Typhoon

30

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 Noel 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 emigres 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.