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. To that end he had arranged for Quayler to book him into the Portman Ritz-Carlton on Nanjing Lu, a five-star high rise with a spa roughly the size of Kowloon, where Joe’s room set the bean-counters at Vauxhall Cross back more than $300 a night. The other luxury hotel which had caught his eye was the Grand Hyatt, situated on the top thirty-four floors of the Jin Mao Tower in Pudong, but Joe had been reliably informed that it was a mistake to be based on the eastern side of the Huangpu: all of the action in Shanghai took place to the west of the river, in the area known as Puxi. There was also an added operational advantage to being registered at one of the city’s top hotels. Every night a list of foreign residents was obtained by the PLA. If Joe was “Beijing Red”-that is to say, if his identity as an MI6 officer had ever been uncovered by Chinese intelligence-his presence as a guest at the Ritz-Carlton would be flagged up. Thereafter he would be subjected to round-the-clock surveillance which would not let up for the duration of his stay in China. In the event of that happening, Joe would be obliged to leave the country and to abandon the operation against Miles.
Joe’s first few days in Shanghai were a magical release from what he described as “the straitjacket of London.” Armed only with a small rucksack containing his wallet, a camera and the Rough Guide to China, he set out to familiarize himself with the geography of the city and to visit the dozen or so places he had longed to see following a lifetime of movies and reading. Having checked in and showered, he headed first for the Bund, not least because it felt like the spiritual centre of Shanghai, a place where the Chinese and European experiences collided with the force of history. Strolling along the broad walkway that looks out over the skyscrapers of downtown Pudong, he watched young Chinese couples with frozen smiles pose for photographs against a background of stilled ships and neon. Dominating the eastern shore was the bizarre, bulbous rocket of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower while, behind it, the Jin Mao soared into the late-afternoon sky like a jagged, glinting dagger. These astonishing buildings were the visible symbols of the Chinese economic miracle and it seemed apt that they should look out across the Huangpu at the great neoclassical edifices on the Bund, which themselves bore architectural witness to an earlier era of rampant prosperity and growth.
The next day, having woken at five with jet lag, Joe took a morning boat trip to the mouth of the Yangtze, realizing, to his gradual disappointment, that the Huangpu was not the river of his romantic imagination-a Seine or a Danube of the East-but instead a churning sea lane as grey and as polluted as the bloated corpse of Kenneth Lenan. That afternoon, to maintain basic cover, he held the first of several meetings with a consultant who advised overseas companies on the logistics of setting up a business in China. The meeting, which had been arranged from Quayler headquarters in London, lasted two hours and took place in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, for maximum public exposure. Joe continued to make work-related telephone calls from his room, and was regularly seen using the email and fax facilities in the hotel’s business lounge. Back in tourist mode, he lunched on dumplings at Nanxiang Mantou Dian, took the obligatory tea at Yu Yuan Gardens and made an excursion to the nineteenth-century basilica built by Catholic missionaries out at She Shan. For anyone who happened to be watching, Joe Lennox was just as he appeared to be: a single man of independent means, gradually finding his feet in Shanghai.