Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  The note was hidden between the base of the dirty metal pot in which the middle-aged woman had brewed the tea and the tray on which she carried it to Ansary’s table.

  “Your friend left this for you,” she said. “Do not come here again.”

  Ansary saw the crumpled piece of paper, folded once in half, and looked around to see if he was being watched. When he was sure that there were no eyes upon him, he lifted the pot, poured the tea, and opened the note. His heart was racing, but he was intrigued by Abdul’s sleight of hand. How had he given the note to the woman without being observed?

  The words had been written quickly, in black ink:

  Our teacher has a new friend who will provide for us. The friend is rich and has our best interests at heart. We are not to meet or to communicate until the teacher instructs us to do so. You have a class with him at dawn on the first morning of August at the place we both know. Tell as many of our brothers as you can. The teacher’s friend has a great and wonderful plan. I am glad to see you. Burn this.

  Professor Wang Kaixuan claimed that he watched the Hong Kong celebrations on a small black-and-white television set at his apartment in Urumqi, although I later discovered that this, like so many of his utterings, was a lie. TRABANT had calculated—correctly as it turned out—that the eyes of Chinese Intelligence would be momentarily averted by the handover celebrations and that it would therefore be a good opportunity to hold a meeting in a room at the Holiday Inn to discuss developments with TYPHOON. Wang must have watched highlights of the broadcast when he returned home at about two o’clock in the morning. His wife was ill in bed next door, which gave him the opportunity to mutter insults under his breath whenever Chinese triumphalism threatened to get out of hand. Drinking a beer on the very couch where his slain son had slept for almost every night of his twenty-five-year life, Wang marvelled at the stoicism of the magnificent British soldiers as they paraded in the rain, and raised his glass of beer to Patten as tears fell from the governor’s eyes. How many other Han Chinese, he wondered, on this night of triumph for the Motherland, would be toasting the health of the “Triple Violator” and his “capitalist running dogs” in London?

  One thing, in particular, provoked Wang’s ire. In Jiang Zemin’s speech, delivered in the Convention Centre just a few minutes after midnight, the British were accused of having subjected Hong Kong to more than a century of “vicissitudes.” I remember the Mandarin word he used—cangsang—because it provoked considerable argument among the press corps at the time, not least because nobody was entirely sure of its precise meaning. Had Jiang meant “difficulties” or “problems?” Was “vicissitudes” the correct translation? Had he really intended to insult the British at such a delicate and sensitive moment in their history? But Professor Wang Kaixuan was in no doubt, and the childish slur appalled him. What problems, after all, had Hong Kong suffered under colonial rule? A few riots in the fifties and sixties, all of them engineered by agents of Chairman Mao. By comparison, China in the same period had been decimated by communist rule: millions dead from famine; families torn apart by the insanity of the Cultural Revolution; minority ethnic groups tortured and flung into prison. The hypocrisy was breathtaking.

  Towards dawn Wang shut off the television and lay awake on his son’s bed, dreaming of Dapeng Bay as the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory” formed a loop in his mind. He thought of all the lies he had told, and all the truths he had uttered in his extraordinary journey to meet the now departed Patten. What had come over him in those long, crazy weeks? Why had he believed that he had even the slightest chance of fulfilling his quest? He might have drowned. He could have been shot or imprisoned. And yet he had succeeded, in a fashion that he could never have imagined. Western intelligence now given him the opportunity to make sense of his loss and rage. Lenan and Coolidge had allowed Wang Kaixuan the chance to avenge his son’s murder.

  One question, however, continued to puzzle him. What had happened to the first of them, the spy from Government House? Wang had warmed to the young graduate of Wadham College Oxford, who had seen through his lies and reacted with genuine horror to the brutalities of Yining and Baren. Why had he never seen him again? What on earth had become of Mr. John Richards?

  24

  HANDOVER

  Young couples break up all the time. It’s an old story. It’s a new story. This one was a little different.

