“Unless Miles didn’t know about Wang Bin.”
“Who’s Wang Bin?”
“Wang’s son.”
I stopped taking notes. At first, Sally-Ann didn’t seem to notice my surprise. “Maybe Lenan had been to Taiwan and found out what had happened to him,” she said. “When he told us over the conference phone it certainly sounded like it was fresh information.”
“What information? What the hell happened to Wang’s son?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Tell me, Sally.”
“Wang Bin was killed,” she said. “Shot by the Chinese PLA. During some riot in Xinjiang. I guess that was his justification for what he did. I guess that was Wang’s justification for everything.”
19
Do spies believe in God?
During one of our many conversations in the flat in Brook Green that Joe rented in 2004, he brought up the subject of religion. It was not something that I had ever expected to discuss with him, and his attitude took me by surprise.
“I’ve always believed in God,” he said. “I don’t really know why. How does something like that begin?”
Certainly not with his father. Peter Lennox was what might loosely be described as an agnostic moralist, a man of science whose experience with organized religion was limited to making occasional appearances at a wedding or funeral. On Christmas mornings, for example, he preferred to remain behind in the house to “watch the turkey” while the rest of his family went to church. At the same time, he maintained that he lived his life “by Christian principles,” a nebulous claim that very few people-Joe included-could be bothered to argue with. Joe’s mother, Catherine, was a more recognizable type, an old-fashioned, lapsed Anglican whose face was known to her local vicar. Though not ostentatiously spiritual, Catherine occasionally appeared at church fetes and, as a child, Joe vividly remembers sitting beside her at the start of an Easter Sunday service when a ladder appeared in her tights as she knelt down to pray.
At the age of eight, Joe was sent away to the same top-of-the-range preparatory school in Wiltshire where his father, his uncles and his paternal grandfather (as well as an heir to the throne of Nepal) had all been pupils at one time or another. It was a Christian school. There was a small private chapel on site and, every evening, shortly before packing the boys off to their windy dormitories, the headmaster would call for silence in the cavernous dining room and read from the Book of Common Prayer.
“I can still picture it,” Joe told me. “I can still hear his voice: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and the dangers of this night. What perils? What dangers? We were a hundred and sixty boys wearing Aertex shirts, miles from home, living in an old monastery in the middle of the English countryside. Who the hell was coming to get us?”
At thirteen Joe went on to a larger, though still all-male, public school where the students were obliged to attend a fifteen-minute church service every weekday morning, with a longer version on Sundays. By and large it was more of the same: long, humourless sermons, eight-verse hymns which never seemed to end, older boys flicking spit and hard stares across the nave. For most teenagers, such an experience would have put them off religion for life, but somehow Joe maintained his faith.
“But you don’t go to church,” I said to him. “I didn’t exactly see you down at St. John’s Cathedral every Sunday when we were living in Causeway Bay.”
He looked at me as though I was being naive. Joe would no more have wasted a Hong Kong Sunday in church than he would have broken cover.
“Why was that?” I asked. “Was Isabella an atheist?”
It was the first time I had mentioned her name for weeks. Joe looked down at the glass of wine he was drinking and ran his thumb along the stem.
“No. She wasn’t.” He stood up and walked away from the table, ostensibly to fetch me another can of Guinness, but doubtless as a means of preventing me from seeing the expression on his face. “She was Catholic, although I think probably we had a pretty similar attitude to religion. It wasn’t something that we talked about very much. Both of us hated the paraphernalia, the interference, that you get with religion, at least in its British incarnation. Wide-eyed vicars and half-empty pews. Bankrupt businessmen reading the lesson, trying to pass themselves off as pillars of the community. Going to church is at best a social occasion, isn’t it? A place where people can go and not feel lonely or devoid of hope.”
“Maybe,” I said, suspecting that this cynicism was a little forced. Then Joe surprised me again.
“When it came to Isabella,” he said, “I had this extraordinary feeling that she was a gift from God. That was the extent of the spell she cast over me.” I made to interrupt him but he looked at me with a fierce intensity. Both of us knew that what he was about to say was not something that a man like Joe might ordinarily disclose. “As our relationship developed, I felt that God was saying to me, ‘Here, this is the person that I want you to be with. This is the opportunity I am giving you to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Don’t mess it up.’ It was extraordinary. It was as if I had no choice.”
“And that’s why you wanted her to marry you?”
“Sure. That’s why I wanted her to marry me.”
So Joe went to Waterfield, because Waterfield was his mentor in Hong Kong, his priest and father figure. When he had first arrived in the colony, their relationship had even formed part of Joe’s cover. SIS created what is known as a Backstop, verifying a fiction that Waterfield had done National Service with one of Joe’s tutors at SOAS by doctoring a few military records and even airbrushing an old black-and-white photo from Sandhurst. He had therefore “looked him up” as a useful contact a few days after landing at Kai Tak and attended a dinner party at the Waterfield’s apartment where, for the benefit of any gossips or Chinese bugs, the two of them had engaged in a forty-minute conversation about Brian Lara and the difficulty of obtaining decent red wine in Asia. So it was not remarkable for both men to be seen together one Saturday afternoon at the bird market in Mongkok. Even if a Chinese spook had developed suspicions about Joe, he would have encountered an impenetrable wall of deep cover should he have chosen to investigate.
“You wanted to ask me about something.” Waterfield had brought his wife with him, but she was busy buying orchids on Flower Market Road.
“It’s about Isabella.”
“I see.”
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which SIS was a male-dominated culture among Waterfield’s generation. Talk of wives and girlfriends generally made them suspicious and bored. Women were like children in the era of Victorian parenting: to be seen and not heard.
“I think I’d like to ask her to marry me.”
“Really. Well, congratulations.”
They were walking side by side down a cramped alleyway that was lined with bird cages, the smarter ones fashioned from varnished bamboo. Rainwater from a recent storm dripped from corrugated-iron roofs and made a thin mud of the dirt and straw at their feet. If anybody had been attempting to record the conversation, the take quality would have been severely compromised by a perpetual, tuneless squawk of mynah birds and parakeets.
“Does that present any difficulties as far as the Office is concerned?”
More than a month had passed since Joe had interviewed Wang and he was still wary of putting his foot wrong. Waterfield glanced down at a table covered in sealed transparent bags and stopped walking.
“Crickets,” he said, prodding one of the bags so that the insects inside them leaped out of a camouflage of leaves and dried grass. “They feed them to the birds. With chopsticks.” Waterfield appeared to remember that Joe had asked him a question and looked up into his eyes. “It presents a difficulty, of course, only if you’re going to want to have everything out in the open.”
