what tall story Miles had concocted to justify Chen’s intrusion, but the quality of his acting could not be faulted. Under the deafening assault of the speakers, Isabella seemed to fold in on herself, as if all of her elegance and poise and that lovely, open self-confidence in her face was being sucked out of her like a cancer. Was it just my imagination, or had Chen confirmed some dark suspicion that she had long held about Joe’s true identity? Right on cue, Miles now came up behind her-he had watched the whole thing being played out-and grabbed Chen by the arm, frog-marching him from the bar like a bouncer. It was an impressive physical sight, her knight in shining armour, and several of the revellers in F-Stop, as well as a couple of bar staff, stepped aside to absorb what was going on, as if it were all part of the handover fun. God knows what Miles did with him afterwards. Probably slapped him on the back and slipped him a thousand dollars for his trouble. I was more concerned about Isabella, who was looking at me as if I myself had betrayed her.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I have no idea,” I replied. “I really have absolutely no idea.” Wearily, I tried to lay the blame at the door of the CIA, saying, “He’s a Triad who must have got Joe confused with Miles. Believe me, your boyfriend does not work for MI6.”
But we were too far down the line and Isabella was too smart and too shocked to be deceived. However drunk she had been, what had happened had sobered her up to an absolute clarity. I can only compare the look on her face to the impact that sudden loss can have on a grieving friend or relative. Either to get some air, or to follow Miles and Chen outside in the search for further answers, she now pushed past me and made her way out of the bar onto Lan Kwai Fong. It was extraordinarily humid on the street and the contrast with the air-conditioned bar was enervating. It felt as if you were drowning in a wet, suffocating heat. The pavements and the road itself were rammed with Westerners, and Billy Chen was nowhere to be seen. Isabella, moving with that certain force and determination which obliges people to step out of your way, began walking downhill, perhaps because she had seen Miles heading in that direction, perhaps because she was simply confused and wanted to go somewhere she could think and move more freely. I was quickly swallowed up by the crowd and found myself walking several metres behind her when I noticed Joe coming up the hill. He was smoking a cigarette and must have seen the confusion on Isabella’s face because a plume of uninhaled smoke emerged from his mouth and he started to run towards her.
“What’s the matter?” he said when he was close enough to be heard. “What’s happened? Why are you crying?”
I wasn’t thinking straight and barged in on this, trying to warn Joe with my eyes while placing a hand on Isabella’s shoulder. Sensing me behind her, she spun round and shouted, “Just fuck off, Will” and spittle landed in my eyes and on my cheeks. Joe looked stunned. But she was right to have said it. I had no place intervening. Joe was either going to convince her that Billy Chen had been a madman, or it was all over between them. I couldn’t see how he was going to salvage things, but I had to leave him to work it out. There was still no sign of Miles and people in the crowd were beginning to stare at me as I backed off.
“What’s going on?” Joe said again. I noticed he had dropped his cigarette on the street.
“I need to go home,” Isabella told him. “I want you to take me home.” So he immediately put his arm round her and started walking down the street. They looked like survivors stumbling away from a plane crash. Seconds earlier, Joe Lennox had been a young man in the prime of life, less than twenty-four hours away from proposing to a woman he loved as he would never love again. Now he was on the brink of fighting to save that relationship because of an incident engineered by a jealous friend and colleague. It was bewildering. I stared at them walking down the hill and knew in my heart that Joe was doomed. I also knew that things between the four of us would never be the same again.
PART TWO
25
After the handover, Joe remained in Hong Kong for six months, but Isabella left him for Miles almost immediately. Certain women, I suppose, might have been thrilled to discover that their boyfriend was not a run-of- the-mill shipping clerk, but instead a spy doing work of unimaginable importance on behalf of the secret state. But not Isabella. She felt utterly betrayed. It was as if Joe had been deliberately toying with her emotions; she would not listen to any of his protestations of innocence nor expressions of regret. As far as I know, he never mentioned the fact that he was on the point of proposing. Miles, ever the opportunist, sided with Isabella in the ensuing days and I am convinced that she turned to him so quickly as a means of wounding Joe for the intense pain that his deception had caused her.
“At least Miles is honest about what he does for a living,” she told me. “At least he doesn’t manipulate me and hide behind a wall of lies. It’s not the spying that I object to. It’s the treachery. Every day for three years Joe was deceiving me. I’m going to the bank. I’ll be late home from work. I can’t make dinner. How could I trust a single thing he said to me ever again?”
Miles left Hong Kong for Chengdu in September of that year, and he took Isabella with him. All of us were stunned that she was prepared to take such a gamble, but there was no doubt that the two of them had forged an extraordinary bond in the short time that they had been seeing one another. It didn’t surprise me, for example, to run into Isabella at a wedding in Paris two years later and discover that she and Miles were engaged.
“He’s very romantic, you know,” she said, almost as if apologizing for falling in love with him. “He’s always surprising me, taking me away for little breaks and weekends.” I tried to summon up a picture of Miles presenting Isabella with boxes of chocolates, perfumed candles or flowers, but the images wouldn’t compute. After dinner, we spoke at length about the years in Hong Kong and she was a good deal less brittle on the subject of Joe. There were underlying reasons for her decision to end their relationship which Isabella seemed to have accepted. She admitted, for example, that she had perceived Miles as a challenge. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man; he was almost feral in his refusal to conform to people’s expectations of how a man in his position should behave. When he wanted to, Miles Coolidge could make a woman feel as though she was the only person in the room. Life with such a man was never going to be dull. Perhaps Isabella had been prepared to overlook his myriad faults for this reason. She doubtless started out in the naive belief that she could change him.
For Joe, however, the knowledge that his girlfriend was making a new life in an anonymous Chinese city with a man he despised corroded something elemental in his soul. For a long time after ’97 he was utterly withdrawn and focused only on work, recruiting and running as many as a dozen new Chinese political and military targets, to the delight of London but to his own almost total personal indifference. Just after the East Asian stock market crash in October, Joe gave serious consideration to quitting SIS but was persuaded to stay on by David Waterfield, who offered him a plum job in Kuala Lumpur.
“Get away,” he said. “Make a fresh start. Find out why you got into this business in the first place.” Joe packed his bags that Christmas.
His postings to Malaysia and, latterly, Singapore, are not particularly relevant to the story I am here to tell. People I have spoken to who knew Joe during this period refer to him as “quiet” and “reliable,” lively only when drunk but respected by everyone with whom he came into contact. He remained in South-east Asia, without seeing or speaking to either Miles or Isabella, for four years. I flew in to Singapore for his thirtieth birthday in the summer of 2001 and discovered that Joe had been seeing an Italian medical doctor named Carla for about three months. This seemed a positive step, but the two of them had soon gone their separate ways. “It just didn’t feel right,” he told me in an email. “It wasn’t going anywhere.” These were phrases Joe would often employ when discussing his relationships with women. In final analysis, none of them matched up to the Isabella template. It was as if he was walking around with a ghost of the perfect woman and would not rest until Isabella had come to her senses. Of
