Unlike most of his contemporaries, who went off to pick fruit in Australia or smoke weed for six months on Koh Samui, Joe didn’t take a gap year but instead went straight up to Oxford to study Mandarin as part of the BA Honours course at Wadham. Four years later he graduated with a starred First and was talent-spotted for Six in late 1993 by a tutor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he had gone to enquire about the possibility of doing a PhD. He went to a couple of interviews at Carlton Gardens, sailed through the Civil Service exams and had been positively vetted by the new year of 1994. Years later, Joe and I had dinner in London, when he began to speak candidly about those first few months as an Intelligence Branch officer.
“Think about it,” he said. “I was twenty-three. I’d known nothing but straitjacket British institutions from the age of eight. Prep school, public school, Wadham College Oxford. No meaningful job, no serious relationship, a year in Taiwan learning Mandarin, where everyone ate noodles and stayed in their offices until eleven o’clock at night. When the Office vetted me for the EPV I felt like a standing joke: no police record; no debts; no strong political views-these were the Major years, after all; a single Ecstasy tablet swallowed in a Leeds nightclub in 1991. That was it. I was a completely clean slate, tabula rasa. They could do with me more or less as they pleased.”
Vetting led to Century House, in the last months before the move to Vauxhall Cross. Joe was put into IONEC, the fabled initiation course for new MI6 recruits, alongside three other Ox-bridge graduates (all male, all white, all in their thirties), two former soldiers (both Scots Guards, via Sandhurst) and a forty-year-old Welsh biochemist named Joanne who quit after six weeks to take up a $150,000-a-year position at MIT. On Joe’s first day, “C” told the new intake that SIS still had a role to play in world affairs, despite the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Joe specifically remembered that the Chief made a point, very early on, of emphasizing the importance of the “special relationship with our Cousins across the pond” and of praising the CIA for its “extraordinary technical resources,” without which, it was implied, SIS would have been neutered. Joe listened, nodded and kept his head down, and within two months had been taken to the spook training centre at Fort Monckton, where he persuaded strangers in Portsmouth pubs to part with their passport numbers and learned how to fire a handgun. From the sources I’ve spoken to, it’s fairly clear that Joe, in spite of his age, was considered a bit of a star. Spies, declared or otherwise, usually operate from the safety of British embassies overseas, using diplomatic cover as a means of running agents in hostile territories. Very early on, however, it was suggested that Joe would be most effective working under non-official cover in Asia, at long-term, deniable length from the Service. It was certainly a feather in his cap. While his fellow IONEC officers were moved into desk jobs in London, analysing intelligence and preparing for their first postings overseas, the Far East Controllerate was finding Joe a job in Hong Kong, ostensibly working as a freight forwarder at Heppner Logistics, a shipping company based in Jardine House. In reality he was a NOC, operating under non-official cover, by far the most sensitive and secret position in the intelligence firmament.
Joe turned twenty-four on the day he touched down at Kai Tak. His parents had seen him off at Heathrow under the misguided impression that their beloved only son was leaving England to seek his fortune in the East. Who knew? Perhaps he’d be back in a few years with a foxy Cantonese wife and a grandchild to show off in the Home Counties. Joe felt awkward not telling his family and friends the truth about what he was up to, but Six had advised against it. It was better that way, they said. No point in making anyone worry. Yet I think there were additional factors at play here. Secrecy appealed to something in Joe’s nature, a facet of his personality that the spooks at Vauxhall Cross had recognized instantly, but which he himself had not yet fully come to understand. Lying to his parents felt like an act of liberation: for the first time in his life he was free of all the smallness and the demands of England. In less than a year Joe Lennox had cut himself off from everything that had made and defined him. Arriving in Hong Kong, he was born again.
