Typhoon

3
Lennox

Joe Lennox left Jardine House at seven o’clock that evening, nodded discreetly at a French investment banker as he sank two vodka and tonics at the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Oriental, hailed a cab on Connaught Road, made his way through the rush-hour traffic heading west into the Mid-Levels and walked through the door of Rico’s at precisely 8.01 p.m. It was a gift. He was always on time.

I was sitting towards the back of the restaurant drinking a Tsingtao and reading a syndicated article in the South China Morning Post about the prospect of a Labour victory in the forthcoming UK elections. A ginger-haired Canadian woman at the next table was eating crayfish and throwing out dirty looks because of the cigarette I was smoking. When she coughed and waved her hand in front of her face once too often, I stubbed it out. The air conditioning was on high and it felt as though everyone in the room was shivering.

Joe looked the way Joe always looked in those days: fit and undiminished, his characteristically inscrutable expression becoming more animated as he found my eyes across the room. At first glance, I suppose he was no different from any other decent-looking Jardine Johnnie in a Welsh & Jeffries suit, the sort who moves millions every day at Fleming’s and Merrill Lynch. That, I suppose, was the whole point about Joe Lennox. That was the reason they picked him.

‘Cold in here,’ he said, but he took his jacket off when he sat down. ‘What are you reading?’

I told him and he ventured a mildly critical opinion of the columnist – a former Tory cabinet minister – who had written the piece. (The next day I went through some cuttings and saw that the same grandee had been responsible for a couple of Patten-savaging articles in the British press, which probably explained Joe’s antagonism.) He ordered a Tsingtao for himself and watched as the Canadian woman put her knife and fork together after finishing the crayfish.

‘Been here long?’ he asked.

‘About ten minutes.’

He was wearing a dark blue shirt and his forearms were tanned from walking in the New Territories with Isabella the previous weekend. He took out a packet of cigarettes and leaned towards the Canadian to ask if she would mind if he smoked. She seemed so taken aback by this basic display of courtesy that she nodded her assent without a moment’s hesitation, then eyebrowed me as if I had been taught a valuable lesson in charm. I smiled and closed the Post.

‘It’s good to see you,’ I said.

‘You too.’

By this point we had been friends for the best part of a year, although it felt like longer. Living overseas can have that effect; you spend so much time socializing with a relatively small group of people that relationships intensify in a way that is unusual and not always healthy. Nevertheless, the experience of getting to know Joe had been one of the highlights of my brief stay in Hong Kong, where I had been living and working since the autumn of 1994. In the early days I was never certain of the extent to which that affection was reciprocated. Joe was an intensely loyal friend, amusing and intelligent company, but he was often withdrawn and emotionally unreadable, with a habit – doubtless related to the nature of his profession – of keeping people at arm’s length.

To explain how we met. In 1992 I was reporting on the siege of Sarajevo when I was approached at a press conference by a female SIS officer working undercover at the UN. Most foreign journalists, at one time or another, are sounded out as potential sources by the intelligence services. Some make a song and dance about the importance of maintaining their journalistic integrity; the rest of us enjoy the fact that a tax-free grand pops up in our bank account every month, courtesy of the bean-counters at Vauxhall Cross. Our Woman in Sarajevo took me to a quiet room at the airport and, over a glass or two of counterfeit-label Irish whiskey, acquired me as a support agent. Over the next couple of years, in Bosnia, Kigali and Sri Lanka, I was contacted by SIS and encouraged to pass on any information about the local scene that I deemed useful to the smooth running of our green and pleasant land. Only very occasionally did I have cause to regret the relationship.

Joe Lennox left school – expensive, boarding – in the summer of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He was not an exceptional student, at least by the standards of the school, but left with three good A-levels (in French, Spanish and history), a place at Oxford and a private vow never to submit any children of his own to the peculiar eccentricities of the English private school system. Contemporaries remember him as a quiet, popular teenager who worked reasonably hard and kept a low profile, largely, I suspect, because Joe’s parents never lost an opportunity to remind their son of the ‘enormous financial sacrifices’ they had made to send him away in the first place.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, who went off to pick fruit in Australia or smoke weed for six months on Koh Samui, Joe didn’t take a gap year but instead went straight up to Oxford to study Mandarin as part of the BA Honours course at Wadham. Four years later he graduated with a starred First and was talent-spotted for Six in late 1993 by a tutor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he had gone to enquire about the possibility of doing a PhD. He went to a couple of interviews at Carlton Gardens, sailed through the Civil Service exams and had been positively vetted by the new year of 1994. Years later, Joe and I had dinner in London, when he began to speak candidly about those first few months as an Intelligence Branch officer.

‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘I was twenty-three. I’d known nothing but straitjacket British institutions from the age of eight. Prep school, public school, Wadham College Oxford. No meaningful job, no serious relationship, a year in Taiwan learning Mandarin, where everyone ate noodles and stayed in their offices until eleven o’clock at night. When the Office vetted me for the EPV I felt like a standing joke: no police record; no debts; no strong political views – these were the Major years, after all; a single Ecstasy tablet swallowed in a Leeds nightclub in 1991. That was it. I was a completely clean slate, tabula rasa. They could do with me more or less as they pleased.’

Vetting led to Century House, in the last months before the move to Vauxhall Cross. Joe was put into IONEC, the fabled initiation course for new MI6 recruits, alongside three other Oxbridge graduates (all male, all white, all in their thirties), two former soldiers (both Scots Guards, via Sandhurst) and a forty-year-old Welsh biochemist named Joanne who quit after six weeks to take up a $150,000-a-year position at MIT. On Joe’s first day, ‘C’ told the new intake that SIS still had a role to play in world affairs, despite the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Joe specifically remembered that the Chief made a point, very early on, of emphasizing the importance of the ‘special relationship with our Cousins across the pond’ and of praising the CIA for its ‘extraordinary technical resources’, without which, it was implied, SIS would have been neutered. Joe listened, nodded and kept his head down, and within two months had been taken to the spook training centre at Fort Monckton, where he persuaded strangers in Portsmouth pubs to part with their passport numbers and learned how to fire a handgun. From the sources I’ve spoken to, it’s fairly clear that Joe, in spite of his age, was considered a bit of a star. Spies, declared or otherwise, usually operate from the safety of British embassies overseas, using diplomatic cover as a means of running agents in hostile territories. Very early on, however, it was suggested that Joe would be most effective working under non-official cover in Asia, at long-term, deniable length from the Service. It was certainly a feather in his cap. While his fellow IONEC officers were moved into desk jobs in London, analysing intelligence and preparing for their first postings overseas, the Far East Controllerate was finding Joe a job in Hong Kong, ostensibly working as a freight forwarder at Heppner Logistics, a shipping company based in Jardine House. In reality he was a NOC, operating under non-official cover, by far the most sensitive and secret position in the intelligence firmament.

Joe turned twenty-four on the day he touched down at Kai Tak. His parents had seen him off at Heathrow under the misguided impression that their beloved only son was leaving England to seek his fortune in the East. Who knew? Perhaps he’d be back in a few years with a foxy Cantonese wife and a grandchild to show off in the Home Counties. Joe felt awkward not telling his family and friends the truth about what he was up to, but Six had advised against it. It was better that way, they said. No point in making anyone worry. Yet I think there were additional factors at play here. Secrecy appealed to something in Joe’s nature, a facet of his personality that the spooks at Vauxhall Cross had recognized instantly, but which he himself had not yet fully come to understand. Lying to his parents felt like an act of liberation: for the first time in his life he was free of all the smallness and the demands of England. In less than a year Joe Lennox had cut himself off from everything that had made and defined him. Arriving in Hong Kong, he was born again.

Heppner Logistics was a tiny operation run out of two small offices on the eleventh floor of Jardine House, a fifty-two-storey edifice overlooking Victoria Harbour and dotted with tiny circular windows, an architectural anomaly which earned it the local nickname ‘The House of a Thousand Arseholes’. Ted Heppner was a former Royal Marine who emigrated to Hong Kong in 1972. For eighteen years he had facilitated the international shipment of ‘sensitive’ cargoes on behalf of SIS, but this was the first time that he had agreed to take on an intelligence officer as an employee. At first, Ted’s Singaporean wife Judy, who also functioned as his secretary, wasn’t keen on the idea, but when the Cross bought her a Chanel handbag and bumped up her salary by twenty per cent she embraced Joe like a long-lost son. Nominally he was required to show up every day and to field whatever faxes and phone calls came into the office from clients looking to move freight consignments around the world, but in reality Ted and Judy continued to deal with over ninety-five per cent of Heppner business, leaving Joe free to carry out his work for Queen and Country. If anybody asked why an Oxford graduate with a starred First in Mandarin was earning less than £20,000 a year working for a logistics company in Hong Kong, Joe told them that he’d been involved in a failed business venture back home and had just wanted to get the hell out of London. If they continued to pry, he hinted that he saw Heppner’s as a short-term option which would allow him, within six or eight months, to apply for a job with one of the larger Taipan conglomerates, such as Swire’s or Jardine Matheson.

