This chogie was an illegal.
“I have told you. I don’t usually carry any form of identification with me.”
“Not even a credit card?”
“My name is Wang Kaixuan, I am a professor of economics at the university here in Hong Kong. Please telephone the department switchboard if you feel uncertain. On a Wednesday morning my colleagues are usually at their desks by eight o’clock. I live at 71 Hoi Wang Road, Yau Ma Tei, apartment number 19. I can understand that the Black Watch regiment has an important job to do in these difficult months but I have lived in Hong Kong ever since I was a child.”
Anderson unclipped his radio. It would only take ten seconds to call in the sighting. He seemed to have no other option. This guy was a conman, using tactics of questions and bluster to throw him off the scent. Leung’s unit could be down in a police patrol boat before seven o’clock. Let them sort it out.
“Nine, this is One Zero, over.”
Wang now had a choice to make: sustain the lie, and allow the soldier to haul him in front of Immigration, which carried the risk of immediate deportation back to China, or make a move for the radio, engendering a physical confrontation with a Scotsman half his age and almost twice his height. In the circumstances, it felt like no choice at all.
He had knocked the radio out of Anderson’s hand before the soldier had time to react. As it spun into the sand Anderson swore and heard Wang say, “I am sorry, I am sorry,” as he stepped away. Something in this surrendering, apologetic gesture briefly convinced him not to strike back. For some time the two men stared at one another without speaking until a crackled voice in the sand said: “One Zero, this is Nine. Go ahead, over,” and it became a case of who would blink first. Anderson bent down, keeping his eyes on Wang all the time, and retrieved the radio as if picking up a revolver from the ground. Wang looked at the barrel of Anderson’s rifle and began to speak.
“Please, sir, do not answer that radio. All I am asking is that you listen to me. I am sorry for what I did. Tell them it was a mistake. I beg you to tell them you have resolved your problem. Of course I am not who I say I am. I can see that you are an intelligent person and that you have worked this out. But I am asking you to deal with me correctly. I am not a normal person who swims across the inlet in the middle of the night. I am not an immigrant looking for a job. I do not want citizenship or refugee status or anything more or less than the attention of the British governor in Hong Kong. I am carrying with me information of vital importance to Western governments. That is all that I can tell you. So please, sir, do not answer that radio.”
“I have to answer.” Anderson was surprised to hear a note of conciliation in his voice. The encounter had taken on a surreal quality. How many Chinese mainlanders pitched up on a beach at 6 a.m. talking about David Rose at the Hook in fluent, near-accentless English? And how many of them claimed to have political intelligence that required a meeting with Governor Chris Patten?
“What kind of information?” he asked, amazed that he had not already jammed Wang’s wrists into a set of PlastiCuffs and marched him up the beach. Again the voice said, “One Zero, this is Nine. Please go ahead, over,” and Anderson looked back across the water at the pale contours of China, wondering what the hell to do. A fishing boat was edging out into the bay. Wang then turned his head to stare directly into Anderson’s eyes. He wanted to convey the full weight of responsibility which now befell him.
“I have information about a very senior figure in Beijing,” he said. “I have information about a possible high- level defection from the Chinese government.”
3
Joe Lennox left Jardine House at seven o’clock that evening, nodded discreetly at a French investment banker as he sank two vodka and tonics at the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Oriental, hailed a cab on Connaught Road, made his way through the rush-hour traffic heading west into the Mid-Levels and walked through the door of Rico’s at precisely 8:01 p.m. It was a gift. He was always on time.
I was sitting towards the back of the restaurant drinking a Tsingtao and reading a syndicated article in the South China Morning Post about the prospect of a Labour victory in the forthcoming UK elections. A ginger-haired Canadian woman at the next table was eating crayfish and throwing out dirty looks because of the cigarette I was smoking. When she coughed and waved her hand in front of her face once too often, I stubbed it out. The air conditioning was on high and it felt as though everyone in the room was shivering.
Joe looked the way Joe always looked in those days: fit and undiminished, his characteristically inscrutable expression becoming more animated as he found my eyes across the room. At first glance, I suppose he was no different from any other decent-looking Jardine Johnnie in a Welsh amp; Jeffries suit, the sort who moves millions every day at Fleming’s and Merrill Lynch. That, I suppose, was the whole point about Joe Lennox. That was the reason they picked him.
“Cold in here,” he said, but he took his jacket off when he sat down. “What are you reading?”
I told him and he ventured a mildly critical opinion of the columnist-a former Tory cabinet minister-who had written the piece. (The next day I went through some cuttings and saw that the same grandee had been responsible for a couple of Patten-savaging articles in the British press, which probably explained Joe’s antagonism.) He ordered a Tsingtao for himself and watched as the Canadian woman put her knife and fork together after finishing the crayfish.
“Been here long?” he asked.
“About ten minutes.”
He was wearing a dark blue shirt and his forearms were tanned from walking in the New Territories with Isabella the previous weekend. He took out a packet of cigarettes and leaned towards the Canadian to ask if she would mind if he smoked. She seemed so taken aback by this basic display of courtesy that she nodded her assent without a moment’s hesitation, then eyebrowed me as if I had been taught a valuable lesson in charm. I smiled and closed the Post.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“You too.”
By this point we had been friends for the best part of a year, although it felt like longer. Living overseas can have that effect; you spend so much time socializing with a relatively small group of people that relationships intensify in a way that is unusual and not always healthy. Nevertheless, the experience of getting to know Joe had been one of the highlights of my brief stay in Hong Kong, where I had been living and working since the autumn of 1994. In the early days I was never certain of the extent to which that affection was reciprocated. Joe was an intensely loyal friend, amusing and intelligent company, but he was often withdrawn and emotionally unreadable, with a habit-doubtless related to the nature of his profession-of keeping people at arm’s length.
To explain how we met. In 1992 I was reporting on the siege of Sarajevo when I was approached at a press conference by a female SIS officer working undercover at the UN. Most foreign journalists, at one time or another, are sounded out as potential sources by the intelligence services. Some make a song and dance about the importance of maintaining their journalistic integrity; the rest of us enjoy the fact that a tax-free grand pops up in our bank account every month, courtesy of the bean-counters at Vauxhall Cross. Our Woman in Sarajevo took me to a quiet room at the airport and, over a glass or two of counterfeit-label Irish whiskey, acquired me as a support agent. Over the next couple of years, in Bosnia, Kigali and Sri Lanka, I was contacted by SIS and encouraged to pass on any information about the local scene that I deemed useful to the smooth running of our green and pleasant land. Only very occasionally did I have cause to regret the relationship.
Joe Lennox left school-expensive, boarding-in the summer of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He was not an exceptional student, at least by the standards of the school, but left with three good A-levels (in French, Spanish and history), a place at Oxford and a private vow never to submit any children of his own to the peculiar eccentricities of the English private-school system. Contemporaries remember him as a quiet, popular teenager who worked reasonably hard and kept a low profile, largely, I suspect, because Joe’s parents never lost an opportunity to remind their son of the “enormous financial sacrifices” they had made to send him away in the first place.
