Typhoon (42 page)

“Do you mind if we just walk a while?” he said. “I haven’t been outside in a long time.”

“What’s the matter?” Joe asked. “What happened?”

The answer was a long time coming, and its content did not surprise him.

“I guess I feel like I owe you an apology,” Shahpour said finally. “I was out of line the other night.”

“How so? I had a great time.”

Shahpour’s humid eyes stared into Joe’s, who saw that there was no energy left in them for British
politesse
.

“I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I’d heard things about you that I had misinterpreted.”

“What kind of things?”

“That you were the only man left on either side of the Atlantic with any principles. That all the secretaries at Vauxhall Cross were crying in the restrooms at your farewell party. That Joe Lennox was a guy I could talk to, whether or not he was working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals.”

“What if I’m not working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals?”

They were standing beside a fruit stall on the corner of Shanxi Road. A gap-toothed Mongolian was preparing slices of watermelon on a chopping board erected in the street. Shahpour came to a halt beside her and turned to look at Joe.

“Keep walking,” Joe said quietly. “Keep walking.”

They went north.

“What did you mean by that?” Shahpour was running a hand through his hair, looking behind him, as if concerned that they were being followed. They had not passed another foreigner since leaving the apartment.

“Tell me about Beijing,” Joe said.

“What about it?”

“Tell me about the Olympics.”

Shahpour stared at him. “You’ve seen Wang, haven’t you?”

Right on cue, a phalanx of uniformed PLA guards turned the corner ahead of them and marched two abreast along the opposite side of the street. Shahpour swore under his breath.

“I’m going to take a chance,” Joe told him. He had prepared precisely what he was going to say. A passer-by, observing their conversation, would have suspected that Joe was talking about nothing more pressing than the weather. “If my instincts are correct, you and I can possibly save a lot of innocent lives. If they’re wrong, I’m going to look like the biggest idiot this side of the Yangtze River.” A man stepped in front of them and opened up a briefcase of counterfeit watches, following for several paces until Joe waved him away. “You were right about Zapata’s. Our meeting was not an accident. I used Megan to draw you on.”

“I knew it!” Shahpour was like an excited child. Joe would have told him to calm down if he had not quickly done so himself. This wasn’t a game. He needed Shahpour to concentrate.

“But you neglected to mention Beijing. I want to know what’s being planned for the Olympics.”

There is a certain, undeniable thrill in running a successful agent, a feeling of absolute control over the destiny of another human being. Joe experienced something of the same pleasure as he observed the gradual shift in Shahpour’s body language, the softening of his demeanour. It was obvious that he trusted Joe implicitly. He had found the one man who offered him release from his wretched predicament.

“The only reason I didn’t tell you is that there didn’t seem any point. I bought your story, man. I really thought you were out. I can’t believe this.”

They had come to an intersection. Shahpour was a decent man, erratic of temperament and occasionally immature, but Joe liked him. He had concluded that he had been selected in haste by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11 and rushed through training at the Farm, probably for reasons of racial profiling. He would have been more suited to a career in sales or, indeed, computing. As if to confirm this basic impression, Shahpour now lit a cigarette and walked straight into what appeared to be a clear road, having apparently forgotten that in China it is best to look left and right, up and down, front and back, before stepping out into traffic. He was quickly assaulted by the horn of an oncoming cab, angling towards him on the wrong side of the road. Joe grabbed his shirt and pulled him back.

“Jesus!”

“Let’s try to keep you alive.”

Safely on the opposite side of the street, Shahpour began to extrapolate on Wang’s description of the CIA’s plans for Beijing. Miles apparently wanted several incidents, at least one “on the scale of Atlanta,” which would concentrate media attention on casualties and civil unrest, rather than on the gleaming economic miracle of modern China. Using his cover at Microsoft, Shahpour had been tasked with recruiting underpaid, overworked Chinese employees inside the stadium complex, as well as television and advertising personnel in the city. He was due to move to the capital in the late summer. Meanwhile, Miles was working on a plan to bring a Uighur cell into Beijing to bomb the Olympic village.

“The same cell that’s in Shanghai?”

