reasonably good in bed.”
“Oh thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He stood up and drew back the curtains. His room was on the forty-third floor of the Ritz-Carlton building, but the sound of the street below, the gridlocked traffic of that late Shanghai morning, was still audible through the doubled glass. Six blocks to the east, construction workers, obscured by a haze of sunshine, were steering a rust- coloured girder into the dark interior of a half-completed skyscraper. Joe followed the slow, gradual sweep of the crane as the girder inched home. Megan stirred behind him and he turned.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” she said.
The bowl of fruit salad was resting on the bed beside a copy of The Great Gatsby, which Joe had been reading the previous afternoon. She lifted it up and he found himself captivated by the simple sight of her pale, slim arm. He knew every part of her now. They were each other’s secret.
“What are you looking at?”
“Your arm,” he said. “I love the shape of it.”
“You should see my other one.”
He took the book from her and she lifted the sheet around her body before walking to the bathroom. Joe picked a croissant from the breakfast trolley and ate it as he watched the news, finding that he enjoyed the noise of the shower running in the background. It was good to have company. It was good not to wake up alone. As he listened to Megan in the bathroom, gasping at the heat of the water, humming as it ran down her skin, he felt no disquiet over what had happened, no confusion or regret. Just a strange raw feeling in the base of his spine, as if he had done what he had done in order to protect himself from Isabella. Why was that? Was everything a calculation? With every step, with every Ansary or Shahpour, he was edging closer and closer to Miles. Now Megan was pulling him further and further away.
No more introspection. Time to dress. Time to work. Just after midday they made their way down to the lobby where Joe put Megan in a cab. She worked part-time at an investment bank in Pudong and was already three hours late. As he held the door for her, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“I had a fantastic time,” she said. “Can we do this again?”
“As soon as possible.” He held her hand. “What are you doing for dinner?”
Megan laughed and ducked into the taxi. She turned in the back seat as the cab pulled away and Joe waved, aware that he was being watched by the doorman. It was only after the car had turned onto Nanjing Road that he realized he did not have her number.
The doorman smiled as Joe walked back into the lobby, a grin between men. It was good of him to risk it; Joe admired his cheek.
“My cousin from Malaysia,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Your cousin from Malaysia.”
36
He called Waterfield that afternoon using an encrypted SIM smuggled into China in the spine of The Queen of the South. It was only the second time that the two men had spoken since Joe’s departure from Heathrow. Waterfield sounded distant and groggy, as if he had been woken from a deep sleep.
“How are things?” he asked. It was nine o’clock in the morning in London.
“Things are fine,” Joe replied, “but I need a couple of favours.”
“Go on.”
“On the river that day, you told me that you had a source in Garden Road back in ‘97. What are the chances of getting the American transcript of my interview with Wang?”
“The transcript from the safe house?”
“Yes.”
An audible intake of breath. The original SIS document had been destroyed almost immediately by Kenneth Lenan. “Depends what steps Miles took to cover his tracks. If he was as thorough as Ken, I don’t rate our chances. No harm in asking, though.”
“It would help piece something together.”
“Leave it with me.”
Joe was sitting on a bench in Renmin Park, looking up at his favourite building in Shanghai, the J. W. Marriott Tower in Tomorrow Square. It was a humid, sun-blinding afternoon and England was truly half a world away. He tried to picture Waterfield in his tiny pied-a-terre in Drayton Gardens, working his way through a pot of Twining’s English Breakfast while John Humphrys harangued somebody on the Today programme. The London of Joe’s memory was Routemaster buses and Capital Radio, cafes on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.
“You said a couple of favours.”
Waterfield was waking up. A Chinese teenager with dyed hair and torn jeans curled past Joe on a skateboard. “Can you also run a check on a Shahpour Goodarzi, possible Cousin, possible former employee at Macklinson?” Joe spelt out the name as he wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. “He’s American, probably second-generation Iranian immigrant, family resident in California. Works for Microsoft, might be using the same cover as Miles.” Joe was holding Shahpour’s business card and read out the email address and cellphone details printed in the lower right-hand corner. “I also need you to contact Amnesty International about a Uighur activist, imprisoned briefly in the mid-1990s. See if they have anything on an Ansary Tursun.” He again spelt out the name. “Can you also try Human Rights Watch? Do they have a file on him? Anything unusual we should know?”
“Done.”
Joe put Shahpour’s card back in his pocket. “So how are things in the old country?”
“Same old, same old. You’ve heard about Rebiya Kadeer?”
Kadeer was a Uighur businesswoman who was arrested in 1999 while en route to meet a US Congressional delegation which had arrived in Xinjiang to investigate human rights abuses. Kadeer had sent newspaper clippings to her husband, a Uighur exile resident in the United States, and was subsequently charged with “leaking state secrets” by the PRC. The Chinese also alleged that Kadeer had been in possession of a list of ten Uighur dissidents with “connections to national separatist activities.”
“She’s been freed, hasn’t she?” Joe replied. The Kadeer story had been covered in the International Herald Tribune, copies of which were available to overseas guests in the business lounge of the Ritz-Carlton.
“Released last week as a sop to Condoleezza, officially on medical grounds. In reality, Beijing struck a deal to ensure that the Yanks dropped a resolution on Chinese human rights abuses at the UN.”
“What a lovely story.”
“Heartening, isn’t it? And there’s been a bus bomb in Jiangxi province.”
“Yes. We heard about that one.” On 17 March a double-decker bus had exploded in Shangrao, killing all thirty people on board.
“Who are the Chinese blaming?” Waterfield asked.
“Party line seems to be that it was a case of mishandled explosives. A worker travelling with some dynamite in his suitcase who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Was a pig flying past at the time?”
Joe laughed. “Several,” he said.
Humour was the simplest way of acknowledging the possibility that explosions of this sort could be linked to separatist activity. Waterfield sneezed, blew his nose and remembered something, saying, “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Coolidge went to a funeral on a trip home six months ago. Young officer from the Directorate of Operations called Josh Pinnegar. Gave the address at the service, spoke about their ‘close personal and professional’ relationship, that sort of thing. Pinnegar was murdered by a Triad gang in San Francisco. Our source indicates that he also had links to TYPHOON. There may be a connection there.”
