Typhoon (33 page)

“Is what true?” he called back.

“That you used to be a spy.”

Joe searched for his reflection in the bathroom mirror, but found that his face was obscured by a film of steam on glass.
This is where it always begins
.
This is where I have to start lying
.

“What’s that? Ricky’s theory?”

“Everybody jokes about it.” Megan had a cup of black coffee on the table beside her and she picked it up. When Joe came into the bedroom, rubbing a towel through wet hair, she clasped the cup against her chest and sneezed.

“Bless you. Who’s everybody?”

“You know . . .” They were both tired and Joe simply smiled and nodded. He sat on the edge of the bed.

“To be honest with you, it always irritated me that they never asked. At Oxford, it was a sort of running joke that anybody studying Mandarin who could tie their own shoelaces would get talent-spotted by MI6. But the offer never came. Even when I was working for the Foreign Office, I never got the nod.”

Megan sipped her coffee. “How come?”

“Search me. I can lie to people. I can drink Martinis. I’ve fired a gun.”

She pushed her foot against his thigh and he felt toes wriggling through the fabric of his robe. “You’d have been good at it, I think.”

“You do?”

“Definitely.” She lowered the coffee and teased him with her eyes. “You’re discreet. You’re sensitive. You’re reasonably good in bed.”

“Oh thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He stood up and drew back the curtains. His room was on the forty-third floor of the Ritz-Carlton building, but the sound of the street below, the gridlocked traffic of that late Shanghai morning, was still audible through the doubled glass. Six blocks to the east, construction workers, obscured by a haze of sunshine, were steering a rust-coloured girder into the dark interior of a half-completed skyscraper. Joe followed the slow, gradual sweep of the crane as the girder inched home. Megan stirred behind him and he turned.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” she said.

The bowl of fruit salad was resting on the bed beside a copy of
The Great Gatsby
, which Joe had been reading the previous afternoon. She lifted it up and he found himself captivated by the simple sight of her pale, slim arm. He knew every part of her now. They were each other’s secret.

“What are you looking at?”

“Your arm,” he said. “I love the shape of it.”

“You should see my other one.”

He took the book from her and she lifted the sheet around her body before walking to the bathroom. Joe picked a croissant from the breakfast trolley and ate it as he watched the news, finding that he enjoyed the noise of the shower running in the background. It was good to have company. It was good not to wake up alone. As he listened to Megan in the bathroom, gasping at the heat of the water, humming as it ran down her skin, he felt no disquiet over what had happened, no confusion or regret. Just a strange raw feeling in the base of his spine, as if he had done what he had done in order to protect himself from Isabella. Why was that? Was everything a calculation? With every step, with every Ansary or Shahpour, he was edging closer and closer to Miles. Now Megan was pulling him further and further away.

No more introspection. Time to dress. Time to work. Just after midday they made their way down to the lobby where Joe put Megan in a cab. She worked part-time at an investment bank in Pudong and was already three hours late. As he held the door for her, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“I had a fantastic time,” she said. “Can we do this again?”

“As soon as possible.” He held her hand. “What are you doing for dinner?”

Megan laughed and ducked into the taxi. She turned in the back seat as the cab pulled away and Joe waved, aware that he was being watched by the doorman. It was only after the car had turned onto Nanjing Road that he realized he did not have her number.

The doorman smiled as Joe walked back into the lobby, a grin between men. It was good of him to risk it; Joe admired his cheek.

“My cousin from Malaysia,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Your cousin from Malaysia.”

He called Waterfield
that afternoon using an encrypted SIM smuggled into China in the spine of
The Queen of the South
. It was only the second time that the two men had spoken since Joe’s departure from Heathrow. Waterfield sounded distant and groggy, as if he had been woken from a deep sleep.

“How are things?” he asked. It was nine o’clock in the morning in London.

“Things are fine,” Joe replied, “but I need a couple of favours.”

“Go on.”

“On the river that day, you told me that you had a source in Garden Road back in ‘97. What are the chances of getting the American transcript of my interview with Wang?”

“The transcript from the safe house?”

“Yes.”

An audible intake of breath. The original SIS document had been destroyed almost immediately by Kenneth Lenan. “Depends what steps Miles took to cover his tracks. If he was as thorough as Ken, I don’t rate our chances. No harm in asking, though.”

“It would help piece something together.”

“Leave it with me.”

Joe was sitting on a bench in Renmin Park, looking up at his favourite building in Shanghai, the J. W. Marriott Tower in Tomorrow Square. It was a humid, sun-blinding afternoon and England was truly half a world away. He tried to picture Waterfield in his tiny pied-à-terre in Drayton Gardens, working his way through a pot of Twining’s English Breakfast while John Humphrys harangued somebody on the
Today
programme. The London of Joe’s memory was Routemaster buses and Capital Radio, cafés on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.

“You said a couple of favours.”

Waterfield was waking up. A Chinese teenager with dyed hair and torn jeans curled past Joe on a skateboard. “Can you also run a check on a Shahpour Goodarzi, possible Cousin, possible former employee at Macklinson?” Joe spelt out the name as he wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. “He’s American, probably second-generation Iranian immigrant, family resident in California. Works for Microsoft, might be using the same cover as Miles.” Joe was holding Shahpour’s business card and read out the email address and cellphone details printed in the lower right-hand corner. “I also need you to contact Amnesty International about a Uighur activist, imprisoned briefly in the mid-1990s. See if they have anything on an Ansary Tursun.” He again spelt out the name. “Can you also try Human Rights Watch? Do they have a file on him? Anything unusual we should know?”