“I have no idea. Miles only tells me what I need to know. But it’s compartmentalized. There could be hundreds of officers working on this, could be just me and him.”

Joe shook his head and lit a cigarette. That the operation appeared so chaotic was, he concluded, an indication of its absolute secrecy, rather than an illustration of CIA or Pentagon incompetence. Shahpour continued.

“Miles thinks it’s gonna be easy falsifying documentation to get into the village. I told him the Chinese won’t let anybody move in there unless they can prove they’re legitimate. How the fuck are we supposed to get a bunch of out-of-shape Turkic Muslims into an elite training area for the world’s finest athletes? I’m telling you, the whole plan is a mess.”

“It can’t be the same cell that’s here in Shanghai,” Joe concluded. “If they carry out an attack this summer, they’ll be arrested. Miles can’t expect the cell to survive undetected for three more years.”

Shahpour tossed his cigarette into the street. “I guess you’re right,” he said.

“How much do you know about the cell?” They were forced to walk around a pool of water flooding out of a canteen halfway down Xinle Road. Crowds of Chinese were hunched over tables, shovelling rice and cuts of pork into their mouths, oblivious to the chaos around them. “When did Miles recruit them?”

“I think they’re the dregs,” Shahpour replied. “I only look out for one of them. Memet Almas. He’s Kazakh, kind of devout, so he likes it that I’m a fellow Muslim, you know? Has a wife back in Kashgar. Miles doesn’t give me any other names. The less people that know, the better, right?” Joe asked for a spelling of Memet Almas. “But I get the impression he’s using fanatics. In the old days, TYPHOON was what you might call a secular operation. They were lapsed Sufis, fighting for a political cause. Far as I can work out, a guy like Memet just wants to blow things up. The whole thing has become radicalized.”

“What about Ansary Tursun? Abdul Bary? Do those names mean anything to you?”

Shahpour shook his head. It was dark and two mopeds without headlights were coming towards them on the opposite side of the street.

“Ablimit Celil?”

Another shake of the head. Joe was bewildered that Shahpour seemed to know so little about the operation. “What makes you think they’re all radicalized?” he asked.

“Just listening to Miles talk. Maybe he’s bought into the whole Chinese state propaganda thing that all Uighurs are terrorists. How do I know? The whole thing’s gotten fucked up.”

“Wang thinks Celil is the head of the cell. He also thinks he might be ISI.”

“He thinks
what
?”

Shahpour had stopped in his tracks. Joe again asked him to keep walking and put a hand around his back. His body was powerfully built and sweat had collected at the bottom of his shirt. “He told me Celil spent time at an al-Qaeda training camp a few years ago. He thinks the cell may be being controlled from Islamabad.”

“Then Wang is full of shit.” An elderly man in a rocking chair was staring at them from the darkened entrance of a
shikumen
.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s been full of shit about things in the past so he’ll be full of shit about things in the future.” Joe’s memory was thrown back to the basement of the nightclub in Wan Chai. What was it that Miles had said to him?
Wang Kaixuan is a myth, a spook story. Nothing that old fuck told you has any meaning
.

“Is that you talking, or Miles?”

Shahpour appeared offended by the criticism implicit in the question. He stepped out in front of a cyclist and separated himself from Joe by crossing the street. They were on a narrow, dimly lit road in the heart of the French Concession, the dark plane trees bending low over their heads and stretching like a tunnel into the distance. Without hurrying, Joe caught up with him and simply picked up where they had left off.

“How do you meet Almas?” he asked.

Shahpour did not hesitate before responding. He was eager to dispense of operational secrets which had been weighing down on him for too long. “We go to a bar on Nanyang Lu. Place called Larry’s.”

Joe knew it. Larry’s was a block behind the Ritz-Carlton, a split-level American-style pub with big-screen sports and pool tables. He had eaten there, watching coverage of a one-day cricket international between England and South Africa. It was popular with twentysomething
laowais
who liked burgers and French fries. “You meet him in the open? In a restaurant?” He did not want to risk incurring Shahpour’s wrath by asking further questions about the sloppiness of his tradecraft.

