Both Lambert and Marston looked at Jenson as if they were now expected to speak. Instead, aware of the gathering silence in Washington, Miles carried on.
“What we want to suggest to you today, gentlemen, is a strategy on several fronts. Dick, Josh, you OK if I go ahead?”
“Absolutely.”
Miles glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him on which he had scrawled some bullet-pointed notes. “Now it’s my understanding that Macklinson has offices outside of Beijing in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Harbin, Golmud, Xining and Chengdu. Is that correct?”
“That is correct,” Lambert told him.
“Well then here’s what we would like to suggest.”
18
Sally-Ann McNeil is nowadays a mother of three children-two boys, one girl-living in a quiet suburb of Maryland, married to a balding, wealthy, not exactly charismatic tax attorney named Gerry. Their house, with its low white roof and its sprinkler on the lawn, is no more than an hour’s drive from the airport and resembles every other house on the anonymous residential street on which they have chosen to make their home. Sally-Ann works part-time at a local real estate office, offers private tuition to dyslexic schoolchildren and plays golf with her friend Mary up to three times a week.
“Bill Marston got me into it,” she says. “If he was still alive today, I could kick his ass.”
It took a while to track Sally-Ann down. Her name has changed through marriage and, in the wake of TYPHOON, she was understandably reluctant to stick her head above the parapet. We spoke one weekday afternoon in 2006 in a warm, plant-filled conservatory at the back of her house when Gerry was away at work and the eldest of their children at school. If she was nervous about talking to a nosey writer, she did not betray it, although the breaking of her long silence was something for which she had clearly been preparing herself for some time.
“To be honest, it was all so long ago. I thought nobody would ever ask,” she said, letting the two-week-old baby she was holding in her arms suckle on a manicured finger. “It was part of my job to be anonymous, to be the note taker, the assistant who fixed coffee. Nobody even seemed to notice I was there.” She looked sideways out of the window and her gaze seemed regretful. “I knew right away that I was carrying a pretty burdensome secret. I’ve never told Gerry a thing, you know? I figured the day that I did would be the day that they came looking for me.”
Sally-Ann now began to relate what Miles had said on the long-distance line as the Washington meeting developed either side of lunch. Her voice was low and steady and I was impressed both by her memory and by her grasp of the political ramifications of the discussion. In common with most Europeans over the previous five or six years, I had tended to underestimate the intelligence of the average Bush-voting American, but Sally-Ann was as lucid and as perceptive as I could have wished.
“What you have to remember is that Bill Marston was a politician first and a businessman second,” she said. “With Mike Lambert it was the other way around.” I was taking notes and my pen ran out of ink. She was still talking as I swapped it for a biro in my jacket pocket. “Both of them had this image of themselves as patriots, when in fact they were just ignorant, ambitious neocons. I guess you’ve seen it a lot in the past few years. Throwbacks from a different era with little or no understanding of how anybody east of New York really behaves. Men of money and power whose sole objective is to make America richer and more powerful than she already is. So when this articulate, seemingly well-informed spy from Hong Kong started to suggest using Macklinson hardware and know-how to get access into mainland China, they both just started to glow. The plan was so crazy, but it was perfect. They were going to conceal explosives, weapons, cellphones, laptop computers, printers, photocopiers, even Korans, in Macklinson freight shipments coming in by air or sea from the United States.
Coolidge knew we had contracts running in dozens of Chinese cities, including four, I think, in Xinjiang itself, and others just over the border in Gansu and Qinghai. He proposed funding the setting up of English-language schools on site, nominally for teaching Chinese-speaking employees how to communicate with their American bosses, but in reality as cover for CIA teachers in Xinjiang and surrounding provinces to recruit disaffected laborers for the creation of civil strife.”
“Some of those teachers got caught,” I muttered.
“Sure,” she replied, as if this wasn’t news to her. “Then they sent out literally hundreds of video cameras for distribution among the peasant underclass so they could record the riots when they took place, with the idea of exerting extra pressure on Beijing through the subsequent outrage of the international community. I think maybe that was one idea that actually worked, right, because I saw a news report on CNN.” I nodded, unsure whether CNN had covered the same riot story as the one picked up by the Washington Post in the summer of 2003, when video footage of a pitched battle between disgruntled peasants and gangs employed by a Chinese electricity company was leaked to the Post by a farmer. The film showed a small group of peasants who had refused to abandon their land being attacked by a gang armed with pipes and shovels. “And then of course they were going to fill Macklinson with deep-cover CIA guys who would nominally be working on road or rail construction projects but would in fact be running agents across the entirety of north-west China. It was all on an unbelievable scale. Coolidge talked about encouraging Saudi funding using ‘well-established channels,’ about the need to identify and fund a Uighur leader at the head of an Eastern Turkestan government-in-exile. They even talked, at that early stage, about recruiting Uighur pilgrims when they travelled to Mecca. It was very imaginative, very persuasive. Yet even as I was listening to it all, with everybody going into detail and new ideas springing up all the time, I remember thinking, How can it be that this morning neither Bill Marston nor Mike Lambert could point to Xinjiang on a map? Yet here they are signing up a publicly listed company to a top-secret CIA project which nearly bankrupted its operations in Asia.”
“Oil,” I said, because, when it came to TYPHOON, oil was the answer to almost everything.
“I guess you’re right.” Sally-Ann’s middle child, a blond-haired toddler called Karl who was watching television in the next room, suddenly waddled in and asked for some fruit juice. She fetched it for him and then returned to the conservatory carrying a plate of apparently home-baked cookies. As if she had been turning the idea over in her mind, she said, “I think Mike was always a lot smarter than Bill, y’know? The top guys at Macklinson were almost always figureheads, former government officials who lent a certain kind of gravitas and credibility to the boardroom. Men like Mike Lambert were the ones making the decisions. He’d been with the company from the age of twenty-two. Now he’s worked his way to the top. And I definitely think you’re right when you say that it was the prospect of the oil and gas in Xinjiang that made him go along with it. That was the quid pro quo with the CIA as far as he was concerned. You scratch our back now and we’ll scratch yours later. You could actually see him envisaging an independent Xinjiang run by a puppet government of the United States. That was how delusional they were. Macklinson sweeping up contracts to build pipelines, refineries, road networks, hotels in the desert…”
Sally-Ann suddenly looked tired and I realized that she had probably been up most of the night feeding her baby. She laid the child in a crib on the floor and I wondered whether this was my cue to leave. We had been talking for several hours.