Typhoon (6 page)

“That was quick.” Waterfield’s
éminence grise
sounded uncharacteristically chirpy.

“Kenneth. Hello. What’s up?”

“Are you having dinner?”

“It’s OK.”

“Alone?”

“No. Isabella is here with Will Lasker. Miles, too.”

“And how is our American friend this evening?”

“Sweaty. Belligerent. What can I do for you?”

“Unusual request, actually. Might be nothing in it. We need you to have a word with an eye-eye who came over this morning. Not blind flow. Claims he’s a professor of economics.” “Blind flow” was a term for an illegal immigrant coming south from China in the hope of finding work. “Everybody else is stuck at a black-tie do down at Stonecutters so the baton has passed to you. I won’t say any more on the phone, but there might be some decent product in it. Can you get to the flat in TST by ten-thirty?”

Lenan was referring to a safe house near the Hong Kong Science Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui East, on the Kowloon side. Joe had been there once before. It was small, poorly ventilated and the buzzer on the door had been burned by a cigarette. Depending on traffic, a taxi would have him there in about three-quarters of an hour. He said, “Sure.”

“Good. Lee’s looking after him for now, but he’s refusing to speak to anyone not directly connected to Patten. Get Lee to fill you in when you get there. Apparently there’s already a file of some sort.”

Back in the dining area, Joe didn’t bother sitting down. He stood behind Isabella—almost certainly deliberately, so that he didn’t have to look at her—and put his hands on her shoulders as he explained that the bill of lading from a freight consignment heading to Central America had been lost in transit. It would have to be retyped and couriered to Panama before 2 a.m. Neither Miles nor myself, of course, believed this story for a minute, but we made a decent fist of saying, “Poor you, mate, what a nightmare,” and “You’ll be hungry” as Isabella kissed him and promised to be awake when he came home.

Once Joe had gone, Miles felt it necessary to polish off the lie and began a sustained diatribe against the phantom clients of Heppner Logistics.

“I mean, what’s the matter with these people in freight? Bunch of fuckin’ amateurs. Some asshole on a ship can’t keep hold of a piece of paper? How tough is that?”

“They work him so hard,” Isabella muttered. “That’s the third time this month he’s been called back to the office.”

I was trying to think of ways of changing the subject when Miles chimed in again.

“You’re right. You gotta guy there working hard, trying to climb the ladder from the bottom rung up, they’re always the ones who get treated badly.” He was enjoying having Isabella more or less to himself. “But it can’t last. Joe is way too smart not to move onto bigger and better things. You have to stay positive, Izzy.
Mah jiu paau, mouh jiu tiuh.
”

“What the hell does that mean?”

It was Cantonese. Miles was showing off.

“Deng Xiaoping, honey. ‘The horses will go on running, the dancing will continue.’ Anybody join me in another bottle of wine?”

Joe hailed a
cab on the corner of Man Yee Lane and was grateful for the cooling chill of air conditioning as he climbed into the back. A humid three-minute walk from the restaurant had left his body encased in the damp, fever sweat which was the curse of living in Hong Kong: one minute you were in a shopping mall or restaurant as cool as iced tea, the next on humid streets that punched you with the packed heat of Asia. Joe’s shirt glued itself to the plastic upholstery of the cab as he leaned back and said, “Granville Road, please,” with sweat condensing on his forehead and sliding in drops down the back of his neck. Five feet from the cab, a group of Chinese men were seated on stools around a tiny television set drinking cans of Jinwei and watching a movie. Joe made out the squat, spike-haired features of Jean-Claude van Damme as the taxi pulled away.

