“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.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “It’s just that they don’t seem to be spending much time together.”
“They don’t,” Jian replied flatly. “She is hardly ever with him.”
This, Joe supposed, was good news, but he could feel no elation. He had always known that Isabella’s marriage to Miles would be a sham, that the American would betray her, that she would be unhappy. To see it played out as he had predicted was grim and dispiriting. “Hardly ever?” he asked. “They don’t go out?”
“Hardly ever.”
There were a great many photographs of Miles at night. In a sequence of backlit images taken inside what Jian described, somewhat mysteriously, as “a Mexican nightclub,” Miles could be seen in heated conversation with a young man, no older than twenty-six twenty-seven, who looked of Pakistani or north Indian origin. It was quite rare in Shanghai to see Asians from the subcontinent, and Joe began to speculate on a possible link with TYPHOON.
“Who’s this guy?” he asked, pressing the screen so that his fingertip blurred the man’s face.
“We don’t know,” Jian replied quickly. “These images were very difficult for us, because the light was so low. My brother could only use his telephone.”
“He’s not a diplomat? Is he resident here?” Joe was thinking about the Pamir mountains which separate Xinjiang from India and Pakistan. Waterfield’s source in Beijing had told him that explosives which were later used by TYPHOON cells in terrorist incidents had been smuggled through the Khunjerab Pass in the summer of 1999.
“We know nothing. I am sorry. This photograph you are looking at was taken only one week ago, maybe ten days. But I have seen him with your friend several times and he is always in this place. We call him ‘Sammy’ because he reminds us of somebody in our family.”
“Sammy?”
“Yes. He is part of your friend’s group who go out at night to the bars and clubs. He is younger than most of them. That is all I can tell you.”
By coincidence, the next photograph was a medium close-up of a mustachioed Uighur man, slightly out of focus and taken from waist height, possibly from below a table in a restaurant. He was wearing a traditional embroidered yellow shirt and a doppa.
“Who’s this?” Joe asked immediately. “Is there any connection between them?”
“No, this man is just a waiter.” Jian sensed Joe’s quickening interest.
“If he’s just a waiter, why did you take his photograph?”
“Your friend goes to Urumqi,” Jian replied quietly. “He also eats at the Kala Kuer restaurant where he speaks to this man a great deal. I have seen them together. And I have been in this business long enough to know that when foreigners take an interest in Xinjiang, it is not always because of the food.”
Joe smiled. There was a nice curl of irony at the perimeter of Jian’s grin. Perhaps he knew why Joe had come to Shanghai, after all. A man with Jian’s contacts—his guanxi—had probably caught a whiff of TYPHOON long ago.
“So do you know the waiter’s name?” he asked.
“Of course.” Jian seemed pleased finally to have a correct answer. The slide show was over and he reached across to retrieve his laptop. “The waiter’s name is Ansary Tursun.”
34
NIGHT CRAWLING
All the way back to the hotel, in the lift to his room, down to the spa and through twenty laps of the Ritz-Carlton’s outdoor pool, Joe Lennox tried to remember where he had heard the name Ansary Tursun. Switching on CNN at eight o’clock, he watched a news report about a car bomb in Iraq and contemplated sending a message to Vauxhall Cross asking them to comb the files for mention of Tursun’s name. But Joe was a stubborn man and it became a point of operational pride that he should remember where he had heard the name before London woke in the morning. If he could not come up with an answer, he would admit defeat and contact Waterfield. Yet he had retrieved Platoon from his memory, and the violins of Barber’s “Adagio” still soared in his mind. What was the difference? It was just a question of locating the melody of Ansary Tursun.
The phone rang beside his bed. Joe muted the television and picked up.
“Joe? It’s Tom. What are you doing for dinner?”
He had seen Tom Harper three times in the previous week. In other contexts, this might have been considered excessive, but it was quite normal in Shanghai, where groups of Western expats met up sometimes three or four nights a week. The alternative was bleak: to stay at home watching cheap, pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters with a takeaway from Sherpa’s for company. Most of the interesting overseas radio stations were banned by the Chinese internet censor and state television consisted largely of game shows, military parades and historical soap operas. When Joe had lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, expats had also clung together in gangs, and life was lived to an excess which would have been unthinkable back home. It was one of the things he had found most frustrating about returning to London: his social life had somehow seemed stale and predictable by comparison.
“I hadn’t got any plans,” he replied.
Tom explained that half a dozen of his friends were going to Paradise Gardens, a Thai restaurant on Fumin Lu. Joe was pleased to be invited, and not simply because of the operational advantage to being seen out in Shanghai. He had also begun to feel the restrictions of life in the hotel. He had no desire for women, but neither did he want to spend every waking moment thinking about Miles and Isabella. Although it was in the nature of his profession to exist in what might be described as a perpetual artificial state, Joe was no different from most people in that he required the escape valve of an occasional night out.
They arranged to meet at the restaurant at nine. Joe took the lift down to the first-floor bar, where he sank a vodka and tonic and nodded at the band, a New Orleans jazz trio who had been playing at the hotel for the previous fortnight and knew Joe on sight. He bought the pianist a Coke (“I’m AA,” he had disclosed during their one and only conversation), malt whiskies for the vocalist and drummer, and signed the bill to his room. There was a long queue for cabs downstairs, so he walked a block east along Nanjing Lu and hailed one off the street.