It was illustrative of the extreme sensitivity of Joe’s position that Ted and Judy were two of only a handful of people who knew that Joe was under non-official cover. The others included David Waterfield, Head of Station for SIS in Hong Kong, Waterfield’s second-in-command, Kenneth Lenan, and Rick Zagoritis, a legendary figure in the Far East Controllerate who acted as Joe’s mentor and go-between in the first few months of his posting. I became aware of his activities when Zagoritis was obliged to fly to London for medical reasons in the autumn of 1995. Up to that point, Rick had been my SIS handler. As a result of an article I had written for the Sunday Times Magazine about Teochiu triad heroin dealers, London had become interested in the contacts I had made in the criminal underworld and I had provided Zagoritis with detailed assessments of the structure and intentions of triad groups in the Pearl River Delta. With Rick gone, I needed a new handler.

That was when Joe stepped in. It was a considerable challenge for such a junior player, but he proved a more than competent replacement. Within less than a year of arriving in the colony, he had made a name for himself as a highly effective NOC. Nor were there any concerns about his private life. In two reports commissioned by Kenneth Lenan as routine checks into the behaviour of new recruits, Joe demonstrated himself to be surprisingly self-disciplined when confronted by the myriad opportunities for hedonism which are part and parcel of male expat life in Asia. (‘He’ll learn,’ Waterfield muttered glumly. ‘He’ll learn.’) Nor was he troubled by the paranoia and duplicity of his double life. One of the more potent myths of the secret world, put about by spy writers and journalists and excitable TV dramas, is that members of the intelligence community struggle constantly with the moral ambiguity of their trade. This may be true of a few broken reeds, most of whom are quietly shown the door, but Joe lost little sleep over the fact that his life in Hong Kong was an illusion. He had adjusted easily to the secret existence, as if he had found his natural vocation. He loved the work, he loved the environment, he loved the feeling of playing a pivotal role in the covert operations of the state. About the only thing that was missing in his life was a woman.

4
Isabella

Isabella Aubert arrived at the restaurant at about twenty-past eight. The first indication that she had entered the room came with a simultaneous movement from two male diners sitting near the entrance, whose heads jerked up from their bowls of soup and then followed her body in a kind of dazed, nodding parabola as she swayed between the tables. She was wearing a black summer dress and a white coral necklace that seemed to glow under the lights against her tanned skin. Joe must have picked up on the crackle in the room because he pushed his chair back from the table, stood up and turned to face her. Isabella was smiling by now, first at me, then at Joe, checking around the restaurant to see if she recognized anyone. Joe kissed her only briefly on the cheek before she settled into the chair next to mine. Physically, in public, they were often quite formal together, like a couple who had been married for five or ten years, not two twenty-six-year-olds in only the second year of a relationship. But if you spent time around Joe it didn’t take long to realize that he was infatuated with Isabella. She dismantled his instinctive British reserve; she was the one thing in his life that he could not control.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you, Will?’ Our little hug of greeting went wrong when I aimed a kiss at her cheek that slid past her ear.

‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘You?’

‘Hot. Overworked. Late.’

‘You’re not late.’ Joe reached out to touch her hand. Their fingers mingled briefly on the table before Isabella popped her napkin. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

They had met in December 1995, on Joe’s first visit back to the UK from Hong Kong, when he had been an usher at a wedding in Hampshire. Isabella was a friend of the bride’s who had struggled to keep a straight face while reading from ‘The Prophet’ during the service. ‘Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself,’ she told the assembled congregation. ‘He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness.’ At one point Joe became convinced that the beautiful girl at the lectern in the wide-brimmed hat was looking directly at him as she said, ‘He kneads you until you are pliant. And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast,’ but it was probably just a trick of the light. At that moment, most of the men in the church were labouring under a similar delusion. Afterwards Isabella sought him out at the pre-dinner drinks, walking towards him carrying a glass of champagne and that hat, which had lost its flower.

