This is an act, Joe kept telling himself. These are lies. Wang’s dignity and his rage are identical faces that he can put on to achieve any end. “Your son?” he said.
“Yes, my son.” Wang touched the broad, happy face in the photograph. The young man could not have been older than nineteen or twenty. “You were too young to understand, Mr. Richards. Perhaps that is why I did not tell you. A man without children cannot understand the impact of a child’s loss.” Joe was staring at Wang’s blackened feet. “Your colleagues, on the other hand, were cleverer than you were. Or perhaps I should say they were more cynical. They realized that my grief would compel me to act. And so that is what I did.”
Joe assumed that Wang was speaking about Lenan and Coolidge and felt, in his confusion, a small sense of relief that Wang’s story chimed with the versions he had heard both in London and from Shahpour. “Those men were not my colleagues,” he said. “The man you knew as Lodge was a British intelligence officer who was working for the Americans without our knowledge. TYPHOON was an American operation.”
Wang held up his hands. “I do not want to know,” he said, although Joe could sense his fascination. Wang had spent a lifetime absorbing secrets; he thrived on information. “As I have told you, my work with your organization is over.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Joe said.
“And how is that?”
“Because I think you still know things that could be important for us.”
“Us?”
The repetition was a taunt. In this game, nobody helped anybody. Nobody loved thy neighbour.
“Yes. For me and for you. For the British in bringing an end to the violence, and for you, in saving hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent lives.”
Wang looked confused, as if Joe were trying to trick him with words. They were speaking in English again, switching between the two languages like a struggle for power. The professor finished his tea and went into the kitchen, reigniting the gas on the stove. As he did so, Joe opened his moneybelt and withdrew the surveillance photograph of Shahpour Moazed and Miles Coolidge arguing at Zapata’s. It had been folded and a faint white line was visible between the two faces. “I’m going to show you a picture,” he said. “I want you to tell me what you think of these men.”
Wang turned away and sniffed, a man of long and weary experience who was above playing such childish games. But Joe had judged him correctly. As he held out the photograph, the professor snatched at it and studied the image closely.
“These men? What do I think of them?” He laughed again, but without feeling. “I think you know how I feel about Miles Coolidge. And I believe that his friend has a big problem.”
“And why do you say that?”
“Because he has discovered that the world is not as straightforward as he would like it to be. Is he a friend of yours, Mr. Richards? Because he is very much like you. He allows unscrupulous men to control him.”
“I’m not like that any more,” Joe said, and regretted it, because the response sounded feeble. The photograph was a test, of course. Joe’s decision to come to Beijing and to seek out Wang was based on a simple premise: that Shahpour had been telling him the truth. Everything flowed from that. If Wang now confirmed his story, Joe would know that his instincts had been correct. “What kind of problem does he have?” he asked.
“His problem is that his employers are still determined to continue with their policy of chaos in China. Even after everything they have learned. Even after everything they have seen with their own eyes, they maintain fantasies of influence. They believe that by mimicking the activities of the same Islamist fanatics who have so troubled their own country in recent years, they will bring about rebellion in China. I would assume that this is the reason the British have sent you to talk to me.” Joe felt a surge of excitement, the certainty now that TYPHOON was reborn. He wanted to ask Wang to elaborate, but his host needed no prompting. “The politicians and spies in Washington to whom you have allied yourself, the men to whom your Iranian friend is answerable, have tasked him with recruiting agents at the Olympics site here in Beijing. Did you know that? Construction workers, security guards, officials at the Olympic village. These are the new targets.”
“Shahpour is recruiting them?” Joe asked. He experienced a moment of fear because the American had said nothing about this at M on the Bund.
“Shahpour?” Wang replied. “I know him only as Mark. All of you have so many personalities.” Joe shifted on the hard, unforgiving sofa. “He has certainly been instructed to recruit them. Whether his divided conscience will allow him to do so is a different matter. When I worked for Miles, he convinced me that we could bring about change in Xinjiang. I realize now, of course, that he was lying. He was interested in change because he was interested in oil and gas.”
Wang suddenly stood up and went into the bedroom. He was gone for some considerable time and Joe was concerned that the flow of information might now stop. He recalled how difficult it had been to draw out Wang’s secrets on that long-ago night in Hong Kong. He heard a rustle of papers, the scraping of a box, then the flap of what sounded like newspaper. Wang eventually emerged holding a cut-out article from the China Daily which he thrust into Joe’s hand.
“Read this,” he said.
MACKLINSON, PETROSINA SIGN JOINT-VENTURE
CHINA: An international consortium in which the local Petrosina and Macklinson Corporation of the United States hold a 74 % and 26 % stake respectively is gearing up to develop the Yakera-Dalaoba gas field in Xinjiang province. The front-end engineering and design contract was awarded for a planned US$600,000,000 upstream facility in the Tarim basin and is scheduled for completion by some time during the first quarter of 2008.
“This is a recent article?” Joe asked. Wang was stretching a muscle which had tightened in his arm.
“Very recent,” he said. “Did you read what was written? A six hundred million-dollar joint venture, brokered by your good friend Mr. Lambert. His company now has all that they required from the Uighur people. They have their land, they have their oil and they have their gas. The Central Intelligence Agency may have failed in its efforts to destabilize Xinjiang, but it has surely succeeded in filling the bank accounts of America’s richest men.”
“But what about Beijing? Why would they start all over again? If you believe that about the CIA, this new operation makes no sense.”
“Oh it makes sense, Mr. Richards.” Joe was desperate to reveal his true identity, if only to stop Wang’s incessant, taunting repetition of the cover name. “Their goal for China is a loss of face. This is what Miles has stooped to. America understands that the Games of 2008 represent an opportunity for the People’s Republic to present a civilized face to the world. Think of it as a coming-out party, if that phrase is still used in England. In three years’ time, China wishes to announce itself as a superpower competing on an equal footing with the United States of America. This is the dream of the apparatchiks in Tiananmen Square and they are determined to realize it. They have already relocated tens of thousands of people from their homes, and they will relocate tens of thousands more, myself and my neighbours included, to make way for their roads and stadiums. They will drive tramps and beggars out into the countryside. They will seed clouds to control the rain, fill the streets with smiling volunteers. And the world’s press will come here and they will photograph the gleaming buildings and the successful athletes of the Chinese economic miracle and these journalists will tell the world that this is what the future looks like.”
“And the Americans want to stop that?”
“Of course they want to stop that. There can be only one superpower. There is no place for China at the top table. These few men who wish to do this are as unrepresentative of the American people as you, an Englishman, or I, a Chinese. And yet they hold the absolute power. They will do whatever it takes to humiliate Beijing.”