Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  The next day, having woken at five with jet lag, Joe took a morning boat trip to the mouth of the Yangtze, realizing, to his gradual disappointment, that the Huangpu was not the river of his romantic imagination—a Seine or a Danube of the East—but instead a churning sea lane as grey and as polluted as the bloated corpse of Kenneth Lenan. That afternoon, to maintain basic cover, he held the first of several meetings with a consultant who advised overseas companies on the logistics of setting up a business in China. The meeting, which had been arranged from Quayler headquarters in London, lasted two hours and took place in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, for maximum public exposure. Joe continued to make work-related telephone calls from his room, and was regularly seen using the email and fax facilities in the hotel’s business lounge. Back in tourist mode, he lunched on dumplings at Nanxiang Mantou Dian, took the obligatory tea at Yu Yuan Gardens and made an excursion to the nineteenth-century basilica built by Catholic missionaries out at She Shan. For anyone who happened to be watching, Joe Lennox was just as he appeared to be: a single man of independent means, gradually finding his feet in Shanghai.

  In these early stages my new SIS handler had calculated that I would be a useful support agent for Joe from my base in Beijing. My first task was to put him in touch with one of the most pop ular and well-connected expats in Shanghai, an old friend of mine named Tom Harper. I had no idea that the two of them would go on to hit it off as resoundingly as they did, although Joe’s natural affinity for flawed mavericks should have tipped me off.

  Educated in England, Tom had inherited a small fortune at the age of twenty when his parents had died within six months of each other. He had spent the next fifteen years bouncing around the globe, earning an undergraduate degree at Berkeley, an MBA from INSEAD, marrying—briefly—a French television actress and bewildering a long line of expensive psychoanalysts. He was a man of almost limitless good humour and generosity, about whom one rarely heard an unkind word spoken. He also knew everything there was to know about having a good time in Shanghai. In three years living in the city, Tom had been a male model, a nightclub impresario, a yacht broker and a restaurateur. He was at every dinner party, every movie premiere and every bar and club launch worth mentioning. He didn’t seem to sleep more than four or five hours a night and survived on a diet of caffeine, alcohol and illegal recreational drugs. He did not know Miles Coolidge personally, but that hardly mattered; the way things worked in Shanghai, there would be a maximum of two or three degrees of separation between them. On that basis, it would only be a matter of time before Tom led Joe to his quarry.

  Sunday brunch at the Westin seemed an ideal place for the two of them to meet. The Westin is the Indonesian-owned hotel on the junction of Henan Road and Guangdong Road that spoils a certain view of the Bund: look behind the old HSBC building and it’s the fat high-rise, two blocks back, with an illuminated metal crown sprouting from its roof. On Sunday mornings the hotel lays on an opulent buffet attended by wealthy Western families and twenty-something rich kids keen to impress their latest girlfriends. For around 400 renminbi—the equivalent of PS25 in 2005, or a week’s wage to the average Shanghai Chinese—guests can help themselves to limitless quantities of sushi, Parma and Serrano ham, Russian caviar, roast rib of beef, freshly made tortellini and as much Veuve Clicquot champagne as they can swallow. The Westin brunch has become an institution in the city, not least as a place where people can catch up on the latest gossip, a commodity—both social and commercial—on which the overseas community thrives.

  I had given Joe Tom’s number and they had arranged to meet in the lobby at midday on Sunday 30 January. Rather than describe the brunch in detail, I’ll quote from a couple of letters that Tom sent to me, both of which help to paint a picture of Joe’s first few weeks in Shanghai.

  Will—

  One of the things I like about China, and about Shanghai in particular, is that it’s completely meritocratic. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a city where obscene wealth and obscene poverty exist side by side, but it always seemed to me, at least from a foreigner’s point of view, that you get nowhere in China on the basis of reputation alone. Ex-Yale, ex-Sorbonne, a double-starred First from Cambridge—none of that really matters here. This place is immune to class or background. If you can’t do what you promised to do, you’ll get found out. It’s not like, say, Hong Kong or Singapore, where a lot of really average people have been making a lot of really easy money for decades. If you come to China expecting the locals to roll over and say how grateful they are, you’re in for a big shock. Only the best people succeed here. It’s completely ruthless.

