“Thanks,” he mouthed as Miles bent down to pick up a fallen beer mat. Chris gave a second airing to his expression of infinite wisdom and understanding and whispered the word “Pleasure” back. After handshakes all round, Chris left a hundred-dollar tip on the table and disappeared into the crowds of Wan Chai.
“What got into him?” Miles was fingering the hundred-dollar note, as if weighing up whether or not to steal it. “I go to the bathroom, I come back, suddenly he wants to leave.”
“Search me.”
“Did you arrange for him to take off, Joe? Did you want me all to yourself?”
Joe smiled as the chorus of “With or Without You” played loud on the Samba’s sound system. They were sitting opposite one another at the table, drunk blondes from England singing at the bar. “If you play games with me,” he said, “I’m obliged to play games with you.”
Miles looked away. “Noisy in here,” he said. Their relationship was frequently a sparring match in which neither side was prepared to concede ground or admit to weakness. Isabella once compared them to a couple of alpha-male gorillas grappling it out in the eastern Congo, which may have been hard on Joe, but was certainly a compliment as far as Miles was concerned. Their mutual bravado concealed a deep affection, but it saddens me to look back and realize that any loyalty between them was strictly oneway traffic.
“So you wanted to know about Wang?” Miles said finally.
“Yes. I want to know about Wang.”
“Why didn’t you just ask Kenneth?”
“I did. And now I’m asking you.”
Samba’s is the sort of place where expats gather to drink in the evening before moving on to dinner or a nightclub in Lan Kwai Fong. It is always packed and always noisy and, with the music as a constant smothering background, there is little danger of conversations being overheard. Nevertheless Miles lowered his voice as he said, “I’m prepared to tell you anything you want.” The lime-green Hawaiian shirt glowed against the dull red upholstery of his chair, sculpting gym-toughened shoulders into slabs of power. Very few men in Hong Kong could have worn that shirt and not looked ridiculous. “You look a little pissed, Joe,” he said. “Everything OK?”
Joe hadn’t meant to look angry but he was aware that thirty-six hours without meaningful sleep, combined with an evening of beer and tequila, had scrambled his senses. He tried to appear more relaxed.
“What’s the situation between you and Kenneth? Why did you wait outside last night instead of coming in?”
Miles leaped forward at the accusation. “Why did I what?”
There were customers all around them, standing at the bar, between tables, sitting on chairs near the window. Joe warned Miles with his eyes and began to repeat the question. “I said, why did you-”
“I heard what you said. Is that what you think? Is that what you think I’d do to you?”
“That’s what it looked like.” Joe ordered two more beers from a passing waitress and felt a tremor of guilt for doubting Miles’s story. Then he remembered that he was speaking to one of the colony’s most accomplished liars, a man whose characteristic response when cornered was to become confrontational and aggressive. “Is that not what happened?”
“No, it’s not.” Miles shot back the reply with apparent disbelief. “What happened is that you left because it was three o’clock in the morning and Kenneth thought you looked wiped out. I was on my way over and must have missed you by less than five minutes.”
“Why didn’t Kenneth mention to me that you were coming over?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know? Isn’t that something you should be asking him?”
At the next table a Chinese girl turned round and scowled at them, as if to make it clear that their argument was proving detrimental to her enjoyment of the evening. Miles saw her off with a flare-eyed stare.
“What time did you leave Isabella?” Joe was determined to check every inch of Miles’s story.
“I have no idea. I got a call around midnight saying Wang was using one of our houses. I told her I had to get going and left her in Club 64.”
“You left my girlfriend on her own in Club 64?”
Miles shook his head. “Oh come on, Joe. She’s a big girl. Why do British guys always act like that around women?”
“Act like what?”
“Like the fucking knight in shining fucking armour. She’s a tough lady. She can take care of herself.”
“At around midnight?” Joe repeated.
“Sure. At around midnight.”
Was there a slight hesitation here, a gap in the story?
“And you’re saying that your people had already heard of Wang Kaixuan?”
Miles swallowed a mouthful of Michelob and emerged with a look of disgust on his face. “ ‘My people?’ Are you OK, Joe? Aren’t we supposed to be fighting the same war? Aren’t we supposed to be working on the same side?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Joe wondered whether to back off. They were both drunk, both tired, both ambitious, fractious spies talking around a subject which would be better discussed in the sober light of a new day. “It means I’m confused,” he said. “It means I’ve not been given the full picture…”
“So you’ve spent most of your day moping around feeling sorry for yourself, wondering whether Kenneth and Miles, and probably David, too, have got their own little conspiracy going that you aren’t a part of?”
Joe didn’t bother denying this. “The thought had occurred to me.”
“Oh come on.” Miles raised his hands in the air, finally pushed too far. It looked for a moment as though he might leave.
“It surprises you that I would ask that?” Joe offered him a cigarette. “You don’t think there’s anything strange in what’s happened over the last twenty-four hours?”
“Frankly, no.” Miles’s eyes were on the Chinese girl’s back and the worst of his anger seemed to have passed. “Look. Wang draws a lot of water on the mainland. He was involved in an operation in Beijing three years ago which exposed two of our agents. Led to deportations. That’s how we already knew him.”
Joe frowned. “What kind of operation?”
“The kind I’m not allowed to talk about.”
When a spook says that to another spook, you know you’re in trouble.
“So all anyone has to do is hear Wang’s voice on a safe-house microphone and they immediately know it’s him?”
It was the obvious flaw in Miles’s version of events, but the American had it covered.
“We got lucky,” he said.
“How?”
“You know Steve Mackay?”
Joe knew Steve Mackay. “Yes.”
“He was involved in what happened in Beijing. Got a routine call from Kenneth yesterday asking if it was cool for you guys to use Yuk Choi Road. Said they had a Xinjiang walk-in who’d rafted over from Shenzhen. Bill asked for a description, got a hold of the audio, called me in when he put two and two together.”
“Hence Kenneth’s presence this morning.”
“Hence.” Miles made a face at the word. “He was your man, Joe, he was your walk-in. You had a duty to share.”
Joe leaned back and caught the eye of a girl at the bar. She smiled through the crush of bodies, dark, interested eyes. For some reason “With or Without You” was playing a second time on the sound system and he felt as though he were trapped in a loop of persistent evasions.
“What happened when you got there?”
“Like Kenneth told you. We already knew who he was and took him back up to the border.”
Joe seized on this. “You’ve spoken to Kenneth about me today?”
“Sure.” Miles took a drag on his cigarette, like a tell in poker. “You think that’s odd?”
“I don’t think it’s normal.” Miles produced a look of bewilderment which invited Joe to continue. “Try to see it from my perspective. I get to the apartment this morning, Lee acts like I’m a priest about to walk in on an orgy. It
