Typhoon

‘And what has been your role during this period?’ Joe was still trying to do his job, still trying to suck out the secret.

‘Do you know what a meshrep is?’ Wang asked, apparently evading the question. Joe said that he did not. ‘A meshrep is a traditional form of gathering for young people in Xinjiang. These youth groups existed for positive reasons. To revive Islamic traditions, for young men to recite poems, to sing music and so on. You would think of them in the West perhaps as a community or social project, where problems of alcohol or drug abuse within the population are openly discussed with a view to improving the lifestyles and conditions of all young Muslims throughout the region. The first of these meshreps was revived in the city of Gulja, in Ili Prefecture, a city known to the Han as Yining. Within a few years there were dozens of them throughout Xinjiang, perhaps as many as four hundred, and all established with the strict agreement of the provincial government. Because what could be wrong with this? Young Uighur people trying to solve their own problems and, at the same time, revive their traditions in a sensible fashion.’

‘But the authorities cracked down?’

‘Absolutely.’ A sheen of sweat had appeared on Wang’s forehead, which glistened in the low light of the room. ‘In 1995 it was declared that the meshreps were cover organizations for separatist radicals seeking to undermine the Motherland. They must be closed down, their leaders arrested. This was the paranoid state of our government in Beijing, who cannot sleep in their beds for fear of an uprising, for fear of an Eastern Turkestan. Four students from a meshrep in Kashgar were subsequently arrested in that year for allegedly discussing political and human rights issues at a birthday picnic. A picnic. Beijing has informers at every level of Chinese society and they had mistakenly trusted one of their own friends, who had reported them. These young men were then accused of being counter-revolutionaries and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. When one of them appealed to the People’s High Court, his sentence was actually increased by the judge, who accused him of wasting the court’s time. It is a situation that Kafka would recognize, no?’

Joe remained still.

‘All of these many issues have come to a head in the last two years. The Uighur people were tired of racial abuse, tired of discrimination from the state, tired of sending their children to schools where they were obliged to write sitting on the floor because of a lack of desks and chairs. Unemployment is running so high among Uighurs in Xinjiang that the sons and daughters of proud Muslims have been obliged to turn to crime, even to prostitution, in order to provide for their families. Of course this only deteriorates their image in the eyes of the Han men who use up these women for sex and then discard them like old bones.’ Joe noticed that Wang’s voice was gradually growing louder, his rhetoric increasing to a politician’s intensity. ‘Let me now tell you that when thousands of Uighurs gathered in Yining in February of this year to make a peaceful protest, to demand better jobs, better working conditions, they were gunned down by armed police.’

Joe started forward. ‘Gunned down? What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say.’ Wang looked angry, as if Joe had questioned his integrity. ‘I mean that the police beat them with sticks, they used tear gas, they attacked them with dogs. Those with cameras or recording equipment who attempted to witness what was happening had these items confiscated. And as the people saw what was happening, the riot exploded.’

‘And this is when the shooting began? This was in Yining two months ago?’ Finally Joe had sight of the product, a story that all of his veteran colleagues appeared to have missed.

‘That is correct. We estimate that four hundred people were killed, thousands more arrested. The jails became so full that prisoners were taken to a sports stadium on the outskirts of the city, where they were obliged to live for days without shelter in the snow. The police hosed them with water cannons to make their situation worse. Some froze as a result. Many lost hands and fingers through frostbite.’

‘None of this has been reported in the West,’ Joe said, a statement which he believed to be true. Had they all been so wrapped up in the handover, in Patten’s democratic reforms, that they had ignored mass slaughter in China? He was witnessing, more or less for the first time in his career, the operational limitations of Western intelligence. With all their money, all their resources and know-how, SIS and the CIA had been blindsided by a massacre in China. Joe thought that he should be seen to write something down, to give Wang the impression, however false, that the safe house was not wired for sound. But the professor was in the sweat of a sustained revelation, apparently paying little attention to how Joe was behaving.

