Typhoon
Perfect for fans of John le Carré, a gripping and suspenseful spy thriller from ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday)Hong Kong, 1997. Only a few short months of British rule remain before the territory returns to Chinese control.It’s a feverish city. And the spooks are hard at work, jostling for position and influence. So when an elderly man emerges from the sea, claiming to know secrets he will share only with the British Governor, a young MI6 officer, Joe Lennox, sees the chance to make his reputation.But when the old man, a high-profile Chinese professor, is spirited away in the middle of the night by the CIA, it’s clear that there’s a great deal more at stake here than a young spy’s career.The professor holds the key to a sinister and ambitious plan that could have catastrophic repercussions for the world in the twenty-first century…
Читать Typhoon онлайн беплатно
CHARLES CUMMING
Typhoon
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published by Michael Joseph, Penguin Books, in 2008
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2008
Cover photographs © Nik Keevil/Arcangel Images (man); Shutterstock.com (background)
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007487189
Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007487219
Version: 2015-07-07
For Iris and Stanley
and
to the memory of Pierce Loughran
(1969-2005)
The superior man understands what is right;
the inferior man understands what will sell.
Confucius
‘Washington has gone crazy.’
I am standing at the foot of Joe’s bed in the Worldlink Hospital. Six days have passed since the attacks of 11 June. There are plastic tubes running from valves on his wrists, a cardiac monitor attached by pads to the spaces between the bruises and cuts on his chest.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only a handful of people at Langley knew what Miles was up to. Nobody else had the faintest idea what the hell was going on out here.’
‘Who told you this?’
‘Waterfield.’
Joe turns his head towards the window and looks out on another featureless Shanghai morning. He has a broken collarbone, a fracture in his left leg, a wound on his skull protected by loops of clean white bandage.
‘How much do you know about all this?’ he asks, directing his eyes into mine, and the question travels all the way back to our first months in Hong Kong.
‘Everything I’ve researched. Everything you’ve ever told me.’
My name is William Lasker. I am a journalist. For fourteen years I served as a support agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service. For ten of those years, Joe Lennox was my handler and close friend. Nobody knows more about RUN than I do. Nobody except Joe Lennox himself.
He clears a block in his throat. His voice is still slow and uneven from the blast. I offer him a glass of water which he waves away.
‘If the CIA didn’t know about Miles, they’ll be going through every file, every email, every telephone conversation he ever made. They’ll want answers. Heads are going to roll. David Waterfield can get you those files. He has a source at Langley and a source in Beijing.’
‘What are you getting at?’
A nurse comes into the room, nods at Joe, checks the flow rate on his IV drip. Both of us stop talking. For the past six days the Worldlink has been crawling with Chinese spies. The Ministry of State Security will be keeping a record of everybody who comes in and out of this room. The nurse looks at me, seems to photograph my face with a blink of her eyes, then leaves.
‘What are you getting at?’ I ask again.
‘They say that every journalist wants to write a book.’ Joe is smiling for the first time in days. I can’t tell whether this remark is a statement or a question. Then his mood becomes altogether more serious. ‘This story needs to be told. We want you to tell it.’
Professor Wang Kaixuan emerged from the still waters of the South China Sea shortly before dawn on Thursday 10 April 1997. Exhausted by the long crossing, he lay for some time in the shallows, his ears tuned to the silence, his eyes scanning the beach. It was 5.52 a.m. By his calculations the sun would begin to rise over Dapeng Bay in less than fifteen minutes. From that point on he would run the greater risk of being spotted by a passing patrol. Keeping his body low against the slick black rocks, he began to crawl towards the sanctuary of trees and shrubs on the far side of the beach.
