Typhoon (41 page)

Wang had been in the process of taking an apple out of a bowl. His hand froze and he replaced the fruit, turning to face Joe. “Ansary is alive?” It was as if Joe had spoken of Wang’s son. Any lingering doubts he may have held about the wisdom of his decision to come to Beijing were dispelled in this moment.

“Alive and well and working in a Muslim restaurant in Shanghai. Given that he has suffered as much as anyone else at the hands of the Chinese, it seems logical to me that he might be involved in a plot to harm them.”

“What do you mean by that?” Wang’s question carried a false note. It was possible that he was testing the extent of Joe’s knowledge.

“Eight years ago, you told me that Ansary had been tortured in a Chinese prison. I suspect that he was one of the first people you turned to when the Americans engaged your services. You also mentioned a second man, a student of yours, Abdul Bary. I suspect that he, too, became instrumental in the struggle for an in de pen-dent Eastern Turkestan. Am I correct?”

Wang nodded admiringly. “You are not incorrect,” he replied. There was a sound outside the door. It would not have surprised Joe if uniformed officers of the PLA had suddenly burst into the room. He had exercised the minimum precaution in reaching Wang’s home and had acted with wild impulsiveness in seeking him out. But it was just an animal scratching around in the dusty passage outside. “I did not know that Ansary was still alive,” Wang said quietly. “We were once very close. It is true. But we have not spoken for a number of years. We had what you might describe as a falling out.”

“What sort of falling out?”

“It was the same with Abdul,” Wang continued. He was nervously scratching his arm. “They became radicalized after 9/11 and fell under the influence of a Uighur fighter named Ablimit Celil. They are not the men they once were. It is one of the unfortunate consequences of your war on terror that it obliges good men into alliances they would once have considered foolish. It becomes more important to fight the war than to fight the war for a meaningful purpose. Does that make sense to you?” Joe nodded. Wang brushed an insect from his sleeve. “I never trusted Celil,” he said. “I never liked him. He was the kind who was emboldened by the actions of al-Qaeda and who allowed the independence movement to be infiltrated by external elements. We had a fight, a series of arguments. I believed that they had lost sight of the cause for which we were all once fighting. You say that this cell has American backing?”

Joe was confused by the inference behind the question. “Possibly,” he said.

“I doubt this.”

An expression of profound concern had formed on Wang’s face. He looked like an organized, resourceful man who had allowed a moment of stupidity to cloud his thinking.

“What do you mean?”

“Ansary and Abdul would have no business with Americans,” Wang said. “On the day of September 11th I was sitting with them in a hotel room in Kashgar. Tears were streaming down Ansary’s face as the second plane hit the tower. I looked at him and I saw in his eyes that they were tears of happiness.” Joe wiped a droplet of sweat from his forehead. “Ablimit spent a year at a training camp in the Pamir mountains. He became an agent of the Pakistani ISI. Surely the Americans know this?”

Joe was perplexed. “Not unless you’ve told them,” he said. “Did you say something to Mark?”

“I never thought to tell him,” Wang replied. “It was not my business. He spoke of a cell in Shanghai but he did not speak of names.”

“Celil?” Joe said, trying to remain thorough and logical. “How would you write that?”

Wang spelled out the letters. “The last I knew of him, he worked in Urumqi as a hotel doorman.” Wang wrote an address on a small piece of paper using a pencil which he had retrieved from the floor. “If you find him, let me know. Because if you find Ablimit Celil, you will find Ansary Tursun. And I would very much like to see him.”

Miles Coolidge was
going to the movies.

In a city built on commerce, Xujiahui—pronounced
Shoo-jahwe
—is a modern Mecca of Shanghai shopping. Seven separate malls and department stores are located at the junctions of Hengshan, Hongqiao and Zhaojiabang roads, about a mile south-west of Joe’s apartment in the French Concession. At all hours of the day, but particularly in the early to late evening, Xujiahui teems with tens of thousands of Chinese, buying and selling everything from computers and electrical equipment to children’s toys and the latest clothes from East and West. You would not describe it as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Traffic clogs the packed streets. Subway exits lead to a warren of interconnected underground tunnels which are so hot in summer that to pass through them is to be suffocated by stagnant, putrid air. Horns and jackhammers puncture the atmosphere. A pretty steepled church and an old library, set back from nearby Caoxi Road, are all that remain of the colonial era. Progress has claimed the rest.

