Typhoon (2008) Read online

  Joe allowed a silence to develop in which he gathered his thoughts. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The streets outside were quiet now and he heard only the occasional barking of a neighbourhood dog, the distant sound of a police siren. So much information had been spilled over the course of the interview that he was finding it difficult to pick his way through it. Joe knew that it was his job to report the uprising in Yining, and the extent of separatist fervour across Xinjiang was certainly valuable intelligence. But he could not piece together Wang’s role in the struggle and felt that there were holes in his story. And what of the human rights issues? To Joe’s shame, he was surprised by how little impact the news of the torture had had on him. The suffering of these jailed men was somehow an inchoate thing, a nebulous concept around which he could not assemble sympathy. Only when Wang had spoken of the man beating his head against the radiator had he felt even the faintest tremor of discomfort. What was wrong with him? Had he grown immune to human suffering already? Had three years in SIS turned him into a machine? How was it possible to sit in a room with a man like Wang Kaixuan and not weep for the state of his country?

  There were two sudden bursts on the doorbell. Joe noticed that Wang did not flinch. After a short pause the bell was rung again, four times. The agreed signal. Either Lenan or Waterfield was waiting outside. Lee emerged from the bedroom, rubbed his eyes as if he had been asleep and picked up the intercom. Joe heard him say, “Yes, Mr. Lodge,” with an air of tense servility and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Joe left Wang in the sitting room and went into the hall.

  “Sorry to have taken so long.” Kenneth Lenan was wearing a white dress shirt tucked into formal black trousers, but no jacket and no bow tie. The function at Stonecutters appeared otherwise to have left no other visible impression upon him. He was neither drunk nor sober, neither particularly relaxed nor tense. He was the way that Kenneth Lenan always was. Unreadable. “Is everything OK?”

  “Everything’s fine. I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

  “You look tired, Joe. Why don’t I give you a break? We might give Mr. Wang a few hours’ sleep then tackle him first thing in the morning.”

  The act of standing up and walking out into the hall caused Joe to realize the extent of his own mental and physical exhaustion. Without thinking, he told Lenan that, yes, he would appreciate a few hours of sleep. Following him into the bedroom, he added that Isabella might be wondering why it had taken him more than five hours to fix a simple paperwork problem at Heppner’s, and that it would be wise to return home to protect his cover. This detail seemed to settle it.

  “Do you want me to run through what’s been said?” Joe asked, picking up his jacket on the way out.

  “In the morning,” Lenan replied. “Go home, grab a few hours’ sleep, be back here around eight. We’ll go through all of it then.”

  It only remained for Joe to bid Wang farewell. Returning to the sitting room, he explained that a second official from Government House, a Mr. Lodge, would be staying at the apartment overnight and that Wang could now rest until morning. The interview was concluded. They would see one another again in a few hours.

  “I thank you for listening,” Wang told him, standing and shaking Joe’s hand.

  It would be another eight years before the two men would meet again.

  12

  A GOOD WALK SPOILED

  Three months earlier, a little more than 8,000 miles away on a sun-kissed Virginian golf course, former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense William “Bill” Marston had stood over his Titleist Pro V1 and intoned a favourite golfing mantra.

  “The ball is my friend,” he whispered, “the ball is my friend,” and as he shook out his fattened hips and gripped the shaft of his gleaming five iron, Marston pictured the arc of the shot—just as he had been taught to do by the Turnberry professional who had charged him more than $75 an hour on a summer vacation to Scotland three years earlier—and truly believed, in the depths of his reactionary soul, that he was going to land the ball on the green.

  He steadied his head. He drew back the club. He was one up with one to play. The five iron whistled through the warm spring air and connected with the Titleist in a way that felt powerful and true, but on this occasion, as on so many others throughout the course of his long, frustrating golfing life, the ball was not Bill Marston’s friend, the ball was not soaring gracefully towards the stiff red flag at the crown of the seventeenth green; the ball was his enemy, hooking violently towards the trees at the edge of the vast Raspberry Falls golf course and ending its days approximately 120 metres away in a camouflage of earth and leaves from which it would never be returned.

