Typhoon (2 page)

A noise down on the beach. He dropped the cigarette and reached for his binoculars. He heard it again. A click of rocks, something moving near the water’s edge. Most likely an animal of some kind, a wild pig or civet cat, but there was always the chance of an illegal. To the naked eye Anderson could make out only the basic shapes of the beach: boulders, hollows, crests of sand. Peering through the binoculars was like switching off lights in a basement; he actually felt stupid for trying. Go for the torch, he told himself, and swept a steady beam of light as far along the coast as it would take him. He picked out weeds and shingle and the blue-black waters of the South China Sea, but no animals, no illegal.

Anderson continued along the path. He had another forty-eight hours up here, then five jammy days in Central raising the Cenotaph Union Jack at seven every morning, and lowering it again at six. That, as far as he could tell, was all that he would be required to do. The rest of the time he could hit the bars of Wan Chai, maybe take a girl up to the Peak or go gambling out at Macau. “Enjoy yourself,” his father had told him. “You’ll be a young man thousands of miles from home living through a little piece of history. The sunset of the British Empire. Don’t just sit on your arse in Stonecutters and regret it that you never left the base.”

The light was improving all the time. Anderson heard a motorbike gunning in the distance and waved a mosquito out of his face. He was now about a mile from Luk Keng and able to pick out more clearly the contours of the path as it dropped towards the sea. Then, behind him, perhaps fifteen or twenty metres away, a noise that was human in weight and tendency, a sound that seemed to conceal itself the instant it was made. Somebody or something was out on the beach. Anderson swung round and lifted the binoculars, yet they were still no good to him. Touching his rifle, he heard a second noise, this time as if a person had toppled off balance. His pulse quickened as he scanned the shore and noticed almost immediately what appeared to be an empty petrol can lying on the beach. Beside it he thought he could make out a second container, perhaps a small plastic drum—had they been painted black?—next to a wooden pallet. So much debris washed up on-shore that Anderson couldn’t be certain that he was looking at the remains of a raft. The men had been trained to look for flippers, clothing, discarded inner tubes, but the items here looked suspicious. He would have to walk down to the beach to check them for himself and, by doing so, run the risk of startling an eye-eye who might care more for his own freedom than he did for the life of a British soldier.

He was no more than twenty feet from the containers when a stocky, apparently agile man in his late forties poked his nose out of the trees and walked directly towards him, his hand outstretched like a bank manager.

“Good morning, sir!” Anderson levelled the rifle but lowered it in almost the same movement as his brain registered that it was listening to fluent English. “I am to understand from your uniform that you are a member of Her Majesty’s Black Watch. The famous red hackle. Your bonnet. But no kilt, sir! I am disappointed. What do they say? The kilt is the best clothes in the world for sex and diarrhoea!” The chogie was shouting across the space between them and grinning like Jackie Chan. As he came crunching along the beach it looked very much to Anderson as though he wanted to shake hands. “The Black Watch is a regiment with a great and proud history, no? I remember the heroic tactics of Colonel David Rose at the Hook in Korea. I am Professor Wang Kaixuan at the university here, Department of Economics. Welcome to our island. It is a genuine pleasure to meet you.”

Wang had at last arrived. Anderson took an instinctive step back as the stranger came to a halt three feet away from him, planting his legs like a sumo wrestler. They did indeed shake hands. The chogie’s closely cropped hair was either wet or greasy; it was hard to tell.

“Are you out here alone?” Wang asked, looking lazily at the colouring sky as if to imply that the question carried no threat. Anderson couldn’t pick the broad face for northern Han or Cantonese, but the spoken English was impeccable.

“I’m on patrol down here at the beach,” he said. “And yourself?”

“Me? I stayed in the area over the weekend. To take the opportunity to look for the egrets that are native to the inlet at this time of year. Perhaps you have seen one on your patrol?”

“No,” Anderson said. “I haven’t.” He wouldn’t have known what an egret looked like. “Could you show me some form of identification, please?”