  So whenever I meet the latest Jardine Johnnie fresh off the plane who wants to “try his luck in Shanghai,” I’m always a bit suspicious. Do they think China owes them a living? Have they got the slightest idea what they’re getting themselves into?

  All of this is a roundabout way of thanking you for putting me in touch with Joe, who I’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few weeks. For a start, he didn’t arrive with any illusions about China, which always helps. He also seems to know a hell of a lot more about China and the Chinese than most people who’ve been living here for five or ten years. Where did you say you knew him from?

  We met at the Westin, as you’d recommended. There was the usual scene there: guilty investment bankers finding a three-hour slot between meetings and hookers to spend “family time” with their wife and kids; underage Chinese gymnasts turning themselves inside out in the lobby while a live band played the best of Carly Simon; a guy dressed up in a Spiderman outfit, attached to the roof by a harness, cleaning the glass windows 100ft over our heads. I’d been out clubbing all night and hadn’t been to bed. At about 10 in the morning I was sitting in Dragon with two girls from Barcelona, one of whom was coming down off a bad pill, when I looked at my watch and saw the time. Gave serious thought to cancelling the whole thing but because Joe was a friend of yours—and because I’m an extremely decent, upstanding person—I grabbed my jacket, had a shower and took a cab down to the Westin. Was at least twenty minutes late, knackered, etc, but Joe couldn’t have been nicer about it. He was in the lobby making conversation (in fluent, very old-school Mandarin) with an octogenarian cleaning woman who had bags under her eyes like Huan Huan the Panda. She looked as though nobody had bothered to speak to her since the Cultural Revolution and was busy telling Joe stories about all the old buildings in her neighbourhood which had been knocked down by developers. He took one look at me and must have realized what a mess I was in because he did most of the talking for the first twenty minutes. He also paid the bill for both of us as we went in and before long we were three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne, I’d forgotten all about my hangover, and it was as if we’d known one another for years.

  This is the second of them. Tom Harper is one of the world’s last great letter writers, but the first half of the following email was mostly a 1,500-word account of a trip to Thailand. The section which was relevant to Joe began about halfway through:

  What’s funny about Shanghai is how quickly word gets round that there’s an interesting new face in town. The other day I took Joe down to Babyface (that’s a nightclub, Will, just in case you’re too old) and introduced him to a few people I knew there, told them he used to work in the Foreign Office, etc. For some reason, this piece of information spread around town like the clap. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least a dozen random people subsequently asked me about Joe in the space of a few weeks. “How did you meet him?”

  “Is he single?”

  “Did he really leave the Foreign Office as a protest against the war?” One (predictable) rumour going round is that he used to be a spy, but I’m not sure about that. I can’t picture him doing the dirty. Also, he spends most of his time sleeping off hangovers at the Ritz-Carlton. Aren’t Foreign Office types supposed to behave themselves?

  On the phone the other day you were asking about Quayler, which seems to be
up and running. When he first arrived I put Joe in touch with a letting agency contact of mine from restaurant days who had an office free in a building looking out over Xintiandi. Joe’s found himself two Chinese staff and I think they moved in there last week. I also introduced him to an Australian girl who has an apartment to rent in the French Concession. If things work out, he should be in there by the end of March, and might be able to sublet for a year or even 18 months because the girl is going home to look after her mother who has cancer or something. So don’t say I don’t look after my friends, OK? My performance has been nothing short of heroic.