  I sensed there was trouble brewing the moment I saw Billy Chen forcing his way through the sweat-and rain-soaked crowds of Lan Kwai Fong. It was about eleven o’clock on the night of the 29th. Imagine a Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve in a sticky, tropical climate, with thousands of over-excited, emotionally exhausted, inebriated Westerners puking and kissing and laughing and dancing and you’ll have some idea of what it was like to be out in Hong Kong that night. Joe, Isabella, Miles and myself—along with about a dozen other colleagues and hangers-on—were drinking in F-Stop, a long-established bar halfway up Lan Kwai Fong. Joe had left the bar momentarily to buy cigarettes at a nearby convenience store and had been gone about five minutes. The bar was popular with Chinese yuppies but Chen still looked out of place squeezing himself through the bottleneck of customers at the entrance, wearing a pair of cheap jeans, trainers and a dirty white T-shirt. He was sweating profusely and his eyes had a kind of wild, narcotic stare that I can still picture vividly to this day.

  At first I couldn’t place him, but when he was about ten feet away I had a vivid recollection that I had met Billy in either Macau or Shenzhen about eighteen months earlier while researching an article for the Sunday Times. What the hell was a Teochiu Triad doing in F-Stop the night before the handover? I had done a line of coke and must confess that my first, somewhat hysterical reaction was that Chen was going to pull out a knife or gun and start slaying random expats as a symbolic act of violence on the eve of wui gwai. He certainly looked capable of causing a serious disturbance. Then I saw that he was looking around for somebody and assumed that he was meeting a girl, or perhaps wanting to have words with the management. Yet that didn’t properly explain the look of urgency on his face, the near-panic which characterized his every gesture. Miles was standing beside me talking to a couple of women from Credit Suisse and I pulled him out of his conversation to let him know what was going on.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  It was difficult to be heard above the noise of the bar and I had to shout as I repeated myself. “Billy Chen has just walked in.”

  “Who the fuck is Billy Chen?”

  Looking back, that was the first clue. It didn’t make sense that Miles would forget the name of one of his prize assets. I was about to reply when Chen looked directly at Miles through the ruck of heaving bodies and produced an expression that was as malevolent as any I have ever seen. It was as if the two of them were engaged in a blood feud. I heard Miles mutter: “Oh Jesus Christ” under his breath and then he tried to start a staged conversation with me, as if we were two extras standing at the back of a crowd scene attempting to look normal. “Just act natural, man, just act natural,” he said. “Talk to me, keep talking.” Of course the whole set-up was an elaborate piece of theatre; it was just that Miles and Billy were the only actors among us who knew their lines. Taking hold of my shoulder, Miles twisted me towards the bar, so that we both had had our backs to the room.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I asked, and instinctively looked to my right to see what was happening to Isabella. She was standing twenty feet away, squeezed against a wall by a pincer movement of three drunken expats, all of whom seemed to be taking advantage of Joe’s absence from the bar to try to chat her up. To my astonishment, Chen burst through all three of them and grabbed her by the arm. She looked visibly, understandably shocked, but the men must have clocked Chen’s physique and seen the possibility of violence in his vivid, fevered eyes because they made no attempt to intervene, nor to protect Isabella from what was happening. Seeing this, I broke clear of Miles and tried to make my way through the cro
wd to help her. On a normal night this would have taken no time at all, but with so many people dancing and talking and oblivious to anything but their own enjoyment of the party, it was some time before I could reach her.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said to Chen when I got there, and he immediately released his grip. Isabella no longer looked so frightened, and she was clearly relieved that one of her friends had shown up to help her.

  “He says he knows Joe,” she said, trying to smile and sound relaxed, but obviously unsettled by what was happening. “He says that Joe has to help him with something.”

  I realized immediately that there was a danger of Joe’s cover being blown. I also assumed—as Miles had surely hoped I would—that something had happened between the CIA and the Triads and that Billy was coming to the Brits to help him out.

  “This guy doesn’t know Joe,” I replied, intent on salvaging the situation. “Believe me, this guy does not know Joe.”

