The two men had known one another for almost ten years and yet the characteristics of their relationship had not changed a great deal in that time. Although Joe was now in his mid-thirties, he still looked upon Waterfield in the same way that he had done back in Hong Kong: as a surrogate father and mentor, as an old hand of far greater experience than his own, whose wisdom and intuition was almost sacred. With no other senior colleague at SIS did Joe experience feelings of this kind. It was as if he had been programmed never to question Waterfield’s judgment.
“What about Miles?” Joe asked. “What’s happened to him?”
The question was loaded and both of them knew it. Miles meant Isabella, and Isabella was Joe’s past. Wherever the two of them might be, he was surely going to follow. That was the purpose of the meeting. That was what Waterfield was going to ask him. It was now just a question of how he was going to articulate his offer.
“Miles appears to have remained below the Chinese radar. Whatever information Macklinson and Lenan gave the MSS, we don’t think it included anything about Coo lidge’s networks.”
“Unless the Chinese are deliberately giving him enough rope to hang himself.”
Waterfield conceded the possibility of this but flicked the notion to one side, like the dust off the immaculate sleeve of his jacket. “Given that Wang is also walking the streets as a free man, we might assume some sort of connection between the two of them.”
“But you said earlier that Lenan was living in Urumqi. Wouldn’t that imply that he, rather than Miles, was running Wang, and that Wang would therefore be the first person he would have given up?”
Waterfield seemed briefly caught out. Sometimes he allowed himself to forget the sharpness of Joe’s memory, the speed with which he made operational calculations.
“That wasn’t how things worked. As far as we know, the Cousins tried to put as much water between themselves and the cell structures as possible. For example, Miles ran Wang from Chengdu. They met only twice a year in locations that we still haven’t been able to identify. Lenan’s people were in Gansu and Qinghai, which is where most of the post-TYPHOON arrests were made. Two of the three CIA officers who worked undercover at Macklinson were based in Shenzhen, but were observed meeting contacts as far afield as Taiyuan, Harbin and Jilin. The third was operating out of a Macklinson office in Golmud but was tenuously linked to Uighur groups in Yining and Kashgar. TYPHOON criss-crossed China. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge. That has nothing to do with what I’m proposing.”
“And what are you proposing, David?”
“Let’s go to the Tate.”
A silent quarter-mile later, David Waterfield and Joe Lennox were queuing for sandwiches in the near-deserted Members Room at Tate Modern. Waterfield paid while Joe found a couple of facing seats with a view across the river to St. Paul’s. He had so many questions running through his mind that he had been glad of the brief time alone to compose himself. Had Isabella been introduced to Lenan? Had Miles made her conscious of TYPHOON? He thought of all the weeks and months she must have spent alone in Chengdu while Miles shuttled around the country running his network of subversives. What a life. That she was prepared to exchange their future together for a thankless existence in Sichuan province had always struck him as the final, debilitating irony of their separation. To swap one spy, one set of lies, for another. Wasted love.
“You look deep in thought,” Waterfield said, bearing a plastic tray on which he had balanced two bottles of mineral water and a brace of pre-packaged sandwiches. “Is everything all right?”
He sat opposite Joe, looking down at the Millennium Bridge.
“Where was Isabella through all of this?” Joe asked.
Waterfield was surprised by his candour. Isabella Aubert was the name you didn’t mention around RUN.
“They’re still together,” he said, answering the question that he felt Joe had wanted to ask. “She’s been living in Shanghai with Miles for the past two years.”
Joe’s heart did its usual thing: the thump of loss, then the bile of jealousy and regret. Nothing had changed in seven years. He said, “So they were friends with Lenan?”
“Kenneth was visiting Shanghai when he was killed. We don’t know if he had meetings with Coo lidge during that period. If he had sold out the CIA, and if Miles had found out about that, you can imagine that he might have felt somewhat aggrieved.”
“This has something to do with Isabella, doesn’t it?” Joe had not thought through the question, which betrayed the true direction of his feelings. Waterfield buried his reaction in a sip of water.
“Do you want it to have something to do with Isabella?”
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.”