Miles pulled up in a cab outside the Paradise City mall, the huge, seven-storey edifice where, just a few weeks later, TYPHOON would reach its horrific zenith. He passed a twenty-yuan note through the driver’s perspex separator and waited as his receipt chugged out of the meter. A vast, fifty-foot-high photograph of David Beckham gazed down at him from an advertising hoarding slung from the façade of the Metro City mall on the opposite side of the intersection. Miles stepped out of the taxi and held the door for two Chinese girls dressed head to toe in Western brands. A moped swept past him, buzzing its horn. He tried giving one of the girls the eye, but she ignored him and slammed the door.

The Paradise City was a sanctuary of air conditioning which released Miles from the cloud-trapped pollution outside. Surveillance footage shows him stepping around a salesman handing out leaflets for skincare products and taking an escalator to the first floor. He bought a latte and a chocolate muffin from a branch of Costa Coffee. Tables were arranged at the perimeter of a balcony which afforded panoramic views of the gleaming white atrium. Ahead of him, Miles could see all seven floors of the mall, the branches of French Connection and Nike Golf, the bubble lifts and sliding banks of escalators, the giggling girls gassing on mobile phones.

The meeting was set for seven-thirty. At half-past six, he walked round to the opposite side of the atrium, where he caught a lift to the seventh floor. Heading to the north-western corner of the mall, Miles entered the Silver Reel cinema multiplex and purchased a ticket for the 6:50 movie showing in Screen Four. There were extensive queues at the popcorn concession but he waited in line under the watchful eye of Elmo and Bugs Bunny, purchasing a tub of salted popcorn and half a litre of Diet Coke. This was his usual routine. There was no security as he handed over his ticket, just a Chinese girl standing at the gate who said, “Hello, sir,” in English, indicating the entrance to Screen Four behind her. Miles made his way along the darkened corridor, entered the cinema and sat in his usual seat at the end of row Q. The advertisements had already started and he leaned back in his chair, waiting for Ablimit Celil.

London had gone
silent. Upon returning to Shanghai, Joe had put in a request for information on Ablimit Celil. Five days had passed and he had heard nothing back.

It was partly his fault. Under normal circumstances, Joe would have filed a CX report about his meeting with Wang Kaixuan, detailing the significant allegation that Celil maintained links to the Pakistani ISI. But Waterfield had effectively forbidden him from pursuing Wang as a line of enquiry; until Joe had firm intelligence that the professor was telling the truth, he could hardly admit to having ignored London’s basic instructions. That was the trouble with the secret world; only on very rare occasions did all the rumours and the leads and the theories converge to paint a perfect picture. There was no such thing as the truth. There was only product.

Joe had also been in touch with Zhao Jian, who had never heard of Ablimit Celil, far less seen him in the company of Miles Coolidge. As for Shahpour Moazed, Zhao Jian’s brothers joked that they had developed bunions waiting for him to emerge from his apartment building on Fuxing Road. Miles’s right-hand man had gone to ground. Nobody had seen hide nor hair of Moazed for almost a week. When Jian had telephoned the Microsoft office in Pudong, a secretary had informed him that Shahpour was sick. They were expecting him back at work on Monday.

Shahpour was indeed sick, but not with stomach cramps brought on by dodgy tofu, or with a nasty dose of the flu. He was suffering from a sustained bout of regret and paranoia. For five long days he had bunkered down in his apartment, surviving on a diet of counterfeit DVDs, Thai marijuana, Chinese hookers and takeaway food. To his longstanding doubts about the moral rectitude of TYPHOON was now added a second, shaming regret that he had spilled his guts to Joe Lennox. Prior to leaving for M on the Bund, Shahpour had smoked a pre-dinner joint, then sunk two bottles of white wine, a cognac and a vodka Martini at dinner before calmly informing a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service that the CIA was bankrolling terrorism in China. He had somehow persuaded himself that Joe Lennox was his saviour. The reality, of course, was that Joe was now a private citizen who would surely have gone straight to SIS Station in Shanghai and informed them about the plot. Shahpour was amazed that he had not yet been called home. He was stunned that he had not, at the very least, received a visit from an irate Miles Coolidge. He had already drafted his letter of resignation and was preparing to pack.