Traffic on Des Voeux Road, coming both ways: buses, bicycles, trucks, cabs, all of the multi-dimensional crush of Hong Kong. The journey took forty minutes, under the cross-hatch of neon signs in Central, past the mamasans loitering in the doorways of Wan Chai, then dropping into the congested mid-harbour tunnel at North Point and surfacing, ten minutes later, into downtown Kowloon. Joe directed the driver to within two blocks of the safe house and covered the last 200 metres on foot. He stopped at a street café for a bowl of noodles and ate them at a low plastic table in the heat of the night, sweat coagulating against his clothes. His shirt and the trousers of his suit seemed to absorb all of the dust and the grease and the slick fried stench of the neighbourhood. He finished his food and bought a packet of counterfeit cigarettes from a passing vendor, offering one to an elderly man jammed up at the table beside him; his smile of gratitude was a broken piano of blackened teeth. Joe drank stewed green tea and settled the bill and walked to the door of the safe house at the southern end of Yuk Choi Road.

The burned buzzer had been replaced with a blue plastic bell. Joe pushed it quickly, twice, paused for three seconds, then pushed it again in four short bursts to establish his identity. Lee came to the intercom, said, “Hello, fourth floor please,” in his awkward, halting English, and allowed Joe to pass into a foyer which smelled, as all such foyers did in the colony, of fried onions and soy sauce.

Lee was thirty-two, very short, with neat clipped hair, smooth skin and eyes that constantly asked for your approbation. He said, “Hello, Mr. Richards,” because that was the name by which he knew Joe.

“Hi, Lee. How are things?”

The stale air in the light-starved apartment had been breathed too many times. Joe could hear the high-frequency whine of a muted television in the sitting room as he laid his jacket on a chair in the hall. No air-con, no breeze. His only previous visit to the safe house had taken place on a cool autumnal day six months earlier, when Miles had done most of the talking, pretending to comfort a cash-strapped translator from a French trade delegation while three CIA stooges took advantage of his absence from the Hilton to ransack his room for documents. To the right of the hall was a cramped bathroom where Joe splashed water on his face before joining Lee in the kitchen.

“Where is he?”

Lee nodded across the hall towards a red plastic strip-curtain which functioned as the sitting-room door. The sound had come back on the television. Joe heard Peter O’Toole saying, “We want two glasses of lemonade,” and thought he recognized both the film and the scene. “He watch
Lawrence of Arabia
,” Lee confirmed. “With Sadha. Come with me into the back.”

Joe followed the slap-and-drag of Lee’s flip-flops as he walked through to the bedroom. Once inside, with the door closed, the two men stood in front of one another, like strangers at a cocktail party.

“Who is he?” Joe asked. “Mr. Lodge wasn’t able to tell me very much on the phone.”

Mr. Lodge was the name by which Kenneth Lenan was known to those former employees of the Hong Kong police force, Lee among them, who occasionally assisted SIS with their operations.

“The man’s name is given as Wang Kaixuan. He claims to be a professor of economics at the University of Xinjiang in Urumqi City.”

“So he’s not a Uighur?”

Uighurs are the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang—pronounced “Shin-jang”—a once predominantly Muslim province in the far north-west of China which has been fought over, and colonized, by its many neighbours for centuries. Rich in natural resources, Xinjiang is China’s other Tibet, the province the world forgot.

“No, Han Chinese, forty-eight years old. This morning at dawn he swam from the mainland to the east of Sha Tau Kok, where he became involved in a struggle with a soldier from Black Watch.” Lee picked up the file that Lenan had mentioned and studied it for some time. Joe watched him flick nervously through the pages. “The soldier’s name was Lance Corporal Angus Anderson, patrolling a beach on Dapeng Bay. Mr. Wang try to present himself as Hong Kong citizen, a birdwatcher, says he is a professor at the university here in Western District. Lance Corporal Anderson does not believe this story and they get into a struggle.”

“Birdwatcher,” Joe muttered. “What kind of struggle?”

Outside on the street a young man was trading insults in Cantonese with a woman who yelled at him as he gunned off on a motorbike.

“Nothing. No injury. But something about the situation makes Anderson uneasy. Most blind flow in his experience do not speak fluent English, do not, for example, know much about the history of the Black Watch regiment. But Mr. Wang seems well informed about this, very different to what Anderson has been trained to look for. Then he begs him not to be handed over to immigration.”

“Isn’t that what you’d expect someone in his situation to do?”

“Of course. Only then he claims that he is in possession of sensitive information relating to the possible defection of a high-level Chinese government official.”

