Typhoon

28

Murders are a rare occurrence in the secret world. SIS prides itself on the fact that no officer has been killed on active duty since World War II. Kenneth Lenan may have been a traitor to the Service, a cast-off in the private sector, but it still took Joe a while to process what Waterfield had told him. They left the cafe and walked past the entrance to the National Theatre.

“The manner of his death,” he said. “It’s a signature of the Green Gang. Do people realize that?”

“People realize that,” Waterfield replied.

The Green Gang were the infamous criminal fraternity who operated in Shanghai until the communists took over in 1949. Lenan had been the victim of a specific form of revenge killing, whereby traitors had every tendon in their body severed with a fruit knife before being left to bleed to death on the street. Unable to move because of their injuries, they were often placed in a sack weighed down by rocks and thrown into the Huangpu River.

“So who did he betray?”

Waterfield looked up at the sky and smiled. He had done his grieving.

“Whom,” he corrected.

Joe wasn’t in the mood to play games. “All right then. Whom?”

“Could have been anybody.”

“Someone on our side?”

Waterfield suggested with a tightening of the eyes that he found that idea both distasteful and preposterous.

“What, then? You think his murder was connected to TYPHOON?”

“I would have said almost certainly.”

They walked in silence for about a hundred metres. It was as if Waterfield was anticipating a particular line of questioning that Joe had not yet produced. The sun was warm on Joe’s face. A young, dreadlocked juggler was unpacking a suitcase on the path in front of them.

“You said that TYPHOON was wound up after 9/11.”

“Yes.” Waterfield scratched his neck again. Joe assumed that he had been bitten by an insect of some kind, just behind the left ear. “After that, all bets were off. Langley was under instruction to withdraw support for any Muslim group within five thousand miles of Kabul.”

“But TYPHOON kept going?”

“Not really. By the summer of that year the operation had been so severely compromised it was all but dead in the water.”

“Was Wang arrested?” For a reason that he could not precisely explain, Joe hoped that the professor was still alive.

“No. He was one of the lucky ones. Last I heard, Wang was living in Tianjin.”

They turned a corner and it occurred to Joe that the professor was the source of Waterfield’s information. How else did he know so much about TYPHOON?

“Did we turn Wang?” he asked. “Did you recruit him when you were stationed in Beijing? How come you know where he is?”

Waterfield seemed amused by the idea. “Everything that I’ve told you this morning has come from two separate sources, neither of whom is Professor Wang Kaixuan.” He blew his nose aggressively on a freshly laundered handkerchief. “The Controllerate has a new, highly placed official in the MSS recruited by Station in Beijing in the last twelve months. We also have an older, established contact on the American side with whom I formed a relationship long ago in Hong Kong.”

“You had a Cousin on the books in ‘97?”

Waterfield allowed himself to feel flattered. “I had all sorts of things going on that RUN wasn’t privy to. As you said, Joe, you were very low down on the food chain.”

It sounded like an insult but Waterfield decorated his quip with a knowing grin. The slightly tense atmosphere which had existed between them since the cafe had now eased away.

“And what have your sources told you about Lenan’s death?”

“It’s still largely a mystery.” Waterfield offered a fatalistic glance at the sky. “I can hazard an educated guess.”

Joe stepped aside to allow an undernourished jogger to limp past them.

“It involves Macklinson. According to my Cousin, as a consequence of his relationship with the CIA, Kenneth developed a close personal friendship with the company’s chief financial officer, an individual by the name of Michael Lambert. Played golf together, that sort of thing. Lambert is now Macklinson CEO, because the lovely Bill Marston dropped dead of a heart attack a couple of years ago. With TYPHOON in full flight in the late 1990s, Lambert had become very excited by the oil and gas potential in Xinjiang and invested the company, for strategic reasons, with Petrosina.”

“The Chinese state oil producer? But they don’t allow foreign investment on any kind of scale.”

“That’s not strictly true. Macklinson bought a controlling stake in a specialist oil services company called Devon Chataway which had been sold a two point four per cent holding in Petrosina by the Chinese government. The way Lambert saw things panning out, if TYPHOON failed, Macklinson would still have a significant claim on fossil fuels in Xinjiang. If it was successful, the corporation would be well placed to become a major player in an independent Eastern Turkestan. He explained all this to Kenneth, who remortgaged his house in Richmond, wrote his stockbroker a cheque for?950,000 and told him to sink it in Chinese oil.”

Joe shook his head.

“The one thing neither man anticipated was a clusterfuck on the scale of TYPHOON. As the operation began to unravel, the MSS applied intense pressure on Macklinson, and on Lambert in particular. ‘Tell us what you know about your operations in China and you can continue to do business here. Give us the names of the CIA operatives with whom you have an association and we will continue to allow Devon Chataway to benefit from their investments in Petrosina. Refuse to co-operate and Beijing will turn TYPHOON into an international scandal which will humiliate the American government.’ ”

Joe swore and looked out at the river. Here was the limitless cynicism of greed and power, the curse of the age. Every man for his bank balance and screw the consequences. It was a quiet, blameless morning on the Thames and he felt a sense of helpless anger close to the impotent frustration of watching the day-to-day horrors in Iraq.

“So Lenan gave them up?” he asked. It was the only possible outcome. “He and Lambert sold out the CIA to protect their investments?”

