Charles Cumming - Typhoon

“Everything’s fine. I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“You look tired, Joe. Why don’t I give you a break? We might give Mr. Wang a few hours’ sleep then tackle him first thing in the morning.”

The act of standing up and walking out into the hall caused Joe to realize the extent of his own mental and physical exhaustion. Without thinking, he told Lenan that, yes, he would appreciate a few hours of sleep. Following him into the bedroom, he added that Isabella might be wondering why it had taken him more than five hours to fix a simple paperwork problem at Heppner’s, and that it would be wise to return home to protect his cover. This detail seemed to settle it.

“Do you want me to run through what’s been said?” Joe asked, picking up his jacket on the way out.

“In the morning,” Lenan replied. “Go home, grab a few hours’ sleep, be back here around eight. We’ll go through all of it then.”

It only remained for Joe to bid Wang farewell. Returning to the sitting room, he explained that a second official from Government House, a Mr. Lodge, would be staying at the apartment overnight and that Wang could now rest until morning. The interview was concluded. They would see one another again in a few hours.

“I thank you for listening,” Wang told him, standing and shaking Joe’s hand.

It would be another eight years before the two men would meet again.

Three months earlier, a little more than 8,000 miles away on a sun-kissed Virginian golf course, former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense William “Bill” Marston had stood over his Titleist Pro V1 and intoned a favourite golfing mantra.

“The ball is my friend,” he whispered, “the ball is my friend,” and as he shook out his fattened hips and gripped the shaft of his gleaming five iron, Marston pictured the arc of the shot-just as he had been taught to do by the Turnberry professional who had charged him more than $75 an hour on a summer vacation to Scotland three years earlier-and truly believed, in the depths of his reactionary soul, that he was going to land the ball on the green.

He steadied his head. He drew back the club. He was one up with one to play. The five iron whistled through the warm spring air and connected with the Titleist in a way that felt powerful and true, but on this occasion, as on so many others throughout the course of his long, frustrating golfing life, the ball was not Bill Marston’s friend, the ball was not soaring gracefully towards the stiff red flag at the crown of the seventeenth green; the ball was his enemy, hooking violently towards the trees at the edge of the vast Raspberry Falls golf course and ending its days approximately 120 metres away in a camouflage of earth and leaves from which it would never be returned.

“Fuck it,” Marston spat, but managed to maintain his composure in the presence of his personal assistant, the Minnesota-born Sally-Ann McNeil who, for reasons which she was never properly able to explain, had been impelled to caddy for her boss. Sally-Ann, who was twenty-eight and college-educated, was somewhat wary of William “Bill” Marston. Nevertheless, when he lost his temper like this, she knew exactly what to say.

“Oh that’s so unfair, sir.” The boss was already telling her to pick him out another ball and indicating to his opponent that he would be happy to drop a shot.

“You sure about that, Bill?” CIA deputy director Richard Jenson had sliced his own drive into the deep rough on the opposite side of the fairway. He was wearing moleskin plus-fours and preparing to attack the green. “You sure you don’t just wanna concede and call it all-square going up eighteen?”

“I’m sure.” Marston’s reply was so quiet that even Sally-Ann had difficulty making it out. Handing him a replacement Titleist-his fourth of the round-she took a step backwards, caught the eye of Jenson’s caddy, Josh, who was thirtysomething and tanned and kept looking at her, and shuddered as the man from Langley struck a faultless six iron slap-bang into the middle of the green.

“Great shot, Dick,” Marston shouted out, muttering “Asshole” under his breath as soon as he had turned round. Sally-Ann struggled to disguise a smile. It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch at the clubhouse was booked for two. Standing over the ball, Marston glanced quickly at his PA, as if the sight of a beautiful woman might calm him in his hour of need. Then he drew back the graphite shaft a second time and prayed for a golfing miracle.

It was the worst kind of shot. The Titleist lifted itself no more than three inches from the ground before shooting in a plumb-line across the immaculate Virginia fairway for about eighty metres, finally bobbling to rest at the edge of the green. Marston sniffed the air.

“I can still take a five,” he muttered. “Dick can three-putt,” offering just a glimpse of his ferocious competitive spirit. You didn’t get to be one of Reagan’s favourite sons, you didn’t get to be chairman and director of Macklinson Corporation, you didn’t get to sit on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee by quitting when the going gets tough. Bill Marston was a winner. Bill Marston was a fighter. Bill Marston let his five iron drop to the ground so that Sally-Ann could pick it up.

He had been playing most of the round in a bad mood. In the trunk of his armour-plated Mercedes, secured under lock and key and watched over by a 250-pound former Navy SEAL chauffeur, was a leaked, top-secret copy of the Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the People’s Republic of China-now commonly referred to as the Cox Report. Cox was a classified document until a few years ago and, strictly speaking, Marston shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. However, a disgruntled staffer in the House of Representatives had suggested to one of Marston’s senior employees that he might be able to obtain a draft copy in return for a position as a Macklinson executive in Berlin earning low six-figures after tax. Marston had agreed to the deal and had spent most of the previous evening reading the report at his home in Georgetown. The process had left him incensed to the point of insomnia.

These were the edited highlights, digested over a bowl of his wife’s notoriously insipid clam chowder:

The People’s Republic of China (hereafter the PRC) has stolen classified design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons. These thefts of nuclear secrets from our national weapons laboratories have enabled the PRC to design, develop, and successfully test modern strategic nuclear weapons sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

“Fuckers,” Marston muttered.

The stolen information includes classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal. The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the “neutron bomb”) which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.

“Jesus.”

The Select Committee judges that the PRC will exploit elements of the stolen design information on the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons. The PRC has three mobile ICBM programs currently underway, all of which will be able to strike the United States.

Since the joyful, Cold War-ending events of 1991, Bill Marston had been looking around for a new global enemy. Finally he had found one.

Jenson won the seventeenth hole with a nerveless putt from eight feet, but Marston produced a second shot onto the eighteenth green which effectively won the match when his opponent failed to escape a fairway bunker at the third attempt. Afterwards, while Josh explained to Sally-Ann that he worked in an office “about forty feet” from CIA director John Deutch and wondered if she was by any chance free for dinner, the two old friends showered and met at the bar for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda. After polite exchanges with several fellow club members they got down to business.