Typhoon (26 page)

“And that’s what happened?”

“Of course it is.” If Waterfield sounded frustrated, it was only because he was still flabbergasted by the naïvety of TYPHOON’s conception. “In the spring of 2000, one of the Macklinson shipments was intercepted by Chinese customs in Dalian. A barn stuff ed with copying machines and anti-communist literature was discovered shortly afterwards about fifty miles outside Shihezi. At least three cells with TYPHOON fingerprints were penetrated by the MSS between 1999 and the spring of 2001, with as many as nineteen Uighur separatists subsequently tortured and executed for splittist activities. Four so-called Macklinson employees, all of them in reality CIA, were expelled from China for ‘undermining the security of the Socialist Motherland through acts of subversion and sabotage.’ It was a total bloody disaster.”

“How come we didn’t get to hear about it?”

“Good question. Essentially because the Chinese and the Yanks came to an arrangement.”

“What sort of an arrangement?”

“The sort that got people killed.”

For a strange and exhilarating moment, about which Joe would later feel ashamed, he wondered if Waterfield was about to tell him that Miles Coo lidge had been executed by the PLA. A waitress approached and cleared away their plates and cups.

“Here’s the situation,” Waterfield said. He flicked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his suit. “Three weeks ago, Kenneth Lenan’s body was pulled out of the Huangpu River. His tongue had been cut out. Every tendon in his body had been sliced open. The Chinese authorities claim that they have no idea who did this to him. We don’t exactly believe that.”

Murders are a
rare occurrence in the secret world. SIS prides itself on the fact that no officer has been killed on active duty since World War II. Kenneth Lenan may have been a traitor to the Service, a cast-off in the private sector, but it still took Joe a while to process what Waterfield had told him. They left the café and walked past the entrance to the National Theatre.

“The manner of his death,” he said. “It’s a signature of the Green Gang. Do people realize that?”

“People realize that,” Waterfield replied.

The Green Gang were the infamous criminal fraternity who operated in Shanghai until the communists took over in 1949. Lenan had been the victim of a specific form of revenge killing, whereby traitors had every tendon in their body severed with a fruit knife before being left to bleed to death on the street. Unable to move because of their injuries, they were often placed in a sack weighed down by rocks and thrown into the Huangpu River.

“So who did he betray?”

Waterfield looked up at the sky and smiled. He had done his grieving.

“Whom,” he corrected.

Joe wasn’t in the mood to play games. “All right then.
Whom
?”

“Could have been anybody.”

“Someone on our side?”

Waterfield suggested with a tightening of the eyes that he found that idea both distasteful and preposterous.

“What, then? You think his murder was connected to TYPHOON?”

“I would have said almost certainly.”

They walked in silence for about a hundred metres. It was as if Waterfield was anticipating a particular line of questioning that Joe had not yet produced. The sun was warm on Joe’s face. A young, dreadlocked juggler was unpacking a suitcase on the path in front of them.

“You said that TYPHOON was wound up after 9/11.”

“Yes.” Waterfield scratched his neck again. Joe assumed that he had been bitten by an insect of some kind, just behind the left ear. “After that, all bets were off. Langley was under instruction to withdraw support for any Muslim group within five thousand miles of Kabul.”

“But TYPHOON kept going?”

“Not really. By the summer of that year the operation had been so severely compromised it was all but dead in the water.”

“Was Wang arrested?” For a reason that he could not precisely explain, Joe hoped that the professor was still alive.

“No. He was one of the lucky ones. Last I heard, Wang was living in Tianjin.”

They turned a corner and it occurred to Joe that the professor was the source of Waterfield’s information. How else did he know so much about TYPHOON?

“Did we turn Wang?” he asked. “Did you recruit him when you were stationed in Beijing? How come you know where he is?”

Waterfield seemed amused by the idea. “Everything that I’ve told you this morning has come from two separate sources, neither of whom is Professor Wang Kaixuan.” He blew his nose aggressively on a freshly laundered handkerchief. “The Controllerate has a new, highly placed official in the MSS recruited by Station in Beijing in the last twelve months. We also have an older, established contact on the American side with whom I formed a relationship long ago in Hong Kong.”

