Typhoon (30 page)

The branch of Starbucks which is situated across Nanjing Road from the park is one of dozens of franchised outlets which have opened up across China in recent years, selling lattes and muffins and cinnamon teas indistinguishable from those available in Sydney and Paris and Washington. Joe later wrote in his report that he entered the café using the Nanjing Road entrance at approximately 4:40 p.m. With a mug of cappuccino, he headed for the back and found an outdoor table looking south over Renmin Park. Joe’s fellow customers were mainly Western tourists and a few wealthier Chinese, and he smoked a cigarette while the smog-screened sun warmed his face. A previous occupant of the table had left a copy of
That’s Shanghai
, the weekly English-language listings magazine, on the chair beside him. Joe opened it, flicked his way backwards through the contents and read a review of a new lounge bar which had opened up in Pudong. Shortly before five o’clock he removed
The Queen of the South
from his rucksack and placed it on the table. He was neither nervous nor particularly apprehensive. He had done his preparation and this sort of work was second nature to him.

At approximately 5:05 p.m. Joe became aware of a man standing close to the table, about two metres away, talking in Mandarin into a mobile phone. He was a middle-aged Han wearing cheap leather slip-on shoes, high-waisted black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. His demeanour roughly fitted the cheerful, portly description of Jian which Waterfield had provided in London. To be certain, Joe glanced at the man’s right hand and saw a thick scar running from the top of his wrist to the knuckle of his middle finger. (“Fishing accident,” Waterfield had explained.) In the same hand, Jian was carrying a slim, black attaché case. Joe finished his coffee, placed the book in the rucksack and pushed his chair back from the table. As a formal signal, he bent down to tighten the laces on his shoes, and by the time he had stood up, Jian was already twenty metres away, heading into the park.

Joe’s task was simple: to follow his contact and to ensure that he was not being tailed. In due course, it had been arranged that Jian would stop at a clearing beside a small lotus-covered pond where local men and women played cards and
majiang
. At this point their roles would be reversed: Joe would continue ahead while Jian followed at a discreet distance, ensuring that he too was clean. The chances of either man having been compromised were minimal, but it was partly because they had exercised caution of this kind in the past that they had survived so long undetected in their respective careers.

Jian was walking in a westerly direction towards the new Grand Theatre and, very quickly, the noise of Shanghai became no more than a distant hum. To scout the location, Joe had visited Renmin Park on four previous occasions and he always enjoyed this sudden, miraculous tranquillity. It was as if the narrow paths and the branches of the trees around him somehow closed up to absorb the city’s perpetual din. Even the usually choking, polluted air seemed, for once, blessedly clean. After about three minutes Jian stopped and made a call on his mobile phone from the centre of the path in a standing position. This allowed Joe to observe the men and women around him for any matching behaviour. If they also stopped suddenly, or attempted to conceal themselves, Joe would abandon the meeting by walking directly out of the park. Jian would then be obliged to make emergency contact with his embassy handler and the operation against TYPHOON would almost certainly be shelved. Yet there was nothing unusual to report. During the conversation, a pair of young lovers, walking shyly, hand-in-hand, moved off the path and laid out a rug on the grass. An elderly Chinese lady, catching sight of a friend sitting on a nearby bench, waved and walked across to join her. Having closed his phone, Jian continued on his way. After about four minutes he came to a halt beside the lotus-covered pond and joined a small group of standing spectators who had gathered to watch a game of
chudadi
. Joe saw a movement in the trees beyond them, but it was just an elderly man practising taichi in the shade of a gingko. Joe moved past their group and was obliged to walk around an old wooden cart into which a gardener was throwing litter and weeds. The atmosphere was peaceful and he could hear only the murmur of talk, the slap of playing cards on the hard concrete tables, the plastic click of tiles. He then continued in a counter-clockwise direction towards the Shanghai Museum, sipping from a bottle of Evian and listening to the sound of singing birds. Joe knew that Jian was following him, that his experienced Chinese eyes had not detected a problem, because twice he used the reflective metal surface of the park bins to locate Jian’s position behind him. He had the easy, loose-hipped walk characteristic of Chinese men of a certain build and moved at a steady pace. When Joe had reached the south-eastern corner of the park, he waited at the circle of secluded benches where the meeting was scheduled to take place.

