nobody’s fault but his own if he occasionally found the demands of the secret life overwhelming. The last thing Joe Lennox ever wanted was for people to feel sorry for him. “Everything about her was intoxicating to me,” he said, trying to return to the original subject. “Every day she said or did something that took my breath away. We were connected.” He stopped momentarily, as if trying to remember something. “There are some lines in T. S. Eliot. ‘We think the same thoughts without need of speech. And babble the same speech without need of meaning.’ Does that make sense? When I think back to it, there was a kind of perfect relaxation between us, an effortless timing. It’s very hard to explain. And I knew that I would never meet anybody who made me feel that way again.” He gestured at the walls of the kitchen in the Brook Green flat, as if they contained actual physical evidence of this theory. “So far that’s proved true,” he said.
“I guess what interests me is the timing,” I said. “You had the meeting with Waterfield about a month before the handover, right? Isabella wasn’t planning to leave Hong Kong. She had the job with the French television company, but there was no risk of her going to Paris or elsewhere. You were living together, you were getting on. Why the hurry?”
Joe picked up on the subtext of the question. “What’s relevant about the job?” he asked. “What are you getting at?”
I hesitated, because once again I was venturing into treacherous waters. Both of us reached for a packet of cigarettes that Joe had placed on the table in front of him. He got there first, offered one to me, and repeated the question.
“What do you mean?”
I poured the Guinness into a pint glass and waited for it to settle. “My theory about marriage is this,” I said.
Joe shuffled back in his chair, folded his arms and smiled. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
I struggled on. “I think part of the reason why men finally decide to cash in their chips and settle down, apart from love and convention and pressure, is proprietorial.”
“Proprietorial in what sense?” He was frowning.
“In the sense that you want to take your girlfriend off the market. You want to make sure, once and for all, that nobody else can fuck her.”
This produced a deservedly contemptuous laugh. “Are you serious? Ownership? Isn’t that a bit passe, Will?” Then Joe saw my expression and realized what I was getting at.
“I suppose I am serious.” I looked at the clean white stripe at the head of my Guinness and risked it. “It always struck me that you must have been worried about Miles, even if it was only in an intuitive way. Deep in your heart, you must have known that your relationship with Isabella was doomed.”
20
This is how rumours get around, on a small island, among spies.
David Waterfield held a meeting with Kenneth Lenan in his office in the House of a Thousand Arseholes five days after talking with Joe in the Mongkok bird market. Lenan had been in Thailand on a week-long holiday and was sporting one of his characteristically deep suntans. Waterfield was running a light tropical fever and looked as though he needed to spend three days in bed.
“So we not only have eight thousand journalists showing up on June the 30th, Prince Charles, the all-new, all-smiling British Prime Minister, the US Secretary of State, the right-on, Right Honourable Mr. Robin Cook, most of the outgoing Tory cabinet, half of the Chinese Politburo and probably Sir Cliff Richard as well. We now have the added problem that RUN wants to propose to his bloody girlfriend.”
“At the handover ceremony?” Lenan asked.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”
Lenan didn’t smile much but he smiled at that one. “He wants her to know he’s a NOC?”
“Absolutely.”
Lenan frowned. “He wants her to know that for the past two years he’s been lying to her morning, noon and night?”
“That would appear to be the scenario, yes.” In the corridor outside Waterfield’s office, one of the secretaries sneezed. “Joe and I had a chat in Mongkok. He actually said he wanted the Office’s help in making it happen.”
“Our help?”
“Mmmm.” Waterfield began coughing and spat something into his handkerchief. “Not exactly sure what he meant by that.” He looked out across Victoria Harbour, following the progress of a distant junk. “Does he want us to tell her we made him do it? That he was perfectly happy in the shipping business until SIS came along?” The joke went nowhere so he became more serious. “This is a tough life we have chosen, Kenneth. Hard on marriages. Even harder when you bring children into the frame. You’ve been sensible. Kept yourself unattached. I just hope to God Joe knows what he’s doing.”
Forty-eight hours later Lenan had dinner with Miles Coolidge in a quiet corner of his favourite Indian restaurant in Hong Kong, situated a few blocks south of Kowloon Park on the third floor of the Ashley Centre. Both men had ordered chicken dhansak and several plates of unnecessary vegetable dishes. Above their heads, an ageing air-conditioning unit hummed, threatening to drip water onto the carpet. Towards ten o’clock, when most of their fellow diners had left for the evening, Miles ordered a bowl of ice cream and instigated a conversation about TYPHOON.
“Any word from your buddy?”
“Back in Urumqi,” Lenan replied flatly. “Classes begin on Monday morning.”
“And there were no problems? Nobody asked where he’d been to?”
SIS had developed a support agent in Urumqi, a salesman with a British passport who worked for a large German car manufacturer. Codenamed TRABANT, he was initially the first point of contact between Wang and Lenan, and would in due course be replaced by Lenan himself.
“No. Nobody asked. He told them he’d been on holiday in Guangdong and that was that.”
Miles was halfway through a glass of iced Sprite. It was an idiosyncrasy of his relationship with Lenan that he rarely drank alcohol in his presence. “This whole thing has happened pretty fast,” he said.
Lenan reacted to the doubt implicit in Miles’s comment by taking his napkin off his lap and balling it up on the table. “Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s still not clear to some of my guys back home, even after everything that’s gone down, why he risked the swim.”
“Is it at least clear to you?”
Miles rotated the Sprite on the tablecloth and lifted a shard of poppadom into his mouth. He had spun the lie so confidently to Joe in Samba’s and the Wan Chai nightclub partly because he had always possessed private doubts about Wang’s credentials. “Sure. It’s totally clear to me. But I had Josh Pinnegar on the phone for an hour and a half earlier this week wanting to go over every detail of the initial interrogations one more time, the transfer to Taiwan, the means by which you were able to get him back into Xinjiang. He told me there’s a feeling back home that this whole thing might have been played by the MSS.”
“A feeling?” Lenan became impatient. “What does that mean? Who is experiencing these feelings? Isn’t it a bit late in the day for all this? Is a plug about to be pulled, Miles?”
“Shit no. It’s just background. The professor’s a fifty-year-old guy, for Chrissakes. He could have drowned. You can see why people might ask questions.”
Kenneth Lenan panned his narrow, impassive eyes around the room, settling them on a distant waiter. As always, he looked enormously bored and enormously frustrated by the intellectual limitations of inferior men. “Well, the next time anybody brings the subject up, it’s quite simple. You tell them to see it from a Chinese perspective. If Beijing wanted to play one of their top agents into Hong Kong and drop him into the lap of British intelligence so