“You had a Cousin on the books in ‘97?”

Waterfield allowed himself to feel flattered. “I had all sorts of things going on that RUN wasn’t privy to. As you said, Joe, you were very low down on the food chain.”

It sounded like an insult but Waterfield decorated his quip with a knowing grin. The slightly tense atmosphere which had existed between them since the café had now eased away.

“And what have your sources told you about Lenan’s death?”

“It’s still largely a mystery.” Waterfield offered a fatalistic glance at the sky. “I can hazard an educated guess.”

Joe stepped aside to allow an undernourished jogger to limp past them.

“It involves Macklinson. According to my Cousin, as a consequence of his relationship with the CIA, Kenneth developed a close personal friendship with the company’s chief financial officer, an individual by the name of Michael Lambert. Played golf together, that sort of thing. Lambert is now Macklinson CEO, because the lovely Bill Marston dropped dead of a heart attack a couple of years ago. With TYPHOON in full flight in the late 1990s, Lambert had become very excited by the oil and gas potential in Xinjiang and invested the company, for strategic reasons, with Petrosina.”

“The Chinese state oil producer? But they don’t allow foreign investment on any kind of scale.”

“That’s not strictly true. Macklinson bought a controlling stake in a specialist oil services company called Devon Chataway which had been sold a two point four per cent holding in Petrosina by the Chinese government. The way Lambert saw things panning out, if TYPHOON failed, Macklinson would still have a significant claim on fossil fuels in Xinjiang. If it was successful, the corporation would be well placed to become a major player in an independent Eastern Turkestan. He explained all this to Kenneth, who remortgaged his house in Richmond, wrote his stockbroker a cheque for £950,000 and told him to sink it in Chinese oil.”

Joe shook his head.

“The one thing neither man anticipated was a clusterfuck on the scale of TYPHOON. As the operation began to unravel, the MSS applied intense pressure on Macklinson, and on Lambert in particular. ‘Tell us what you know about your operations in China and you can continue to do business here. Give us the names of the CIA operatives with whom you have an association and we will continue to allow Devon Chataway to benefit from their investments in Petrosina. Refuse to co-operate and Beijing will turn TYPHOON into an international scandal which will humiliate the American government.’ ”

Joe swore and looked out at the river. Here was the limitless cynicism of greed and power, the curse of the age. Every man for his bank balance and screw the consequences. It was a quiet, blameless morning on the Thames and he felt a sense of helpless anger close to the impotent frustration of watching the day-to-day horrors in Iraq.

“So Lenan gave them up?” he asked. It was the only possible outcome. “He and Lambert sold out the CIA to protect their investments?”

Waterfield nodded. “That’s just my personal opinion,” he said. “That’s just a David Waterfield theory.”

The two men had known one another for almost ten years and yet the characteristics of their relationship had not changed a great deal in that time. Although Joe was now in his mid-thirties, he still looked upon Waterfield in the same way that he had done back in Hong Kong: as a surrogate father and mentor, as an old hand of far greater experience than his own, whose wisdom and intuition was almost sacred. With no other senior colleague at SIS did Joe experience feelings of this kind. It was as if he had been programmed never to question Waterfield’s judgment.

“What about Miles?” Joe asked. “What’s happened to him?”

The question was loaded and both of them knew it. Miles meant Isabella, and Isabella was Joe’s past. Wherever the two of them might be, he was surely going to follow. That was the purpose of the meeting. That was what Waterfield was going to ask him. It was now just a question of how he was going to articulate his offer.

“Miles appears to have remained below the Chinese radar. Whatever information Macklinson and Lenan gave the MSS, we don’t think it included anything about Coo lidge’s networks.”

“Unless the Chinese are deliberately giving him enough rope to hang himself.”

Waterfield conceded the possibility of this but flicked the notion to one side, like the dust off the immaculate sleeve of his jacket. “Given that Wang is also walking the streets as a free man, we might assume some sort of connection between the two of them.”

