was as if he’d been instructed to keep me in the dark.”
“That’s the nature of the business we’re in.” Miles illustrated his point with hard, staccato chops of his hand, as if stating the obvious to a junior officer still learning the ropes. “That’s how Lee has been trained to operate. When a Chinese double gets turned back to the mainland, the less people that know about it, the better. Right?”
“So I can’t be trusted with that information? I spend three hours interviewing this guy, uncover intel about riots in Yining, revolutionary fervour across north-west China, as well as what appear to be astonishing human rights abuses in Xinjiang prisons, but his whereabouts are to remain a complete mystery to me.”
Miles was about to say “What mystery?” when two things happened. First, the Chinese girl stood up, along with the other four members of her table, and left the bar. Second, a troupe of five stewardesses passed her on their way into Samba’s wearing the bright red uniforms of Virgin Airways. It was Christmas Day for Miles Coolidge. He forgot all about the Wang situation and produced a low, involuntary hum like the mating call of a sperm whale.
“Sweet Mary mother of all that is good and sacred. Look at what we have here.”
Joe could follow their progress in a mirror hung on the opposite wall, a moving tapestry of hair and make-up laughing all the way to the bar. He watched as Miles’s tanned, shaved head rotated through a hundred and eighty degrees.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Oh come on.” The American was already on his feet. “Isabella’s all tucked up in bed. Let’s go get some before it gets cold.”
But Joe was lucky. As Miles walked towards the bar, taking with him all hope of their conversation continuing, the stewardesses were enveloped in a ring of freshly showered pilots and cabin crew, never to be seen again. Miles turned on his heels.
“Fuckers,” he said, returning to his seat. “Fuckers.”
15
They lasted another ten minutes before Miles announced that he wanted to go “someplace else.” Joe should have been wise to the implication-it was one o’clock in the morning, after all-but he allowed Miles to lead him through the stifling, humid streets to a basement nightclub on Luard Road where there was a bouncer on the door, a dimly lit staircase and no entry fee. In Wan Chai, that usually meant only one thing: the club would be full of hookers.
“Been here before?” Joe asked as he pushed through a warped double door at the foot of the stairs to be hit by a wall of cigarette smoke and house music. Miles said, “Coupla’ times,” and followed close behind him. To their left was a darkened, open-plan seating area where groups of expat men, varying in age from perhaps eighteen up to sixty-five, sat at tables talking to girls from the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. The bar was directly ahead of them, a high-countered rectangle surrounded on all sides by customers and girls on stools. A sweat-oozing dance floor heaved to their right. Miles walked past Joe, found a table in the far corner of the club and brought over two vodka and tonics.
“Why not Neptune’s? Why not Big Apple?” Joe asked, tilting the question towards sarcasm. Big Apple and Neptune’s were Miles’s favoured knocking shops on the island, ports of call for a certain type of gweilo looking for easy sex after a night out in Hong Kong. Both were awash with women from South-east Asia who would accompany you home for less than the price of a three-course dinner at Rico’s. Joe had been to Neptune’s on several occasions and had hated everything about the experience, not least the barely disguised contempt the trafficked girls held for their cash-rich clientele. But sex for sale was part of everyday life in Hong Kong and Joe wasn’t the type to sit in judgment. If Miles wanted to pay an eighteen-year-old girl from Haiphong who spoke no English to spend the night with him at his apartment in the Mid-Levels, that was his problem.
“I’m not here to get laid, man,” Miles said, as if reading his mind. “I just like the atmosphere. It’s smaller than those other places, right? More intimate. You rather be someplace else?”
Joe knew that Miles had probably brought him to the club as a means of testing the boundaries of his fidelity to Isabella, but he was not about to give a drunk, randy, belligerent American the pleasure of his moral indignation.
“I really don’t care,” he said. “I just want to find out what happened to Wang.”
Miles rolled his eyes and curled a grin at a passing girl wearing a short pink skirt. “Jesus. Can’t you let that go? You fucked up, Joe. You thought Wang was going to make your career and you fell for it. It’s nobody’s fault but your own. Deal with it.”
It took a lot to trigger Joe Lennox’s temper, and this was as close as anyone had come in a long time. He looked across at the dance floor, at the unchosen girls dancing in solemn pairs, at a pot-bellied businessman draping his heavy, sweat-stained arms over the shoulders of a micro-skirted hooker, at a Thai girl laughing as she ground her arse into the crotch of a man whose face was a rictus of consternation, and wondered why the hell he spent so much time in the company of this craven spy whose behaviour was a constant affront to his sensibilities. Was it just a sense of professional responsibility which kept them together? Isabella seemed to like Miles; perhaps that had something to do with it. Or was it simply that Joe had always preferred the company of mavericks and nonconformists, if only because they offered an antidote to the mostly strait-laced sons and daughters of middle England around whom he had grown up?
“I don’t think I fucked up,” he replied, controlling his anger. “I just think you’re lying to me.”
Miles shook his head. “Jesus.” A girl in tottering heels approached their table and he waved her away as if she were little more than a fly in his face. Joe felt a thump of despair. “Let’s put this argument out of its misery, OK?” Miles took one of Joe’s cigarettes and moved his vodka to one side of the table, as if clearing space in which he could make his point. “I’ve listened to last night’s tapes. I’ve listened to what Wang told you. And none of it is news to us. None of it is in the slightest bit of any fucking interest whatsoever.”
Joe caught a wave of garlic breath and pitched away, his eyes going back to the dance floor. He thought of Isabella asleep in bed and wanted to be beside her, entwined in her, away from this. It occurred to him that he had no idea how she had spent her day and this depressed him. “None of it?” he said.
“None of it. The Agency has known about Yining since day one. Christ, we had informants who took part in the riots. Everybody knows what’s going on up there. I’m surprised Wang had the nerve to show up with such an old story.”
Joe had spent the afternoon in the House of a Thousand Arseholes shuttling around the SIS computer system looking for recent reports on Xinjiang. Suffice to say, the Brits had nothing on record about a February uprising in Yining. It was the extent of Joe’s distrust that he suspected Lenan of having wiped the files that morning.
“What about the torture?” he said. “What about the human rights abuses?”
“What about them? Last time I checked I didn’t work for Amnesty International.” Miles was scoping girls, barely seeming to listen to him. At a nearby table, two of them, possibly sisters, slid in next to an American with a thick beard and a deep Texan accent. The low boom of his voice carried to where Joe was sitting and he could hear the man asking if they wanted drinks. “Look, do you know about Baren?”
Joe shook his head.
“Baren is a township in Aktu, near Kashgar.” Miles turned back to the table and now adopted a more serious expression. He had a near-encyclopaedic memory and enjoyed reeling off chunks of history. “Back in April 1990, the Chinese police broke up a public prayer meeting outside some government offices in Baren. Accused the worshippers of inciting jihad, of getting funding from the Afghan muj. Caused a riot involving about two thousand local Muslims. The cops and the Public Security Bureau, probably the Bin Tuan as well, brought in helicopters, riot troops, shot about fifty of them, including the ones who were running away. Surely you know about this?” Joe ignored the effortless condescension. “Baren was just about the biggest ethnic separatist uprising in Xinjiang in the last seven years. Out of a Muslim community of ten thousand, every man between the age of thirteen and sixty was arrested in connection with what happened. That’s how serious the Chinese take the situation up there. Then you