Wang managed to look momentarily off ended. “Oh, I don’t carry that sort of thing.” As if to illustrate the point, he made a show of frisking himself, patting his hands up and down his chest before securing them in his pockets. “It is a pity you have not seen an egret. An elegant bird. But you enjoy our surroundings, no? I am told—although I have never visited there myself—that the hills in this part of the New Territories are very similar in geographical character to certain areas of the Scottish Highlands. Is that correct?”

“Aye, that’s probably true.” Anderson was from Stranraer, a pan-flat town in the far south-west, but the comparison had been made many times before. “I’m sorry, sir. I can see that you’re carrying binoculars, I can see that you’re probably who you say you are, but I’m going to have to ask you again for a passport or driving licence. Do you not carry any form of identification?”

It was the moment of truth. Had Angus Anderson been a different kind of man—less certain of himself, perhaps more trusting of human behaviour—the decade of events triggered by Wang’s subsequent capture might have assumed an entirely different character. Had the professor been allowed, as he so desperately desired, to proceed unmolested all the way to Government House, the name of Joe Lennox might never have been uttered in the secret corridors of Shanghai and Urumqi and Beijing. But it was Wang’s misfortune that quiet April morning to encounter a sharp-eyed Scot who had rumbled him for a fake almost immediately. This chogie was no birdwatcher. This chogie was an illegal.

“I have told you. I don’t usually carry any form of identification with me.”

“Not even a credit card?”

“My name is Wang Kaixuan, I am a professor of economics at the university here in Hong Kong. Please telephone the department switchboard if you feel uncertain. On a Wednesday morning my colleagues are usually at their desks by eight o’clock. I live at 71 Hoi Wang Road, Yau Ma Tei, apartment number 19. I can understand that the Black Watch regiment has an important job to do in these difficult months but I have lived in Hong Kong ever since I was a child.”

Anderson unclipped his radio. It would only take ten seconds to call in the sighting. He seemed to have no other option. This guy was a conman, using tactics of questions and bluster to throw him off the scent. Leung’s unit could be down in a police patrol boat before seven o’clock. Let them sort it out.

“Nine, this is One Zero, over.”

Wang now had a choice to make: sustain the lie, and allow the soldier to haul him in front of Immigration, which carried the risk of immediate deportation back to China, or make a move for the radio, engendering a physical confrontation with a Scotsman half his age and almost twice his height. In the circumstances, it felt like no choice at all.

He had knocked the radio out of Anderson’s hand before the soldier had time to react. As it spun into the sand Anderson swore and heard Wang say, “I am sorry, I am sorry,” as he stepped away. Something in this surrendering, apologetic gesture briefly convinced him not to strike back. For some time the two men stared at one another without speaking until a crackled voice in the sand said: “One Zero, this is Nine. Go ahead, over,” and it became a case of who would blink first. Anderson bent down, keeping his eyes on Wang all the time, and retrieved the radio as if picking up a revolver from the ground. Wang looked at the barrel of Anderson’s rifle and began to speak.

“Please, sir, do not answer that radio. All I am asking is that you listen to me. I am sorry for what I did. Tell them it was a mistake. I beg you to tell them you have resolved your problem. Of course I am not who I say I am. I can see that you are an intelligent person and that you have worked this out. But I am asking you to deal with me correctly. I am not a normal person who swims across the inlet in the middle of the night. I am not an immigrant looking for a job. I do not want citizenship or refugee status or anything more or less than the attention of the British governor in Hong Kong. I am carrying with me information of vital importance to Western governments. That is all that I can tell you. So please, sir, do not answer that radio.”

“I have to answer.” Anderson was surprised to hear a note of conciliation in his voice. The encounter had taken on a surreal quality. How many Chinese mainlanders pitched up on a beach at 6 a.m. talking about David Rose at the Hook in fluent, near-accentless English? And how many of them claimed to have political intelligence that required a meeting with Governor Chris Patten?

“What kind of information?” he asked, amazed that he had not already jammed Wang’s wrists into a set of PlastiCuffs and marched him up the beach. Again the voice said, “One Zero, this is Nine. Please go ahead, over,” and Anderson looked back across the water at the pale contours of China, wondering what the hell to do. A fishing boat was edging out into the bay. Wang then turned his head to stare directly into Anderson’s eyes. He wanted to convey the full weight of responsibility which now befell him.