  There was a kind of drunken deliriousness about what was happening, as if the conversation was taking place in a parallel dimension. “You stay out of it,” Chen countered, pointing a finger at me. He had obviously recognized my face. Either that, or Miles had briefed him that I would be in the bar. “I’m looking for her boyfriend,” he said, pointing the same finger at Isabella. “Her boyfriend have to help me. Otherwise we all in trouble.”

  “But how can he help you?” Isabella asked. I was relieved to see that she was beginning to act as if the whole thing was a case of mistaken identity.

  “He help me because he work for British government,” Chen replied.

  I produced a hopeless fake laugh, on the off-chance that it would make a nonsense of the accusation and, at first, Isabella seemed amused. “Joe doesn’t work for the British government,” she said. “You’ve got him confused with someone else.”

  “Don’t trick me,” Chen replied, a clever answer, because it kept the conversation going. “I need to talk him urgent. He only man I can trust. I have seen you with him many times. You tell me where I find him.”

  We were standing directly beneath a speaker which was blaring out music at a near-deafening volume. I simply couldn’t believe that what was unfolding was happening tonight, of all nights, when there was so much in the way of distraction and chaos around us. I was too drunk and high, not sharp enough to make decent, accurate decisions. I should have written Chen off as a lunatic, but I became obsessed by the idea of protecting Joe’s cover and the simplest solution did not present itself. I was also starting to wonder what the hell had happened to Miles.

  “Let’s go outside, Billy,” I said, calculating that it was best to get Chen out of the bar and away from Isabella. “Let’s talk where there aren’t so many people and we can actually hear what’s being said.”

  “You know this guy?” Isabella asked.

  I felt like I had no choice but to answer truthfully and said, “We’ve met before.” But of course this was a mistake, because it added an entirely new layer of confusion to the crisis unravelling before my eyes. Isabella looked unsettled again. She frowned and slowly shook her head, as if she knew that she was being lied to.

  “When have you met?” she said. The noise of the music was annoying her and she ducked under the speaker to make it easier for her to hear. “Does Joe know him as well?”

  “Let’s go onto the street,” I shouted, and that’s when Chen just came out with it.

  “Of course Joe know me,” he said. “Why you pretend he work for Heppner’s when everybody know he is a British spy?” He rattled the words out and added something about being “betrayed by the CIA.” I never did discover what tall story Miles had concocted to justify Chen’s intrusion, but the quality of his acting could not be faulted. Under the deafening assault of the speakers, Isabella seemed to fold in on herself, as if all of her elegance and poise and that lovely, open self-confidence in her face was being sucked out of her like a cancer. Was it just my imagination, or had Chen confirmed some dark suspicion that she had long held about Joe’s true identity? Right on cue, Miles now came up behind her—he had watched the whole thing being played out—and grabbed Chen by the arm, frog-marching him from the bar like a bouncer. It was an impressive physical sight, her knight in shining armour, and several of the revellers in F-Stop, as well as a couple of bar staff, stepped aside to absorb what was going on, as if it were all part of the handover fun. God knows what Miles did with him afterwards. Probably slapped him on the back and slipped him a thousand dollars for his trouble. I was more concerned about Isabella, who was looking at me as if I myself had betrayed her.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “I really have absolutely no idea.” Wearily, I tried to lay the blame at the door of the CIA, saying, “He’s a Triad who must have got Joe confused with Miles. Believe me, your boyfriend does not work for MI6.”

  But we were too far down the line and Isabella was too smart and too shocked to be deceived. However drunk she had been, what had happened had sobered her up to an absolute clarity. I can only compare the look on her face to the impact that sudden loss can have on a grieving friend or relative. Either to get some air, or to follow Miles and Chen outside in the search for further answers, she now pushed past me and made her way out of the bar onto Lan Kwai Fong. It was extraordinarily humid on the street and the contrast with the air-conditioned bar was enervating. It felt as if you were drowning in a wet, suffocating heat. The pavements and the road itself were rammed with Westerners, and Billy Chen was nowhere to be seen. Isabella, moving with that certain force and determination which obliges people to step out of your way, began walking downhill, perhaps because she had seen Miles heading in that direction, perhaps because she was simply confused and wanted to go somewhere she could think and move more freely. I was quickly swallowed up by the crowd and found myself walking several metres behind her when I noticed Joe coming up the hill. He was smoking a cigarette and must have seen the confusion on Isabella’s face because a plume of uninhaled smoke emerged from his mouth and he started to run towards her.

