Joe had made a mistake. An officer made privy to the information that Waterfield had disclosed should not be dwelling on an aspect of his private life. He should be thinking about blowback, about murder, about the implications of TYPHOON for the Special Relationship.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just sounded as though…”
Waterfield put him out of his misery. “Look, from what I can gather, it hasn’t all been plain sailing between them. Let’s leave it at that. She got a job working with underprivileged children in Chengdu and might have chucked the whole thing in had it not been for that.”
Joe felt his spirit quicken. “Where are you getting your information?”
“Grapevine.” Waterfield stared at a point beyond Joe’s shoulder. “Wasn’t Isabella Catholic?”
Joe nodded.
“That might explain a few things. Marriage vows. No release in the eyes of God from a lifetime of commitment. Graham Greene country. Never underestimate the obstinacy of the Catholic bride. How else do you explain a woman like Isabella spending the rest of her life with Miles Coo lidge?”
Joe was beginning to feel a curious and not entirely enjoyable sense of disorientation. Why was Waterfield telling him all this? To get his hopes up? Was it all just a pack of lies? Two elderly women settled at the next-door table and Waterfield quickly generalized the conversation.
“Tell me,” he said, “how serious is all this anti-war stuff?”
Joe was glad for the change of subject and tore open the plastic packaging of his sandwich. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how much has the Iraq fiasco contributed to your decision to work for Guy Coates?”
Joe had two reactions to this. The first noted that Waterfield had referred to Iraq as a “fiasco.” It was the first time that he had heard him utter such a direct criticism of the war. The second was that David knew about Quayler. Joe had not disclosed the name of his prospective employer to anyone at SIS.
“How did you find out about that?”
Waterfield returned his gaze to the river. There is an unwritten rule among spies that you do not question a colleague on the nature of his sources unless it is absolutely necessary. Joe had broken that rule at least twice in one morning.
“Grapevine,” he replied again. “Look.” Waterfield leaned towards him. He wanted to reassure Joe about something. “I know that you have misgivings about rendition. I know that you have concerns about using product possibly gained from the torture chambers of Cairo and Damascus. We all do.” He lowered his voice as the two elderly ladies stirred sachets of sugar into cups of tea. “But what’s the alternative? We all resign in protest and leave the Office in the hands of a bunch of Blairite careerists? Go off and write our memoirs? Come off it. In any case, the current lot”-he nodded across the river in the general direction of Whitehall-“will be out of a job in a few years” time. Politics is cyclical, Joe. All one has to do is bide one’s time and the right people will come round again. Then things can go back to the way things were.” Joe was looking down at the floor. “What I want to tell you is this.” Waterfield was now almost whispering. “You could go all the way in this business. People are keeping an eye on you, Joe.” He tried a joke to ice the compliment. “You can’t leave us at the mercy of the love children of Percy Craddock and Deng Xiaoping. We’ve already got too many Sinologists on the books in thrall to the Middle Kingdom. You were always tougher than that. You see the Politburo for what they are. The next ten to fifteen years are going to be vital in terms of Anglo-Chinese relations and we can’t afford to roll over and run up the white flag. You could play an absolutely critical role in that.”
It was a decent enough pitch, accurate in places, too. Ever since the days of Patten and Wang, Joe had been profoundly suspicious and distrustful of communist China, an attitude not always shared by his colleagues in the Foreign Office, most of whom had both eyes on the country’s vast market potential for British business. But Waterfield could see that he still wasn’t quite getting through. He put his bottle of water on the table and tried a different approach.
“It strikes me that you’re bored,” he said. “It strikes me that you would prefer to be out in the field, making a difference. Nobody wants to be kicking their heels behind a desk in London.”
“But what can you offer me?” Joe said, not as a bargaining position, but rather as a statement of his belief that all the best jobs in China had been taken. Nowadays it was all Iraq and Af ghan i stan. The Far East Controllerate had been filleted down to its bare bones. “If it’s a choice between carving out a decent career in the private sector or being posted to some shithole like Manila or Ulan Bator, I know where my instincts lie.”
“Your instincts, yes. But what about your loyalties?”
Waterfield knew Joe well enough to gamble on playing the guilt card. In spite of all of his misgivings about the direction of British policy since 9/11, Joe Lennox was at heart a patriot. Scratch the liberal humanist who railed against Bush and Blair and you would reveal an old-fashioned servant of the state who still believed in the mirage of Queen and Country, in the primacy of Western values. It was like Joe’s faith in the concept of a Christian God, a strange, institutionalized consequence of his privileged upbringing. Yet still he said, “Oh come on. Is that what this comes down to? Both of us know which way to pass the port so I have to keep the British end up?”
“The Pentagon may be trying to reactivate TYPHOON,” Waterfield replied, sabotaging Joe’s argument with the clean, flat timing of his revelation.
“Says who?”
“Says a watertight source in Washington.” Before Joe could interrupt, Waterfield was pitching him again.
“The details we have are sketchy. Of course the formal Bush position is that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda. Best guess is that Miles used to fund some of the ETIM boys pre-9/11 and has now gone off piste. We think he’s running a clandestine operation on CIA time without the knowledge of his masters at Langley. Somebody at the Pentagon, almost certainly an individual adjacent to Donald Rumsfeld, has given him carte blanche to make merry in China.”
“Even after everything that’s happened?”
“Even after everything that’s happened.”
Joe was bewildered. This was in direct contradiction of the Bush administration’s position on Xinjiang. “Surely someone at Langley knows what’s happening? Why don’t they bring him home?”
“Search me.” It was common knowledge in the intelligence fraternity that the CIA had been turned inside-out in the wake of 9/11. “Earn the wrath of Dick and Donald these days and you might as well start clearing your desk. Best to keep your mouth shut, right? Best just to sit down and stop rocking the boat.” Waterfield took a sip of his water. “Look. We need somebody who already knows Miles to go out there and find out exactly what’s going on. To put a stop to it, if necessary. Is the Office vulnerable? Was Coo lidge responsible for what happened to Kenneth and will the trail lead back to London? We can’t afford to have British fingerprints on a new TYPHOON. If the Chinese know that Lenan was once one of ours, we need to do something about it.”
The Members Room was a ripple of crockery and small talk as Joe’s mind spun through the deal. When Waterfield saw that he was not going to respond, he added, “Come on, Joe. Are you really telling me that you want to spend the next five years of your life living in a soulless apartment in Beijing, flogging around China trying to secure patents for a tiny pharmaceutical company that in five years’ time probably won’t be worth the paper they’re written on?”
But Joe didn’t need any more persuading. The offer was too enticing to resist. It was Miles, it was China, and it was Isabella. Adopting a more playful tone of voice he said, “What’s wrong with Beijing, David?” and, in that instant, Waterfield knew that he had finally hooked his man. Matching Joe’s grin with one of his own, he leaned back in the sofa and stretched out his arms.
“Oh, everything’s wrong with Beijing,” he said. “Freezing half the year, baking hot the other. Anybody with any taste prefers Shanghai.”
29
It was getting Joe to Shanghai that posed the problem.