  One small complaint: he has a habit of droning on about his job, but I suppose he’s new here and that’s what we all did when we first arrived, so I can’t really blame him. And he certainly seems to know what he’s talking about. You’d warned me that he could be a bit intellectual and withdrawn, but he hasn’t seemed that way to me. The guy can drink like Sue Ellen. I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned, but I’ve found him very open and funny and easy to hang out with. There’s obviously a big brain whirring away back there and I’d like to know more about his story. He says he’s lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, but always seems to change the subject whenever you try to delve too deeply into his past. (Christ, maybe he WAS a spy … )

  Anyway, give me a call and fill me in. Better still, tell your newspaper you have to come down to do a story. We all want to know the truth about Joe Lennox …

  Love Tom

  Tom probably won’t thank me for reproducing his private correspondence, but I’m fascinated by these letters for what they reveal about Joe’s tradecraft. “Droning on” about Quayler, for example, would have been a deliberate tactic that he employed to prevent people digging around in his cover. The purpose behind it was simple: to bore anyone who happened to be listening to the edge of coma. Believe me, once you’d heard Joe’s ten-minute monologue about the future of niche pharmaceuticals—China has twenty per cent of the world’s population but only one point five per cent of the global pharmaceuticals market … The sector is growing by sixteen per cent a year, largely because drug use is rising among the Chinese middle classes … - you never wanted to ask him about his work ever again.

  There are other details from the Westin letter that interest me: offering to pick up the bill; taking the time to talk to the elderly cleaning lady in the lobby; demonstrating a fluency in Mandarin. All of these things would have been premeditated tactics designed to impress upon Tom the idea that Joe Lennox was a generous, intelligent man, experienced in Chinese affairs, but without airs and graces, who would be worth cultivating as a friend. It’s also interesting that Joe was “three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne” not long after sitting down for brunch. Joe rarely drank alcohol during the day, but he must have intuited that Tom was the sort of person for whom booze was a semi-religion, and acted accordingly. Sipping mineral water wouldn’t have conveyed the right image. You can also guarantee that when Joe was supposedly “sleeping off a hangover at the Ritz-Carlton” he was in reality investigating the police and media reports into Kenneth Lenan’s murder and further waterproofing his cover. His decision to reveal that he had quit the Foreign Office on moral grounds would also have been intentional. If anything was designed to set off a firestorm of rumour and half-truth, it was that. I had told Joe that Tom Harper was one of the epicentres of Shanghai gossip, but I had no idea that he was going to give him so much to work with.

  Then, of course, there is that mysterious line in the second letter: “I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned.” For some reason, Joe wasn’t telling anybody about his relationship with Isabella. This may have been tactical—he didn’t mention Miles by name to any of Tom’s friends, either—but neither was he responding to the myriad sexual opportunities which are part and parcel of life in Shanghai. The slight possibility of reconciliation with Isabella was one of the principal catalysts which drove Joe’s work in China. He told me later that summer that he had dreaded what he described as “the Zhivago moment,” when, passing in a bus or taxi, he might catch sight of Isabella on a busy Shanghai street or, worse, find himself standing in front of her at a party and seeing only vague recollection in her eyes. Despite all this, the hold she exerted over him continued to be unhealthy. I told him as much, of course, but he wouldn’t listen. When it came to Isabella Aubert, Joe was closed and distant, seemingly hell-bent on a collision between the two of them which I was convinced would end in tragedy.

  32

  SLEEPER

  All that remained of TYPHOON was four Uighur men living 2,000 miles apart, on opposite sides of China. A terrorist cell. A time bomb.

  Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary lived and worked in Shanghai, but were never seen together in public. Abdul was married with a son and worked fourteen-hour days packaging parts for children’s toys at a factory in Putuo district.

  Ansary had no girlfriend, nor any blood family to speak of. He had a part-time job as a waiter at a Uighur restaurant on Yishan Lu. Both men, under the guidance and tutelage of Professor Wang Kaixuan, had been responsible for carrying out low-level terrorist attacks against Han targets between October 1997 and late 2001. On Wang’s advice, they had curtailed their activities as TYPHOON disintegrated in 2002. Miles Coolidge had recruited them back two years later.