‘What happened?’ he said.

‘Dog,’ she replied, as if that explained everything. They did not leave one another’s side for the next two hours. At dinner, seated at separate tables, they made naked eyes across the marquee as a farmer complained to Isabella about the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy while Joe told a yawning aunt on his left that freight forwarding involved moving ‘very large consignments of cargo around the world in big container ships’ and that Hong Kong was ‘the second busiest port in Asia after Singapore’, although ‘both of them might soon be overtaken by Shanghai’. As soon as pudding was over he took a cup of coffee over to Isabella’s table and sat at a vacant chair beside hers. As they talked, and as he met her friends, for the first time he regretted having joined SIS. Not because the life required him to lie to this gorgeous, captivating girl, but because within four days he would be back at his desk on the other side of the world drafting CX reports on the Chinese military. Chances are he would never see Isabella again.

Towards eleven o’clock, when the speeches were done and middle-aged fathers in red trousers had begun dancing badly to ‘Come on Eileen’, she simply leaned across to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Let’s go.’ Joe had a room at a hotel three miles away but they drove back along the M40 to Isabella’s flat in Kentish Town, where they stayed in bed for two days. ‘We fit,’ she whispered when she felt his naked body against hers for the first time, and Joe found himself adrift in a world that he had never known: a world in which he was so physically and emotionally fulfilled that he wondered why it had taken him so long to seek it out. There had been girlfriends before, of course – two at Oxford and one just a few days after he had arrived in Hong Kong – but with none of them had he experienced anything other than the brief extinguishing of a lust, or a few weeks of intense conversations about the Cultural Revolution followed by borderline pointless sex in his rooms at Wadham. From their first moments together Isabella intrigued and fascinated him to the point of obsession. He confessed to me that he was already planning their lives together after spending just twenty-four hours in her flat. Joe Lennox had always been a decisive animal, and Joe Lennox had decided that he was in love.

On the Monday night he drove back to his hotel in Hampshire, settled the bill, returned to London and took Isabella for dinner at Mon Plaisir, a French restaurant he loved in Covent Garden. They ate French onion soup, steak tartare and confit of duck and drank two bottles of Hermitage Cave de Tain. Over balloons of Delamain – he loved it that she treated alcohol like a soft drink – Isabella asked him about Hong Kong.

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘Anything. Tell me about the people you work with. Tell me what Joe Lennox does when he gets up in the morning.’

He was aware that the questions formed part of an ongoing interview. Should I share my life with you? Do you deserve my future? Not once in the two days they had spent together had the subject of the distance that would soon separate them been broached with any seriousness. Yet Joe felt that he had a chance of winning Isabella round, of persuading her to leave London and of joining him in Hong Kong. It was fantasy, of course, not much more than a pipe dream, but something in her eyes persuaded him to pursue it. He did not want what they had shared to be thrown away on account of geography.

So he would paint a picture of life in Hong Kong that was vivid and enticing. He would lure her to the East. But how to do so without resorting to the truth? It occurred to him that if he told Isabella that he was a spy, the game would probably be over. Chances were she would join him on the next flight out to Kowloon. What girl could resist? But honesty for the NOC was not an option. He had to improvise, he had to work around the lie.

‘What do I do in the morning?’ he said. ‘I drink strong black coffee, say three Hail Marys and listen to the World Service.’

‘I’d noticed,’ she said. ‘Then what?’

‘Then I go to work.’

‘And what does that involve?’ Isabella had long, dark hair and it curled across her face as she spoke. ‘Do you have your own office? Do you work down at the docks? Are there secretaries there who lust after you, the quiet, mysterious Englishman?’

Joe thought about Judy Heppner and smiled. ‘No, there’s just me and Ted and Ted’s wife, Judy. We’re based in a small office in Central. If I was to tell you the whole story you’d probably disintegrate with boredom.’

‘Are you bored by it?’

‘No, but I definitely see it as a stepping stone. If I play my cards right there’ll be jobs that I can apply for at Swire’s or Jardine Matheson in a year or six months, something with a bit more responsibility, something with better pay. After university, I just wanted to get the hell out of London. Hong Kong seemed to fit the bill.’

‘So you like it out there?’

