Typhoon (44 page)

Eight years as the wife of an American spy appeared to have normalized her attitude to Joe’s chosen trade. She had grinned as she asked the list of questions and he had no hesitation in replying.

“I’m not married,” he said, adding quickly, “Not divorced, either,” because he saw what he interpreted as a look of confusion on Isabella’s face. “I don’t have any children. At least I didn’t last time I checked.”

“And the Foreign Office?”

Joe noted that there had been a little blink and swallow as she had absorbed the news that he was single. “Are we back here again?” he said. He could afford to risk the joke because there was no more pain between them. He stared at Isabella’s face, at the eyes he had kissed, the neck he had touched, and marvelled that their conversation was so effortless. “Actually I made a private vow to myself eight years ago that if we ever met again I wouldn’t lie to you about what I do for a living.”

“And yet here you are about to do exactly that.” She waved away her indiscretion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” Their eyes met in a moment of quiet understanding. Joe could see that Isabella was now all too aware of the unique, private frustrations of the secret life.

“Can I say something about that?” she said suddenly.

“About what?”

“About the way I behaved in Hong Kong.” It was not yet ten o’clock, but she had plainly made the decision to clear her conscience as quickly as possible. “I was very hard on you.” She swept a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You didn’t deserve it. It took me a long time to realize that, and by then I was in Chengdu with Miles. I’m so sorry.” Joe tried to stall the confession, because he was shocked both by its candour and by the impact that Isabella’s words had on his heart. They had come too late, and yet they were all that he had longed to hear. “The truth is that I wasn’t really ready for what we had. I was too young. I used what I discovered about you as an excuse to end what we had between us.”

“Izzy . . .”

“No, please. Let me finish. For all I know it’ll be another eight years before I see you again and I’ve been wanting to say this for ages.” She lowered the cup of coffee she had been holding and placed it on the table in front of her. Joe suddenly glimpsed an extraordinary solitude in her eyes, as if there was no one in Shanghai to whom Isabella could speak as frankly and as passionately as she was now doing. “I wasn’t as kind as you thought I was,” she said. “You deserved better. I had a habit of pushing men away who were good to me. I did it with Anthony and I did it with you. It was heartless.”

“I lied to you,” Joe said, trying to protect her. “I should have been more honest from the start.”

“No. How could you have been?” She had thought it all through. She was trying to demonstrate her desire to mend their shared wound, as if they could not speak of anything else until the past had been laid to rest. “It was the nature of your job,” she said. “You couldn’t have done it if you were going around telling everybody the truth.”

“Perhaps,” Joe said. It occurred to him that there were other things, more damaging things, yet just as truthful, that Isabella might now have added. That Joe had been just a little bit too sensible, a little bit too buttoned up, a little bit too withdrawn and conservative for a girl of her background and character. A part of him had always known that Isabella had discovered his dark secret just at the point when she was beginning to tire of him. The timing was immaculate. Had he asked her to marry him, she might well have said no. These were less consoling truths and Isabella was being kind not to speak of them.

“And what about now?” he asked. He was trying to smile, trying to get her to relax and enjoy the morning. “Are you happy? Did it all work out the way you wanted it to?”

She stared across the blinding courtyard, the sun burning the concrete and glinting off the surface of the water. How much does a woman tell a man about the secrets in her heart? How much can a wife disclose about the failures of her marriage?

“Isn’t that why you’ve come?” she said.

Joe lit a cigarette. “I don’t understand.”

“To talk about Miles.”

He took the first smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the cloud-smothered sky. “It’s partly why I’ve come,” he conceded, though he could not imagine what Isabella knew.

“To talk about Linda?”

This stunned him. “You know about that?” he said, before he had a chance to consider the wisdom of betraying Miles.

There was silence.

“Izzy?” Joe experienced the extraordinary sensation that she had been waiting eight years to break her silence. He suddenly felt as though she regarded him as her closest friend in the world, and that he had ignored that friendship out of sheer spite.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She took one of his cigarettes. She wasn’t going to break down or cry. That wasn’t her style. “It’s the lot of the expat wife, the
tai tai
. We make our beds, we lie in them.”

