that we all broke out the bubbly, they’d hardly risk putting him on a makeshift raft at three o’clock in the morning on the off-chance he might wash up on a beach in Dapeng Bay. Far more likely they’d give him papers to come across from Shenzhen and allow him to present himself as a walk-in.”
Miles’s customary mood in the presence of Lenan was not dissimilar to Joe’s. He felt generally inferior and second rate in his company, a consequence of the older man’s nerveless self-confidence. “You’re right, Kenneth,” he said, crunching another poppadom. “Of course you’re right.” He decided, right then and there, to go for a hand job at Lily’s after dinner. Miles always wanted sex when he was put under pressure; it was a way of reasserting his authority.
“What about Macklinson’s end of things?” Lenan asked. Miles’s pudding arrived, a bright red cocktail cherry perched on the summit of four enormous balls of vanilla ice cream. “Are they having doubts as well?”
“None,” Miles told him, though he had spoken to neither Michael Lambert nor Bill Marston for several days. “Nobody is having any doubts, Ken. Everything at Macklinson is under control. Shipments are being arranged, personnel prepared. All you have responsibility for is Professor Wang.”
Lenan shuddered, both at the explicit mention of Wang’s name and at Miles’s curt dismissal of his responsibilities. His involvement in TYPHOON was, of course, a closely guarded secret. Nobody on the British side knew that the CIA was, in effect, employing one of their best men on a subcontractual basis. Why was Lenan doing it? Why did he risk everything to go off-piste with Miles Coolidge? He was being paid, certainly, and may have believed that there would be long-term benefits in cosying up to the Cousins. But I think his desire to play a central role in TYPHOON was born chiefly out of frustration.
“Let me tell you something about the British mindset,” he had told Miles when the American had first suggested using British know-how and infrastructure to spirit Wang out of Hong Kong and to return him as an agent to Urumqi. “If I go to David Waterfield with what you’re proposing, the answer is going to be ‘No.’ The Office will want him back in Sha Tau Kok by sunset. Why? Because as a nation we’re small, risk averse. We lack the imagination to do anything that might actually change things. If there’s a reason not to do something, you can guarantee that the British will find it. Added to that is the small problem of the handover. Nobody wants to ruffle any Chinese feathers just at present.”
Miles had performed a quick calculation. As TYPHOON accelerated over the next few years, his own responsibilities would also quicken and multiply. Lenan would be a useful ally, both as an experienced hand and as a window onto secret British thinking. They were standing in the bedroom of the safe house where Joe, just a few hours earlier, had been exhaustively interrogating Wang. Right there and then, with a wild decisiveness born of instinct and pressure, Miles agreed to Lenan’s request “to keep SIS out of it” and to pay him as an asset of the CIA. For the next four years, $50,000 a month made its way into a Luxembourg bank account that Vauxhall Cross couldn’t have traced to one of their own if they’d spent fifty years looking. Lenan was therefore nominally answerable to Miles, although a fellow diner at the Indian restaurant, observing the manner and body language of both men, would have assumed that Coolidge was very much the junior partner.
“So I have something else I need to tell you, Ken.”
“You do? What’s that?”
“Our people need somebody on the mainland to co-ordinate things. A focal point. A leader. The task force we’re putting together is ultimately going to stretch to maybe twenty or thirty agents, the majority of whom are currently stationed all over the Far East. When Bill’s shipments start rolling in, somebody is going to have to pull all those disparate elements together.”
Lenan reacted as though Miles were being unnecessarily oblique. “You’re telling me that you’ve been promoted,” he said. “You’ll shortly be leaving Hong Kong for bigger and better things.”
It was characteristic of Lenan that he should manage to puncture any sense of pride that Miles might have felt in his achievement. To control an operation on the scale of TYPHOON at this stage in his career was a significant feather in his cap.
“You got it,” he replied flatly. He wanted to fling a neat white ball of vanilla ice cream across the table into Lenan’s smug, tanned face. Yet he also craved the Englishman’s respect. Miles spent the next seven years of his life trying to reconcile these two conflicting positions. “Langley wants me to pack my bags and settle there by Christmas,” he said. “That means I’ll be leaving Hong Kong in the fall.”
So many consequences flowed from this statement that Lenan’s initial response might have been construed as flippant.
“You’ll miss the wedding, then,” he said.
Miles’s head jerked up. “What wedding?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Joe and Isabella are getting engaged.”
Miles Coolidge possessed many attributes as a spy-tenacity, self-confidence, a bold if sometimes reckless imagination-but a poker face was not chief among them. All of the tautness and the colour in his expression slipped down like a collapsing building. It was a sight that filled Kenneth Lenan with a profound if childish satisfaction, for he had long suspected Miles of harbouring a secret desire for Isabella. He took a sip of water from a glass on the table and watched the American scramble for answers.
“They’re what? Engaged? Since when? Who told you that?”
“It’s common knowledge.” It wasn’t, of course, but it was the sort of thing Lenan said when he was needling people.
Miles looked down at the table and tried to assemble some dignity. “Jesus. So how did he pop the question?”
“Oh it’s not popped.” Lenan seemed to enjoy the playful language.
“I don’t understand.”
“Rumour has it he’s going to do it at the handover.”
“On June 30th?”
“That is the day that has been outlined for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty back to the People’s Republic of China, yes.”
Miles said “Jesus” one more time.
“You seem shocked, Miles.”
“I’m pretty surprised, sure.” He was thinking, calculating, his mind turning over, like the low hum of the air- conditioning unit above their heads. “Does David know?”
“David is the one who found out.”
“What? Joe asked his permission?”
“Apparently.”
A sniff of laughter from both men. Colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic liked to console themselves with the theory that Joe was still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world. It made them feel better about their own shortcomings.
“So he wants her to know all about RUN? He’s prepared to break cover?”
Lenan nodded.
Which gave Miles an idea.
21
Twenty minutes later — no time for coffee, for digestifs — Miles was making a phone call on the corner of Haiphong Road and Kowloon Park Drive having put Lenan into a cab.
“Billy? I got a problem. What are you doing for wui gwai?”
Billy Chen was an American asset in the Triads whom Joe distrusted as a faithless opportunist, a drug- running hoodlum whose lust for the trappings of wealth and power was matched only by his colossal vanity and self-importance. Chen must have been about twenty or twenty-one in 1997, and had been taking Miles’s dollar for
