Typhoon (15 page)

“God,” he heard her say, running water at the basin. “He’s so lonely. He must be so unhappy if he’s doing stuff like that.”

The remark was like a prophetic indication of Isabella’s desire to change Miles, to save him from himself. Joe couldn’t think how to reply.

“What about you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“Did
you
feel up any girls from Ulan Bator?”

“What?” She was drying her hands. The tone of the question had been mischievous rather than disapproving. “Of course not,” he said.

“Really?” Isabella came back into the room and saw that Joe was now standing in his boxer shorts, hanging his suit near the window. Her pyjamas were unbuttoned almost to the waist and she came up behind him, her hands touching his stomach. “Did you want to fuck one of the girls? Were you jealous of Miles? Is that why you had a fight?”

He turned and his eyes went to the dark brown freckles at the crown of her breasts. He kissed them, saying nothing, falling to his knees and pushing her onto the bed. The scent of Isabella’s skin was a paradise which he breathed and tasted, as if it would free him from all of the stress and the madness of Wang and Lenan and Miles. But in the half-light of their bedroom, as he moved inside her, Isabella suddenly became Kitty and Kitty became Isabella and Joe’s head swarmed with guilt. For the first time between them he lost all trace of her as they made love, and he could sense that she knew this. Adrift in the warmth of the woman he adored he went through the motions of a drunken, head-spinning fuck before collapsing in a funk of guilt and booze.

The diary entry continues:

It was as if he wasn’t with me. For the first time it felt ordinary and boring and I just wanted it over. Then I started thinking about what had happened with Miles. I started thinking about the dream.

Miles woke the
next morning at 8 a.m., pitched out of an all-too brief sleep by the same Sanyo radio alarm clock which had served him well for the previous thirteen years. Purchased in a West Berlin shopping mall in the winter of 1984, it had survived a three-year posting to Germany, a one-year stint back at Langley, four post-Cold War summers in Luanda and a period in Singapore during which he had contracted dengue fever and been nursed back to health by an Indonesian beauty therapist named Kim. Miles was a heavy sleeper and needed to maximize the volume control on the alarm clock in order to be sure of waking up. Today, RTHK Radio 3 was playing The Verve’s “Lucky Man,” a song Miles enjoyed, but the suddenness of the opening bars acted upon him like an electric shock. He rolled out of bed and moved to a sitting position, turning down the volume on the radio and holding his head in his hands. Through open curtains Miles Coolidge could see fog enshrouding the Peak. Kitty, he recalled, had left at 5 a.m. There was an empty highball glass on the floor at his feet, a discarded condom, an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes and an unopened bottle of warm white wine on the bedside table. When Miles drank heavily, he made sure to consume at least a litre of water before going to bed, the only effective preventative measure against a hangover that he had ever encountered. He made his way slowly to the shower, adjusted the nozzle setting to “Massage” and blasted his scalp in a shuddering jet of scalding water. Afterwards, naked and dripping water on the spiral staircase, he walked slowly downstairs to the open-plan kitchen and sitting room, where he retrieved three Panadol Extra from a drawer in his desk, juiced four oranges and made a mug of instant coffee which he drank while scrambling eggs. Americans, he had been repeatedly told, drank filthy coffee, and Miles was oddly proud of this, regularly importing vast cans of Folger’s Instant into Hong Kong after trips back home to the States.

By midday he had cleared his in-tray at the consulate, jogged along Bowen Road and sat in the steam room at his local gym expunging the poisons of the previous evening: the tequilas of Samba’s, the vodkas of Luard Road, the lines of coke aggressively snorted from Kitty’s flat, soft belly at 3 a.m. Yet the fight with Joe preyed on his mind. Miles realized that he had behaved unpleasantly in the club. He knew that Joe would be angry. Their friendship was a delicate web into which the American frequently pushed a fat, obnoxious finger, but he cared enough about Isabella to make amends. Joe, after all, was the link to the woman he craved.

With this in mind, Miles called Joe’s cellphone at around one o’clock, adopting a tone of contrition which might almost have been heartfelt.

