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.
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.