  “Fuck it,” Marston spat, but managed to maintain his composure in the presence of his personal assistant, the Minnesota-born Sally-Ann McNeil who, for reasons which she was never properly able to explain, had been impelled to caddy for her boss. Sally-Ann, who was twenty-eight and college-educated, was somewhat wary of William “Bill” Marston. Nevertheless, when he lost his temper like this, she knew exactly what to say.

  “Oh that’s so unfair, sir.” The boss was already telling her to pick him out another ball and indicating to his opponent that he would be happy to drop a shot.

  “You sure about that, Bill?” CIA deputy director Richard Jenson had sliced his own drive into the deep rough on the opposite side of the fairway. He was wearing moleskin plus-fours and preparing to attack the green. “You sure you don’t just wanna concede and call it all-square going up eighteen?”

  “I’m sure.” Marston’s reply was so quiet that even Sally-Ann had difficulty making it out. Handing him a replacement Titleist—his fourth of the round—she took a step backwards, caught the eye of Jenson’s caddy, Josh, who was thirtysomething and tanned and kept looking at her, and shuddered as the man from Langley struck a faultless six iron slap-bang into the middle of the green.

  “Great shot, Dick,” Marston shouted out, muttering “Asshole” under his breath as soon as he had turned round. Sally-Ann struggled to disguise a smile. It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch at the clubhouse was booked for two. Standing over the ball, Marston glanced quickly at his PA, as if the sight of a beautiful woman might calm him in his hour of need. Then he drew back the graphite shaft a second time and prayed for a golfing miracle.

  It was the worst kind of shot. The Titleist lifted itself no more than three inches from the ground before shooting in a plumb-line across the immaculate Virginia fairway for about eighty metres, finally bobbling to rest at the edge of the green. Marston sniffed the air.

  “I can still take a five,” he muttered. “Dick can three-putt,” offering just a glimpse of his ferocious competitive spirit. You didn’t get to be one of Reagan’s favourite sons, you didn’t get to be chairman and director of Macklinson Corporation, you didn’t get to sit on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee by quitting when the going gets tough. Bill Marston was a winner. Bill Marston was a fighter. Bill Marston let his five iron drop to the ground so that Sally-Ann could pick it up.

  He had been playing most of the round in a bad mood. In the trunk of his armour-plated Mercedes, secured under lock and key and watched over by a 250-pound former Navy SEAL chauffeur, was a leaked, top-secret copy of the Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the People’s Republic of China—now commonly referred to as the Cox Report. Cox was a classified document until a few years ago and, strictly speaking, Marston shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. However, a disgruntled staffer in the House of Representatives had suggested to one of Marston’s senior employees that he might be able to obtain a draft copy in return for a position as a Macklinson executive in Berlin earning low six-figures after tax. Marston had agreed to the deal and had spent most of the previous evening reading the report at his home in Georgetown. The process had left him incensed to the point of insomnia.

  These were the edited highlights, digested over
a bowl of his wife’s notoriously insipid clam chowder:

  The People’s Republic of China (hereafter the PRC) has stolen classified design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons. These thefts of nuclear secrets from our national weapons laboratories have enabled the PRC to design, develop, and successfully test modern strategic nuclear weapons sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

  “Fuckers,” Marston muttered.

  The stolen information includes classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal. The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the “neutron bomb”) which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.

  “Jesus.”

  The Select Committee judges that the PRC will exploit elements of the stolen design information on the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons. The PRC has three mobile ICBM programs currently underway, all of which will be able to strike the United States.

  Since the joyful, Cold War-ending events of 1991, Bill Marston had been looking around for a new global enemy. Finally he had found one.

