Hong Kong 1997 - only a few short months of British rule remain before the territory returns to Chinese rule. It's a febrile place. And in that claustrophobic environment of uncertainty and fear the spooks are hard at work, jostling for position and influence.

So when an elderly man emerges from the seas off the New Territories, claiming to know secrets he will share only with the Governor himself, a young MI6 agent, Joe Lennox, sees an opportunity to make his reputation.

But when the old man, a high-profile Chinese professor, is spirited away in the middle of the night by Joe's superiors in collusion with the CIA, it's clear that there's a great deal more than a young spy's career at stake.

The professor, it seems, holds the key to a sinister and ambitious plan that could have awesome and catastrophic repercussions for China in the twenty-first century...

» Read the prologue and first three chapters of Typhoon by downloading the Penguin Taster here

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Prologue

‘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.’

Bestselling author Charles Cumming on his brand new secre-agent adventure TYPHOON.

Where did Typhoon come from? There are many answers to that question. Back in 2005, after I had finished writing my third book, The Spanish Game, the media seemed to be running more and more stories about the Chinese economic miracle. The Middle Kingdom was clearly becoming the Next Big Thing and, of course, the Olympic Games were just around the corner.

China seemed to contain everything that I wanted to write about: it was exotic and unknown; it was a place where the West’s economic greed came up against its so-called commitment to human rights; Britain had a long colonial association with Hong Kong and Shanghai; and the rampant growth of twenty-first-century China seemed to be signalling the end of the American empire.

So I set off to Beijing, where I was introduced to Oliver August, the China correspondent for The Times. Beside a polluted municipal lake, I told Oliver that I wanted to find a way of making China interesting and relevant to western readers. China today is all about money: the making of it, the spending of it, the corruption that money engenders. And money isn’t a particularly interesting subject for a novel. Who cares about a guy who’s just trying to get rich? Besides, there are any number of wonderful non-fiction books about American and European businessmen who had come to China in search of their fortune and ended up with badly burnt fingers. Why write another one?

It was Oliver who pointed me towards Xinjiang, the vast, oil-rich desert province in north-west China (pronounced ‘Shin-jang’). ‘Beijing’s greatest fear,’ he said, ‘is losing the territorial integrity of China. That’s why it’s so paranoid about Taiwan and Tibet. They will do anything to keep China together. And Xinjiang is the biggest prize of all.’

I discovered that roughly half the population are Uighur-Muslim and that the region has long been an important strategic buffer between China and the former Soviet republics. From this flowed the idea of an American-sponsored coup d’etat in the region. If Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were prepared to land grab Iraq in order to get their hands on Saddam’s oil, it followed that they might be interested in getting their hands on Xinjiang. I had my story.

Two other factors came into play. In November, I went to Namibia to write a travel article for Condé Nast. In the evenings I was reading John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener and, inspired by this, I set myself the task of writing a spy novel that was also a love story; a political thriller that was about a real and pressing contemporary issue. Where le Carré had written about corrupt pharmaceutical companies, I would concentrate on the extreme human-rights abuses perpetrated against Uighurs in China.

Now all I needed were my central characters. In my Alec Milius novels, A Spy by Nature and The Spanish Game, the so-called ‘special relationship’ between America and the United Kingdom had played a central role. It would be the same with Typhoon: I wanted to find a way of dramatizing the relationship between the Blair government and the Bush administration. Thus Miles Coolidge was born. A brash, charismatic, reckless CIA officer, described as ‘the American of your dreams and nightmares’, Miles became the face of neo-conservative America in the age of Al-Qaeda. His antagonist would be Joe Lennox, a more cerebral, contemplative British spy under deep cover in Hong Kong. Over the course of the book, Joe and Miles would become friends but would fight over Joe’s girlfriend, the mysterious Isabella Aubert.

So now all I had to do was find a way into the story. I had once had a conversation with a family friend Peter, who had served as a commander of the Gurkhas in Hong Kong in the 1970s. He had told me the extraordinary true story of a Chinese academic who had swum from mainland China, across Starling Inlet, in the dead of night in an attempt to defect to British-controlled Hong Kong. Spotted by a young soldier on the beach, he had been brought to Peter. Articulate, charismatic and charming, the academic had quickly captivated Peter, who was sorely tempted to set him free. However, rules are rules, and the academic was sent back to China. To this day, Peter has no idea what became of him.

This story became the opening chapter of Typhoon. This time, however, the academic – who I have called Professor Wang – makes it across to the New Territories and is allowed to progress to Tsim Tsa Shui, albeit in the custody of MI6. Sympathetic to the Uighur cause, he becomes a key figure in a secret American plan to foment a militant uprising in Xinjiang. As Typhoon reaches its climax, a small group of disenfranchised Uighur radicals plans to set off a series of bombs at the Beijing Olympics. Of course I had no idea that, two years later, the Chinese government would claim to have arrested or killed more than a dozen so-called ‘terrorists’ who had that exact plan.

I hope you enjoy Typhoon. It was fun to write and is a book I’m very proud of.