Miles had performed a quick calculation. As TYPHOON accelerated over the next few years, his own responsibilities would also quicken and multiply. Lenan would be a useful ally, both as an experienced hand and as a window onto secret British thinking. They were standing in the bedroom of the safe house where Joe, just a few hours earlier, had been exhaustively interrogating Wang. Right there and then, with a wild decisiveness born of instinct and pressure, Miles agreed to Lenan’s request “to keep SIS out of it” and to pay him as an asset of the CIA. For the next four years, $50,000 a month made its way into a Luxembourg bank account that Vauxhall Cross couldn’t have traced to one of their own if they’d spent fifty years looking. Lenan was therefore nominally answerable to Miles, although a fellow diner at the Indian restaurant, observing the manner and body language of both men, would have assumed that Coolidge was very much the junior partner.
“So I have something else I need to tell you, Ken.”
“You do? What’s that?”
“Our people need somebody on the mainland to co-ordinate things. A focal point. A leader. The task force we’re putting together is ultimately going to stretch to maybe twenty or thirty agents, the majority of whom are currently stationed all over the Far East. When Bill’s shipments start rolling in, somebody is going to have to pull all those disparate elements together.”
Lenan reacted as though Miles were being unnecessarily oblique. “You’re telling me that you’ve been promoted,” he said. “You’ll shortly be leaving Hong Kong for bigger and better things.”
It was characteristic of Lenan that he should manage to puncture any sense of pride that Miles might have felt in his achievement. To control an operation on the scale of TYPHOON at this stage in his career was a significant feather in his cap.
“You got it,” he replied flatly. He wanted to fling a neat white ball of vanilla ice cream across the table into Lenan’s smug, tanned face. Yet he also craved the Englishman’s respect. Miles spent the next seven years of his life trying to reconcile these two conflicting positions. “Langley wants me to pack my bags and settle there by Christmas,” he said. “That means I’ll be leaving Hong Kong in the fall.”
So many consequences flowed from this statement that Lenan’s initial response might have been construed as flippant.
“You’ll miss the wedding, then,” he said.
Miles’s head jerked up. “What wedding?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Joe and Isabella are getting engaged.”
Miles Coolidge possessed many attributes as a spy-tenacity, self-confidence, a bold if sometimes reckless imagination-but a poker face was not chief among them. All of the tautness and the colour in his expression slipped down like a collapsing building. It was a sight that filled Kenneth Lenan with a profound if childish satisfaction, for he had long suspected Miles of harbouring a secret desire for Isabella. He took a sip of water from a glass on the table and watched the American scramble for answers.
“They’re what? Engaged? Since when? Who told you that?”
“It’s common knowledge.” It wasn’t, of course, but it was the sort of thing Lenan said when he was needling people.
Miles looked down at the table and tried to assemble some dignity. “Jesus. So how did he pop the question?”
“Oh it’s not popped.” Lenan seemed to enjoy the playful language.
“I don’t understand.”
“Rumour has it he’s going to do it at the handover.”
“On June 30th?”
“That is the day that has been outlined for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty back to the People’s Republic of China, yes.”
Miles said “Jesus” one more time.
“You seem shocked, Miles.”
“I’m pretty surprised, sure.” He was thinking, calculating, his mind turning over, like the low hum of the air-conditioning unit above their heads. “Does David know?”
“David is the one who found out.”
“What? Joe asked his permission?”
“Apparently.”
A sniff of laughter from both men. Colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic liked to console themselves with the theory that Joe was still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world. It made them feel better about their own shortcomings.
“So he wants her to know all about RUN? He’s prepared to break cover?”
Lenan nodded.
Which gave Miles an idea.
21
Twenty minutes later — no time for coffee, for digestifs — Miles was making a phone call on the corner of Haiphong Road and Kowloon Park Drive having put Lenan into a cab.
“Billy? I got a problem. What are you doing for wui gwai?”
Billy Chen was an American asset in the Triads whom Joe distrusted as a faithless opportunist, a drug-running hoodlum whose lust for the trappings of wealth and power was matched only by his colossal vanity and self-importance. Chen must have been about twenty or twenty-one in 1997, and had been taking Miles’s dollar for three years in return for information about criminal activity in Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong. Joe had had the chance to recruit him as an agent of SIS shortly after he arrived in 1995, but had turned it down flat on the basis that Chen was clearly unreliable. The Yanks, he quickly discovered, were less discerning; they tended to throw money at anybody who was willing to tell them what they wanted to hear.
“ Wui gwai?” Chen replied, pronouncing the Cantonese phrase for “handover” with a native finesse denied to Miles. “Maybe I’m in Hong Kong, maybe I’m not. How come you don’t call me so long?”
“Listen, Billy. I need you to do me a favor.”
“What kind of favour?”
Chen was sitting in the front seat of his favourite BMW with one hand on his mobile phone and the other sliding up the leg of a teenage girl plucked from a KTV bar in Shenzhen.
“Nothing serious, nothing special,” Miles told him. “Just involves a couple of friends of mine in the run-up to June 30th.”
“The run-up?” It was as if Chen didn’t understand the expression.
“That’s right, the run-up.” Miles couldn’t be bothered to explain it. He was in a panic over Isabella and had made a lightning quick decision to undermine Joe’s proposal with a simple if somewhat clumsy strategy of his own. For the time being, all thoughts of going to Lily’s had been postponed.
“Everybody take five days off,” Chen said, referring to the common assumption that Hong Kong would grind to a halt in the week of wui gwai, as offices closed and the colony’s residents waved their final farewells to British rule.
“Yeah, everybody’s taking five days off. But on one of those days you’ll be helping me, Billy. You’ll be at the end of the phone and you’ll be doing me a favor. Like I said, it’s nothing special. Just make sure you’re in Hong Kong.”
It felt good to be bullying someone after two hours of Kenneth Lenan. Miles had the leverage to make demands of Billy Chen because, for all his suits and his cars and his blank-eyed girls, the gangster was just another creature of American power, a small fish in a great sea whose elevated position within the Teochiu could be ended with a single phone call.
“OK, Miles. OK. So tell me what you want to do. Tell me why you need me around.”
“You remember my friend Joe?”
“Who?”
“The English guy. Tall. You met him a couple of years back at the Lisboa.”
A memory of meeting Joe in a hotel room at Macau’s largest casino assembled itself in Chen’s mind. Hesitatingly, he said, “Sure.”
“Well that’s who you’ll be dealing with,” he said. “That’s the guy I’m after.”
22
In the final weeks of British rule-that strange, chaotic period of excitement and regret and uncertainty over the colony’s future-many people commented on the change that came over Miles Coolidge. Several of his consulate colleagues at Garden Road, for example, noticed that he was less brash and self-assured around the office, while Joe was struck by a sudden courteousness in Miles’s behaviour, bordering on humility. Unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, we all assumed that he was simply putting his house in order before making the big move to Chengdu, and didn’t want his final months in Hong Kong to be obscured by a fog of conflicts and hedonism. There were parties almost every night in June, yet Miles kept his head down and worked hard, laying further foundations for TYPHOON and popping up socially only for the occasional beer at Club 1911, or a bowl of pasta at Grappa’s.