Joe saw that two of the four benches were occupied, but he was not concerned by this. The principal advantage of the location was the presence of a number of public address speakers in the vicinity which piped classical music into the surrounding area. Conversation was therefore almost completely smothered, negating any concerns about audio surveillance. Looking up from the path, Jian made eye contact with Joe for the first time and moved towards the furthest of the four benches, a broad smile on his cheerful face.

“Mr. Joe,” he called out. “Very good to see you again.”

The benches were situated in a small clearing, about half the size of a tennis court, and surrounded on three sides by a thick screen of acacia trees and peony bushes. Joe and Jian could be observed from the main path that runs along the southern perimeter of Renmin Park, but the sight of a middle-class Han conversing with a Westerner in this part of town was not at all incongruous. Their body language suggested that they knew one another reasonably well and had probably chosen to conduct an informal business meeting out of doors, taking advantage of the warm weekend weather. Jian shook Joe’s hand, pointed out a couple of half-finished skyscrapers and mentioned that Renmin Park had once been a racecourse. He then extracted a slim laptop computer from his attaché case and settled down to business.

“What have you got for me today?” Joe asked.

A Chinese student, seated at the closest of the three benches, was listening to rock music at high volume on an mp3 player. A tinny, synthetic din of drums and guitars emerged from the moulded white earpieces. The second occupied bench was more than ten feet away and situated directly beneath one of the speakers. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” had just replaced the aria from the Goldberg Variations and Joe tried to remember the name of the film in which the music had featured.

“Your American friend goes out of town a lot,” Jian began. It had been decided that they would speak in English. “We have followed his car to the airport seven times.”

“Destinations?” Joe asked. It felt liberating finally to be discussing Miles Coolidge’s movements in the city where the American had made his home. After weeks of careful planning, the operation was finally under way.

“I have found it best in my years of long association with your company to be honest about my shortcomings,” Jian said. He was smiling, but his round eyes were plain and serious. “So I must say that we are only absolutely certain of his destination on two occasions. Our resources are small, you see.”

Joe appreciated his honesty and knew that he would enjoy working with Jian. It was the ones who had all the answers that you had to be wary of. “Of course,” he said.

“On both those occasions your friend flew to Urumqi.”

Joe concealed his surprised reaction by offering Jian a cigarette. The older man declined and Joe replaced the packet in the pocket of his trousers, having lit one of his own.

“And the other five? Were they all domestic flights out of Hongqiao?”

“No.” Jian shook his head. He was about fifty-five, with smooth, pouchy cheeks which reminded Joe of a squirrel storing up nuts for winter. “Twice he was collected by car from his apartment very early in the morning and driven to the airport at Pudong. If I was to speculate on the nature of these journeys, I would say that he was travelling to the United States.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because both times he did not return for over a week, because there were flights to Washington that fitted with his schedule on those mornings, and because he did not take his wife.”

Isabella. The thought of her name was melodramatized by the soaring violins of Barber’s “Adagio.” Joe wanted to ask Jian how she was, what he thought of her, whether she seemed happy or sad. He found himself reflecting, not for the first time during his short stay in Shanghai, that he was breathing the same air as the woman he loved. This was the quiet madness in which his heart resided.

“But the other three were internal flights within China?”

“Yes. And one of these could have been to Urumqi, because the timings were also similar. But this is just speculation on my part. The others we are almost certain were to separate destinations.”

“As part of his job?”

Jian nodded. Miles’s cover involved posing as an employee of Microsoft, investigating incidents of copyright theft in China. It was a clever ruse, not least because it allowed a senior CIA man the freedom to move around the country without arousing suspicion.