“So nobody’s seen him for a week?” Joe asked Zhao Jian.

“That is correct, sir. Nobody has seen him since your dinner on the Bund.”

“And you’re convinced that he’s still in his apartment? You’re sure he hasn’t flown the nest?”

“Convinced, sir. Convinced.”

There was only one thing for it. On a damp Friday evening, Joe walked the short distance from his apartment in the French Concession to Central Fuxing Road. He paused outside a barber’s shop where an exhausted-looking businessman was receiving a head massage and called Shahpour’s mobile.

“Hello?” The voice was gravelly, only half-alert.

“Shahpour? This is Joe. Joe Lennox. How are you doing?”

Shahpour thought about hanging up, but was intrigued. He had heard nothing from Joe since their conversation at dinner, only a rumour that he had left town for a few days on Quayler business. He looked at the clock on his kitchen wall. A dried chunk of spaghetti sauce obscured one of the digits but he could see that it was after eight o’clock.

“Hi, Joe. I guess I’m doing fine. It’s good to hear from you. What’s up?”

“Well, I was just passing your door and I wondered if you fancied a drink? It’s Friday, Megan’s away and I hoped you might be at a loose end.”

“How did you know where I live?”

It was the first indicator of his paranoid state. “You told me. At dinner. Fuxing Road, right?”

Ten minutes later Joe was in a lift riding to the fourth floor of an apartment block built in the hideous neo-Grecian style which is considered luxurious by certain Chinese architects. Shahpour lived alone at the end of a long corridor crowded with old boxes and plastic bags. Joe rang the doorbell and waited up to a minute for the American to answer.

A stewardess once described to me the smell which emerges from an aeroplane when the doors are opened for the first time after a long-haul flight. Joe experienced a comparable odor as he stepped into Shahpour’s apartment to be greeted by a noxious cocktail of stale air, farts and socks which almost made him gag with its intensity. Shahpour had grown a substantial beard and was dressed only in a pair of torn jeans and a Puma T-shirt. He had taken on the countenance of a brilliant, insomniac postgraduate student who has been toiling in a laboratory for days. The air conditioning in the apartment had been switched off, and there was no natural light to speak of. Plastic DVD cases and pizza cartons were scattered on a
kilim
, dirty clothes strewn on an L-shaped white leather sofa. On the table nearest the door Shahpour had placed a laptop computer and a Tupperware box containing enough marijuana to earn him a seven-year prison sentence. An iPod glowed in the corner.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“The place needs to be cleaned up,” Shahpour muttered, walking into the kitchen. Joe saw that he had already begun to make a start on five days of washing up. A bin bag in the corner had been hastily tied together and the floor was sticky under his feet. “I haven’t been out much.”

“Let’s go out now,” Joe suggested, as much to relieve his own discomfort as to offer Shahpour a release from his torpor. “Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll take you out for dinner?”

“OK.” Shahpour sounded like a drunk preparing to sober up. “Might be a good idea. Give me five minutes.”

It took fifteen. Joe waited in the deep-litter sitting room, sipping from a can of lukewarm Tsingtao and flicking through a copy of
City Weekend
. He wanted to draw the curtains, to open a window, to tidy some of the detritus from the floor, but it was not his place to do so. Eventually Shahpour appeared, with the beard slightly trimmed, wearing a clean T-shirt, worn jeans and a pair of trainers. The transformation was remarkable.

“I needed that,” he said.

“Let’s go.”

At first they walked in near-silence, heading west in the general direction of Joe’s apartment. He felt like a visitor to a sanatorium, strolling in the grounds with a patient on day release. Cyclists and passers-by cast strange looks at the tall, bearded Persian in Joe’s company, and he was concerned that they would soon attract the wrong sort of attention from the wrong sort of Chinese. Joe suggested going to Face, a bar in the Rui Jin Guest House a few blocks away, where expats could blend into a gin and tonic in relative obscurity, but Shahpour was apparently enjoying the fresh air.