Joe picked up on the subtext of the question. “What’s relevant about the job?” he asked. “What are you getting at?”
I hesitated, because once again I was venturing into treacherous waters. Both of us reached for a packet of cigarettes that Joe had placed on the table in front of him. He got there first, offered one to me, and repeated the question.
“What do you mean?”
I poured the Guinness into a pint glass and waited for it to settle. “My theory about marriage is this,” I said.
Joe shuffled back in his chair, folded his arms and smiled. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
I struggled on. “I think part of the reason why men finally decide to cash in their chips and settle down, apart from love and convention and pressure, is proprietorial.”
“Proprietorial in what sense?” He was frowning.
“In the sense that you want to take your girlfriend off the market. You want to make sure, once and for all, that nobody else can fuck her.”
This produced a deservedly contemptuous laugh. “Are you serious? Ownership? Isn’t that a bit passe, Will?” Then Joe saw my expression and realized what I was getting at.
“I suppose I am serious.” I looked at the clean white stripe at the head of my Guinness and risked it. “It always struck me that you must have been worried about Miles, even if it was only in an intuitive way. Deep in your heart, you must have known that your relationship with Isabella was doomed.”
20
CHINESE WHISPERS
This is how rumours get around, on a small island, among spies.
David Waterfield held a meeting with Kenneth Lenan in his office in the House of a Thousand Arseholes five days after talking with Joe in the Mongkok bird market. Lenan had been in Thailand on a week-long holiday and was sporting one of his characteristically deep suntans. Waterfield was running a light tropical fever and looked as though he needed to spend three days in bed.
“So we not only have eight thousand journalists showing up on June the 30th, Prince Charles, the all-new, all-smiling British Prime Minister, the US Secretary of State, the right-on, Right Honourable Mr. Robin Cook, most of the outgoing Tory cabinet, half of the Chinese Politburo and probably Sir Cliff Richard as well. We now have the added problem that RUN wants to propose to his bloody girlfriend.”
“At the handover ceremony?” Lenan asked.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”
Lenan didn’t smile much but he smiled at that one. “He wants her to know he’s a NOC?”
“Absolutely.”
Lenan frowned. “He wants her to know that for the past two years he’s been lying to her morning, noon and night?”
“That would appear to be the scenario, yes.” In the corridor outside Waterfield’s office, one of the secretaries sneezed. “Joe and I had a chat in Mongkok. He actually said he wanted the Office’s help in making it happen.”
“Our help?”
“Mmmm.” Waterfield began coughing and spat something into his handkerchief. “Not exactly sure what he meant by that.” He looked out across Victoria Harbour, following the progress of a distant junk. “Does he want us to tell her we made him do it? That he was perfectly happy in the shipping business until SIS came along?” The joke went nowhere so he became more serious. “This is a tough life we have chosen, Kenneth. Hard on marriages. Even harder when you bring children into the frame. You’ve been sensible. Kept yourself unattached. I just hope to God Joe knows what he’s doing.”
Forty-eight hours later Lenan had dinner with Miles Coolidge in a quiet corner of his favourite Indian restaurant in Hong Kong, situated a few blocks south of Kowloon Park on the third floor of the Ashley Centre. Both men had ordered chicken dhansak and several plates of unnecessary vegetable dishes. Above their heads, an ageing air-conditioning unit hummed, threatening to drip water onto the carpet. Towards ten o’clock, when most of their fellow diners had left for the evening, Miles ordered a bowl of ice cream and instigated a conversation about TYPHOON.
“Any word from your buddy?”
“Back in Urumqi,” Lenan replied flatly. “Classes begin on Monday morning.”
“And there were no problems? Nobody asked where he’d been to?”
SIS had developed a support agent in Urumqi, a salesman with a British passport who worked for a large German car manufacturer. Codenamed TRABANT, he was initially the first point of contact between Wang and Lenan, and would in due course be replaced by Lenan himself.
“No. Nobody asked. He told them he’d been on holiday in Guangdong and that was that.”