“I don’t understand.”

She lit the cigarette because he had forgotten to do it for her. “I mean that we come out here on six-figure packages, we get our club-class air tickets, our tennis lessons and our houses in Jinqiao. And what’s the trade-off? Husbands who are away two hundred days a year with a girlfriend in every port and a permanent hangover on weekends.” She met his eyes. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about, Joe. How long have you lived in Asia?”

“For ever.”

“Exactly. And it was the same story in Hong Kong, the same in KL, the same in Singapore, right?” He didn’t wholly agree with her, but knew better than to interrupt. “The Empire lives on. In the 1930s, corporate wives went to the Del Monte and the Cathay. Nowadays we go to Bar Rouge and M on the Bund. There’s no difference. We’re still bored and frustrated. We still have more money than the locals. We still have servants. We still dress up and play the Empire game. Meanwhile, our beloved husbands fuck as many Chinese girls as they can get their hands on and convince themselves they’re part of a master race.”

In truth, this was not the first time that Joe and Isabella had had a conversation of this kind. Her father, Eduard, the French insurance broker, had been a serial womanizer whose philandering was a frequent source of anguish for Isabella, even ten years after his death. When she had left Joe for Miles, a part of him rationalized the switch on the cod-Freudian basis that all women eventually married their fathers. Nevertheless, as he listened to Isabella on that summer morning, Joe experienced something of the same uncertainty that he had felt in the early stages of his conversations with Shahpour and Wang.
Is everybody lying to me, or is everybody telling the truth?

“Where’s this coming from?” he asked. “I don’t know how I can help you. I don’t know what it is that you want me to do.”

She laughed. “Oh, Joe. You’re so sweet. You were always so old-fashioned. I don’t want you to
do
anything. It’s just lovely to see you again. It’s just lovely to talk. I had no idea how much I missed you. This place is so . . .”—she gestured north—“exhausting.”

Joe would have reached out to touch her hand, but he lacked the confidence. Isabella had stripped that away from him. In the eight years without her he had put on skins, layers, a carapace of emotional toughness to prevent him from falling prey to another woman. It had worked, by and large. Megan had broken through for a little while, but as he sipped his coffee and reflected that his heart was still anchored to Isabella, he resolved to end that relationship as soon as possible. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Why do you stay with him?” he asked.

It was a brave question. Isabella ground out her cigarette.

“Because I made a vow. In church. In front of God.”

Joe wasn’t sure whether this was a statement or a question. His own faith had become a nebulous thing; he admired any expression of devotion. “Nothing else? Are things that bad between you?”

“They’re like any marriage.” She placed the sun hat on her head. “When they’re good, they’re good. When they’re bad, they’re bad. The trouble is that the good times come along less and less often. So you’re left with consolations. You’re left with Jesse.”

“Who’s Jesse?” Even as Joe uttered the question he discovered its ghastly, inevitable answer. Jesse was their child. Miles and Isabella had a son.

“Miles really hasn’t been too forthcoming with the information, has he?” she joked. Joe felt a void opening up inside him like a sickness. “Jesse’s our son. My little boy.”

“Where is he?” Joe had buried his shock in the only question he could think of. He felt betrayed and humiliated. Why had Miles not seized on the opportunity to wound him with the news when he had met him on Huaihai, or at M on the Bund?

“He’s back at the house with Mary.” Joe assumed that Mary was an
ayi
, a Chinese live-in nanny. “Do you want more coffee? Do you mind if I get something to eat?”

He knew that she had said it to relieve his sadness. He shook his head and smiled, saying, “No, but you go ahead,” and Isabella stood up, making her way into the café. Why was he so distraught at the gift of a child? People got married. People had children. Miles was ten years older than Isabella; a pregnancy had been inevitable. The child was probably the one constant happiness in his mother’s life. Why resent it?

Joe’s mobile pulsed in his pocket. He took it out and saw that Waterfield was calling from London. The phone was not secure, so any conversation would have to be short and non-specific.

