the city and to visit the dozen or so places he had longed to see following a lifetime of movies and reading. Having checked in and showered, he headed first for the Bund, not least because it felt like the spiritual centre of Shanghai, a place where the Chinese and European experiences collided with the force of history. Strolling along the broad walkway that looks out over the skyscrapers of downtown Pudong, he watched young Chinese couples with frozen smiles pose for photographs against a background of stilled ships and neon. Dominating the eastern shore was the bizarre, bulbous rocket of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower while, behind it, the Jin Mao soared into the late-afternoon sky like a jagged, glinting dagger. These astonishing buildings were the visible symbols of the Chinese economic miracle and it seemed apt that they should look out across the Huangpu at the great neoclassical edifices on the Bund, which themselves bore architectural witness to an earlier era of rampant prosperity and growth.

The next day, having woken at five with jet lag, Joe took a morning boat trip to the mouth of the Yangtze, realizing, to his gradual disappointment, that the Huangpu was not the river of his romantic imagination—a Seine or a Danube of the East—but instead a churning sea lane as grey and as polluted as the bloated corpse of Kenneth Lenan. That afternoon, to maintain basic cover, he held the first of several meetings with a consultant who advised overseas companies on the logistics of setting up a business in China. The meeting, which had been arranged from Quayler headquarters in London, lasted two hours and took place in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, for maximum public exposure. Joe continued to make work-related telephone calls from his room, and was regularly seen using the email and fax facilities in the hotel’s business lounge. Back in tourist mode, he lunched on dumplings at Nanxiang Mantou Dian, took the obligatory tea at Yu Yuan Gardens and made an excursion to the nineteenth-century basilica built by Catholic missionaries out at She Shan. For anyone who happened to be watching, Joe Lennox was just as he appeared to be: a single man of independent means, gradually finding his feet in Shanghai.

In these early stages my new SIS handler had calculated that I would be a useful support agent for Joe from my base in Beijing. My first task was to put him in touch with one of the most pop ular and well-connected expats in Shanghai, an old friend of mine named Tom Harper. I had no idea that the two of them would go on to hit it off as resoundingly as they did, although Joe’s natural affinity for flawed mavericks should have tipped me off.

Educated in England, Tom had inherited a small fortune at the age of twenty when his parents had died within six months of each other. He had spent the next fifteen years bouncing around the globe, earning an undergraduate degree at Berkeley, an MBA from INSEAD, marrying—briefly—a French television actress and bewildering a long line of expensive psychoanalysts. He was a man of almost limitless good humour and generosity, about whom one rarely heard an unkind word spoken. He also knew everything there was to know about having a good time in Shanghai. In three years living in the city, Tom had been a male model, a nightclub impresario, a yacht broker and a restaurateur. He was at every dinner party, every movie première and every bar and club launch worth mentioning. He didn’t seem to sleep more than four or five hours a night and survived on a diet of caffeine, alcohol and illegal recreational drugs. He did not know Miles Coolidge personally, but that hardly mattered; the way things worked in Shanghai, there would be a maximum of two or three degrees of separation between them. On that basis, it would only be a matter of time before Tom led Joe to his quarry.

Sunday brunch at the Westin seemed an ideal place for the two of them to meet. The Westin is the Indonesian-owned hotel on the junction of Henan Road and Guangdong Road that spoils a certain view of the Bund: look behind the old HSBC building and it’s the fat high-rise, two blocks back, with an illuminated metal crown sprouting from its roof. On Sunday mornings the hotel lays on an opulent buffet attended by wealthy Western families and twenty-something rich kids keen to impress their latest girlfriends. For around 400 renminbi—the equivalent of £25 in 2005, or a week’s wage to the average Shanghai Chinese—guests can help themselves to limitless quantities of sushi, Parma and Serrano ham, Russian caviar, roast rib of beef, freshly made tortellini and as much Veuve Clicquot champagne as they can swallow. The Westin brunch has become an institution in the city, not least as a place where people can catch up on the latest gossip, a commodity—both social and commercial—on which the overseas community thrives.

I had given Joe Tom’s number and they had arranged to meet in the lobby at midday on Sunday 30 January. Rather than describe the brunch in detail, I’ll quote from a couple of letters that Tom sent to me, both of which help to paint a picture of Joe’s first few weeks in Shanghai.