  Jenson won the seventeenth hole with a nerveless putt from eight feet, but Marston produced a second shot onto the eighteenth green which effectively won the match when his opponent failed to escape a fairway bunker at the third attempt. Afterwards, while Josh explained to Sally-Ann that he worked in an office “about forty feet” from CIA director John Deutch and wondered if she was by any chance free for dinner, the two old friends showered and met at the bar for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda. After polite exchanges with several fellow club members they got down to business.

  “What are you guys working on with China?” Marston enquired.

  “You mean Cox?” The Deputy Director was initially reluctant to play Marston’s game. “You know I can’t talk about that, Bill.”

  As far as Marston was concerned, this was just standard-issue bluff. One more glass of Highland Park, a decent bottle of Californian Merlot over lunch and Jenson would be more inclined to talk.

  “What if I told you I’d heard some things on the grapevine?”

  “What kind of things?”

  “That one of our most prestigious satellite communications companies provided some much-needed technical assistance on rocket propulsion to the Chinese without obtaining the correct licences from the federal government. That this prestigious satellite communications company is now facing a multi-million dollar fine for consorting with the enemy.”

  It was the one part of the Cox Report that Marston had enjoyed. While thousands of Chinese spies had been busy ripping off American nuclear secrets for the best part of two decades, Canyon Enterprises, one of Macklinson’s fiercest rivals in the field of satellite communications, had colluded with the PRC on sensitive technologies. Play their cards right and Macklinson stood to benefit from Canyon’s fall from grace, scooping up defence, electronics and system integration businesses worth billions of dollars.

  “That story is already in the public domain, right?” Jenson said. “I can understand why you might be interested.”

  A waiter who had worked in the clubhouse for almost seventeen years, and whose name Marston had never successfully committed to memory, approached the two men and ushered them through to the dining room. They ordered seafood cocktails and broiled Porter house steaks and the conversation continued.

  “What if I also told you that I’d heard about the extent of Chinese infiltration of our nuclear fraternity?” Jenson was looking through the wine list. “What if I knew that thanks to American tax dollars and American scientific breakthroughs and American hard work, Beijing now has dozens of fully functioning, effectively US-made ICBMs pointed at New York, Washington and Los Angeles?”

  “Well then I’d say that nothing has changed. I’d say that Bill Marston still has great sources of information.”

  “I’m pissed, Dick.” Marston hissed the words into a flower arrangement in the centre of the table. He had a history of heart trouble and had to watch himself when he became angry. “These guys have infiltrated our business environments, our scientific communities, our colleges. They’re selling American military technology to rogue states, to regimes hostile to the United States. China has sold guidance components and telemetry equipment to the Iranians, for Christ’s sakes. They’re proliferating to the Syrians, North Korea, fuckin’ Gaddafi. Are you guys on top of this? What’s happening at Langley these days? Ever since Clinton came in, everything’s gotten so goddam soft.”

  “We’re on top of it,” Jenson assured him, though this was far from what he believed. He wanted to hit the gooks just as much as Marston did, but his hands were tied. He resorted to a flimsy soundbite. “Sure, we’ve been the victims of a highly successful campaign of industrial and political espionage, but let me assure you that the United States still maintains an overwhelming military and commercial advantage over the People’s Republic-“

  “I don’t give a shit about that. I know we can still kick their ass in a straight fight. I just don’t like the way they do business. I don’t like the way highly qualified Macklinson executives come to me every day complaining about the impossibility of making a decent buck in Beijing. My people in China have to get to know their clients’ families, remember birthdays, take their wives to health clubs. What are we? A fucking charity? Off the record, Dick, Macklinson is paying for six Chinese kids to go to Stanford. You have any idea what that costs? And just so some board of directors in Wuhan will guarantee the legitimacy of a telecoms contract. And these guys have the nerve to steal our technology at the same time. Who the hell do they think they are? You know, not so long ago American soldiers were fighting in Manchuria trying to stop the entire region speaking Japanese.” Jenson felt the historical argument was somewhat strained. “That’s right. American boys putting their lives on the line for China’s future. And this is how they repay us.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  Marston paused. His glass from the clubhouse bar was a pale yellow meltdown of ice and whisky.