“Joe?”

He was grateful for the immediate distraction of work. “David. How are you?”

“Sorry to have been out of touch.”

“It’s all right.”

A little boy walked past him eating a toffee apple. Waterfield moved straight to business. “No news on your doorman, I’m afraid. Sally’s never heard of him. Ditto the chef.”

The doorman was Ablimit Celil. The chef was a nickname for Memet Almas. “Sally” was agreed language for the database at Vauxhall Cross. Joe leaned his elbows on the table and took a chance.

“Have you tried asking in Pakistan?” He wanted to verify Wang’s theory about the ISI. “I heard a rumour they’d worked in Islamabad. Might be worth checking.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Not entirely.”

Waterfield coughed. “I thought it was American owned?”

It amused Joe to hear him improvising with the coded language. Waterfield was part of the tele gram generation. Speaking about an operation on an open line was contrary to every instinct he possessed for secrecy.

“I thought so too,” he replied. “That still might be the case. It would just be interesting to know if the doorman ever had a job there.”

Isabella was coming out of the museum. When she saw that Joe was on the phone, she stopped, offering to grant him some privacy. Seeing this, he shook his head and waved her over, telling Waterfield that he had to go.

“I’m having a coffee with Isabella,” he said, because it would raise his stock in London.

“You are? Well, good for you. Be sure not to send her my love.”

“Work?” Isabella asked when he had hung up. She had bought two bottles of water and a brace of dehydrated croissants.

“Work,” Joe replied.

On the fifth
floor of a Minxing Road apartment block, seven kilometres from downtown Puxi at the edge of a featureless, traffic-clogged freeway, Ablimit Celil set out the plan for the coordinated attacks of Saturday 11 June, codenamed ZIKAWEI.

It was 9 p.m. on the evening of Sunday the 5th. The one-bedroomed apartment was rented in the name Chan Chi-yung, a known associate of Mohammed Hasib Qadir, an officer of the Pakistani ISI. Celil was seated at the head of a low rectangular table in the living room. To his left was Memet Almas, unshaven and sipping from a bottle of water. To his right, Ansary Tursun was smoking a cigarette, dressed in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and denim jeans. Abdul Bary was directly opposite Celil, his pale face partly obscured by a baseball cap pulled low over the eyes. An hour earlier, the four members of the cell had been eating
kurdak
, a sweet and sour Uighur stew prepared with lamb, carrots and potatoes. The plates and cutlery had now been cleared away from the table and replaced by three improvised explosive devices, each consisting of 22 pounds of Goma-2 ECO gelignite, three detonators and three mobile telephones. Celil had spent forty minutes explaining how to arm the IED and to trigger it using the alarm clock on the phone. He reminded the men that an unexploded bomb from El Pozo station in Madrid had failed to detonate on 11 March 2004 because the alarm had accidentally been set twelve hours late.

Standing up from the table, he started to detail the specifics of the plan.

“Remember this,” he began. “Our brother Ansary was arrested by the Chinese authorities for owning a newspaper.” He looked at Tursun and briefly clasped his hand. “He was tortured and brutalized for this harmless offence.” Celil looked across the room and found Bary’s eyes beneath the shadow of his cap. “Our brother Abdul was imprisoned for insulting a Han.” Celil appeared to wince, as if somehow sharing the memory. “He was tortured and beaten for exercising his right to speak.” Moving behind Almas, Celil now squeezed the muscles of the Kazakh’s shoulders and stared directly ahead at Tursun. “Our brother Memet has come to us to free his Turkic brothers from the yoke of Chinese oppression.” Almas bowed his head. “And we remember those who have died for our cause, who now regard us from paradise. We remember, in par tic ular, our brother Enver Semed, a proud Uighur fighter held in the gulag of Guantanamo and later betrayed by the American infidel. We remember our Muslim brothers and sisters who are tortured daily at Abu Ghraib. We fight on behalf of all Muslims who find their lands occupied by imperial powers.”

Celil picked up the pad. Five floors down, in a dusty Chinese courtyard, children were laughing.