Waterfield nodded. “That’s just my personal opinion,” he said. “That’s just a David Waterfield theory.”

The two men had known one another for almost ten years and yet the characteristics of their relationship had not changed a great deal in that time. Although Joe was now in his mid-thirties, he still looked upon Waterfield in the same way that he had done back in Hong Kong: as a surrogate father and mentor, as an old hand of far greater experience than his own, whose wisdom and intuition was almost sacred. With no other senior colleague at SIS did Joe experience feelings of this kind. It was as if he had been programmed never to question Waterfield’s judgment.

“What about Miles?” Joe asked. “What’s happened to him?”

The question was loaded and both of them knew it. Miles meant Isabella, and Isabella was Joe’s past. Wherever the two of them might be, he was surely going to follow. That was the purpose of the meeting. That was what Waterfield was going to ask him. It was now just a question of how he was going to articulate his offer.

“Miles appears to have remained below the Chinese radar. Whatever information Macklinson and Lenan gave the MSS, we don’t think it included anything about Coo lidge’s networks.”

“Unless the Chinese are deliberately giving him enough rope to hang himself.”

Waterfield conceded the possibility of this but flicked the notion to one side, like the dust off the immaculate sleeve of his jacket. “Given that Wang is also walking the streets as a free man, we might assume some sort of connection between the two of them.”

“But you said earlier that Lenan was living in Urumqi. Wouldn’t that imply that he, rather than Miles, was running Wang, and that Wang would therefore be the first person he would have given up?”

Waterfield seemed briefly caught out. Sometimes he allowed himself to forget the sharpness of Joe’s memory, the speed with which he made operational calculations.

“That wasn’t how things worked. As far as we know, the Cousins tried to put as much water between themselves and the cell structures as possible. For example, Miles ran Wang from Chengdu. They met only twice a year in locations that we still haven’t been able to identify. Lenan’s people were in Gansu and Qinghai, which is where most of the post-TYPHOON arrests were made. Two of the three CIA officers who worked undercover at Macklinson were based in Shenzhen, but were observed meeting contacts as far afield as Taiyuan, Harbin and Jilin. The third was operating out of a Macklinson office in Golmud but was tenuously linked to Uighur groups in Yining and Kashgar. TYPHOON criss-crossed China. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge. That has nothing to do with what I’m proposing.”

“And what are you proposing, David?”

“Let’s go to the Tate.”

A silent quarter-mile later, David Waterfield and Joe Lennox were queuing for sandwiches in the near-deserted Members Room at Tate Modern. Waterfield paid while Joe found a couple of facing seats with a view across the river to St. Paul’s. He had so many questions running through his mind that he had been glad of the brief time alone to compose himself. Had Isabella been introduced to Lenan? Had Miles made her conscious of TYPHOON? He thought of all the weeks and months she must have spent alone in Chengdu while Miles shuttled around the country running his network of subversives. What a life. That she was prepared to exchange their future together for a thankless existence in Sichuan province had always struck him as the final, debilitating irony of their separation. To swap one spy, one set of lies, for another. Wasted love.

“You look deep in thought,” Waterfield said, bearing a plastic tray on which he had balanced two bottles of mineral water and a brace of pre-packaged sandwiches. “Is everything all right?”

He sat opposite Joe, looking down at the Millennium Bridge.

“Where was Isabella through all of this?” Joe asked.

Waterfield was surprised by his candour. Isabella Aubert was the name you didn’t mention around RUN.

“They’re still together,” he said, answering the question that he felt Joe had wanted to ask. “She’s been living in Shanghai with Miles for the past two years.”

Joe’s heart did its usual thing: the thump of loss, then the bile of jealousy and regret. Nothing had changed in seven years. He said, “So they were friends with Lenan?”

“Kenneth was visiting Shanghai when he was killed. We don’t know if he had meetings with Coo lidge during that period. If he had sold out the CIA, and if Miles had found out about that, you can imagine that he might have felt somewhat aggrieved.”

“This has something to do with Isabella, doesn’t it?” Joe had not thought through the question, which betrayed the true direction of his feelings. Waterfield buried his reaction in a sip of water.

“Do you want it to have something to do with Isabella?”

Joe had made a mistake. An officer made privy to the information that Waterfield had disclosed should not be dwelling on an aspect of his private life. He should be thinking about blowback, about murder, about the implications of TYPHOON for the Special Relationship.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just sounded as though…”

Waterfield put him out of his misery. “Look, from what I can gather, it hasn’t all been plain sailing between them. Let’s leave it at that. She got a job working with underprivileged children in Chengdu and might have chucked the whole thing in had it not been for that.”

Joe felt his spirit quicken. “Where are you getting your information?”

“Grapevine.” Waterfield stared at a point beyond Joe’s shoulder. “Wasn’t Isabella Catholic?”

Joe nodded.

“That might explain a few things. Marriage vows. No release in the eyes of God from a lifetime of commitment. Graham Greene country. Never underestimate the obstinacy of the Catholic bride. How else do you explain a woman like Isabella spending the rest of her life with Miles Coo lidge?”

Joe was beginning to feel a curious and not entirely enjoyable sense of disorientation. Why was Waterfield telling him all this? To get his hopes up? Was it all just a pack of lies? Two elderly women settled at the next-door table and Waterfield quickly generalized the conversation.

“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.”