Miles was halfway through a glass of iced Sprite. It was an idiosyncrasy of his relationship with Lenan that he rarely drank alcohol in his presence. “This whole thing has happened pretty fast,” he said.
Lenan reacted to the doubt implicit in Miles’s comment by taking his napkin off his lap and balling it up on the table. “Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s still not clear to some of my guys back home, even after everything that’s gone down, why he risked the swim.”
“Is it at least clear to you?”
Miles rotated the Sprite on the tablecloth and lifted a shard of poppadom into his mouth. He had spun the lie so confidently to Joe in Samba’s and the Wan Chai nightclub partly because he had always possessed private doubts about Wang’s credentials. “Sure. It’s totally clear to me. But I had Josh Pinnegar on the phone for an hour and a half earlier this week wanting to go over every detail of the initial interrogations one more time, the transfer to Taiwan, the means by which you were able to get him back into Xinjiang. He told me there’s a feeling back home that this whole thing might have been played by the MSS.”
“A feeling?” Lenan became impatient. “What does that mean? Who is experiencing these feelings? Isn’t it a bit late in the day for all this? Is a plug about to be pulled, Miles?”
“Shit no. It’s just background. The professor’s a fifty-year-old guy, for Chrissakes. He could have drowned. You can see why people might ask questions.”
Kenneth Lenan panned his narrow, impassive eyes around the room, settling them on a distant waiter. As always, he looked enormously bored and enormously frustrated by the intellectual limitations of inferior men. “Well, the next time anybody brings the subject up, it’s quite simple. You tell them to see it from a Chinese perspective. If Beijing wanted to play one of their top agents into Hong Kong and drop him into the lap of British intelligence so that we all broke out the bubbly, they’d hardly risk putting him on a makeshift raft at three o’clock in the morning on the off-chance he might wash up on a beach in Dapeng Bay. Far more likely they’d give him papers to come across from Shenzhen and allow him to present himself as a walk-in.”
Miles’s customary mood in the presence of Lenan was not dissimilar to Joe’s. He felt generally inferior and second rate in his company, a consequence of the older man’s nerveless self-confidence. “You’re right, Kenneth,” he said, crunching another poppadom. “Of course you’re right.” He decided, right then and there, to go for a hand job at Lily’s after dinner. Miles always wanted sex when he was put under pressure; it was a way of reasserting his authority.
“What about Macklinson’s end of things?” Lenan asked. Miles’s pudding arrived, a bright red cocktail cherry perched on the summit of four enormous balls of vanilla ice cream. “Are they having doubts as well?”
“None,” Miles told him, though he had spoken to neither Michael Lambert nor Bill Marston for several days. “Nobody is having any doubts, Ken. Everything at Macklinson is under control. Shipments are being arranged, personnel prepared. All you have responsibility for is Professor Wang.”
Lenan shuddered, both at the explicit mention of Wang’s name and at Miles’s curt dismissal of his responsibilities. His involvement in TYPHOON was, of course, a closely guarded secret. Nobody on the British side knew tha
t the CIA was, in effect, employing one of their best men on a subcontractual basis. Why was Lenan doing it? Why did he risk everything to go off-piste with Miles Coolidge? He was being paid, certainly, and may have believed that there would be long-term benefits in cosying up to the Cousins. But I think his desire to play a central role in TYPHOON was born chiefly out of frustration.
“Let me tell you something about the British mindset,” he had told Miles when the American had first suggested using British know-how and infrastructure to spirit Wang out of Hong Kong and to return him as an agent to Urumqi. “If I go to David Waterfield with what you’re proposing, the answer is going to be ‘No.’ The Office will want him back in Sha Tau Kok by sunset. Why? Because as a nation we’re small, risk averse. We lack the imagination to do anything that might actually change things. If there’s a reason not to do something, you can guarantee that the British will find it. Added to that is the small problem of the handover. Nobody wants to ruffle any Chinese feathers just at present.”
