“What’s your point?” Joe asked.
“My point, Joe, is that morality, the Judeo-Christian principle of love thy neighbor, is an alien concept to the Chinese.”
“Well, I should be OK then,” said Shahpour.
“How’s that?”
“I’m Muslim.”
That stopped the conversation dead. Joe sipped his wine and grinned at the Bund. Miles made an embarrassing remark about “how we’re all trying to forget that” and struggled on. “Will somebody listen to what I’m saying, please?” He drained his Chablis. Their starters arrived and Joe began eating. His tuna had been rolled in sesame seeds which crunched between his teeth. “The Chinese have no natural sympathy for their fellow man. Once you understand that, anything is possible.”
“If you say so, Miles. If you say so.”
In Joe’s experience, there were two default conversations whenever groups of Western men gathered for dinner in China. The first, which usually took place in the earlier part of an evening, was a complex if largely theoretical discussion about the future of the country. Would China become the great economic superpower that the West had long feared, or would the economy overheat and go the way of the other Asian tigers? Had Beijing been wise to buy up $300 billion of US debt, and could America afford to pay it back? Would the country’s increasingly well-educated, Westernized middle class eventually topple the communist government, having tired of the endemic corruption and repression of the one-party state, or were the great mass of Chinese too obedient, perhaps even too savvy, to undermine the political status quo? Miles ticked almost every one of these conversational boxes as the dinner continued, and Joe eventually realized that little had changed: the man who had taken Isabella from him was just as stubborn, just as confused and cynical about China as he had always been. One minute he was writing off an entire race on the basis that they didn’t think like Americans; the next he was siding with disenfranchised Chinese workers because their plight handed him a convenient stick with which to rail at Beijing. Close his eyes and Joe could have been back at Rico’s, defending Governor Patten against the latest Coolidge onslaught, or listening to one of his stock speeches about “the fucking futility of communism.” Yet was there really that much difference between their two positions? Joe was equally jaded about the government in Beijing. He despaired for a country so contemptuous of its own citizens. But at least he loved China; at least he could see that to impose Western values on a country as complex and as historically damaged as the Middle Kingdom was a policy every bit as lunatic as the invasion of Iraq. Miles, on the other hand, had nothing but contempt for the place: his enthusiasm for TYPHOON, for example, had not been born of a desire to free the Uighurs of Xinjiang, or the migrant workers of Gansu, from the shackles of totalitarian repression; it had been born of a desire to undermine China, to bring bloodshed to the streets, and to profit from the ensuing chaos.
For his part, Shahpour remained on the periphery of the conversation, drinking heavily and offering only the occasional contribution to the intellectual slanging match taking place in front of him. At first, Joe put this down to a younger man’s natural reticence in the presence of two age-old rivals. As the evening progressed, however, he began to sense that Shahpour shared few of his master’s beliefs; indeed, he referred affectionately to his “many Chinese friends” and spoke with admiration of the way the country had “pulled itself up by its own bootstraps” in the previous fifteen years. It simply didn’t make sense that Shahpour could be fighting alongside Miles on the same fool’s errand as TYPHOON. Besides, surely Langley would have preferred to have one of their few Farsi-speaking officers operating in Iran? Maybe Shahpour was Microsoft after all.
The second default conversation, which usually takes place towards the end of dinner, concerns sex. Unsurprisingly, if unwittingly, it was Miles who instigated it when the mobile phone resting on the table beside him lit up and produced the opening bars of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Joe had just finished eating his main course. He could hear a woman’s voice at the other end of the line when Miles picked up. He was certain that it was Isabella until Miles began replying in Mandarin and aimed a conspiratorial look at Shahpour.
“I gotta take this. Work,” he said, and stood up from the table.
As he walked off the terrace, Shahpour leaned forward and said, “You know who that was, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“His ernai.”
Ernai is a Mandarin term for mistress or concubine. Shahpour’s candour surprised Joe but he maintained an expression of vague disinterest. “Really? How do you know?”
“Her name is Linda. She has her own special ring. When she calls, you get the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ When it’s work, you get the CTU phone from 24. If his wife ever phones up, it’s the training anthem from Rocky.”
Joe found himself laughing, even as he noted that Zhao Jian had been correct about Linda’s identity. “How long have they been seeing each other?”
“How do I know? Guy’s some kind of sex addict. I never saw anything like it, not even by Asian standards. No disrespect to his wife, right, but Miles is running chicks all over town.”
It was well past ten o’clock. The terrace was still packed with diners, most of whom had donned jackets or sweaters against the chill of the late evening. Cargo ships were moaning on the Huangpu. The lights of Pudong were as romantic and as breathtaking as any sight in China and Shahpour Goodarzi was casually shopping his boss to the Secret Intelligence Service.
“He doesn’t try to keep any of this under wraps?”
Shahpour looked confused. “Why would he? He’s not British, Joe. Every other guy in this restaurant probably has a chick shacked up in an apartment in Gubei. You know how things work over here.” He ran a finger along the surface of the table. “Still, I gotta say that Miles is operating at a whole other level. He’s tried to screw every Chinese girl from here to Beijing. One of my buddies calls him an MBA.”
“What’s that?”
“Married but available.”
Joe laughed, because he knew that it was vital to appear unfazed by what Shahpour was telling him. The more relaxed he appeared, the more information he would be able to glean. “So Isabella knows?” he asked.
Shahpour shrugged. He was aware that Joe and Isabella had once been involved, but was clearly working on the assumption that Joe no longer harboured feelings for her. “I have no idea what she knows. I’ve never met her. I’m not even sure they still live together.”
The revelation sent a fizz of satisfaction through Joe’s body. That would explain why Jian had never photographed her. He offered Shahpour a cigarette, which the American lit from the candle at the edge of the table. His eyes caught Miles coming back from the restaurant’s interior and Joe turned to find a rather forced look of regret on his face.
“Guys. I got a problem.”
He was behind Joe’s chair. The hot dead weight of his hand again.
“What’s that?” Shahpour seemed to have anticipated what was coming.
“Goddam conference call from Redmond, starting in thirty minutes. I have to get to the office.”
Joe balled his napkin onto the table and grinned in a way that was visible only to Shahpour. A waitress was clearing away their plates. “You have to leave?”
“ ‘Fraid so. But listen, it shouldn’t take long. Maybe I can catch you guys later? We got a lot of catching up to do. Shahpour, will you take care of this? Put it on Gates?”
“Yes, sir.”
And with that he was gone, shaking Joe’s hand and slipping off into the night. It seemed extraordinary that Miles should choose a few hours with Linda over the opportunity to probe more deeply into Joe’s cover. His departure had either been prearranged, as part of a rather obvious American trap, or Miles was still as craven and as selfish as he had ever been. Zhao Jian had a fixed camera outside Linda’s apartment complex which would at least provide Joe with evidence of whether he was telling the truth.