“Joe, man. Listen, buddy, I’m sorry for what happened last night. I was being a dick.”

Joe was coming down the steps of the MTR station at Yau Ma Tei having discovered that there were only twelve apartments—not nineteen—at number 71 Hoi Wang Road, and that nobody in the building had ever heard of Professor Wang Kaixuan. He had shown an elderly Chinese lady, who informed him that she had lived on the ground floor since 1950, a photograph of Wang taken by one of Barber’s men in the early hours of 10 April. The woman, who was widowed and smelled strongly of White Flower oil, shook her head, insisted that she had never seen such a person, then invited Joe inside and fed him green tea and Khong Guan biscuits for half an hour while recalling, in vivid detail, stories of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.

Joe walked back up the stairs to street level, absorbed Miles’s apology, and placed his hand over the receiver so that his reply could be heard above the noise of Nathan Road.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. The polite, conciliatory part of his nature had already kicked in. “It’s me who should be apologizing to you.”

“You think?”

“Did the club ask questions? I didn’t mean to make a scene.”

“We were both shit-faced, man. They were cool about it.”

“Did you take Kitty home?”

Joe had been crass to ask the question, but was nevertheless interested in the reply.

“No. We called it a night.” Miles sniffed involuntarily as he uttered the lie. “Had to get an early start.” He began flicking a ball of paper around his desk and said: “Look, I shouldn’t be encouraging you to go with Chinese girls. You got a great thing with Isabella. It’s obviously not right and it’s obviously not what you want.”

“Oh, I
want
to fuck a Chinese girl.”

“You do?”

Joe was surprised at himself. “Sure. I’m just not
going
to fuck a Chinese girl.”

“Why?” Miles was genuinely confused.

“You don’t understand?” A bicyclist mounted the pavement beside him and sped past, ringing her bell. “Because then I would have to tell Isabella and that would mean I couldn’t fuck
her
any more. Do you get it?”

“I get it.” Miles flicked the paper into the bin and put his feet on the desk. “So where are you?”

“Having a suit fitted.” The lie was instantaneous. “Kowloon.”

Joe wondered whether Miles would mention Wang again. If he did, it would imply that he and Lenan were still concerned about his attitude. But the subject did not come up and when it began to rain, he rang off.

“Listen, I’m going inside,” he said. “No umbrella.”

“Sure. I’ll see you around, Joe.”

“See you around.”

Several hours later, long after the majority of consulate staff had returned home for the evening, Miles passed through three sets of security doors in the basement of 26 Garden Road and made another phone call, this time on a secure line to a townhouse in Washington DC where Bill Marston, his assistant, Sally-Ann McNeil, Richard Jenson and Josh Pinnegar of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mr. Michael T. Lambert, Chief Financial Officer of Macklinson Corporation, had gathered for a day-long conference on TYPHOON, the CIA’s nascent plan for the political and economic destabilization of the People’s Republic of China.

The six-bedroom house, which was located a block north of Pennsylvania Avenue, within spitting distance of Capitol Hill, was used by Macklinson as a venue for lobbying congressmen, hosting fund-raising dinners and as a place for out-of-town executives to hang their hats, saving the expense of a downtown hotel. If one or two of them had girlfriends to stay overnight, well, that was one of the perks of the job.

“Nice place you got here, Bill,” Jenson had said as he walked in shortly after ten o’clock. “Party much?”

But Marston had not been in the mood for jokes. Instructing Sally-Ann to make coffee for six, he watched two former technicians with the NSA, now employed by Macklinson’s security division, sweep the house for bugs, jam UHF and VHF frequencies within a 200-metre radius and ensure that all cellphones, pagers and personal computers in the building were switched off. The younger of the two men then walked into the kitchen, where he set a small portable compact-disc player on the windowsill and put a Beethoven piano concerto on loop. Towards eleven o’clock, the technicians were joined by a third man, from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, who set up an encrypted link to the US Consulate General in Hong Kong before escorting the technicians from the building to a mocked-up FedEx van parked on 5th Street.

“Mr. Coolidge? You there?”