Miles had performed a quick calculation. As TYPHOON accelerated over the next few years, his own responsibilities would also quicken and multiply. Lenan would be a useful ally, both as an experienced hand and as a window onto secret British thinking. They were standing in the bedroom of the safe house where Joe, just a few hours earlier, had been exhaustively interrogating Wang. Right there and then, with a wild decisiveness born of instinct and pressure, Miles agreed to Lenan’s request “to keep SIS out of it” and to pay him as an asset of the CIA. For the next four years, $50,000 a month made its way into a Luxembourg bank account that Vauxhall Cross couldn’t have traced to one of their own if they’d spent fifty years looking. Lenan was therefore nominally answerable to Miles, although a fellow diner at the Indian restaurant, observing the manner and body language of both men, would have assumed that Coolidge was very much the junior partner.
“So I have something else I need to tell you, Ken.”
“You do? What’s that?”
“Our people need somebody on the mainland to co-ordinate things. A focal point. A leader. The task force we’re putting together is ultimately going to stretch to maybe twenty or thirty agents, the majority of whom are currently stationed all over the Far East. When Bill’s shipments start rolling in, somebody is going to have to pull all those disparate elements together.”
Lenan reacted as though Miles were being unnecessarily oblique. “You’re telling me that you’ve been promoted,” he said. “You’ll shortly be leaving Hong Kong for bigger and better things.”
It was characteristic of Lenan that he should manage to puncture any sense of pride that Miles might have felt in his achievement. To control an operation on the scale of TYPHOON at this stage in his career was a significant feather in his cap.
“You got it,” he replied flatly. He wanted to fling a neat white ball of vanilla ice cream across the table into Lenan’s smug, tanned face. Yet he also craved the Englishman’s respect. Miles spent the next seven years of his life trying to reconcile these two conflicting positions. “Langley wants me to pack my bags and settle there by Christmas,” he said. “That means I’ll be leaving Hong Kong in the fall.”
So many consequences flowed from this statement that Lenan’s initial response might have been construed as flippant.
“You’ll miss the wedding, then,” he said.
Miles’s head jerked up. “What wedding?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Joe and Isabella are getting engaged.”
Miles Coolidge possessed many attributes as a spy—tenacity, self-confidence, a bold if sometimes reckless imagination—but a poker face was not chief among them. All of the tautness and the colour in his expression slipped down like a collapsing building. It was a sight that filled Kenneth Lenan with a profound if childish satisfaction, for he had long suspected Miles of harbouring a secret desire for Isabella. He took a sip of water from a glass on the table and watched the American scramble for answers.
“They’re what? Engaged? Since when? Who told you that?”
“It’s common knowledge.” It wasn’t, of course, but it was the sort of thing Lenan said when he was needling people.
Miles looked down at the table and tried to assemble some dignity. “Jesus. So how did he pop the question?”
“Oh it’s not popped.” Lenan seemed to enjoy the playful language.
“I don’t understand.”
“Rumour has it he’s going to do it at the handover.”
“On June 30th?”
“That is the day that has been outlined for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty back to the People’s Republic of China, yes.”
Miles said “Jesus” one more time.
“You seem shocked, Miles.”
“I’m pretty surprised, sure.” He was thinking, calculating, his mind turning over, like the low hum of the air-conditioning unit above their heads. “Does David know?”
“David is the one who found out.”
“What? Joe asked his permission?”
“Apparently.”
A sniff of laughter from both men. Colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic liked to console themselves with the theory that Joe was still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world. It made them feel better about their own shortcomings.
“So he wants her to know all about RUN? He’s prepared to break cover?”
Lenan nodded.
Which gave Miles an idea.
21
CHEN
Twenty minutes later—no time for coffee, for digestifs—Miles was making a phone call on the corner of Haiphong Road and Kowloon Park Drive having put Lenan into a cab.
“Billy? I got a problem. What are you doing for wui gwai?”
