Charles Cumming - Typhoon

On the Kowloon side Joe shuffled out of the terminal through a crush of rush-hour workers and walked east along Salisbury Road. There was still an hour to go before he was expected at the safe house and he gave in to a sudden, imperial urge to eat breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. A waiter in late middle age guided him through the marble splendour of the ancient lobby and found him a quiet table with a view onto the bustling streets outside. Joe ordered eggs Benedict and orange juice and read the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover while thinking of Isabella eating breakfast alone in their apartment. Towards eight o’clock he paid the bill, which came to almost HK$300, and took a cab to within a block of Yuk Choi Road.

Only when he was at the door, waiting for Lee to respond to his four short bursts on the buzzer, did Joe remember that he had switched off his phone the night before. As he waited on the steps of the building, the machine burst into life. The read-out said: “FORGET ABOUT TOMORROW. CHANGE OF PLAN. GO TO WORK AS NORMAL. KL” and Joe felt all the tiredness of a night without sleep catching up with him. It was too early in the morning for an anti-climax.

Lee’s surprised, groggy voice crackled on the intercom.

“Who is this please?”

“It’s John.”

It took some time before Lee finally buzzed Joe inside. He looked unusually anxious when he opened the door to greet him. His forehead was creased with worry lines and he was breathing quickly, as if he, and not Mr. Richards, had just climbed four flights of humid stairs.

“You forget something?” he asked. Nor was this Lee’s typical greeting. He was usually more deferential, keen to smile and make a good first impression. There were windows open throughout the flat and Joe sensed immediately that Wang, Sadha and Lenan had all left. He briefly entertained the wild notion that he had caught Lee with a girl in the back bedroom. He certainly looked not to have slept.

“No, I didn’t forget anything,” he said. “Is everything all right, Lee?”

“Everything fine.”

Joe moved past him into the kitchen and saw that the bedroom was empty. “I just got the message,” he said. “I’ve made a wasted journey. Mr. Lodge told me not to come. Where the hell is everybody?”

“They went home,” Lee replied uneasily.

“What do you mean, they went home?”

“Leave at five. Mr. Wang go with them.”

“Mr. Wang doesn’t have a home.”

This remark seemed to confuse Lee, who looked like an actor struggling to remember his lines. For want of something to say, he muttered, “I really don’t know,” an evasion which irritated Joe. He was beginning to suspect that he was being lied to.

“You don’t know what?”

“What, Mr. Richards? I think they take Mr. Wang somewhere else. I think they leave at five o’clock.”

“You think?”

Lee looked ever more sheepish. He clearly didn’t know whether to tell Joe what had happened or to obey orders and keep his mouth shut.

“What about Sadha?” he asked. “What happened to Sadha?”

“Sadha go with them.”

“With who?”

“With Mr. Lodge and Mr. Coleman. They take the professor north.”

Joe had been passing through the red plastic strip curtains on his way into the sitting room but the shock of this information spun him round. Malcolm Coleman was one of Miles’s cover names.

“The Americans were here?”

Lee looked embarrassed, because he had uttered a secret which it was now too late to retract. His head 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.