Vauxhall Cross, London
IT WAS APPROACHING 10 p.m. in the riverside headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service and every light in the building was still blazing, casting a silvery glow onto the dark, choppy waters of the River Thames below. At this time of night the place was almost empty. But not quite.
Up on the third floor, the China team was assembled. Within SIS, China had become such an overarching priority that there was not just one China team but several. There was China Nuclear, China Political, China Espionage, and so on. Tonight, on the China team there were six people, all seated around a long, rectangular desk beneath a blinking neon strip-light, half-drunk mugs of tea and coffee scattered around next to them. Along the row of digital clocks on the wall one showed the time in Beijing as being 0552 the following morning. Luke and Jenny would be asleep in their hotel now, the Venetian, but the intel they had provided a few hours earlier had set the proverbial cat among the pigeons.
‘We now have,’ said Jack Searle, head of China desk, ‘a crucial decision to make. And we need to make it tonight.’ He was standing up in his shirtsleeves, tie off, jacket over the back of his chair, a nicotine patch just visible beneath the edge of his rolled-up sleeve. ‘We need to direct Jenny and Luke on whether they should proceed or not. But we face the classic intelligence conundrum: we don’t have all the pieces of the jigsaw, only some of them.
‘Let’s start with what we know.’ He spread the fingers of his left hand and began counting off his points one by one. ‘One. Miss Xinyi Yip works for Rodrigues, who we know is up to his neck in organized crime in Macau. Two.’ He tapped the tip of his middle finger. ‘Rodrigues took phone calls from Kowloon just after Hannah’s abduction. Not conclusive, I admit, but still a possible piece of the jigsaw. Three. Both Rodrigues and Miss Xinyi tell our team that, yes, Hannah was brought to Macau, but Xinyi says she’s been moved on. And, yes, they could still both be lying. In fact, we know from the Chief’s meeting this evening in Canada House that Xinyi has already lied about working for our Canadian colleagues. Everything about her screams out that she’s a phoney, a time-waster. Maybe even some kind of Walt.’
‘Sorry?’ interrupted Lucia, the secondee from GCHQ. ‘What’s a Walt?’
‘A Walter Mitty character,’ Jack replied. ‘A fantasist. Someone who makes up stories because they don’t find their own life interesting enough.’
‘Ah. Thanks.’
‘But then there’s Qianfan Lau,’ Jack continued. ‘The contact she’s given us at Macau port. And, thanks to the work Angela and her team have done in the last few hours, he comes up as one of the more convincing pieces of the puzzle. Angela.’ He turned towards Angela Scott, Luke’s line manager and his unofficial mentor since the day he first joined the Service. ‘Can you fill them in, please? Oh, and thanks for dashing back from that lecture across the river. I appreciate it.’
‘Not a problem,’ she replied. She half stood up, then appeared to think better of it and sat down again to deliver her short summation. She was neatly dressed as always, in a green wool jacket over a white blouse, a small gold crucifix on a chain around her neck. ‘Qianfan Lau has a dull-sounding title that belies what he really does. Officially, he is the Deputy Director of Export Certification at the Marine and Water Bureau in the Port of Macau. I know, quite a mouthful, yes? But I called in some help from our friends at Langley.’ She glanced up at the Washington clock on the wall. ‘It’s still only mid-afternoon over there in Virginia. And they have quite a file on this chap Lau. It turns out he keeps an eye on all the shipping coming into and going out of the Port of Macau. At least, the cargoes that matter. And by that I mean the illicit stuff. He’s the eyes and ears of the criminal underworld in that port. Oh, and you won’t be surprised to hear he’s linked to Rodrigues. But let me stop there because Lucia has more on this she can tell you.’
‘Lucia?’ Jack prompted, nodding towards the young signals specialist.
Lucia cleared her throat and glanced briefly at her notepad before closing it with a little coloured elastic strap. ‘Well, we’ve done a reverse trace on her phone,’ she said. ‘That’s Xinyi Yip’s phone. We accessed it through Rodrigues’s accounts. He has several phones, as you’d expect, and I’m pretty sure we’ve got access to all of them now. And here’s the thing.’ She looked at Jack as she spoke. ‘We’ve run a trace on that number she gave Luke and Jenny, the one for Qianfan Lau.’
‘And?’
‘And she called him just a few hours ago. That’s after she left Luke and Jenny and put them into a car back to their hotel.’
‘Wait,’ Jack said. ‘That must have been very late in the evening over there, well after hours, yes?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Do we know what was said? Could you get Cheltenham to send us a translation?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Lucia shook her head. ‘We’ve only got the metadata. Date, time and numbers, no content, sorry, Jack.’
‘Right. So we’ve established that this Qianfan Lau at the port is a definite player, part of the puzzle, no question. But there’s also an inherent risk if we send Luke and Jenny to see him. This could easily be a set-up. And there’s our dilemma.’
Before anyone on the team could respond Jack Searle continued aloud with his train of thought. ‘Look, if the situation with China wasn’t so bloody serious right now we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. But it is and we are. The fact is, we have no other leads. None. Hong Kong station have come up empty-handed. In fact, they’re still pretty sore they were not let in on this op in the first place. So here’s what we’re going to do. Whatever decision we take here, in this room tonight, needs sign-off from the Director Critical. I’m going to recommend to him that we run with it. We send Luke and Jenny to meet Lau at the port in the morning but to get out at the first sign of anything suspicious. Does anyone have any objections?’ He looked round the table. There was some uncomfortable shuffling and shifting on chairs but no one met his gaze and no one spoke. Everyone around that table knew that the decision they had just taken could mean either a breakthrough or sending Luke and Jenny straight into the path of danger.