of habit concealed his reaction. “During the early stages of your interview with Professor Wang, Miles telephoned Garden Road and discovered that you were using a shared safe house. Kenneth Lenan confirmed in a subsequent phone call that you were involved in an interrogation of a Han national from Urumqi who was antagonistic towards Beijing. Miles began listening to a live feed at the consulate and moved on it immediately. He and Kenneth had been involved in several little schemes before, some of which I knew about, some of which I didn’t. You might call it a mutually beneficial relationship, particularly for Kenneth, who managed to squirrel away enough American money for ten retirements. To cut a long story short, Miles had been looking round for ways of developing operations in Xinjiang. Wang looked just the ticket. Miles convinced Kenneth to hand him over to the Cousins and to use SIS channels to spirit the professor out of Hong Kong and back to mainland China. Wang was subsequently recruited and trained in Taiwan as an agent of the CIA with instructions to put together a network of radicalized Uighur youth who would cause chaos on the streets through bombings, riots and anti-communist demonstrations.”
“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “And you say you knew nothing about it? I spent six weeks worrying that I’d failed to identify Wang as MSS.”
“That’s what Miles told you?”
“They both did. Insisted he was a Chinese intelligence officer known to the Cousins who had been involved in an operation that had led to CIA expulsions.”
“And you believed this?”
“Not exactly. But I was young. I was inexperienced. I was too far down the food chain to make a fuss.”
Waterfield’s body language suggested that he accepted the broad logic of this. He took a bite of his cake and spent the next ten minutes outlining Macklinson’s role in TYPHOON. Joe was still reeling from the revelation that Wang Kaixuan, the benign, idealistic intellectual he had interviewed in Tsim Sha Tsui, had somehow been transformed, almost overnight, into a patriarch of terror. For seven years Joe Lennox had been privy to intelligence reports coming out of China about terrorist incidents in Xinjiang and beyond. It was hard to believe that Wang, with American help, might have been responsible for orchestrating some of them.
“How big was TYPHOON? What sort of scale are we talking about?”
“Initially limitless. Of course Langley kept the sharp end of things to a minimum. Any weapons and explosives found their way to a small group of extremists-some of them under Wang’s control, some of them not-who continued to blow up buses and supermarkets in places like Lanzhou and Kashgar. But the softer propaganda tools-video cameras, pro-democracy documents, briefcases of cash-went to a much wider circle of student intellectuals and fledgling democracy types. TYPHOON began as an operation aimed at bringing about independence for Eastern Turkestan, but very quickly spread into a generalized, American-sponsored pro-democracy movement all across Han China.”
“How did the Yanks think they were going to get away with this?”
“God knows. And the short answer is that they didn’t.” Waterfield scratched the side of his neck, producing a raw red mark above the collar of his shirt. “The one thing the Cousins understood only too well was Beijing’s fear of massed, organized rebellion in the provinces. That’s what they were trying to catalyse. Da luan. ‘Big chaos.’ But at the same time they had very little understanding of the situation on the ground. You don’t just walk into a country like China and start fomenting peasant rebellion. By all means fund and supervise a small network of pseudo- Islamist radicals, but don’t get ideas above your station. Informants operate at every level of Chinese society. You’re going to get caught. You’re going to get found out.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“Of course it is.” If Waterfield sounded frustrated, it was only because he was still flabbergasted by the naivety of TYPHOON’s conception. “In the spring of 2000, one of the Macklinson shipments was intercepted by Chinese customs in Dalian. A barn stuff ed with copying machines and anti-communist literature was discovered shortly afterwards about fifty miles outside Shihezi. At least three cells with TYPHOON fingerprints were penetrated by the MSS between 1999 and the spring of 2001, with as many as nineteen Uighur separatists subsequently tortured and executed for splittist activities. Four so-called Macklinson employees, all of them in reality CIA, were expelled from China for ‘undermining the security of the Socialist Motherland through acts of subversion and sabotage.’ It was a total bloody disaster.”
“How come we didn’t get to hear about it?”
“Good question. Essentially because the Chinese and the Yanks came to an arrangement.”
“What sort of an arrangement?”
“The sort that got people killed.”
For a strange and exhilarating moment, about which Joe would later feel ashamed, he wondered if Waterfield was about to tell him that Miles Coo lidge had been executed by the PLA. A waitress approached and cleared away their plates and cups.
“Here’s the situation,” Waterfield said. He flicked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his suit. “Three weeks ago, Kenneth Lenan’s body was pulled out of the Huangpu River. His tongue had been cut out. Every tendon in his body had been sliced open. The Chinese authorities claim that they have no idea who did this to him. We don’t exactly believe that.”
28
Murders are a rare occurrence in the secret world. SIS prides itself on the fact that no officer has been killed on active duty since World War II. Kenneth Lenan may have been a traitor to the Service, a cast-off in the private sector, but it still took Joe a while to process what Waterfield had told him. They left the cafe and walked past the entrance to the National Theatre.
“The manner of his death,” he said. “It’s a signature of the Green Gang. Do people realize that?”
“People realize that,” Waterfield replied.
The Green Gang were the infamous criminal fraternity who operated in Shanghai until the communists took over in 1949. Lenan had been the victim of a specific form of revenge killing, whereby traitors had every tendon in their body severed with a fruit knife before being left to bleed to death on the street. Unable to move because of their injuries, they were often placed in a sack weighed down by rocks and thrown into the Huangpu River.
“So who did he betray?”
Waterfield looked up at the sky and smiled. He had done his grieving.
“Whom,” he corrected.
Joe wasn’t in the mood to play games. “All right then. Whom?”
“Could have been anybody.”
“Someone on our side?”
Waterfield suggested with a tightening of the eyes that he found that idea both distasteful and preposterous.
“What, then? You think his murder was connected to TYPHOON?”
“I would have said almost certainly.”
They walked in silence for about a hundred metres. It was as if Waterfield was anticipating a particular line of questioning that Joe had not yet produced. The sun was warm on Joe’s face. A young, dreadlocked juggler was unpacking a suitcase on the path in front of them.
“You said that TYPHOON was wound up after 9/11.”
“Yes.” Waterfield scratched his neck again. Joe assumed that he had been bitten by an insect of some kind, just behind the left ear. “After that, all bets were off. Langley was under instruction to withdraw support for any Muslim group within five thousand miles of Kabul.”
“But TYPHOON kept going?”
“Not really. By the summer of that year the operation had been so severely compromised it was all but dead in the water.”
“Was Wang arrested?” For a reason that he could not precisely explain, Joe hoped that the professor was still alive.