“Done.”

Joe put Shahpour’s card back in his pocket. “So how are things in the old country?”

“Same old, same old. You’ve heard about Rebiya Kadeer?”

Kadeer was a Uighur businesswoman who was arrested in 1999 while en route to meet a US Congressional delegation which had arrived in Xinjiang to investigate human rights abuses. Kadeer had sent newspaper clippings to her husband, a Uighur exile resident in the United States, and was subsequently charged with “leaking state secrets” by the PRC. The Chinese also alleged that Kadeer had been in possession of a list of ten Uighur dissidents with “connections to national separatist activities.”

“She’s been freed, hasn’t she?” Joe replied. The Kadeer story had been covered in the
International Herald Tribune
, copies of which were available to overseas guests in the business lounge of the Ritz-Carlton.

“Released last week as a sop to Condoleezza, officially on medical grounds. In reality, Beijing struck a deal to ensure that the Yanks dropped a resolution on Chinese human rights abuses at the UN.”

“What a lovely story.”

“Heartening, isn’t it? And there’s been a bus bomb in Jiangxi province.”

“Yes. We heard about that one.” On 17 March a double-decker bus had exploded in Shangrao, killing all thirty people on board.

“Who are the Chinese blaming?” Waterfield asked.

“Party line seems to be that it was a case of mishandled explosives. A worker travelling with some dynamite in his suitcase who didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Was a pig flying past at the time?”

Joe laughed. “Several,” he said.

Humour was the simplest way of acknowledging the possibility that explosions of this sort could be linked to separatist activity. Waterfield sneezed, blew his nose and remembered something, saying, “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Coolidge went to a funeral on a trip home six months ago. Young officer from the Directorate of Operations called Josh Pinnegar. Gave the address at the service, spoke about their ‘close personal and professional’ relationship, that sort of thing. Pinnegar was murdered by a Triad gang in San Francisco. Our source indicates that he also had links to TYPHOON. There may be a connection there.”

“I’ll look into it.” Joe needed to put in an appearance at the Quayler office before the day was out and brought the conversation to an end.

“I’d better be off.”

“Of course. Just a quick request before you go.” Waterfield’s voice briefly became a stern paternal rebuke. “Can you for God’s sake move out of the Ritz bloody Carlton? Fifteen grand on board and lodging is in the general arena of taking the piss. Bean counters not amused. End of lecture.”

The information Joe had requested arrived by diplomatic bag seventy-two hours later. It was sent to Beijing, where it was passed to me in Fish Nation, a tiny, British-style fish-and-chip shop, by the head of media and public affairs at the British embassy. To my knowledge, she thought she was handing over documents relating to Britain’s recent decision to lift an embargo on the sale of arms to China. The package consisted of a padded A4 envelope in which Waterfield had placed two typewritten sheets of paper and a compact disc. I flew to Shanghai that night, placed the papers inside an edition of the
China Daily
, hid the disc inside a bootlegged copy of
Blood on the Tracks
, and presented both items to Joe at dinner. At about midnight, he left me in Park 97 with Tom and Ricky and returned to his hotel.

He soon discovered that London had been unable to trace a Shahpour Goodarzi either to Langley or to the Macklinson Corporation. All known aliases for Iranian-American Cousins under the age of thirty-five had been investigated. A database match of a photograph of “Sammy,” provided by Zhao Jian, had also been attempted, without success. It was the same story with Ansary Tursun. Nothing from Amnesty, nothing from Human Rights Watch. London apologized for “any frustration this might cause.”

The compact disc looked more promising. Booting up his laptop, Joe sat on the bed, inserted a pair of headphones, opened iTunes and was swiftly returned to the innocent spring of 1997.

Professor Wang, this is Mr. John Richards from Government House. The man I tell you about. He has come to see you.

It was the live recording of the interrogation. Joe pressed the headphones against his ears and felt his skin prickle at the sound of Lee’s voice. The take quality was poor; the room sounded faded and lifeless. Joe heard a creak of springs and remembered Wang rising slowly to his feet. He could picture the benign, intelligent face, the face that he had warmed to, the face that had later encouraged young Uighur men to kill.

Mr. Richards. I am very glad to make your acquaintance. Thank you for coming to see me so late at night. I hope I have not been any inconvenience to you or to your organization.

Joe turned up the sound as Shanghai closed in around him. Now he was alone in the safe house, twenty-six years old again, and the pitch of his confident, entitled voice embarrassed him. This younger self was so innocent, so ambitious, so free of the pressures of age.

So I would say that you are a very lucky man, Mr. Wang . . . You survive a very dangerous swim. You are surprised on the beach not by Hong Kong immigration, who would almost certainly have turned you back to China, but by a British soldier. You claim to have information about a possible defection. The army believes your story, contacts Government House, we send a nice, air-conditioned car to pick you up and less than twenty-four hours after leaving China here you are sitting in a furnished apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui watching Lawrence of Arabia. I’d say that qualifies as luck.

He was so sure of himself! Was that the man Isabella would remember? Had he changed so much that he would no longer be of interest to her? Joe lay back on the bed, his eyes closed, the side of his face resting on a fresh white pillow. Every trace of Megan had been erased by chambermaids and air conditioning.

At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper.

On it went. As Joe listened to the recording, images flooded back from the discovered cave of his memory; he had arrived at the name Abdul Bary before he even heard it. Wang said that Bary had been imprisoned, that a toenail had been torn from his foot by a laughing guard. It was like listening to an account of an execution.

Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons. Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr. Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.