  The third member of the cell was a twenty-nine-year-old Kazakh named Memet Almas who had bombed four Beijing taxis in successive weeks in 2000 using explosives shipped into China by the Macklinson Corporation. In January 2001, to the CIA’s dismay, Almas was arrested on unrelated charges of petty theft and sent to Beijing Second Prison for two years. In the circumstances, it was the best thing that could have happened to him. While he languished in jail, nine Uighur radicals, with whom he would almost certainly have been linked, were arrested and executed by the Chinese authorities. Upon his release in 2004, Memet met Miles Coolidge during a football match at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing and was instructed to move to Xinjiang and await further instructions. The cell, Miles told him, would perform only one or two large-scale terrorist attacks in China over the course of the next five years. Those attacks, he said, would draw unprecedented attention to the Uighur cause. Memet bided his time working on a clothing stall at a market in Kashgar. He was regarded as a quiet, hard-working man with little interest in religion or politics. His wife, Niyasam, was a schoolteacher who knew nothing about his revolutionary past. They did not have children. Ansary, Abdul and Memet were all practising Muslims, but Miles had forbidden them to attend mosque for fear of drawing the attention of the authorities. They were also ordered to shave off their beards.

  The leader of the cell, and its oldest member, was Ablimit Celil. As a teenager in the 1980s, Ablimit had been arrested and imprisoned for stealing a Kalashnikov rifle from police headquarters in his home town of Hotan. In prison, he came under the influence of a Uighur imam who developed both his Islamic faith and his hatred of the ruling Han. Later Ablimit joined an underground group which bombed train lines, office blocks and other “soft” targets in Xinjiang. He took part in the Baren riot of April 1990 and fled into the Kunlun mountains alongside hundreds of other activists as Chinese troops poured in. Many of these activists, as well as villagers sympathetic to the separatist cause, were subsequently rounded up and imprisoned. However, Ablimit evaded capture and, two years later, planted a bomb on an Urumqi bus packed with Han revellers celebrating the Chinese New Year. Six people were killed when the device exploded. In 1997 he had been responsible for the deaths of eight soldiers and four catering staff at an army barracks in Turpan when a bomb he had planted in a store cupboard blew up during the evening meal.

  Shortly before 9/11, Ablimit Celil made the first of two journeys to an al-Qaeda training camp in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan. A more devout Muslim than the other members of the cell, he managed to obtain permission to undertake the Haj, and it was at Mecca that he was recruited as an agent of
the CIA by Josh Pinnegar, who was posing as an American newspaper reporter.

  The cell was unusual in that its four members were deliberately kept apart. Ablimit, a widower, lived in Urumqi where he worked as a doorman at a five-star hotel catering to foreigners and rich Chinese businessmen. Whenever he visited the city, Miles always stayed at the hotel and was able to communicate with Ablimit simply by passing him messages in the form of tips. Typically, these would be written on Chinese and American banknotes using inks visible only under ultra-violet light. Shortly after the Madrid bombings of March 2004, Ablimit informed Miles that he was keen to move with Memet to Shanghai and to team up with Abdul Bary and Ansary Tursun. The atmosphere between Hans and Uighurs in Urumqi, he said, had deteriorated dramatically. September 11th had handed the Chinese authorities carte blanche to clamp down on the minority Muslim population and to treat them with a previously unimaginable contempt. Informers now operated at every level of society. Black-clad anti-terrorist police roamed the streets. Where once Han and Uighur had lived contentedly side by side, the two ethnic groups were now divided by fear and mutual suspicion. Passports belonging to thousands of Muslim citizens had been confiscated by the authorities. All travel now had to be approved by a Chinese government paranoid that its oppressed minorities would join militant groups in Chechnya and Pakistan and return to the Motherland, planning to wreak havoc. Only a Madrid-style incident in either Shanghai or Beijing would be sufficient, Celil said, to accelerate the cause of an in depen dent Eastern Turkestan.