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.
“Anyway, just a few weeks ago we got reports of three separate bomb attacks carried out by Uighur separatists in Beijing.” He had assumed that it was time to continue but, still chastened by Marston’s rebuke, aimed his remarks roughly in the direction of Lambert’s midriff.
“Uighurs?” Marston said. He pronounced the word like “Niggers.” Jenson coughed.
“Yessir. There are several different ways of saying ‘Uighur,’ usually with a kind of blowing sound on the first syllable, but ‘Wiggers’ works. ‘Wiggers’ is good.” Sally-Ann hid a smile.
“And these are the guys we’re concentrating on today? A bunch of Muslims? I didn’t think there were any Muslims in China.”
“At the last count, there were about twenty million.”
From the echo chamber of the long-distance line to Hong Kong, Miles Coolidge saved Marston’s blushes. “If I could just come in here,” he said. His voice emerged crisp and true from the speakers on the dining-room table. “Josh is correct in stating that Uighur revolutionaries have been orchestrating low-level bombing and assassination campaigns in mainland China, but this phenomenon has only recently spread to Beijing. Formerly the separatists tended to operate solely in urban centres in Xinjiang, targeting Chinese soldiers and officials. This expansion of a campaign of violence into the Han heartlands is, we feel, significant.”
There are moments in intelligence briefings, indeed in business meetings of all kinds, when it becomes clear to those taking part that a single individual knows a great deal more about the subject under discussion than anybody else. This was one of those moments. The disembodied voice speaking fluently and informatively from the impossibly distant reaches of East Asia confirmed both Marston and Lambert’s vivid first impressions of the CIA structure on TYPHOON: that Jenson had delegated Josh Pinnegar to run the operation as a test of his worth, but that Pinnegar was just a kid. Miles Coolidge was the one driving the strategy.
He continued. “It’s a generally accepted view that separatists seeking to create an Eastern Turkestan were inspired by the defeat of the Soviet occupying force in Afghanistan and, more recently, by the post-Soviet independence of their neighbouring Muslim republics. However, there’s nothing like the same level of understanding or support for the Uighur cause on an international basis as there is for, say, Tibet.” Coolidge’s expert pronunciation of the word “Uighur” here—capturing the whistled “Ui” at the start, the swallowed “ghur” at the back—contrasted vividly with Pinnegar’s lazy Americanization. It was another mark against him. “In fact, there are probably only a handful of people in North America who really understand or care what’s going on up there.” If this was a dig at Marston, it had no effect. Reagan’s favourite son was nodding slowly whilst enthusiastically taking notes. “That said, there’s now every indication that the separatist movement is becoming increasingly coherent and well organized. Beijing is also worried about a possible domino effect if Urumqi falls, with Tibet and Taiwan following suit.”
“Urumqi being the capital of Xinjiang,” Marston said. He had taken the time to look at his map.
“That is correct, sir, yes.” Miles shook his head quietly in the booth, wondering who the hell Jenson and Pinnegar had got themselves involved with. “Probably I should make it clear at this stage that there are also significant oil reserves in the Tarim basin.”
The single word “oil” acted upon Michael Lambert like a shot of espresso. Oil was profit. Oil was power. A grey-haired executive in late middle age was suddenly lifted from his armchair slumber by visions of construction contracts, pipeline deals, Macklinson refineries and chemical plants.
“The Tarim basin?” he said, eyes squinting like knives.
Miles asked who was speaking and Lambert told him. “Call me Mike,” he said.
“Well, Mike, the Tarim basin is essentially the western section of Xinjiang province. It’s mostly sand. The Taklamakan. Locals call it the Desert of Death, the Place of No Return. The literal translation is ‘Go in, and you won’t come out.’ Either way, it’s a great spot for a vacation.”
It was the first joke of the meeting. Sally-Ann smiled into her lap, Josh and Jenson dutifully smirked, while Lambert and Marston dwelled with regret on the cruel indifference of Chinese geography. Getting oil out of a desert made life infinitely more complicated.
“However, regardless of what goes on there, if the economy accelerates in China over the next fifteen years in the way most analysts are predicting, Beijing is going to need to import a further twenty million tons of oil in that period just to maintain current growth trends.” A car alarm triggered on 5th Street and Miles was asked to repeat what he had said. Josh picked up the baton.
“So the communist government is obviously keen to keep a hold of Xinjiang,” he said. Sally-Ann gave him an encouraging smile. “In case there’s something down there. In case there’s oil or gas.”
“It’s not definitely there?” Lambert looked confused. He hadn’t been expecting a qualifier. Did Xinjiang possess significant oil reserves or not? Marston was staring at the speakers. He seemed to be wondering the same thing.
“Not definitely.” Josh picked through his notes until he arrived at a Canadian SIS report on oil exploration in Central Asia. “The situation is not dissimilar to what’s going on in the Caspian Sea right now. Nobody knows how much oil, how much gas they’ve got down there.”
Miles eased back in. “I might have to disagree with that analysis, Josh.” Prior to the meeting, the three men from the CIA had taken part in a telephone conversation in which Jenson had stressed the importance of presenting a united front at all times to Macklinson executives. Miles was aware that his contradiction would reflect badly on Josh, but knew that it was essential to point out the error. “It’s a common misconception that China doesn’t have any oil,” he said. Josh did what he always did when he felt uncomfortable and patted down his hair. “In fact, quite the opposite. The Chinese authorities have known about the oil an
d gas potential in Xinjiang for decades. The China National Petroleum Corporation began exploration and production activity in the early 1950s. We don’t really know too much about this in the West because foreign involvement has been limited. That, coupled with the difficulty of operating in what is an extremely hostile and remote region, has also thwarted investment.”
Lambert looked crushed.
“Nevertheless, Xinjiang is going to remain of huge strategic importance to Beijing as a conduit for any oil coming in by pipeline from, say, Kazakhstan. This is the point I think Mr. Pinnegar was about to make when he referenced the Caspian basin.” It was a skilful redressing of the balance and Josh made sure to catch Marston’s eye. “The question everybody out here wants an answer to is how that oil travels to markets in China, Korea and Japan if Urumqi falls. There isn’t any alternative route unless you detour through Russia.”
Marston looked down at his map. With his fingernail he traced an imaginary pipeline from Baku which passed through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, east via disputed Kashmir and finally into Tibet. An impossible journey. He felt a strange surge of empathy for his political brethren in Beijing and realized, with a fizz of satisfaction, that Xinjiang was the key. TYPHOON had its target.
“Could I also add a note on China’s nuclear capabilities?” Josh asked.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in this. Marston was gazing at the speakers again. Eventually, when nobody responded to the question, Jenson said, “Go ahead, Josh.”
“Well, largely as a relic of the Cold War era, China still maintains a huge military presence, both ground and air, in Xinjiang. Most of its nuclear ballistic missiles are also housed there and we’ve seen up to fifty nuclear tests conducted in the Taklamakan desert since the mid-1960s. Those tests have further fuelled separatist violence in the region. Muslim groups ask, with some justification, why Turkic peoples are being subjected to fallout, ground-water contamination and birth defects while the Han population to the east sleeps soundly in their beds.”
Typhoon (2008) Page 12