“But you said earlier that Lenan was living in Urumqi. Wouldn’t that imply that he, rather than Miles, was running Wang, and that Wang would therefore be the first person he would have given up?”

Waterfield seemed briefly caught out. Sometimes he allowed himself to forget the sharpness of Joe’s memory, the speed with which he made operational calculations.

“That wasn’t how things worked. As far as we know, the Cousins tried to put as much water between themselves and the cell structures as possible. For example, Miles ran Wang from Chengdu. They met only twice a year in locations that we still haven’t been able to identify. Lenan’s people were in Gansu and Qinghai, which is where most of the post-TYPHOON arrests were made. Two of the three CIA officers who worked undercover at Macklinson were based in Shenzhen, but were observed meeting contacts as far afield as Taiyuan, Harbin and Jilin. The third was operating out of a Macklinson office in Golmud but was tenuously linked to Uighur groups in Yining and Kashgar. TYPHOON criss-crossed China. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge. That has nothing to do with what I’m proposing.”

“And what are you proposing, David?”

“Let’s go to the Tate.”

A silent quarter-mile later, David Waterfield and Joe Lennox were queuing for sandwiches in the near-deserted Members Room at Tate Modern. Waterfield paid while Joe found a couple of facing seats with a view across the river to St. Paul’s. He had so many questions running through his mind that he had been glad of the brief time alone to compose himself. Had Isabella been introduced to Lenan? Had Miles made her conscious of TYPHOON? He thought of all the weeks and months she must have spent alone in Chengdu while Miles shuttled around the country running his network of subversives. What a life. That she was prepared to exchange their future together for a thankless existence in Sichuan province had always struck him as the final, debilitating irony of their separation. To swap one spy, one set of lies, for another. Wasted love.

“You look deep in thought,” Waterfield said, bearing a plastic tray on which he had balanced two bottles of mineral water and a brace of pre-packaged sandwiches. “Is everything all right?”

He sat opposite Joe, looking down at the Millennium Bridge.

“Where was Isabella through all of this?” Joe asked.

Waterfield was surprised by his candour. Isabella Aubert was the name you didn’t mention around RUN.

“They’re still together,” he said, answering the question that he felt Joe had wanted to ask. “She’s been living in Shanghai with Miles for the past two years.”

Joe’s heart did its usual thing: the thump of loss, then the bile of jealousy and regret. Nothing had changed in seven years. He said, “So they were friends with Lenan?”

“Kenneth was visiting Shanghai when he was killed. We don’t know if he had meetings with Coo lidge during that period. If he had sold out the CIA, and if Miles had found out about that, you can imagine that he might have felt somewhat aggrieved.”

“This has something to do with Isabella, doesn’t it?” Joe had not thought through the question, which betrayed the true direction of his feelings. Waterfield buried his reaction in a sip of water.

“Do you want it to have something to do with Isabella?”

Joe had made a mistake. An officer made privy to the information that Waterfield had disclosed should not be dwelling on an aspect of his private life. He should be thinking about blowback, about murder, about the implications of TYPHOON for the Special Relationship.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just sounded as though . . .”

Waterfield put him out of his misery. “Look, from what I can gather, it hasn’t all been plain sailing between them. Let’s leave it at that. She got a job working with underprivileged children in Chengdu and might have chucked the whole thing in had it not been for that.”

Joe felt his spirit quicken. “Where are you getting your information?”

“Grapevine.” Waterfield stared at a point beyond Joe’s shoulder. “Wasn’t Isabella Catholic?”

Joe nodded.

“That might explain a few things. Marriage vows. No release in the eyes of God from a lifetime of commitment. Graham Greene country. Never underestimate the obstinacy of the Catholic bride. How else do you explain a woman like Isabella spending the rest of her life with Miles Coo lidge?”

Joe was beginning to feel a curious and not entirely enjoyable sense of disorientation. Why was Waterfield telling him all this? To get his hopes up? Was it all just a pack of lies? Two elderly women settled at the next-door table and Waterfield quickly generalized the conversation.