There was a long silence. Joe sensed that he had found a route through Waterfield’s objections, but he was mistaken.
“Let’s suppose that it is true. How do you know the cell isn’t penetrated? Every other Miles Coolidge operation in China has gone tits up. What’s so different about this one? The man has an inverse Midas touch. Besides, Cousins don’t suddenly walk off the plantation and start baring their souls. Your American friends were trying to provoke exactly this sort of reaction. They’ll be watching you from now on. They’ll want to find out whether you respond to what you’ve been told. This is basic stuff. Page one.”
“Then at the very least let’s try to find Wang.”
“No. Aren’t you listening to me? They’ll have eyes all over him. You try to flush Wang, you’ll draw MSS, CIA, and God knows how many other services into a shitstorm of unimaginable proportions. Leave well alone. Your assignment is to get close to Coolidge. Your operation is to discover how much local liaison knew about Lenan’s activities and whether they can be traced back to London. Now I have to go into a meeting.”
“David, with the greatest respect, those are side issues now…”
“I said I have to go into a meeting. You’re obviously very tired, Joe. It’s late out there. Get some sleep.”
Joe heard the hollow click of Waterfield hanging up and shook his head with frustration. He was sitting at his desk in the second bedroom of his apartment, which he had turned into a makeshift office. The walls were uncovered save for a large National Geographic map of China and a pin board onto which Joe had tacked documents relating to Quayler. The conversation with Waterfield had served only to remind him of the pettiness and obstructive bureaucracy which had characterized the Office in recent years. Where was Waterfield’s willingness to take a risk? What was the purpose of Joe’s being in Shanghai if not to discover what America was up to? Taking a drawing pin out of the board, he pushed it repeatedly into the soft wooden surface of his desk and felt the utter frustration of his solitary trade. He would never make progress. He would never see Isabella. Joe was convinced that Shahpour was telling the truth, that he was trying to find a way of destabilizing the cell which would bring dishonour neither upon himself nor upon the American government. But how to convince Waterfield of that when he was thousands of miles away?
Just before 2:30 in the morning, with a glass of whisky at his side, Joe sent me a text message in Beijing. He had made the decision to ignore Waterfield and to follow his instincts. If he was wrong, so be it; he was deniable to London. If he was right, Waterfield could take credit for his foresight in sending RUN to Shanghai.
I was sitting in the lounge bar of the Kerry Centre Hotel with a government official who was helping me with a story I was writing about the Olympics. A group of Japanese businessmen were sitting on the sofa next to mine drinking Californian Merlots and watching coverage of a golf tournament on ESPN. Jumbo Osaki sank a monster putt at the seventeenth and a roar went up as my phone beeped.
“Ring your sister,” the message said, and I experienced one of those strange, out-of-body surges which are the perks of life as a support agent. Making my excuses, I took a cab back to my apartment, found a clean SIM and called Joe in Shanghai.
His instructions were simple: to find Professor Wang Kaixuan. He was teaching English as a foreign language at one of the schools in Haidian district. What was the name of the school? Where was it located?
As tasks go, it was not particularly taxing, certainly for a reporter of long and weary experience in investigative journalism. A quick search of the internet provided me with an exhaustive list of language schools in the Beijing metropolitan area and I simply cold-called each and every one of them in Haidian throughout the course of the next morning. Joe had given me a simple cover story: to pretend that I was a former student in Mr. Liu Gongyi’s class who wanted to send him a book through the post. Predictably enough, the first eighteen receptionists insisted that they had nobody of that name teaching at their school and that I had dialled an incorrect number. The nineteenth school, however, was only too happy to provide me with a full postal address and were certain that “Mr. Liu” would be delighted to receive his gift.
I called Joe with the good news.
“Not bad for an ageing hack with a drink problem,” he said. “I’m coming to Beijing.”
40
Fourteen hours later, the old Shanghai sleeper rumbled into Beijing station like a faithful dog. I was waiting at the end of the platform with a cup of coffee and saw Joe emerge from the train in conversation with a stewardess who had her hair in a bun. She laughed at something he said as weary passengers disembarked all around them. Then Joe caught my eye and shook her by the hand, rolling his suitcase towards me like the anonymous, nondescript pharmaceuticals salesman he was supposed to be.
“Nice day for the time of year.”
“Welcome to Peking, Mr. Lennox.”
We escaped the pressing crowds in the great vault of the old station and went into a virtually deserted shopping mall nearby, where I told Joe what I knew: that I had been to the language school the previous evening and discovered that Wang gave classes every afternoon, Monday to Friday, beginning at two o’clock and ending at five. Joe was noticeably more intense than he had been on my recent visit to Shanghai, and seemed to be calculating moves and implications all the time. At this early stage, he said very little about his dinner with Miles and Shahpour and nothing at all about the cell. As far as he was concerned, I was just a support agent of the Secret Intelligence Service doing the job that I was paid to do. It was neither my concern, nor my particular business, to know anything more than I needed to. At such times, Joe had a way of keeping our friendship at arm’s length and I knew not to press him on operational details. There was a lot at stake, after all. For a start, RUN would almost certainly be blown if Joe was observed talking to Wang; if Waterfield found out about it, he would be called home. Looking back on the two eventful days that followed, it occurs to me that Joe still didn’t know to what extent Wang was involved in separatist activities. In spite of what Shahpour had told him, there was still a more than plausible chance that he was an American agent. If that was the case, Joe was ruined.
“There are known knowns,” he said, lightening the mood with a joke as we walked to his hotel on Jianguomen Road. It was a typically hot, dry spring day in the capital, traffic and cyclists warring on the wide, featureless streets. “There are things we know that we know. There are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.”
Two days had passed since the dinner at M on the Bund, a period in which Joe had laid the foundations for his trip to Beijing. On his way to the railway station in Shanghai, for example, he had carried out a two-hour counter-surveillance exercise designed to flush out any American watchers before he departed for the capital. On the train itself, he had called Guy Coates from the dining car to arrange a meeting at the nascent Quayler representative office in Beijing, just in case Miles had put eyes on it. He then stayed up most of the night on the top bunk of his four-berth compartment listening once again to the recording of the safe house interrogation with Wang. All of this was a way of preparing himself for their inevitable second encounter. There might be clues in the conversation; there might be leads.