Will—

One of the things I like about China, and about Shanghai in particular, is that it’s completely meritocratic. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a city where obscene wealth and obscene poverty exist side by side, but it always seemed to me, at least from a foreigner’s point of view, that you get nowhere in China on the basis of reputation alone. Ex-Yale, ex-Sorbonne, a double-starred First from Cambridge—none of that really matters here. This place is immune to class or background. If you can’t do what you promised to do, you’ll get found out. It’s not like, say, Hong Kong or Singapore, where a lot of really average people have been making a lot of really easy money for decades. If you come to China expecting the locals to roll over and say how grateful they are, you’re in for a big shock. Only the best people succeed here. It’s completely ruthless.

So whenever I meet the latest Jardine Johnnie fresh off the plane who wants to “try his luck in Shanghai,” I’m always a bit suspicious. Do they think China owes them a living? Have they got the slightest idea what they’re getting themselves into?

All of this is a roundabout way of thanking you for putting me in touch with Joe, who I’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few weeks. For a start, he didn’t arrive with any illusions about China, which always helps. He also seems to know a hell of a lot more about China and the Chinese than most people who’ve been living here for five or ten years. Where did you say you knew him from?

We met at the Westin, as you’d recommended. There was the usual scene there: guilty investment bankers finding a three-hour slot between meetings and hookers to spend “family time” with their wife and kids; underage Chinese gymnasts turning themselves inside out in the lobby while a live band played the best of Carly Simon; a guy dressed up in a Spiderman outfit, attached to the roof by a harness, cleaning the glass windows 100ft over our heads. I’d been out clubbing all night and hadn’t been to bed. At about 10 in the morning I was sitting in Dragon with two girls from Barcelona, one of whom was coming down off a bad pill, when I looked at my watch and saw the time. Gave serious thought to cancelling the whole thing but because Joe was a friend of yours—and because I’m an extremely decent, upstanding person—I grabbed my jacket, had a shower and took a cab down to the Westin. Was at least twenty minutes late, knackered, etc, but Joe couldn’t have been nicer about it. He was in the lobby making conversation (in fluent, very old-school Mandarin) with an octogenarian cleaning woman who had bags under her eyes like Huan Huan the Panda. She looked as though nobody had bothered to speak to her since the Cultural Revolution and was busy telling Joe stories about all the old buildings in her neighbourhood which had been knocked down by developers. He took one look at me and must have realized what a mess I was in because he did most of the talking for the first twenty minutes. He also paid the bill for both of us as we went in and before long we were three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne, I’d forgotten all about my hangover, and it was as if we’d known one another for years.

This is the second of them. Tom Harper is one of the world’s last great letter writers, but the first half of the following email was mostly a 1,500-word account of a trip to Thailand. The section which was relevant to Joe began about halfway through:

What’s funny about Shanghai is how quickly word gets round that there’s an interesting new face in town. The other day I took Joe down to Babyface (that’s a nightclub, Will, just in case you’re too old) and introduced him to a few people I knew there, told them he used to work in the Foreign Office, etc. For some reason, this piece of information spread around town like the clap. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least a dozen random people subsequently asked me about Joe in the space of a few weeks. “How did you meet him?”

“Is he single?”

“Did he really leave the Foreign Office as a protest against the war?” One (predictable) rumour going round is that he used to be a spy, but I’m not sure about that. I can’t picture him doing the dirty. Also, he spends most of his time sleeping off hangovers at the Ritz-Carlton. Aren’t Foreign Office types supposed to behave themselves?

On the phone the other day you were asking about Quayler, which seems to be up and running. When he first arrived I put Joe in touch with a letting agency contact of mine from restaurant days who had an office free in a building looking out over Xintiandi. Joe’s found himself two Chinese staff and I think they moved in there last week. I also introduced him to an Australian girl who has an apartment to rent in the French Concession. If things work out, he should be in there by the end of March, and might be able to sublet for a year or even 18 months because the girl is going home to look after her mother who has cancer or something. So don’t say I don’t look after my friends, OK? My performance has been nothing short of heroic.

One small complaint: he has a habit of droning on about his job, but I suppose he’s new here and that’s what we all did when we first arrived, so I can’t really blame him. And he certainly seems to know what he’s talking about. You’d warned me that he could be a bit intellectual and withdrawn, but he hasn’t seemed that way to me. The guy can drink like Sue Ellen. I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned, but I’ve found him very open and funny and easy to hang out with. There’s obviously a big brain whirring away back there and I’d like to know more about his story. He says he’s lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, but always seems to change the subject whenever you try to delve too deeply into his past. (Christ, maybe he WAS a spy . . . )