  “What’s the matter?” he said when he was close enough to be heard. “What’s happened? Why are you crying?”

  I wasn’t thinking straight and barged in on this, trying to warn Joe with my eyes while placing a hand on Isabella’s shoulder. Sensing me behind her, she spun round and shouted, “Just fuck off, Will” and spittle landed in my eyes and on my cheeks. Joe looked stunned. But she was right to have said it. I had no place intervening. Joe was either going to convince her that Billy Chen had been a madman, or it was all over between them. I couldn’t see how he was going to salvage things, but I had to leave him to work it out. There was still no sign of Miles and people in the crowd were beginning to stare at me as I backed off.

  “What’s going on?” Joe said again. I noticed he had dropped his cigarette on the street.

  “I need to go home,” Isabella told him. “I want you to take me home.” So he immediately put his arm round her and started walking down the street. They looked like survivors stumbling away from a plane crash. Seconds earlier, Joe Lennox had been a young man in the prime of life, less than twenty-four hours away from proposing to a woman he loved as he would never love again. Now he was on the brink of fighting to save that relationship because of an incident engineered by a jealous friend and colleague. It was bewildering. I stared at them walking down the hill and knew in my heart that Joe was doomed. I also knew that things between the four of us would never be the same again.

  PART TWO

  London

  2004

  25

  NOT QUITE THE DIPLOMAT

  After the handover, Joe remained in Hong Kong for six months, but Isabella left him for Miles almost immediately. Certain women, I suppose, might have been thrilled to discover that their boyfriend was not a run-of-the-mill shipping clerk, but instead a spy doing work of unimaginable importance on behalf of the secret state. But not Isabella. She felt utte
rly betrayed. It was as if Joe had been deliberately toying with her emotions; she would not listen to any of his protestations of innocence nor expressions of regret. As far as I know, he never mentioned the fact that he was on the point of proposing. Miles, ever the opportunist, sided with Isabella in the ensuing days and I am convinced that she turned to him so quickly as a means of wounding Joe for the intense pain that his deception had caused her.

  “At least Miles is honest about what he does for a living,” she told me. “At least he doesn’t manipulate me and hide behind a wall of lies. It’s not the spying that I object to. It’s the treachery. Every day for three years Joe was deceiving me. I’m going to the bank. I’ll be late home from work. I can’t make dinner. How could I trust a single thing he said to me ever again?”

  Miles left Hong Kong for Chengdu in September of that year, and he took Isabella with him. All of us were stunned that she was prepared to take such a gamble, but there was no doubt that the two of them had forged an extraordinary bond in the short time that they had been seeing one another. It didn’t surprise me, for example, to run into Isabella at a wedding in Paris two years later and discover that she and Miles were engaged.

  “He’s very romantic, you know,” she said, almost as if apologizing for falling in love with him. “He’s always surprising me, taking me away for little breaks and weekends.” I tried to summon up a picture of Miles presenting Isabella with boxes of chocolates, perfumed candles or flowers, but the images wouldn’t compute. After dinner, we spoke at length about the years in Hong Kong and she was a good deal less brittle on the subject of Joe. There were underlying reasons for her decision to end their relationship which Isabella seemed to have accepted. She admitted, for example, that she had perceived Miles as a challenge. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man; he was almost feral in his refusal to conform to people’s expectations of how a man in his position should behave. When he wanted to, Miles Coolidge could make a woman feel as though she was the only person in the room. Life with such a man was never going to be dull. Perhaps Isabella had been prepared to overlook his myriad faults for this reason. She doubtless started out in the naive belief that she could change him.