Typhoon (38 page)

“Then at the very least let’s try to find Wang.”

“No. Aren’t you listening to me? They’ll have eyes all over him. You try to flush Wang, you’ll draw MSS, CIA, and God knows how many other services into a shitstorm of unimaginable proportions. Leave well alone. Your assignment is to get close to Coolidge. Your operation is to discover how much local liaison knew about Lenan’s activities and whether they can be traced back to London. Now I have to go into a meeting.”

“David, with the greatest respect, those are side issues now . . .”

“I said I have to go into a meeting. You’re obviously very tired, Joe. It’s late out there. Get some sleep.”

Joe heard the hollow click of Waterfield hanging up and shook his head with frustration. He was sitting at his desk in the second bedroom of his apartment, which he had turned into a makeshift office. The walls were uncovered save for a large National Geographic map of China and a pin board onto which Joe had tacked documents relating to Quayler. The conversation with Waterfield had served only to remind him of the pettiness and obstructive bureaucracy which had characterized the Office in recent years. Where was Waterfield’s willingness to take a risk? What was the purpose of Joe’s being in Shanghai if not to discover what America was up to? Taking a drawing pin out of the board, he pushed it repeatedly into the soft wooden surface of his desk and felt the utter frustration of his solitary trade. He would never make progress. He would never see Isabella. Joe was convinced that Shahpour was telling the truth, that he was trying to find a way of destabilizing the cell which would bring dishonour neither upon himself nor upon the American government. But how to convince Waterfield of that when he was thousands of miles away?

Just before 2:30 in the morning, with a glass of whisky at his side, Joe sent me a text message in Beijing. He had made the decision to ignore Waterfield and to follow his instincts. If he was wrong, so be it; he was deniable to London. If he was right, Waterfield could take credit for his foresight in sending RUN to Shanghai.

I was sitting in the lounge bar of the Kerry Centre Hotel with a government official who was helping me with a story I was writing about the Olympics. A group of Japanese businessmen were sitting on the sofa next to mine drinking Californian Merlots and watching coverage of a golf tournament on ESPN. Jumbo Osaki sank a monster putt at the seventeenth and a roar went up as my phone beeped.

“Ring your sister,” the message said, and I experienced one of those strange, out-of-body surges which are the perks of life as a support agent. Making my excuses, I took a cab back to my apartment, found a clean SIM and called Joe in Shanghai.

His instructions were simple: to find Professor Wang Kaixuan. He was teaching English as a foreign language at one of the schools in Haidian district. What was the name of the school? Where was it located?

As tasks go, it was not particularly taxing, certainly for a reporter of long and weary experience in investigative journalism. A quick search of the internet provided me with an exhaustive list of language schools in the Beijing metropolitan area and I simply cold-called each and every one of them in Haidian throughout the course of the next morning. Joe had given me a simple cover story: to pretend that I was a former student in Mr. Liu Gongyi’s class who wanted to send him a book through the post. Predictably enough, the first eighteen receptionists insisted that they had nobody of that name teaching at their school and that I had dialled an incorrect number. The nineteenth school, however, was only too happy to provide me with a full postal address and were certain that “Mr. Liu” would be delighted to receive his gift.

I called Joe with the good news.

“Not bad for an ageing hack with a drink problem,” he said. “I’m coming to Beijing.”

Fourteen hours later,
the old Shanghai sleeper rumbled into Beijing station like a faithful dog. I was waiting at the end of the platform with a cup of coffee and saw Joe emerge from the train in conversation with a stewardess who had her hair in a bun. She laughed at something he said as weary passengers disembarked all around them. Then Joe caught my eye and shook her by the hand, rolling his suitcase towards me like the anonymous, nondescript pharmaceuticals salesman he was supposed to be.

“Nice day for the time of year.”

“Welcome to Peking, Mr. Lennox.”