‘I love it out there.’ Now he had to sell it. ‘I’ve only been away a few months but already it feels like home. I’ve always been fascinated by the crowds and the noise and the smells of Asia, the chaos just round the corner. It’s so different to what I’ve grown up with, so liberating. I love the fact that when I leave my apartment building I’m walking out into a completely alien environment, a stranger in a strange land. Hong Kong is a British colony, has been for over ninety years, but in a strange way you feel we have no place there, no role to play.’ If David Waterfield could hear this, he’d have a heart attack. ‘Every face, every street sign, every dog and chicken and child scurrying in the back streets is Chinese. What were the British doing there all that time?’

‘More,’ Isabella whispered, looking at him over her glass with a gaze that almost drowned him. ‘Tell me more.’

He stole one of her cigarettes. ‘Well, at night, on a whim, you can board the ferry at Shun Tak and be playing blackjack at the Lisboa Casino in Macau within a couple of hours. At weekends you can go clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong or head out to Happy Valley and eat fish and chips in the Members Enclosure and lose your week’s salary on a horse you never heard of. And the food is incredible, absolutely incredible. Dim sum, char siu restaurants, the freshest sushi outside of Japan, amazing curries, outdoor restaurants on Lamma Island where you point at a fish in a tank and ten minutes later it’s lying grilled on a plate in front of you.’

He knew that he was winning her over. In some ways it was too easy. Isabella worked all week in an art gallery on Albemarle Street, an intelligent, overqualified woman sitting behind a desk eight hours a day reading Tolstoy and Jilly Cooper, waiting to work her charms on the one Lebanese construction billionaire who just happened to walk in off the street to blow fifty grand on an abstract oil. It wasn’t exactly an exciting way of spending her time. What did she have to lose by moving halfway round the world to live with a man she barely knew?

She took out a cigarette of her own and cupped Joe’s hand as he lit it. ‘It sounds incredible,’ she said, but suddenly her face seemed to contract. Joe saw the shadow of bad news colour her eyes and felt as if it was all about to slip away. ‘There’s something I should have told you.’

Of course. This was too much of a good thing for it to end any other way. You meet a beautiful woman at a wedding, you find out she’s terminally ill, married, or moving to Istanbul. The wine and the rich food swelled up inside him and he was surprised by how anxious he felt, how betrayed. What are you going to tell me? What’s your secret?

‘I have a boyfriend.’

It should have been the hammer blow, the deal-closer, and Isabella was instantly searching Joe’s face for a reaction. Somehow she managed to assemble an expression that was both obstinate and ashamed at the same time. But he found that he was not as surprised as he might have been, discovering a response to her confession which was as smart and effective as anything he might have mustered in his counter-life as a spy.

‘You don’t any more.’

And that sealed it. A stream of smoke emerged from Isabella’s lips like a last breath and she smiled with the pleasure of his reply. It had conviction. It had style. Right now that was all she was looking for.

‘It’s not that simple,’ she said. But of course it was. It was simply a question of breaking another man’s heart. ‘We’ve been together for two years. It’s not something I can just throw away. He needs me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him before.’

‘That’s OK,’ Joe said. I have lied to you, so it’s only fair that you should have lied to me. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Anthony.’

‘Is he married?’

This was just a shot in the dark, but by coincidence he had stumbled on the truth. Isabella looked amazed.

‘How did you know?’

‘Instinct,’ he said.

‘Yes, he is married. Or was.’ Involuntarily she touched her face, covering her mouth as if ashamed by the role she had played in this. ‘He’s separated now. With two teenage children…’

‘… who hate you.’

She laughed. ‘Who hate me.’

In the wake of this, a look passed between them which told Joe everything that he needed to know. So much of life happens in the space between words. She will leave London, he thought. She’s going to follow me to the East. He ran his fingers across Isabella’s wrists and she closed her eyes.

That night, drunk and wrapped in each other’s bodies in the Christmas chill of Kentish Town, she whispered: ‘I want to be with you, Joe. I want to come with you to Hong Kong,’ and it was all he could do to say, ‘Then be with me, then come with me,’ before the gift of her skin silenced him. Then he thought of Anthony and imagined what she would say to him, how things would end between them, and Joe was surprised because he felt pity for a man he had never known. Perhaps he realized, even then, that to lose a woman like Isabella Aubert, to be cast aside by her, would be something from which a man might never recover.