7

       Wang

      Joe hailed a cab on the corner of Man Yee Lane and was grateful for the cooling chill of air conditioning as he climbed into the back. A humid three-minute walk from the restaurant had left his body encased in the damp, fever sweat which was the curse of living in Hong Kong: one minute you were in a shopping mall or restaurant as cool as iced tea, the next on humid streets that punched you with the packed heat of Asia. Joe’s shirt glued itself to the plastic upholstery of the cab as he leaned back and said, ‘Granville Road, please,’ with sweat condensing on his forehead and sliding in drops down the back of his neck. Five feet from the cab, a group of Chinese men were seated on stools around a tiny television set drinking cans of Jinwei and watching a movie. Joe made out the squat, spike-haired features of Jean-Claude van Damme as the taxi pulled away.

      Traffic on Des Voeux Road, coming both ways: buses, bicycles, trucks, cabs, all of the multi-dimensional crush of Hong Kong. The journey took forty minutes, under the cross-hatch of neon signs in Central, past the mamasans loitering in the doorways of Wan Chai, then dropping into the congested mid-harbour tunnel at North Point and surfacing, ten minutes later, into downtown Kowloon. Joe directed the driver to within two blocks of the safe house and covered the last 200 metres on foot. He stopped at a street café for a bowl of noodles and ate them at a low plastic table in the heat of the night, sweat now coagulating against his clothes. His shirt and the trousers of his suit seemed to absorb all of the dust and the grease and the slick fried stench of the neighbourhood. He finished his food and bought a packet of counterfeit cigarettes from a passing vendor, offering one to an elderly man jammed up at the table beside him; his smile of gratitude was a broken piano of blackened teeth. Joe drank stewed green tea and settled the bill and walked to the door of the safe house at the southern end of Yuk Choi Road.

      The burned buzzer had been replaced with a blue plastic bell. Joe pushed it quickly, twice, paused for three seconds, then pushed it again in four short bursts to establish his identity. Lee came to the intercom, said, ‘Hello, fourth floor please,’ in his awkward, halting English, and allowed Joe to pass into a foyer which smelled, as all such foyers did in the colony, of fried onions and soy sauce.

      Lee was thirty-two, very short, with neat clipped hair, smooth skin and eyes that constantly asked for your approbation. He said, ‘Hello, Mr Richards,’ because that was the name by which he knew Joe.

      ‘Hi, Lee. How are things?’

      The stale air in the light-starved apartment had been breathed too many times. Joe could hear the high-frequency whine of a muted television in the sitting room as he laid his jacket on a chair in the hall. No air-con, no breeze. His only previous visit to the safe house had taken place on a cool autumnal day six months earlier, when Miles had done most of the talking, pretending to comfort a cash-strapped translator from a French trade delegation while three CIA stooges took advantage of his absence from the Hilton to ransack his room for documents. To the right of the hall was a cramped bathroom where Joe splashed water on his face before joining Lee in the kitchen.

      ‘Where is he?’

      Lee nodded across the hall towards a red plastic strip-curtain which functioned as the sitting-room door. The sound had come back on the television. Joe heard Peter O’Toole saying, ‘We want two glasses of lemonade,’ and thought he recognized both the film and the scene. ‘He watch Lawrence of Arabia,’ Lee confirmed. ‘With Sadha. Come with me into the back.’

      Joe followed the slap-and-drag of Lee’s flip-flops as he walked through to the bedroom. Once inside, with the door closed, the two men stood in front of one another, like strangers at a cocktail party.

      ‘Who is he?’ Joe asked. ‘Mr Lodge wasn’t able to tell me very much on the phone.’

      Mr Lodge was the name by which Kenneth Lenan was known to those former employees of the Hong Kong police force, Lee among them, who occasionally assisted SIS with their operations.

      ‘The man’s name is given as Wang Kaixuan. He claims to be a professor of economics at the University of Xinjiang in Urumqi City.’

      ‘So he’s not a Uighur?’

      Uighurs are the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang – pronounced ‘Shin-jang’ – a once predominantly Muslim province in the far north-west of China which has been fought over, and colonized, by its many neighbours for centuries. Rich in natural resources, Xinjiang is China’s other Tibet, the province the world forgot.

      ‘No, Han Chinese, forty-eight years old. This morning at dawn he swam from the mainland to the east of Sha Tau Kok, where he became involved in a struggle with a soldier from Black Watch.’ Lee picked up the file that Lenan had mentioned and studied it for some time. Joe watched him flick nervously through the pages. ‘The soldier’s name was Lance Corporal Angus Anderson, patrolling a beach on Dapeng Bay. Mr Wang try to present himself as Hong Kong citizen, a birdwatcher, says he is a professor at the university here in Western District. Lance Corporal Anderson does not believe this story and they get into a struggle.’

      ‘Birdwatcher,’ Joe muttered. ‘What kind of struggle?’

      Outside on the street a young man was trading insults in Cantonese with a woman who yelled at him as he gunned off on a motorbike.

      ‘Nothing. No injury. But something about the situation makes Anderson uneasy. Most blind flow in his experience do not speak fluent English, do not, for example, know much about the history of the Black Watch regiment. But Mr Wang seems well informed about this, very different to what Anderson has been trained to look for. Then he begs him not to be handed over to immigration.’

      ‘Isn’t that what you’d expect someone in his situation to do?’

      ‘Of course. Only then he claims that he is in possession of sensitive information relating to the possible defection of a high-level Chinese government official.’

      ‘And Anderson swallowed this?’

      ‘He take a risk.’ Lee sounded defensive. For the first time he was beginning to doubt the authenticity of the man who had spent the last three hours beguiling him with stories of China’s terrible past, its awkward present, its limitless future. ‘The soldier walks him back to Black Watch base and tells his company commander what has happened.’

      ‘Barber was the company commander?’ Joe was starting to put the pieces together.

      ‘Yes, Mr Richards. Major Barber.’

      Major Malcolm Barber, an ambitious, physically imposing Black Watch officer with impeccable contacts in the local military, was known to SIS as DICTION. He had been feeding regular gobbets of information to Waterfield and Lenan for three years on the tacit understanding that he would be offered a position within MI6 when he resigned his commission in 1998. To my knowledge he was last seen wandering around the Green Zone in Baghdad, trying to hatch plots against the local insurgency.

      ‘And he believed the story? Got on the phone to Mr Lodge and had him brought south for questioning?’

      ‘That is correct. Mr Lodge send a car to Sha Tau Kok. Had to make sure police and immigration know nothing about it. Every detail is in the report.’

      Joe thought the whole thing sounded ludicrous and briefly considered