“Sure. He blends right in. We sit in the corner, get a cheeseburger, we watch a ball game and act like a couple of Americans a long way from home. Chinese can’t tell the difference. We all look the same to them.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Twice, maybe three times since he came to Shanghai.” From the slightly obstinate tone emerging in Shahpour’s voice, Joe sensed that he was feeling defensive. Best not to push too hard.

“How do you contact him?”

Shahpour scratched an itch on the lobe of his left ear. “Text message.” He waited until he was clear of an elderly lady washing plates in a plastic tub at the edge of the street. “I gave him a cellphone. There’s language I use that indicates a desire to meet. Memet speaks English and we just code the time and date.”

Joe nodded and asked how it worked from Memet’s end.

“Same thing, more or less. He sends a text from a cellphone sourced in the US telling me to contact my grandparents in Sacramento.”

“Because your grandparents in Sacramento are no longer with us?” Joe was always fascinated to glean titbits of Cousin tradecraft.

“No, they’re still with us. But they live in Tehran.”

Joe smiled. “What about Miles?”

“What about him?”

“How does he do it? How does he meet the cell?”

“I have no idea.” Shahpour was shaking his head. Briefly, it looked as though he had no more to say on the subject. Then: “All I know is that he sometimes uses his wife.”

Joe felt a lurch of surprise which quickly turned to indignation. “Isabella?”

“Sure. For cover. You guys know about that, right? Take a chick with you, pretend like you’re going shopping or something, then meet your contact along the way. Isabella makes Miles look normal. But ask me where the hell he takes her and I’ll tell you I have no idea.”

“Where is your
wife?”

The whispered voice of Ablimit Celil was audible above the screams and gunfire of an American disaster movie. He had taken the vacant seat beside Miles Coolidge at the far end of row Q, entering the cinema shortly after the film had begun.

“She couldn’t make it,” Miles replied. “Women’s troubles.”

He enjoyed taunting Ablimit’s religious beliefs, sexualizing women in his company, occasionally referring to his own agnosticism. He wasn’t going to be dictated to by a fanatic. Miles needed Celil, certainly, but Celil also needed Mike. Without American money and American explosives, he was just another two-bit saboteur.

“You wanted to talk.”

Miles had not yet looked at his agent. Three rows ahead of them, a man wearing a baseball cap was making his way through a tub of ice cream and laughing at a snatch of dialogue on screen. Had he turned around, he would have been met by the incongruous sight of two overweight middle-aged men, one with a thick beard, the other clean shaven, leaning towards one another like lovers in the back row. A vivid montage of flickering light reflected in the blackened eyes of Miles Coolidge and Ablimit Celil as they spoke reverently and quietly, like mourners at a funeral.

“How are you doing?”

“We are fine,” Celil replied. “But we must have more money.”

“So what else is new? Patience, for Christ’s sake.”

“Ansary has been ill. He does not work. He questions the direction we are taking.”

“I saw him last week. Ate a good dinner at Kala Kuer. He looked fine to me.”

Miles popped a single kernel of popcorn into his mouth, allowing it to melt on his tongue.

“I mean he is anxious for action. We all are. We wonder why we are waiting.”

Celil was speaking quickly, in Mandarin, and the whisper of his voice was almost lost amid the wail and crash of an action sequence. The film appalled him, the violence and the blasphemies. He tried not to look at the screen.

“I’ve been working up some possible targets,” Miles said, passing a package across the armrest. Celil placed it on his lap, straining to listen. “Factories. State-owned banks. A Sichuan restaurant in Pudong. I don’t want Americans hit, I don’t want Europeans. We’ve suffered enough.” Not much came back from Celil by way of a reaction, just a blank stare into the middle distance. “I want you to think about switching jobs. Leave Abdul at his factory, but Ansary can take a job washing dishes at the restaurant. I can get you security passes for the banks, access all areas. We have a lot of time.”

Celil sniffed violently. The American’s ignorance of Chinese affairs was still breathtaking to him. “This is not easy for Uighurs,” he said. “We cannot just walk into jobs in such places.”