Typhoon. Charles Cumming

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СКАЧАТЬ shook very quickly, like a shiver passing through him, but his decent eyes betrayed the truth. Joe felt pity for him as Lee said, ‘You did not know this, Mr Richards?’

      ‘No, Lee, I did not know this. How long was Coleman here for?’

      Lee sat down on the chair in the hall and disclosed that Miles had arrived shortly after 3 a.m. Only moments, in other words, after Joe had left the building himself. Had he been waiting outside?

      ‘Why didn’t Coleman come up with Mr Lodge?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t they say something to me?’

      Lee shrugged his shoulders. It was a mystery as much to him as it was to Joe. ‘We were in the bedroom,’ he said, as if that absolved him of all responsibility. ‘I was in the bedroom with Sadha.’

      Joe had known moments like this before, moments when he, as the junior spook, had been kept out of the loop by his professional masters. It was as if Waterfield and Lenan, in spite of everything that he had already achieved in his short career, still did not trust him to sit at the top table with older and wiser souls. Why were they so cautious? Everything in SIS was a club; everything was ‘need to know’, ‘expediency’ and ‘restricted access’. But what were they concealing from him? Why would Lenan send a message to Joe telling him to ‘forget about’ Wang and then conspire with the CIA to have him moved to a new location?

      ‘Have you got a number where I can reach Lodge?’ he asked.

      Lee immediately stood up and produced a card from the pocket of his shirt. He smiled as he handed it over, relieved of his duty to lie on Lenan’s behalf. It was a cellphone with a Taiwanese prefix. Joe didn’t recognize the rest of the number but dialled it anyway, using the phone by the door.

      A message system clicked in and he was aware of the need to speak carefully on what might be an open line.

      ‘Hi. It’s me. I’m at the flat. I only got your text this morning, when I was already here. Just wondering what the story is. Just wondering what’s going on. Any chance you could call me?’

      Lee looked intently at Joe as he hung up, like a relative in a hospital anticipating bad news. Lenan rang back within a minute.

      ‘Joe?’

      ‘Speaking.’

      ‘You say you’re at the flat?’

      It was impossible to tell where Lenan was calling from. The tone of his voice suggested that he was both annoyed and slightly disconcerted.

      ‘Yes, I’m here with Lee. I didn’t get your page until –’

      ‘No, obviously you didn’t.’ Lenan was not known for outbursts of temper; rather, he preferred to imply his displeasure with a gesture or carefully chosen phrase. ‘Why did you switch it off?’ he asked, with the clear suggestion that Joe had acted unprofessionally.

      ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking at the time. I didn’t want to wake Isabella.’

      ‘I see.’

      That was a mistake. He shouldn’t have mentioned Isabella. The Office still weren’t happy about their relationship. They wanted it put on a more formal footing.

      ‘Anyway, I’m here now and Lee says you took off with Wang at five o’clock. He also said that Malcolm Coleman was here.’ Lee, listening in, took a deep, chest-inflating breath.

      ‘Lee said that?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Why had Joe bothered to call him ‘sir’? He never called anyone ‘sir’. In his relationship with Waterfield, whom he regarded as something of a father figure, there was respect and understanding, but also a quality of candour which allowed Joe to relax and speak his mind. The more guarded, watchful Lenan, on the other hand, was a different proposition: he brought out something deferential in Joe, who could never escape a feeling of slight nervousness, even of intellectual inferiority, in his company.

      ‘Well, as you know, the Cousins have ears on the safe house.’ Joe sensed that this was already more information than Lenan had been prepared to divulge. Restricted access. Expediency. Need to know. ‘Somebody at the consulate was listening in. They contacted Miles. Reckoned they’d run into Wang before.’

      ‘Run into him before?’

      ‘That’s right.’

      ‘And had they?’

      Lenan reacted as if Joe was asking dull, obvious questions to which there were dull, obvious answers. ‘Yes.’ Then it sounded as if the line had gone dead.

      ‘Hello?’

      ‘I’m still here.’

      ‘I’m sorry, you said Wang had been to Hong Kong before? You’re saying the Cousins had a file on him?’

      ‘That is what I am saying, Joe, yes.’

      Don’t patronize me, you prick. Why should I have to keep pressing you for information? Why is one of my own colleagues blatantly lying to me?

      ‘And?’

      Lenan dropped the bad news. ‘Well, the conclusion that Miles and I arrived at pretty quickly is that Professor Wang was MSS. So we spat him back this morning.’

      Joe was stunned. It simply didn’t make sense that the man he had interrogated less than eight hours earlier was a Chinese double. Wang Kaixuan may have been many things – a smooth-talker, a liar, a sentimentalist – but he was surely not an agent provocateur.

      ‘Well, I have to say that I’m amazed by that. It certainly wasn’t my instinct when I spoke to him.’

      ‘No. It wasn’t. We might have to chalk that one up to experience.’

      The implied criticism was clear: Joe had fallen for a basic Chinese deception. All of which would reflect badly on his reputation within the Office. It was a body blow.

      ‘So he’s already back in China?’

      ‘Dropped him off in Lo Wu this morning.’

       14

       Samba’s

      When Miles Coolidge wanted to avoid awkward conversations he adopted a number of different tactics: meetings cancelled at the last minute; phone calls ignored for days on end; letters and emails left stubbornly unanswered. If it wasn’t in his best interests to tackle a problem, he would leave that problem unresolved. So when Joe walked into Samba’s at nine o’clock that evening and spotted Miles at the crowded bar surrounded by a seven-strong group of his American consulate co-workers, he saw it not as a happy accident of the diplomatic life in Hong Kong, but as a deliberate delaying tactic to prevent any serious discussion of Wang. They had agreed to meet alone. Miles was playing games.

      ‘Joe!’

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