First, Waterfield had to go to Guy Coates with a proposition. Did he want to help Her Majesty’s Government fight the good fight against Chinese tyranny and oppression? He did? Oh good. In that case, would Quayler be prepared to open up a second representative office, this one in Shanghai, staffed by Joe and two local Chinese, all of whom would be on the books with the Secret Intelligence Service? The British government would pay, of course, but Quayler would have to find somebody else to man their operation in Beijing. Joe’s done this sort of thing before, so there’s nothing to worry about. No, he wasn’t working for the Ministry of Defence in London. That was just his cover. I’m sure you are a bit surprised. You’ll have to clear the idea with your board of directors? Fine. But Guy Coates must be the only member of staff privy to what’s going on. You want an extra sixty grand? Not a problem. Least we can do in the circumstances. Just sign here where we’ve printed your name at the bottom.
After that, it was just a question of Joe handing in his notice, citing “ethical problems with the so-called War on Terror,” and serving out his final three months at Vauxhall Cross. To anyone who would listen, he complained about the “iniquity” of Sir John Scarlett’s appointment as “C” and suggested that the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee had struck a deal with No. 10 whereby he would be handed the top job in SIS in return for massaging the dossier on Iraqi WMD. After that, most of Joe’s colleagues became convinced that he had lost his marbles. Which was precisely Joe’s intention.
“We’ll have to throw a leaving party for you,” Waterfield said.
“Really? Isn’t that taking things a bit far?”
“Not at all. Make sure to invite a few Yanks along from Grosvenor Square. That way, word might slip back to Langley. The more people that get to hear about Joe Lennox’s crisis of conscience, the better.”
PART THREE
30
China had dominated Joe’s life. When he was a small boy, his parents had read him stories about the vast, populous country to the east of the Himalayas, a fantastical land of fearless warlords and sumptuous pagodas which had seemed as remote and as mysterious to his childhood imagination as the galaxies of science fiction or the menacing peaks of Mordor. In his early teens he had read the great doorstop novels of James Clavell, Tai-Pan and Noble House, steamy sagas of corporate greed set in colonial-era Hong Kong. With adolescence came Empire of the Sun, both the book-which Joe devoured in a single weekend during the Easter holidays of 1986-and the Spielberg film, released a year later. Spotting this affinity for the East, Joe’s godfather had presented him with a first edition of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China as a present for his eighteenth birthday and Joe had given serious thought to spending a gap year in Beijing before the massacre at Tiananmen obliged him to go straight up to Oxford. For the next three years he had been drenched in Chinese history and literature, reading the novels of Lao She, Luo Guanzhong and Mo Yan in the original Mandarin and poring over scholarly articles about the Qing dynasty. His gradual mastery of the language-honed by an undergraduate year spent in Taiwan-had opened up new understandings of Chinese history and culture and Joe might have spent a further three years as a postgraduate at SOAS had it not been for the timely intervention of SIS.
In all that time, however, including more than a decade working in the Far East Controllerate, he had never visited Shanghai. As a result, China’s most famous city remained a place of his imagination, the Paris of Asia, a teeming commercial port where stories of violence and excess, of vengeance and sin, of fortunes won and fortunes lost, formed a lavish narrative in his mind. Shanghai was Big-Eared Du, the fearsome godfather of the Green Gang who had ruled the city in tandem with Chiang Kai-shek in the era before communist rule. Shanghai was the Bund, the most famous thoroughfare in all Asia, a gorgeous, quarter-mile curve of colonial architecture on the western bank of the Huangpu River. Shanghai was the Cathay, the great art deco hotel on the Bund built by Sir Victor Sassoon where, legend has it, opium could be ordered on room service and Noel Coward wrote Private Lives after succumbing to a bout of flu. The city’s history was as vivid and engrossing as it was surely unique. Where else, in the age of imperialism, had British, French, American and Japanese citizens lived side by side with a native population in foreign concessions governed by their own laws and policed by their own armed forces? Before Mao, Shanghai was less a Chinese city than an international sorting office for the world’s ravaged minorities. It was to Shanghai that Europe’s Jews had fled the pogroms. It was in Shanghai that 20,000 White Russian emigres had found refuge from the revolution of 1917. As Joe flew in over the East China Sea on a damp January afternoon in 2005, he felt as though he was travelling into a dream of history.
Did he know what he was letting himself in for? The purpose of Joe’s operation in Shanghai was to get as close to Miles Coolidge as possible. But getting close to Miles meant getting close to Isabella.
“If you come to China, it’s only going to be a matter of time before you see her,” I had said to him. “If you move to Shanghai, you will bump into Isabella and rake up everything from the past.”
He had that one covered. “That’s the whole point,” he said. “Don’t you get it? That’s the whole idea.”
Joe’s history with Miles was the key to the operation. It would only be a matter of time before word reached the American that his old sparring partner had settled in town. As soon as that happened, Miles wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge of renewing their acquaintance.
“Look at it this way,” Waterfield had told his colleagues in one of several pre-departure brainstorms at Vauxhall Cross. “If Miles thinks Joe’s come to Shanghai to try to win back Isabella, he’ll see that as a challenge. If he thinks he’s working undercover at Quayler, he’ll want a piece of that action.”
“Exactly,” Joe added, warming to the theme. “And if he really believes that I’ve suffered a crisis of conscience over Iraq, he’ll enjoy trying to shred my arguments. If there’s one thing Miles Coolidge hates, it’s smug Limeys.”
They were right, of course. Their reading of Miles’s psychology was spot-on. No other British spy had the potential to get as close to Coolidge as quickly and as effectively as Joe. Nevertheless, it concerned me that Joe seemed to be in denial both about the implications of what he was doing and the nature of his own feelings. However hard he tried to make it look as though he was going to Shanghai purely out of loyalty to the firm, it was obvious that a far deeper, more personal impulse was in play.
31
The key to his approach was the deliberate absence of subterfuge. From the moment he passed through customs at Pudong International Airport, travelling on his own passport and a thirty-day tourist visa, Joe Lennox was just another Western businessman dipping his toes in the waters of China’s most vibrant city. His cover was to assume the behaviour of a wide-eyed European, a role which required little or no effort on Joe’s part because he was only too keen to visit every nook and cranny of the city. In the airport terminal, for example, he did what most inquisitive Brits would have done and bought a ticket for the Maglev, the German-engineered electromagnetic train which hums between the airport and downtown Pudong at over 300mph. As the flat, humid marshlands ripped past, Joe’s first glimpse of Shanghai was a forest of distant skyscrapers obscured by smog. He had left London less than fifteen hours earlier, yet already he felt the thrilling anonymity of being at large in Asia.
Under different circumstances, an undercover SIS officer might have booked himself into one of the smaller hotels in Shanghai, in order to keep a low profile. But Joe had reasoned that a businessman in his thirties on an expense account, recently released from a decade in the Civil Service, might want to splash out on some high living.