We escaped the pressing crowds in the great vault of the old station and went into a virtually deserted shopping mall nearby, where I told Joe what I knew: that I had been to the language school the previous evening and discovered that Wang gave classes every afternoon, Monday to Friday, beginning at two o’clock and ending at five. Joe was noticeably more intense than he had been on my recent visit to Shanghai, and seemed to be calculating moves and implications all the time. At this early stage, he said very little about his dinner with Miles and Shahpour and nothing at all about the cell. As far as he was concerned, I was just a support agent of the Secret Intelligence Service doing the job that I was paid to do. It was neither my concern, nor my particular business, to know anything more than I needed to. At such times, Joe had a way of keeping our friendship at arm’s length and I knew not to press him on operational details. There was a lot at stake, after all. For a start, RUN would almost certainly be blown if Joe was observed talking to Wang; if Waterfield found out about it, he would be called home. Looking back on the two eventful days that followed, it occurs to me that Joe still didn’t know to what extent Wang was involved in separatist activities. In spite of what Shahpour had told him, there was still a more than plausible chance that he was an American agent. If that was the case, Joe was ruined.

“There are known knowns,” he said, lightening the mood with a joke as we walked to his hotel on Jianguomen Road. It was a typically hot, dry spring day in the capital, traffic and cyclists warring on the wide, featureless streets. “There are things we know that we know. There are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.”

Two days had passed since the dinner at M on the Bund, a period in which Joe had laid the foundations for his trip to Beijing. On his way to the railway station in Shanghai, for example, he had carried out a two-hour counter-surveillance exercise designed to flush out any American watchers before he departed for the capital. On the train itself, he had called Guy Coates from the dining car to arrange a meeting at the nascent Quayler representative office in Beijing, just in case Miles had put eyes on it. He then stayed up most of the night on the top bunk of his four-berth compartment listening once again to the recording of the safe house interrogation with Wang. All of this was a way of preparing himself for their inevitable second encounter. There might be clues in the conversation; there might be leads.

I am regarded as a political undesirable, a threat to the Motherland. My actions as an academic drew me to the attention of the authorities in Xinjiang, who jailed me along with many of my students.

The plan to get to Wang was straightforward: to keep a watch on the entrance of the Agosto Language School on Yuanda Road and to follow him to a point where Joe could make secure contact. Given that SIS Station in Beijing had been told, along with everybody else in the intelligence fraternity, that Joe Lennox had quit the Service, we could not call on the British embassy for additional operational support. Nor was Zhao Jian available: Joe had left him and his brothers in Shanghai with instructions to gather more information about Shahpour Moazed and Ansary Tursun. Besides, Joe couldn’t risk a rumour filtering back to Vauxhall Cross that three of their finest Shanghai pavement artists had suddenly been called to Beijing. So it was to be just the two of us, a pair of white faces in a crowded sea of Chinese, trying to follow a renegade academic with years of counter-surveillance experience in one of the busiest and most populous cities on earth. I had long ago received basic training in foot surveillance at a course in Bristol, but Joe knew that I was out of practice; indeed, if the truth be told, I don’t think he fancied our chances that much. On the Tuesday evening, after he had sat through what he characterized as a “skull-numbing” meeting at Quayler, we met for dinner at Li Qun, a Peking duck restaurant off Qianmen East Road, and Joe could speak about little else but the task which lay ahead of us.

“We have to be prepared for every eventuality,” he said. “Does Wang ride a bike? Has he got a car? Does he live within walking distance of the school or, more likely, is he going to want to get on a bus and ride across the city? This is how it’s going to work. He knows what I look like so I can’t get close to him. You, on the other hand, can be standing outside the school entrance with a bike speaking to me on the phone when he comes out. I’ll identify him for you and we can work it from there. We’ve got to hope he has some kind of hat on, or a distinguishing characteristic in his dress, because he’s going to get lost in the rush-hour crowds within seconds of being on the street. If he’s on a bike or in a car, you’ll have to try to stay on his tail. Don’t worry about getting too close—it’s normal to ride in packs and you’ll get lost in the vehicles surrounding him. If he runs a red light, follow. If you sense that he’s about to stop, try to get directly behind him so that he’s not aware of a Caucasian hanging on his shoulder.”

“What if he walks?”

