Typhoon (27 page)

“Tell me,” he said, “how serious is all this anti-war stuff?”

Joe was glad for the change of subject and tore open the plastic packaging of his sandwich. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, how much has the Iraq fiasco contributed to your decision to work for Guy Coates?”

Joe had two reactions to this. The first noted that Waterfield had referred to Iraq as a “fiasco.” It was the first time that he had heard him utter such a direct criticism of the war. The second was that David knew about Quayler. Joe had not disclosed the name of his prospective employer to anyone at SIS.

“How did you find out about that?”

Waterfield returned his gaze to the river. There is an unwritten rule among spies that you do not question a colleague on the nature of his sources unless it is absolutely necessary. Joe had broken that rule at least twice in one morning.

“Grapevine,” he replied again. “Look.” Waterfield leaned towards him. He wanted to reassure Joe about something. “I know that you have misgivings about rendition. I know that you have concerns about using product possibly gained from the torture chambers of Cairo and Damascus. We all do.” He lowered his voice as the two elderly ladies stirred sachets of sugar into cups of tea. “But what’s the alternative? We all resign in protest and leave the Office in the hands of a bunch of Blairite careerists? Go off and write our memoirs? Come off it. In any case, the current lot”—he nodded across the river in the general direction of Whitehall—“will be out of a job in a few years” time. Politics is cyclical, Joe. All one has to do is bide one’s time and the right people will come round again. Then things can go back to the way things were.” Joe was looking down at the floor. “What I want to tell you is this.” Waterfield was now almost whispering. “You could go all the way in this business. People are keeping an eye on you, Joe.” He tried a joke to ice the compliment. “You can’t leave us at the mercy of the love children of Percy Craddock and Deng Xiaoping. We’ve already got too many Sinologists on the books in thrall to the Middle Kingdom. You were always tougher than that. You see the Politburo for what they are. The next ten to fifteen years are going to be vital in terms of Anglo-Chinese relations and we can’t afford to roll over and run up the white flag. You could play an absolutely critical role in that.”

It was a decent enough pitch, accurate in places, too. Ever since the days of Patten and Wang, Joe had been profoundly suspicious and distrustful of communist China, an attitude not always shared by his colleagues in the Foreign Office, most of whom had both eyes on the country’s vast market potential for British business. But Waterfield could see that he still wasn’t quite getting through. He put his bottle of water on the table and tried a different approach.

“It strikes me that you’re bored,” he said. “It strikes me that you would prefer to be out in the field, making a difference. Nobody wants to be kicking their heels behind a desk in London.”

“But what can you offer me?” Joe said, not as a bargaining position, but rather as a statement of his belief that all the best jobs in China had been taken. Nowadays it was all Iraq and Af ghan i stan. The Far East Controllerate had been filleted down to its bare bones. “If it’s a choice between carving out a decent career in the private sector or being posted to some shithole like Manila or Ulan Bator, I know where my instincts lie.”

“Your instincts, yes. But what about your loyalties?”

Waterfield knew Joe well enough to gamble on playing the guilt card. In spite of all of his misgivings about the direction of British policy since 9/11, Joe Lennox was at heart a patriot. Scratch the liberal humanist who railed against Bush and Blair and you would reveal an old-fashioned servant of the state who still believed in the mirage of Queen and Country, in the primacy of Western values. It was like Joe’s faith in the concept of a Christian God, a strange, institutionalized consequence of his privileged upbringing. Yet still he said, “Oh come on. Is that what this comes down to? Both of us know which way to pass the port so I have to keep the British end up?”

“The Pentagon may be trying to reactivate TYPHOON,” Waterfield replied, sabotaging Joe’s argument with the clean, flat timing of his revelation.

“Says who?”

“Says a watertight source in Washington.” Before Joe could interrupt, Waterfield was pitching him again.