“I have information about a very senior figure in Beijing,” he said. “I have information about a possible high-level defection from the Chinese government.”

Joe Lennox left
Jardine House at seven o’clock that evening, nodded discreetly at a French investment banker as he sank two vodka and tonics at the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Oriental, hailed a cab on Connaught Road, made his way through the rush-hour traffic heading west into the Mid-Levels and walked through the door of Rico’s at precisely 8:01 p.m. It was a gift. He was always on time.

I was sitting towards the back of the restaurant drinking a Tsingtao and reading a syndicated article in the
South China Morning Post
about the prospect of a Labour victory in the forthcoming UK elections. A ginger-haired Canadian woman at the next table was eating crayfish and throwing out dirty looks because of the cigarette I was smoking. When she coughed and waved her hand in front of her face once too often, I stubbed it out. The air conditioning was on high and it felt as though everyone in the room was shivering.

Joe looked the way Joe always looked in those days: fit and undiminished, his characteristically inscrutable expression becoming more animated as he found my eyes across the room. At first glance, I suppose he was no different from any other decent-looking Jardine Johnnie in a Welsh & Jeffries suit, the sort who moves millions every day at Fleming’s and Merrill Lynch. That, I suppose, was the whole point about Joe Lennox. That was the reason they picked him.

“Cold in here,” he said, but he took his jacket off when he sat down. “What are you reading?”

I told him and he ventured a mildly critical opinion of the columnist—a former Tory cabinet minister—who had written the piece. (The next day I went through some cuttings and saw that the same grandee had been responsible for a couple of Patten-savaging articles in the British press, which probably explained Joe’s antagonism.) He ordered a Tsingtao for himself and watched as the Canadian woman put her knife and fork together after finishing the crayfish.

“Been here long?” he asked.

“About ten minutes.”

He was wearing a dark blue shirt and his forearms were tanned from walking in the New Territories with Isabella the previous weekend. He took out a packet of cigarettes and leaned towards the Canadian to ask if she would mind if he smoked. She seemed so taken aback by this basic display of courtesy that she nodded her assent without a moment’s hesitation, then eyebrowed me as if I had been taught a valuable lesson in charm. I smiled and closed the
Post
.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

“You too.”

By this point we had been friends for the best part of a year, although it felt like longer. Living overseas can have that effect; you spend so much time socializing with a relatively small group of people that relationships intensify in a way that is unusual and not always healthy. Nevertheless, the experience of getting to know Joe had been one of the highlights of my brief stay in Hong Kong, where I had been living and working since the autumn of 1994. In the early days I was never certain of the extent to which that affection was reciprocated. Joe was an intensely loyal friend, amusing and intelligent company, but he was often withdrawn and emotionally unreadable, with a habit—doubtless related to the nature of his profession—of keeping people at arm’s length.

To explain how we met. In 1992 I was reporting on the siege of Sarajevo when I was approached at a press conference by a female SIS officer working undercover at the UN. Most foreign journalists, at one time or another, are sounded out as potential sources by the intelligence services. Some make a song and dance about the importance of maintaining their journalistic integrity; the rest of us enjoy the fact that a tax-free grand pops up in our bank account every month, courtesy of the bean-counters at Vauxhall Cross. Our Woman in Sarajevo took me to a quiet room at the airport and, over a glass or two of counterfeit-label Irish whiskey, acquired me as a support agent. Over the next couple of years, in Bosnia, Kigali and Sri Lanka, I was contacted by SIS and encouraged to pass on any information about the local scene that I deemed useful to the smooth running of our green and pleasant land. Only very occasionally did I have cause to regret the relationship.

Joe Lennox left school—expensive, boarding—in the summer of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He was not an exceptional student, at least by the standards of the school, but left with three good A-levels (in French, Spanish and history), a place at Oxford and a private vow never to submit any children of his own to the peculiar eccentricities of the English private-school system. Contemporaries remember him as a quiet, popular teenager who worked reasonably hard and kept a low profile, largely, I suspect, because Joe’s parents never lost an opportunity to remind their son of the “enormous financial sacrifices” they had made to send him away in the first place.