“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.
“No. He was one of the lucky ones. Last I heard, Wang was living in Tianjin.”
They turned a corner and it occurred to Joe that the professor was the source of Waterfield’s information. How else did he know so much about TYPHOON?
“Did we turn Wang?” he asked. “Did you recruit him when you were stationed in Beijing? How come you know where he is?”
Waterfield seemed amused by the idea. “Everything that I’ve told you this morning has come from two separate sources, neither of whom is Professor Wang Kaixuan.” He blew his nose aggressively on a freshly laundered handkerchief. “The Controllerate has a new, highly placed official in the MSS recruited by Station in Beijing in the last twelve months. We also have an older, established contact on the American side with whom I formed a relationship long ago in Hong Kong.”
“You had a Cousin on the books in ‘97?”
Waterfield allowed himself to feel flattered. “I had all sorts of things going on that RUN wasn’t privy to. As you said, Joe, you were very low down on the food chain.”
It sounded like an insult but Waterfield decorated his quip with a knowing grin. The slightly tense atmosphere which had existed between them since the cafe had now eased away.
“And what have your sources told you about Lenan’s death?”
“It’s still largely a mystery.” Waterfield offered a fatalistic glance at the sky. “I can hazard an educated guess.”
Joe stepped aside to allow an undernourished jogger to limp past them.
“It involves Macklinson. According to my Cousin, as a consequence of his relationship with the CIA, Kenneth developed a close personal friendship with the company’s chief financial officer, an individual by the name of Michael Lambert. Played golf together, that sort of thing. Lambert is now Macklinson CEO, because the lovely Bill Marston dropped dead of a heart attack a couple of years ago. With TYPHOON in full flight in the late 1990s, Lambert had become very excited by the oil and gas potential in Xinjiang and invested the company, for strategic reasons, with Petrosina.”
“The Chinese state oil producer? But they don’t allow foreign investment on any kind of scale.”
“That’s not strictly true. Macklinson bought a controlling stake in a specialist oil services company called Devon Chataway which had been sold a two point four per cent holding in Petrosina by the Chinese government. The way Lambert saw things panning out, if TYPHOON failed, Macklinson would still have a significant claim on fossil fuels in Xinjiang. If it was successful, the corporation would be well placed to become a major player in an independent Eastern Turkestan. He explained all this to Kenneth, who remortgaged his house in Richmond, wrote his stockbroker a cheque for?950,000 and told him to sink it in Chinese oil.”
Joe shook his head.
“The one thing neither man anticipated was a clusterfuck on the scale of TYPHOON. As the operation began to unravel, the MSS applied intense pressure on Macklinson, and on Lambert in particular. ‘Tell us what you know about your operations in China and you can continue to do business here. Give us the names of the CIA operatives with whom you have an association and we will continue to allow Devon Chataway to benefit from their investments in Petrosina. Refuse to co-operate and Beijing will turn TYPHOON into an international scandal which will humiliate the American government.’ ”
Joe swore and looked out at the river. Here was the limitless cynicism of greed and power, the curse of the age. Every man for his bank balance and screw the consequences. It was a quiet, blameless morning on the Thames and he felt a sense of helpless anger close to the impotent frustration of watching the day-to-day horrors in Iraq.
“So Lenan gave them up?” he asked. It was the only possible outcome. “He and Lambert sold out the CIA to protect their investments?”
Waterfield nodded. “That’s just my personal opinion,” he said. “That’s just a David Waterfield theory.”