“The details we have are sketchy. Of course the formal Bush position is that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda. Best guess is that Miles used to fund some of the ETIM boys pre-9/11 and has now gone off piste. We think he’s running a clandestine operation on CIA time without the knowledge of his masters at Langley. Somebody at the Pentagon, almost certainly an individual adjacent to Donald Rumsfeld, has given him carte blanche to make merry in China.”

“Even after everything that’s happened?”

“Even after everything that’s happened.”

Joe was bewildered. This was in direct contradiction of the Bush administration’s position on Xinjiang. “Surely someone at Langley knows what’s happening? Why don’t they bring him home?”

“Search me.” It was common knowledge in the intelligence fraternity that the CIA had been turned inside-out in the wake of 9/11. “Earn the wrath of Dick and Donald these days and you might as well start clearing your desk. Best to keep your mouth shut, right? Best just to sit down and stop rocking the boat.” Waterfield took a sip of his water. “Look. We need somebody who already knows Miles to go out there and find out exactly what’s going on. To put a stop to it, if necessary. Is the Office vulnerable? Was Coo lidge responsible for what happened to Kenneth and will the trail lead back to London? We can’t afford to have British fingerprints on a new TYPHOON. If the Chinese know that Lenan was once one of ours, we need to do something about it.”

The Members Room was a ripple of crockery and small talk as Joe’s mind spun through the deal. When Waterfield saw that he was not going to respond, he added, “Come on, Joe. Are you really telling me that you want to spend the next five years of your life living in a soulless apartment in Beijing, flogging around China trying to secure patents for a tiny pharmaceutical company that in five years’ time probably won’t be worth the paper they’re written on?”

But Joe didn’t need any more persuading. The offer was too enticing to resist. It was Miles, it was China, and it was Isabella. Adopting a more playful tone of voice he said, “What’s wrong with Beijing, David?” and, in that instant, Waterfield knew that he had finally hooked his man. Matching Joe’s grin with one of his own, he leaned back in the sofa and stretched out his arms.

“Oh, everything’s wrong with Beijing,” he said. “Freezing half the year, baking hot the other. Anybody with any taste prefers Shanghai.”

It was getting
Joe to Shanghai that posed the problem.

First, Waterfield had to go to Guy Coates with a proposition. Did he want to help Her Majesty’s Government fight the good fight against Chinese tyranny and oppression? He did? Oh good. In that case, would Quayler be prepared to open up a second representative office, this one in Shanghai, staffed by Joe and two local Chinese, all of whom would be on the books with the Secret Intelligence Service? The British government would pay, of course, but Quayler would have to find somebody else to man their operation in Beijing. Joe’s done this sort of thing before, so there’s nothing to worry about. No, he wasn’t working for the Ministry of Defence in London. That was just his cover. I’m sure you are a bit surprised. You’ll have to clear the idea with your board of directors? Fine. But Guy Coates must be the only member of staff privy to what’s going on. You want an extra sixty grand? Not a problem. Least we can do in the circumstances. Just sign here where we’ve printed your name at the bottom.

After that, it was just a question of Joe handing in his notice, citing “ethical problems with the so-called War on Terror,” and serving out his final three months at Vauxhall Cross. To anyone who would listen, he complained about the “iniquity” of Sir John Scarlett’s appointment as “C” and suggested that the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee had struck a deal with No. 10 whereby he would be handed the top job in SIS in return for massaging the dossier on Iraqi WMD. After that, most of Joe’s colleagues became convinced that he had lost his marbles. Which was precisely Joe’s intention.

“We’ll have to throw a leaving party for you,” Waterfield said.

“Really? Isn’t that taking things a bit far?”

“Not at all. Make sure to invite a few Yanks along from Grosvenor Square. That way, word might slip back to Langley. The more people that get to hear about Joe Lennox’s crisis of conscience, the better.”