Billy Chen was an American asset in the Triads whom Joe distrusted as a faithless opportunist, a drug-running hoodlum whose lust for the trappings of wealth and power was matched only by his colossal vanity and self-importance. Chen must have been about twenty or twenty-one in 1997, and had been taking Miles’s dollar for three years in return for information about criminal activity in Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong. Joe had had the chance to recruit him as an agent of SIS shortly after he arrived in 1995, but had turned it down flat on the basis that Chen was clearly unreliable. The Yanks, he quickly discovered, were less discerning; they tended to throw money at anybody who was willing to tell them what they wanted to hear.
“Wui gwai?” Chen replied, pronouncing the Cantonese phrase for “handover” with a native finesse denied to Miles. “Maybe I’m in Hong Kong, maybe I’m not. How come you don’t call me so long?”
“Listen, Billy. I need you to do me a favor.”
“What kind of favour?”
Chen was sitting in the front seat of his favourite BMW with one hand on his mobile phone and the other sliding up the leg of a teenage girl plucked from a KTV bar in Shenzhen.
“Nothing serious, nothing special,” Miles told him. “Just involves a couple of friends of mine in the run-up to June 30th.”
“The run-up?” It was as if Chen didn’t understand the expression.
“That’s right, the run-up.” Miles couldn’t be bothered to explain it. He was in a panic over Isabella and had made a lightning quick decision to undermine Joe’s proposal with a simple if somewhat clumsy strategy of his own. For the time being, all thoughts of going to Lily’s had been postponed.
“Everybody take five days off,” Chen said, referring to the common assumption that Hong Kong would grind to a halt in the week of wui gwai, as offices closed and the colony’s residents waved their final farewells to British rule.
“Yeah, everybody’s taking five days off. But on one of those days you’ll be helping me, Billy. You’ll be at the end of the phone and you’ll be doing me a favor. Like I said, it’s nothing special. Just make sure you’re in Hong Kong.”
It felt good to be bullying someone after two hours of Kenneth Lenan. Miles had the lev
erage to make demands of Billy Chen because, for all his suits and his cars and his blank-eyed girls, the gangster was just another creature of American power, a small fish in a great sea whose elevated position within the Teochiu could be ended with a single phone call.
“OK, Miles. OK. So tell me what you want to do. Tell me why you need me around.”
“You remember my friend Joe?”
“Who?”
“The English guy. Tall. You met him a couple of years back at the Lisboa.”
A memory of meeting Joe in a hotel room at Macau’s largest casino assembled itself in Chen’s mind. Hesitatingly, he said, “Sure.”
“Well that’s who you’ll be dealing with,” he said. “That’s the guy I’m after.”
22
DINNER FOR TWO
In the final weeks of British rule—that strange, chaotic period of excitement and regret and uncertainty over the colony’s future—many people commented on the change that came over Miles Coolidge. Several of his consulate colleagues at Garden Road, for example, noticed that he was less brash and self-assured around the office, while Joe was struck by a sudden courteousness in Miles’s behaviour, bordering on humility. Unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, we all assumed that he was simply putting his house in order before making the big move to Chengdu, and didn’t want his final months in Hong Kong to be obscured by a fog of conflicts and hedonism. There were parties almost every night in June, yet Miles kept his head down and worked hard, laying further foundations for TYPHOON and popping up socially only for the occasional beer at Club 1911, or a bowl of pasta at Grappa’s.
The primary motivation for this uncharacteristic behaviour was undoubtedly Isabella’s imminent engagement. Miles wanted to present himself as a viable alternative to Joe and must have believed, in his strange, corrupted pathology, that he had a chance of breaking them up if he appeared to be the sort of man who could put his life back on track at the flick of a switch. As a strategy, it was ambitious to the point of lunacy, yet it had the effect of creating a sense of confusion within Miles’s circle of friends. What had come over him? Why was the celebrated Lothario suddenly cleaning up his act? And, of course, this confusion fed its way down to Isabella.
Typhoon (2008) Page 15