‘A curfew was imposed,’ he said. ‘You must have learned of this. All airports and railway stations in Xinjiang were shut down for weeks. All foreign journalists were expelled from the region. The entire area was sealed. This is what they do in China when they have a problem. Nobody comes in, nobody gets out. In the wake of the Yining riot, house-to-house searches were conducted and another five thousand arrests made. Five thousand. And at the end of this, thirty-five of the so-called ringleaders were sentenced to death. They were taken to the outskirts of the city and simply shot through the back of the head.’ Wang joined two fingers on his right hand and stabbed them into the base of his neck. Bang. ‘Of course these bodies were never returned to their families, just as the parents and relatives of the thousands of Uighur men and women who have been illegally imprisoned on false charges in the past several years have no idea where their loved ones are being held. And after the executions, as if to taunt the other prisoners, to make a spectacle of them, other so-called ringleaders were then paraded through the streets of Yining at a mass sentencing rally, already so drugged and physically damaged by their brief experience of prison that many of them, exposed in open trucks, were unable to stand or even to communicate with the crowd. I saw this with my own eyes, Mr Richards, because I happened to be in Yining for a conference. I saw that their hands and feet were bound by wire as they knelt in the trucks. Many of the prisoners had been forced to wear placards around their necks, proclaiming their crimes, their sins, like something from medieval times. When one of the prisoners found his strength and shouted a slogan against the Communist Party, in full view of the crowd he was forced to the ground and beaten around the head by two policemen. I saw this with my own eyes.’ Wang’s voice briefly tightened to an enraged pitch. ‘A gag was then forced into his mouth to prevent him from shouting further. When certain supporters in the crowd complained about this, they too were arrested by plain-clothes officials who had surrounded them.’

‘And you were among these people?’

‘No.’ The professor looked exhausted. ‘I was first held after a different disturbance, in 1995. I was accused of discussing a riot in Xinjiang in class. One of my students was a spy and he reported me. I know who this was. Luckily I had said very little. Luckily my activities have never properly been exposed. I was treated badly in captivity, I was beaten and kicked, but as nothing compared to others. I am, after all, a Han.’ Joe experienced a strange, sadistic desire to see the scars on Wang’s body and hid his shame in another cigarette. He offered one to Wang, who refused. ‘I also have influential colleagues who were able to pay for my release and clear my name. I was soon back at work. Others were not so lucky. One Han doctor was arrested recently for treating the wounds of an alleged separatist following a riot in Kashgar. Three Yining shopkeepers who discussed the demonstration I have described with a foreign journalist were sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. For a single conversation. In Xinjiang now, even to think about separatism is to be jailed.’

‘You mentioned a second riot in Kashgar,’ Joe said, and realized that either Lee or Sadha was moving around in the kitchen. How long had they been there? He heard a pan being filled with water, then the closing of the bedroom door as privacy was restored.

‘Mr Richards, there are riots all the time in China. Surely you are aware of this? They simply go unreported. What I am here to tell you today is the intensity, the frequency of these riots in Xinjiang. The people are ready for revolution.’

‘And that’s why you’ve come?’

‘That is one reason I have come, yes.’ Creases appeared at the edge of Wang’s eyes. ‘Perhaps Governor Patten’s staff will be interested in the political implications of revolution in north-western China, yes?’ The tone of the question seemed deliberately to mock Joe’s denials that he was involved in intelligence work. Wang now took the cigarette he had earlier been offered and drew out the silence as he lit it with Sadha’s plastic lighter. ‘But it is of course primarily because of what has happened in the prisons that I have come to see Governor Patten.’

‘What has happened in the prisons?’

Wang inhaled very deeply on his cigarette. He was now entering the final phase of his long exhortation. ‘Two men were released,’ he replied. ‘They came to me, because I am known in the underground as a safe outlet, a haven. Once I see Governor Patten I can explain more about this.’

Joe was aware of contradictions emerging in Wang’s story. He had earlier said that he was a political undesirable, that he had been jailed alongside his fellow students for inciting revolution, then stripped of his chair at the university. But where was the evidence of this? ‘Who are these men?’ he asked.

‘Their names are Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary. Ansary had been arrested for ‘‘reading a newspaper’’, Abdul for swearing at his Chinese boss.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That is all. And like the others they received no trial, no habeas corpus, no lawyer. Instead they were sent to the Lucaogu prison in Urumqi by a judge who presided over – what do you call it in English? – a kangaroo court. Before his escape, Ansary was locked up in a cell with eight other men, Abdul with seven. The cell was so crowded that the prisoners had to take it in turns sleeping. You see there was not enough space for everybody to lie down. All of the men told Ansary that they had been beaten and kicked by the guards, just as I was two years before. At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper. Perhaps you look at me and think that this is not so bad, that these sorts of violations are acceptable. Perhaps your own government abuses human rights and tortures prisoners from time to time. When they have problems with the Irish, for example.’

Joe wondered what had caused Wang to become more aggressive. Had he failed to look suitably distraught? ‘Let me reassure you,’ he said, ‘that the British government takes the greatest possible –’

The professor held up his hand to stall his predictable rebuttal.

‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘But let me reassure you about what happened to my friends. Then you can decide if the treatment of prisoners in China is compatible with Western values. Because Abdul Bary was also taken into solitary confinement, and the largest toenail of his right foot removed by a pair of pliers held in the grip of a guard who laughed as he did this, who was so drunk on the power and the humiliation of what he was doing that he found it funny.’

‘I am so sorry,’ Joe said.