“What else can you tell me about his movements?”

Jian exhaled through puffed-out cheeks and tilted his head to one side. His eyebrows hooked in a comic expression of exhausted bewilderment and it was obvious to Joe that Miles hadn’t changed. No other man could produce a reaction like that in an asset of Jian’s experience.

“He is quite a character, the American.” Jian booted up the laptop, clicked through various folders and passed it across to Joe. It was a small Lenovo, light and state-of-the-art. There was a photograph on the screen, about the size of a holiday snap, and Joe adjusted the tilt of the lid so that he was able to see the image more clearly.

“If we are disturbed,” Jian told him quietly, looking out at the grass in front of them, “if anybody should approach us and request to see the information on this computer, you only have to hold down the key marked F8, which has been programmed to delete all relevant files.” A more theatrical personality might have paused here for dramatic effect, but Jian moved swiftly on. “The first picture shows you an individual who will probably interest you a great deal.” The photograph was a close-up shot of a beautiful Chinese woman, taken on a busy street in bright sunlight. “We think your friend is conducting a sexual relationship with this woman. Her English name is Linda, with the Chinese name Ling Shu. He is not in Shanghai at the present time and we believe they are together in Hainan. I have written a more detailed account of their meetings in the main research file contained on the desktop.” Joe felt a strange, conflicting surge of relief and anger: relief because Miles was undermining his marriage through infidelity; anger because he was hurting Isabella by doing so. Jian reached across and pushed the right arrow key on the laptop. The photograph of Linda was replaced with another picture, this time of a different woman. “This second image also shows a girl, as you can see, who is Chinese and of approximately the same age as the first.”

Jian withdrew his hand and leaned back on the bench. Was there a slight undercurrent of moral disgust here? Joe knew nothing of Jian’s private life, but the brisk manner in which he had described the second woman led him to suspect that he was himself the father of a girl.

“Miles is seeing both these women at once?”

Jian produced a curious glottal noise in the base of his throat which might have been the laughter of male camaraderie, but might equally have been the sound of an older man’s disapproval. “Yes. Again, we believe so.” A bird settled on the grass in front of them before quickly flying away. “This one lives in an apartment not far from here and has a number of different boyfriends.”

“You mean she’s a prostitute?”

Jian shrugged. Western men preyed on Chinese girls; Chinese girls preyed on Western men. Sometimes money changed hands; sometimes it didn’t. It was the way of things. The music emerging from the speakers had changed to the waltz from
Sleeping Beauty
. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of yellowed clouds but the temperature in the clearing was still warm. Joe remembered that the “Adagio” had featured in the film
Platoon
and found that the tune had stuck in his mind.

“There are many more photographs,” Jian told him. Joe was surprised when the next picture showed Miles himself standing at what appeared to be the bar of a smart hotel. It had been so long since Joe had seen a contemporary shot of his face that he found himself squinting at the image in near-disbelief. Miles’s weight had ballooned to fourteen or fifteen stone and, perhaps to compensate for the commensurate swelling in his face, he had grown a wild black beard which somehow amplified his natural charisma. Miles was surrounded at the bar by three Caucasians—a man and two women—all of whom were younger than he was and laughing uproariously at something he had said. It was both reassuring and debilitating to see this. Joe stubbed out his cigarette.

“Click through these,” Jian said, pointing at the keyboard. As Joe moved through a slide show, Jian produced a detailed running commentary.
These are your friend’s colleagues from work. This is an American lawyer who he meets at least twice a week. This is his gym. This is his car. This is where he goes to the movies
. Like the bullet in Russian roulette, Joe was waiting for his first glimpse of Isabella, but it was the bullet that never comes.

After perhaps thirty or forty photographs, he said, “What about his wife?”

“What about her, please?”

“Well, where is she?”

It was the only moment of awkwardness between them. Jian reacted as though SIS were questioning the quality of his work. Joe felt obliged to reassure him.