  “What I’m suggesting is an idea.” He had lowered his voice. Jenson was obliged to push forward in his chair and felt a muscle twitch in his lower back. “Off the books, if it has to be. A clandestine operation looking into ways of destabilizing Beijing. Just the same way we gave the Poles a little push. Just the same way the Agency funded Walesa and Havel. Now I know you guys already have operations out there, but this would be in conjunction with Macklinson, using our infrastructure and our people on the ground in China. Come up with something and we’ll help you.” Jenson produced a low, enigmatic whistle. “Communism is a dying art, Dick, and communist China has been around too long. You’ve seen what happened in the Soviet bloc. All we’re lookin’ at is giving these guys a helping hand. Call it a push to a delayed domino effect. And when Beijing falls, I want America there picking up the pieces.”

  13

  THE DOUBLE

  When Joe returned home he found Isabella asleep, a white cotton sheet pushed down below her feet, her face turned towards the bedroom wall so that in the darkness he could make out the lovely cello curvature of her back and legs. He drank a small glass of single malt in their cluttered kitchen, showered in a stuttering stream of vaguely sulphurous Hong Kong water and slipped into bed beside her. He wanted to wake her with kisses that laddered down her spine, to encourage her body to turn towards his, to place his hand in the blissful envelope created by her closed thighs, but he could not do so for fear that she would wake up, look at the clock and ask where he had been, ask why it had taken him so long to resolve a simple problem at Heppner’s, and why it was now almost four o’clock in the morning when he had left the restaurant before ten? Best just to set his alarm for six and to slip out before the questions started. Best just to leave her a note.

  Despite his exhaustion, Joe
found it difficult to sleep. Unable to shut down his mind he lay motionless on his back as the clock on the bedside table thrummed towards five, turning over the details of the long conversation with Wang and plotting the possible trajectory of their imminent second meeting. Shortly before dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which he was woken by dreams of prisons and pliers and Urumqi. At six he gave up on sleep, rolled out of bed, kissed Isabella gently on the shoulder and went into the kitchen. From the fridge he removed a mango, some bananas and a pineapple and prepared a fruit salad for when she woke up. He then laid out a breakfast tray, wrote her a short note, placed a sheet around her body to keep her warm in the cool air of the morning, dressed and slipped outside in search of a cab.

  Twenty minutes later he boarded a half-empty Star ferry which chugged across Victoria Harbour like a faithful dog. Junks and cargo ships assumed silhouettes in the gradually improving light. Joe stood at the stern railings like a departing dignitary, looking back at the coat-hanger lights of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, at the fading neon outlines of Central and Causeway Bay, at the great massed lump of the Peak behind them. As the sun grew brighter he picked out workmen buzzing in the bamboo scaffolding of the Convention and Exhibition Centre, working day and night to finish the building before the handover. Inside the ferry, businessmen and cleaning ladies and ageing shopkeepers, most of whom had known the same view every morning of their working lives, snoozed on cramped plastic chairs, undisturbed by the day’s first aeroplanes which roared in low overhead.

  On the Kowloon side Joe shuffled out of the terminal through a crush of rush-hour workers and walked east along Salisbury Road. There was still an hour to go before he was expected at the safe house and he gave in to a sudden, imperial urge to eat breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. A waiter in late middle age guided him through the marble splendour of the ancient lobby and found him a quiet table with a view onto the bustling streets outside. Joe ordered eggs Benedict and orange juice and read the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover while thinking of Isabella eating breakfast alone in their apartment. Towards eight o’clock he paid the bill, which came to almost HK$300, and took a cab to within a block of Yuk Choi Road.