Marston was chairing the meeting from a central position in the main lounge. All doors and curtains were closed. Sally-Ann was sitting on a sofa to his right with Josh directly beside her. Josh would shortly be making a presentation to the group using notes hastily assembled from the Historical Intelligence section of the library at Langley. The prospect had made him intensely nervous and he was eager to make a good impression. Jenson, who was relying on Josh to put the case for the CIA, was seated to Marston’s left at a small wooden table beside a door leading into the kitchen. He could hear the piano concerto as a faint background melody and wondered whether the Agency should have employed a man to mow the lawn outside, just to add an extra layer of noise. Probably not worth the effort. Michael Lambert was still on his feet, pacing the room like a senator on election night.

“I’m here, sir.”

Miles’s voice was clearly audible through a set of conference-call speakers positioned on a large dining-room table in the centre of the room. Marston liked it that Miles had called him “sir.” It set the tone.

“We’re all ready to go here,” he said. “You getting a clear line through to Hong Kong?”

“Crystal.”

Josh reached for his notes. Shuttling his eyes between Jenson and a reproduction of Thomas LeClear’s portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, he began to speak.

“Well, thank you all for coming here today. We’d like to thank Macklinson Corporation for making their townhouse available for our discussions. As you know, Richard Jenson has called this meeting to bring everybody up to date on certain developments with TYPHOON. Miles Coolidge, one of our officers in Hong Kong, is joining us by secure telephone from the US consulate. On behalf of Mr. Jenson, I’d also like to welcome Michael Lambert, CFO of Macklinson, whose long experience and expertise we predict will be crucial in the effective running of the project on the Chinese mainland.”

Nobody said a word. Lambert came to a halt in front of the largest of three bay windows, ignored the compliment and placed his hands behind his back. Feeling that he needed to be on his feet, Josh stood up, stepped away from the sofa, unwittingly brushing Sally-Ann’s leg as he did so, and walked to the other side of the dining-room table so that he was facing an expectant semicircle of all-powerful Americans. He placed his notes on the varnished wooden surface, reached to straighten a tie that wasn’t there, and continued speaking.

“So, uh, to begin, it is the Agency’s position that we believe a primary point of weakness for any destabilizing effort in China is going to be the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the far northwest.”

“Where?” Marston said.

“Xinjiang, sir.” Josh hadn’t expected an interruption so soon. He spelled out the name and pronounced it slowly—“
Shin-jang
.” “If you look on the map we’ve provided you, you’ll find the region nestled between Mongolia and Russia to the north, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the west, India and Pakistan in the south. Roughly speaking.”

“And it’s a part of China?” Marston didn’t seem to mind going public with his ignorance.

“Yes, sir, it is a part of China. As you are all no doubt aware, the government in Beijing has been under constant threat from Muslim separatists in the region for the past ten years.”

“And what do these guys want?” Marston was in a bullish mood. The coffee had kicked in. It was as if he wanted to topple Beijing by lunchtime. “You’re saying they’re Muslims?”

“That’s right, sir.” Sally-Ann dropped her pen on the floor and picked it up, a distracting movement which caused Josh momentarily to lose his concentration.

“I said what do they want?”

“Uh, an independent Eastern Turkestan, sir. They’re Turkic Muslims.”

“What’s that? Like a Muslim from Turkey?”

Sally-Ann inwardly groaned.

“Not exactly, Bill.” Jenson had moved forward to help out. He tapped a pen on the small table in front of him while Josh stole a glance at his notes. Jenson was sitting with his back to a closed set of curtains. A bright desk light shining in his face gave his expression a spectral quality. “There are many millions of Turkics in Turkey itself, but they’re also spread out right across Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus . . .”

“Exactly,” Josh interjected. “The Turkic regions include Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Kazakhstan–”

“All right, all right, I get it.” Marston scrawled a note on the clipboard in his lap and muttered something under his breath. In the second uncomfortable silence of the morning, Lambert finally chose to sit in an armchair next to the sofa and emitted a bored, arthritic gasp as he did so. Josh felt slightly dizzy.