China had dominated
Joe’s life. When he was a small boy, his parents had read him stories about the vast, populous country to the east of the Himalayas, a fantastical land of fearless warlords and sumptuous pagodas which had seemed as remote and as mysterious to his childhood imagination as the galaxies of science fiction or the menacing peaks of Mordor. In his early teens he had read the great doorstop novels of James Clavell,
Tai-Pan
and
Noble House
, steamy sagas of corporate greed set in colonial-era Hong Kong. With adolescence came
Empire of the Sun
, both the book—which Joe devoured in a single weekend during the Easter holidays of 1986—and the Spielberg film, released a year later. Spotting this affinity for the East, Joe’s godfather had presented him with a first edition of Edgar Snow’s
Red Star Over China
as a present for his eighteenth birthday and Joe had given serious thought to spending a gap year in Beijing before the massacre at Tiananmen obliged him to go straight up to Oxford. For the next three years he had been drenched in Chinese history and literature, reading the novels of Lao She, Luo Guanzhong and Mo Yan in the original Mandarin and poring over scholarly articles about the Qing dynasty. His gradual mastery of the language—honed by an undergraduate year spent in Taiwan—had opened up new understandings of Chinese history and culture and Joe might have spent a further three years as a postgraduate at SOAS had it not been for the timely intervention of SIS.

In all that time, however, including more than a decade working in the Far East Controllerate, he had never visited Shanghai. As a result, China’s most famous city remained a place of his imagination, the Paris of Asia, a teeming commercial port where stories of violence and excess, of vengeance and sin, of fortunes won and fortunes lost, formed a lavish narrative in his mind. Shanghai was Big-Eared Du, the fearsome godfather of the Green Gang who had ruled the city in tandem with Chiang Kai-shek in the era before communist rule. Shanghai was the Bund, the most famous thoroughfare in all Asia, a gorgeous, quarter-mile curve of colonial architecture on the western bank of the Huangpu River. Shanghai was the Cathay, the great art deco hotel on the Bund built by Sir Victor Sassoon where, legend has it, opium could be ordered on room service and Noël Coward wrote
Private Lives
after succumbing to a bout of flu. The city’s history was as vivid and engrossing as it was surely unique. Where else, in the age of imperialism, had British, French, American and Japanese citizens lived side by side with a native population in foreign concessions governed by their own laws and policed by their own armed forces? Before Mao, Shanghai was less a Chinese city than an international sorting office for the world’s ravaged minorities. It was to Shanghai that Europe’s Jews had fled the pogroms. It was in Shanghai that 20,000 White Russian émigrés had found refuge from the revolution of 1917. As Joe flew in over the East China Sea on a damp January afternoon in 2005, he felt as though he was travelling into a dream of history.

Did he know what he was letting himself in for? The purpose of Joe’s operation in Shanghai was to get as close to Miles Coolidge as possible. But getting close to Miles meant getting close to Isabella.

“If you come to China, it’s only going to be a matter of time before you see her,” I had said to him. “If you move to Shanghai, you will bump into Isabella and rake up everything from the past.”

He had that one covered. “That’s the whole point,” he said. “Don’t you get it? That’s the whole idea.”

Joe’s history with Miles was the key to the operation. It would only be a matter of time before word reached the American that his old sparring partner had settled in town. As soon as that happened, Miles wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge of renewing their acquaintance.

“Look at it this way,” Waterfield had told his colleagues in one of several pre-departure brainstorms at Vauxhall Cross. “If Miles thinks Joe’s come to Shanghai to try to win back Isabella, he’ll see that as a challenge. If he thinks he’s working undercover at Quayler, he’ll want a piece of that action.”

“Exactly,” Joe added, warming to the theme. “And if he really believes that I’ve suffered a crisis of conscience over Iraq, he’ll enjoy trying to shred my arguments. If there’s one thing Miles Coolidge hates, it’s smug Limeys.”

They were right, of course. Their reading of Miles’s psychology was spot-on. No other British spy had the potential to get as close to Coolidge as quickly and as effectively as Joe. Nevertheless, it concerned me that Joe seemed to be in denial both about the implications of what he was doing and the nature of his own feelings. However hard he tried to make it look as though he was going to Shanghai purely out of loyalty to the firm, it was obvious that a far deeper, more personal impulse was in play.