“I said, what are the rooms like at the Ritz-Carlton?”
“A mess,” Joe said, because he knew now that he ought to leave, to contact London, to speak to Waterfield before England went to bed.
“Don’t they tidy up after you?”
“Not when I tell them not to.”
Megan was waiting for an invitation. Of course she was. A woman needed more than code. He thought of the long night that lay ahead of them, the sudden end to his permanent solitude, the challenge and the excitement of taking a beautiful woman to bed, then the rapture of eventual sleep beside her. The twin, competing strands of Joe Lennox’s personality, his immense tenderness and his ceaseless professional zeal, helixed in an instant that dizzied him. He wondered whether it was possible to do both: to love and to work; to lie and to please? He was drunk and he was out of answers. A weakness in him, or perhaps it was a strength, said, “Come home with me tonight.”
Megan squeezed his arm so tightly that he almost laughed. He saw her twist away from him and turn and look up into his eyes in a way that was suddenly beyond lust and game-playing. Did this girl actually understand him? A few hours earlier Joe had been sitting beside her eating green curry, trying to sound clever about China. Yet his desire for her now was overwhelming. He wanted to kiss her, but also to save that kiss until they were alone and there was privacy and control. He did not want anybody to see them. He did not want those kinds of rumours.
“There are cabs outside,” she said.
“Let’s go.”
35
Nine hours later, Megan was sitting up in Joe’s wide double bed, a sheet wrapped around her body, picking at a room-service fruit salad. The curtains were drawn and she was watching BBC News 24 with the sound switched off.
“So is it true?” she called out.
Joe had stepped out of the shower and put on a dressing gown. He could still taste the sweetness of her body, the scent of the night on her skin. Drifting in and out of sleep beside this sensual, beguiling woman had been a waking dream of pleasure, by turns wild and then eerily calm. They were at ease with one another, and the morning had been blessedly free of any awkwardness or indifference.
“Is what true?” he called back.
“That you used to be a spy.”
Joe searched for his reflection in the bathroom mirror, but found that his face was obscured by a film of steam on glass. This is where it always begins. This is where I have to start lying.
“What’s that? Ricky’s theory?”
“Everybody jokes about it.” Megan had a cup of black coffee on the table beside her and she picked it up. When Joe came into the bedroom, rubbing a towel through wet hair, she clasped the cup against her chest and sneezed.
“Bless you. Who’s everybody?”
“You know…” They were both tired and Joe simply smiled and nodded. He sat on the edge of the bed.
“To be honest with you, it always irritated me that they never asked. At Oxford, it was a sort of running joke that anybody studying Mandarin who could tie their own shoelaces would get talent-spotted by MI6. But the offer never came. Even when I was working for the Foreign Office, I never got the nod.”
Megan sipped her coffee. “How come?”
“Search me. I can lie to people. I can drink Martinis. I’ve fired a gun.”
She pushed her foot against his thigh and he felt toes wriggling through the fabric of his robe. “You’d have been good at it, I think.”
“You do?”
“Definitely.” She lowered the coffee and teased him with her eyes. “You’re discreet. You’re sensitive. You’re 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.