‘Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons.’ Wang’s cigarette was shaking as he spoke. ‘Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life. This is the extent of what they had done to him. This is the extent of human rights abuses in so-called reformist, capitalist China. When I had finished protecting these two men, I knew that I had to come to Hong Kong. When I heard this I knew that our only salvation lay in England.’

Joe allowed a silence to develop in which he gathered his thoughts. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The streets outside were quiet now and he heard only the occasional barking of a neighbourhood dog, the distant sound of a police siren. So much information had been spilled over the course of the interview that he was finding it difficult to pick his way through it. Joe knew that it was his job to report the uprising in Yining, and the extent of separatist fervour across Xinjiang was certainly valuable intelligence. But he could not piece together Wang’s role in the struggle and felt that there were holes in his story. And what of the human rights issues? To Joe’s shame, he was surprised by how little impact the news of the torture had had on him. The suffering of these jailed men was somehow an inchoate thing, a nebulous concept around which he could not assemble sympathy. Only when Wang had spoken of the man beating his head against the radiator had he felt even the faintest tremor of discomfort. What was wrong with him? Had he grown immune to human suffering already? Had three years in SIS turned him into a machine? How was it possible to sit in a room with a man like Wang Kaixuan and not weep for the state of his country?

There were two sudden bursts on the doorbell. Joe noticed that Wang did not flinch. After a short pause the bell was rung again, four times. The agreed signal. Either Lenan or Waterfield was waiting outside. Lee emerged from the bedroom, rubbed his eyes as if he had been asleep and picked up the intercom. Joe heard him say, ‘Yes, Mr Lodge,’ with an air of tense servility and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Joe left Wang in the sitting room and went into the hall.

‘Sorry to have taken so long.’ Kenneth Lenan was wearing a white dress shirt tucked into formal black trousers, but no jacket and no bow tie. The function at Stonecutters appeared otherwise to have left no visible impression upon him. He was neither drunk nor sober, neither particularly relaxed nor tense. He was the way that Kenneth Lenan always was. Unreadable. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Everything’s fine. I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

‘You look tired, Joe. Why don’t I give you a break? We might give Mr Wang a few hours’ sleep then tackle him first thing in the morning.’

The act of standing up and walking out into the hall caused Joe to realize the extent of his own mental and physical exhaustion. Without thinking, he told Lenan that, yes, he would appreciate a few hours of sleep. Following him into the bedroom, he added that Isabella might be wondering why it had taken him more than five hours to fix a simple paperwork problem at Heppner’s, and that it would be wise to return home to protect his cover. This detail seemed to settle it.

‘Do you want me to run through what’s been said?’ Joe asked, picking up his jacket on the way out.

‘In the morning,’ Lenan replied. ‘Go home, grab a few hours’ sleep, be back here around eight. We’ll go through all of it then.’

It only remained for Joe to bid Wang farewell. Returning to the sitting room, he explained that a second official from Government House, a Mr Lodge, would be staying at the apartment overnight and that Wang could now rest until morning. The interview was concluded. They would see one another again in a few hours.

‘I thank you for listening,’ Wang told him, standing and shaking Joe’s hand.

It would be another eight years before the two men would meet again.

12

A Good Walk Spoiled

Three months earlier, a little more than 8,000 miles away on a sun-kissed Virginian golf course, former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense William ‘Bill’ Marston had stood over his Titleist Pro V1 and intoned a favourite golfing mantra.

‘The ball is my friend,’ he whispered, ‘the ball is my friend,’ and as he shook out his fattened hips and gripped the shaft of his gleaming five iron, Marston pictured the arc of the shot – just as he had been taught to do by the Turnberry professional who had charged him more than $75 an hour on a summer vacation to Scotland three years earlier – and truly believed, in the depths of his reactionary soul, that he was going to land the ball on the green.

He steadied his head. He drew back the club. He was one up with one to play. The five iron whistled through the warm spring air and connected with the Titleist in a way that felt powerful and true, but on this occasion, as on so many others throughout the course of his long, frustrating golfing life, the ball was not Bill Marston’s friend, the ball was not soaring gracefully towards the stiff red flag at the crown of the seventeenth green; the ball was his enemy, hooking violently towards the trees at the edge of the vast Raspberry Falls golf course and ending its days approximately 120 metres away in a camouflage of earth and leaves from which it would never be returned.

‘Fuck it,’ Marston spat, but managed to maintain his composure in the presence of his personal assistant, the Minnesota-born Sally-Ann McNeil who, for reasons which she was never properly able to explain, had been impelled to caddy for her boss. Sally-Ann, who was twenty-eight and college-educated, was somewhat wary of William ‘Bill’ Marston. Nevertheless, when he lost his temper like this, she knew exactly what to say.

‘Oh that’s so unfair, sir.’ The boss was already telling her to pick him out another ball and indicating to his opponent that he would be happy to drop a shot.