“Take the bike but follow on foot. Again, try to anticipate when he’s going to stop. Get on the opposite side of the road as much as you can. If he doubles back more than once, chances are he’s conscious of you and will try to shake you at a choke point. But if he walks, it’s probably because he’s heading for a bus stop. If that’s the case, hang well back and, once he gets on board, just tail the bus for as long as you can. I’ll have a cab waiting on the corner outside the school. Once you have a good idea of the mode of transport he’s using and the direction he’s heading in, I’ll follow in the vehicle. More than likely I’ll try to get close to where you are and we can work him in parallel.”

“How do you know the cab will stick around?” I asked, beginning to feel anxious about the demands Joe was placing on me. “Wang might not come out of the school for an hour. The driver could get itchy feet.”

“Because I’ll pay him to stick around,” Joe said, as if my basic understanding of the pathology of taxi drivers needed fine-tuning. A ragged Chinese boy, no older than five or six, came into the restaurant and handed one of the waiters a few coins in exchange for a bagged-up duck carcass. His family would use it for soup. “Another thing,” Joe said. “Charge your phones up overnight so they don’t run out of juice.”

“Phones?” I replied. “Plural?”

“We could be talking for up to three hours. If one of them drops, I need to know that I can reach you quickly. To blend in, wear a plain white T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses. If Wang turns round, you don’t want him looking into your eyes.”

This went on for another half-hour. Every angle was covered, every nuance of Wang’s possible behaviour anticipated and thought through. Then Joe settled the bill and headed back to his hotel for an early night. The next morning he was at my apartment by eight and we travelled north to scout the immediate area around the language school. Feeling somewhat ridiculous, I practised cycling around while talking to Joe on the phone, using an earpiece and a microphone clipped to my shirt. By midday, I knew every bus stop, restaurant and traffic light within a two-block radius. That said, Haidian is the university district in Beijing and I did not feel that I knew the rest of the area particularly well. Having lived in the city for just a few months, I was still frequently spun round by the grid system of seemingly identical streets; there are very few landmarks in Beijing, no hills, nothing to give you a bearing. My worry was that Wang would vanish in a section of the city that I simply did not know or recognize. There were times when every corner in the capital looked the same. How would I then be able to give Wang’s location to Joe, who might be five or six blocks away in a cab?

As things turned out, we got lucky. At 4:45 p.m. on the Wednesday, I leaned my bicycle against the exterior wall of the Agosto and dialled Joe’s mobile. We were both using clean phones purchased the previous day. He was fifty metres away, on the opposite side of the street, sitting on a metal railing with a street map of Beijing open on his lap.

“You look like a tourist,” I told him.

“And you look like a sad middle-aged man who can’t afford to buy a decent bicycle.”

It was a grey, smoggy day and there was plenty of traffic between us. When Wang came out, he would be unlikely to spot Joe through what amounted to a permanent, moving screen of dust and cars. The cab driver was waiting on the next corner, reckoning it was his lucky day, because Joe had picked him from five different drivers that he’d spoken to at the rank outside his hotel and handed him the equivalent of a hundred and fifty dollars to be his chauffeur-on-call all day. At about five to five, a gorgeous Chinese girl wearing a knee-length
qipao
walked past me and Joe made a joke about giving me the rest of the day off to follow her. I was grateful for his easy humour because it cut through the tension of the long wait. I was ashamed by how edgy I was feeling; at this early stage, to avoid drawing attention to myself, I had my phone in my hand and the hard plastic casing was sticky and damp against my ear.

“Not long now,” Joe said. “Try to look as though you’re waiting for your girlfriend. A lot of washed-up European perverts get lucky at foreign-language schools.”

I looked across the street and Joe was smiling at me, looking extraordinarily relaxed; he’d done this sort of thing dozens of times before. Just then, the first of the students started trickling out of the entrance and he said “Here we go” in a way that made my pulse kick. About five of them hung around on the pavement in front of me, all Caucasians in their late twenties, and they were soon joined by a flood of others. This went on for about ten minutes until I was lost in a thick swarm of foreigners.