“And Anderson swallowed this?”

“He take a risk.” Lee sounded defensive. For the first time he was beginning to doubt the authenticity of the man who had spent the last three hours beguiling him with stories of China’s terrible past, its awkward present, its limitless future. “The soldier walks him back to Black Watch base and tells his company commander what has happened.”

“Barber was the company commander?” Joe was starting to put the pieces together.

“Yes, Mr. Richards. Major Barber.”

Major Malcolm Barber, an ambitious, physically imposing Black Watch officer with impeccable contacts in the local military, was known to SIS as DICTION. He had been feeding regular gobbets of information to Waterfield and Lenan for three years on the tacit understanding that he would be offered a position within MI6 when he resigned his commission in 1998. To my knowledge he was last seen wandering around the Green Zone in Baghdad, trying to hatch plots against the local insurgency.

“And he believed the story? Got on the phone to Mr. Lodge and had him brought south for questioning?”

“That is correct. Mr. Lodge send a car to Sha Tau Kok. Had to make sure police and immigration know nothing about it. Every detail is in the report.”

Joe thought the whole thing sounded ludicrous and briefly considered the possibility that he was being wound up. Professor of economics? Dawn swims across Dapeng Bay? A defection? It was the stuff of fantasy. Why would Lenan or Waterfield take it seriously? And why would they consider RUN for such a job? Surely by presenting himself to an unidentified eye-eye Joe was running the risk of breaking his cover. If most of his colleagues were up to their eyeballs in port and Stilton at a Stonecutters function, why not keep Wang overnight and have them tackle him in the morning? What was the hurry?

Lee handed the file to Joe, let out an exhausted breath and took a respectful step backwards. It was like marking a change of shift. Joe said, “Thank you,” and sat on the bed. Barber had typed a covering letter, written in a tone which suggested that he shared the broad thrust of Anderson’s conviction. Nevertheless, he had been wise enough to cover his back:

I would be very surprised if Professor Wang turns out to be bona fide, but he is natural defector material, highly intelligent, immense charm and perfect English, clearly knows his way around the Chinese political structure, claims to have been tortured at Prison No. 3 in Urumqi sometime between 1995 and 1996. Has the scars to prove it. At the very least he may have the sort of local information in which HMG might be interested. Suggest you hold him for 24 hours, then we can spit him back to Shenzhen with no awkward questions asked. No harm in finding out what he has to say, etc. Of course always the danger that he might be a double, but that’s your area of expertise. As far as the central claim regarding defection is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t be much help. Wang is a sealed vault on that. Insists on speaking to CP in person. But he hasn’t been difficult about it. In fact, rather grateful to us for “taking him seriously,” etc. Best of luck.

“Has he said anything to you?”

Lee was sipping a glass of tea. Joe’s question caught him off guard.

“About what, Mr. Richards?”

“About anything? About SIS setting up the defection? About swimming to Cambodia?”

“Nothing, sir. We talk about general Chinese political situation, but very little connected to the report. The conversations have been recorded in accordance with instructions from Mr. Lodge.”

“And is that tape still running?”

“The tape is still running.”

Joe gathered his thoughts. He had no experience of this sort of interrogation, only those particular skills of human empathy and intuition which had been recognized, and then nurtured so successfully, by SIS. He had left Isabella alone in a restaurant with two close friends whose good intentions towards his girlfriend he could not guarantee. He was very hot and craved a shower and a fresh set of clothes. It was going to be a long night. He followed Lee into the sitting room.

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

Wang had not slept for twenty-four hours and it was beginning to show. The spring had gone out of his step. Rather than leap to his feet with the effervescence that Anderson would have recognized, he lifted himself slowly from an armchair in the corner, took two steps forward and shook Joe Lennox firmly by the hand.

“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.”

What can you tell about a person right away? What can you take on trust? That Wang had the face of a man who was decent and courageous? That he looked both sharp and sly? Joe studied the broad, Han features, absorbed the power of the squat, surprisingly fit body and considered that last phrase: “
Your organization
.” Did Wang already suspect that he was British intelligence?