‘You sure about that, Bill?’ CIA deputy director Richard Jenson had sliced his own drive into the deep rough on the opposite side of the fairway. He was wearing moleskin plus-fours and preparing to attack the green. ‘You sure you don’t just wanna concede and call it all-square going up eighteen?’

‘I’m sure.’ Marston’s reply was so quiet that even Sally-Ann had difficulty making it out. Handing him a replacement Titleist – his fourth of the round – she took a step backwards, caught the eye of Jenson’s caddy, Josh, who was thirtysomething and tanned and kept looking at her, and shuddered as the man from Langley struck a faultless six iron slap-bang into the middle of the green.

‘Great shot, Dick,’ Marston shouted out, muttering ‘Asshole’ under his breath as soon as he had turned round. Sally-Ann struggled to disguise a smile. It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch at the clubhouse was booked for two. Standing over the ball, Marston glanced quickly at his PA, as if the sight of a beautiful woman might calm him in his hour of need. Then he drew back the graphite shaft a second time and prayed for a golfing miracle.

It was the worst kind of shot. The Titleist lifted itself no more than three inches from the ground before shooting in a plumb-line across the immaculate Virginia fairway for about eighty metres, finally bobbling to rest at the edge of the green. Marston sniffed the air.

‘I can still take a five,’ he muttered. ‘Dick can three-putt,’ offering just a glimpse of his ferocious competitive spirit. You didn’t get to be one of Reagan’s favourite sons, you didn’t get to be chairman and director of Macklinson Corporation, you didn’t get to sit on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee by quitting when the going gets tough. Bill Marston was a winner. Bill Marston was a fighter. Bill Marston let his five iron drop to the ground so that Sally-Ann could pick it up.

He had been playing most of the round in a bad mood. In the trunk of his armour-plated Mercedes, secured under lock and key and watched over by a 250-pound former Navy SEAL chauffeur, was a leaked, top-secret copy of the Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the People’s Republic of China – now commonly referred to as the Cox Report. Cox was a classified document until a few years ago and, strictly speaking, Marston shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. However, a disgruntled staffer in the House of Representatives had suggested to one of Marston’s senior employees that he might be able to obtain a draft copy in return for a position as a Macklinson executive in Berlin earning low six-figures after tax. Marston had agreed to the deal and had spent most of the previous evening reading the report at his home in Georgetown. The process had left him incensed to the point of insomnia.

These were the edited highlights, digested over a bowl of his wife’s notoriously insipid clam chowder:

The People’s Republic of China (hereafter the PRC) has stolen classified design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons. These thefts of nuclear secrets from our national weapons laboratories have enabled the PRC to design, develop, and successfully test modern strategic nuclear weapons sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

‘Fuckers,’ Marston muttered.

The stolen information includes classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal. The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the ‘neutron bomb’) which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.

‘Jesus.’

The Select Committee judges that the PRC will exploit elements of the stolen design information on the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons. The PRC has three mobile ICBM programs currently underway, all of which will be able to strike the United States.

Since the joyful, Cold War-ending events of 1991, Bill Marston had been looking around for a new global enemy. Finally he had found one.

Jenson won the seventeenth hole with a nerveless putt from eight feet, but Marston produced a second shot onto the eighteenth green which effectively won the match when his opponent failed to escape a fairway bunker at the third attempt. Afterwards, while Josh explained to Sally-Ann that he worked in an office ‘about forty feet’ from CIA director John Deutch and wondered if she was by any chance free for dinner, the two old friends showered and met at the bar for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda. After polite exchanges with several fellow club members they got down to business.

‘What are you guys working on with China?’ Marston enquired.

‘You mean Cox?’ The Deputy Director was initially reluctant to play Marston’s game. ‘You know I can’t talk about that, Bill.’

As far as Marston was concerned, this was just standard-issue bluff. One more glass of Highland Park, a decent bottle of Californian Merlot over lunch and Jenson would be more inclined to talk.

‘What if I told you I’d heard some things on the grapevine?’

‘What kind of things?’

‘That one of our most prestigious satellite communications companies provided some much-needed technical assistance on rocket propulsion to the Chinese without obtaining the correct licences from the federal government. That this prestigious satellite communications company is now facing a multi-million dollar fine for consorting with the enemy.’

It was the one part of the Cox Report that Marston had enjoyed. While thousands of Chinese spies had been busy ripping off American nuclear secrets for the best part of two decades, Canyon Enterprises, one of Macklinson’s fiercest rivals in the field of satellite communications, had colluded with the PRC on sensitive technologies. Play their cards right and Macklinson stood to benefit from Canyon’s fall from grace, scooping up defence, electronics and system integration businesses worth billions of dollars.