Heppner Logistics was a tiny operation run out of two small offices on the eleventh floor of Jardine House, a fifty-two-storey edifice overlooking Victoria Harbour and dotted with tiny circular windows, an architectural anomaly which earned it the local nickname “The House of a Thousand Arseholes.” Ted Heppner was a former Royal Marine who emigrated to Hong Kong in 1972. For eighteen years he had facilitated the international shipment of “sensitive” cargoes on behalf of SIS, but this was the first time that he had agreed to take on an intelligence officer as an employee. At first, Ted’s Singaporean wife Judy, who also functioned as his secretary, wasn’t keen on the idea, but when the Cross bought her a Chanel handbag and bumped up her salary by twenty per cent she embraced Joe like a long-lost son. Nominally he was required to show up every day and to field whatever faxes and phone calls came into the office from clients looking to move freight consignments around the world, but in reality Ted and Judy continued to deal with over ninety-five per cent of Heppner business, leaving Joe free to carry out his work for Queen and Country. If anybody asked why an Oxford graduate with a starred First in Mandarin was earning less than?20,000 a year working for a logistics company in Hong Kong, Joe told them that he’d been involved in a failed business venture back home and had just wanted to get the hell out of London. If they continued to pry, he hinted that he saw Heppner’s as a short-term option which would allow him, within six or eight months, to apply for a job with one of the larger Taipan conglomerates, such as Swire’s or Jardine Matheson.
It was illustrative of the extreme sensitivity of Joe’s position that Ted and Judy were two of only a handful of people who knew that Joe was under non-official cover. The others included David Waterfield, Head of Station for SIS in Hong Kong, Waterfield’s second-in-command, Kenneth Lenan, and Rick Zagoritis, a legendary figure in the Far East Controllerate who acted as Joe’s mentor and go-between in the first few months of his posting. I became aware of his activities when Zagoritis was obliged to fly to London for medical reasons in the autumn of 1995. Up to that point, Rick had been my SIS handler. As a result of an article I had written for the Sunday Times Magazine about Teochiu triad heroin dealers, London had become interested in the contacts I had made in the criminal underworld and I had provided Zagoritis with detailed assessments of the structure and intentions of triad groups in the Pearl River Delta. With Rick gone, I needed a new handler.
That was when Joe stepped in. It was a considerable challenge for such a junior player, but he proved a more than competent replacement. Within less than a year of arriving in the colony, he had made a name for himself as a highly effective NOC. Nor were there any concerns about his private life. In two reports commissioned by Kenneth Lenan as routine checks into the behaviour of new recruits, Joe demonstrated himself to be surprisingly self- disciplined when confronted by the myriad opportunities for hedonism which are part and parcel of male expat life in Asia. (“He’ll learn,” Waterfield muttered glumly. “He’ll learn.”) Nor was he troubled by the paranoia and duplicity of his double life. One of the more potent myths of the secret world, put about by spy writers and journalists and excitable TV dramas, is that members of the intelligence community struggle constantly with the moral ambiguity of their trade. This may be true of a few broken reeds, most of whom are quietly shown the door, but Joe lost little sleep over the fact that his life in Hong Kong was an illusion. He had adjusted easily to the secret existence, as if he had found his natural vocation. He loved the work, he loved the environment, he loved the feeling of playing a pivotal role in the covert operations of the state. About the only thing that was missing in his life was a woman.
4
Isabella Aubert arrived at the restaurant at about twenty-past eight. The first indication that she had entered the room came with a simultaneous movement from two male diners sitting near the entrance whose heads jerked up from their bowls of soup and then followed her body in a kind of dazed, nodding parabola as she swayed between the tables. She was wearing a black summer dress and a white coral necklace that seemed to glow under the lights against her tanned skin. Joe must have picked up on the crackle in the room because he pushed his chair back from the table, stood up and turned to face her. Isabella was smiling by now, first at me, then at Joe, checking around the restaurant to see if she recognized anyone. Joe kissed her only briefly on the cheek before she settled into the chair next to mine. Physically, in public, they were often quite formal together, like a couple who had been married for five or ten years, not two twenty-six-year-olds in only the second year of a relationship. But if you spent time around Joe it didn’t take long to realize that he was infatuated with Isabella. She dismantled his instinctive British reserve; she was the one thing in his life that he could not control.
“Hi,” she said. “How are you, Will?” Our little hug of greeting went wrong when I aimed a kiss at her cheek that slid past her ear.