By the time Joe arrived at the restaurant, Tom’s friends—three men, two women—were already sitting down. He knew all of them except for one, a striking woman in her mid-twenties who looked lively and possibly Malaysian. The others—Ricky, a Scouser who managed a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai making ladies’ underwear; Mike, a physics teacher at the American School in Pudong; Jeff, a Canadian ex-lawyer who now hawked teeth-whitening products to the Chinese; and Sandrine, a senior French employee of Estee Lauder—were familiar faces. They were all of a similar age and had lived in Shanghai for several years.
“Watch out, here comes the spy,” Ricky called out as Joe walked in. “You’re looking very handsome tonight, mate.”
“That’s because I’m wearing one of your bras, Ricky,” Joe replied, and everybody laughed. He apologized for being late and sat at the vacant seat between Tom and the Malaysian girl, who introduced herself as Megan. Her voice was confident and international and Joe suspected that she had been educated, at some point, in America. He scoped her ring finger and saw that she was not married.
> “So how’s the Ritz-Carlton?” Jeff asked. Jeff always asked about the Ritz-Carlton.
“Expensive. I had my company accounts director on the phone this morning asking why I’d sent her a bill for fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars? Why so much?”
“Because spies watch lots of porn,” said Ricky.
Joe was shown a menu from which he ordered a beer and a green chicken curry. It didn’t bother him that Ricky made jokes of this sort: on the one hand, they added to the Lennox legend, which was helpful in terms of rumours filtering down to Miles; on the other, Ricky’s sheer effrontery suggested that he did not take the idea that Joe might once have been a spy particularly seriously. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have kept his mouth shut. Popping a napkin and placing it in his lap, Joe felt the momentary apprehension that comes from being seated next to an attractive woman and was glad when Tom engaged him directly in conversation. They spoke about a building which was being torn down in Tom’s neighbourhood to make way for a shopping mall, but Ansary Tursun was still on Joe’s mind and he set about trying to trigger his memory.
“Have you ever eaten in a restaurant called Kala Kuer?”
“Xinjiang food?”
Joe nodded.
“Sure. It’s on Yishan Lu. Probably the best la mian noodles in town. Why? You getting bored of Chinese?”
“Very,” Joe replied. “We should go there sometime.”
Joe’s beer arrived and he decided to keep pressing. Tom was a walking Yellow Pages of Shanghai bars and restaurants and it saved time to pick his brain.
“What about Mexican nightclubs?”
“What about them?” Megan had leaned across to interrupt, bringing with her an invisible mist of scent and shampoo. She looked at Joe and smiled a smile that told him she was a test. I’m single, you’re single. These guys are setting us up.
“One of the musicians at the bar in my hotel told me what a good time he’d had at this Mexican nightclub.” He took his beer from the waiter and said “Thank you” in Mandarin. “Said I should go down there but couldn’t remember the name of the place.”
Megan and Tom shared a look that Joe could not quite interpret. After a beat, she said, “That’s where we were going to go afterwards.”
“Seriously?”
“He must have been talking about Zapata’s,” Tom explained. “That’s the only Mexican bar between here and Tijuana.”
“It’s a bar, not a nightclub?”
“It’s everything,” Megan whispered. “You’ll see.”
A two-storey building on the corner of Hengshan Road and Dong Ping Road, Zapata’s is a wild, chaotic Shanghai nightspot that relies for its atmosphere on a cocktail of cheap alcohol, elastic opening hours and hot Asian weather. Joe arrived direct from the restaurant with Tom, Megan and Ricky, who led him across a crowded outdoor terrace where tanned, freshly showered expats sank Heinekens and talked shop in midnight temperatures of twenty degrees. Conscious of Zhao Jian’s disclosure that Sammy, Miles’s Pakistani contact, was a regular customer, Joe scanned the crowds for his face, but there were too many people to make an effective assessment.
A wooden staircase on the far side of the terrace led to a packed first-floor “cantina,” where margaritas were on special offer and queues at the bar went three deep. Mike, who had come ahead in a separate cab with Jeff and Sandrine, had already bought a round of drinks which he was distributing from a small metal tray. Against a deafening background of Aerosmith and Run DMC, Joe thanked him and took a mouth-numbing slug of crushed ice and cheap tequila.
“What do you think?” Megan asked, looking up at him with wide, dark eyes. After a long campaign over dinner, she was still flirting, still apparently assessing his potential.
“Rammed,” was all Joe managed to say before Ricky hooked a hand through her arm and dragged her away through the crowds.
“You’re dancing,” he told her.
Joe turned. There was a second, interior entrance towards which Ricky was leading the now laughing Megan. Joe followed them and found himself on a three-sided wooden balcony overlooking a thronging bar and dance floor. A Western girl wearing only a bikini top and a pair of skinny jeans had leaped up onto the top of the curved bar, where she was grinding and writhing her body to the chorus of “Walk this Way.” Men and women alike clapped and whooped on the dance floor as a second girl joined in, removed her T-shirt and threw it into the crowd. Tom appeared at Joe’s side and must have misinterpreted the look on his face because he said, “Now that’s what I call a cultural revolution. Chairman Mao must be turning in his grave.”
One of the barmen, a sinewy Chinese with the waxed, sculpted hair of a male model, reached out his hand and was pulled up onto the bar by the prettier of the two girls. Joe saw that he was carrying a bottle of tequila. The customers directly beneath him seemed to know what this signified because they turned around, tipped back their heads and allowed the barman to pour it neat into their opened mouths. More cheers, more whoops as the tequila was coughed and spat and swallowed. The inevitable “Billie Jean” replaced “Walk this Way” and Joe took out a cigarette.
“Interesting place,” he said.
That was when he spotted him. On the left-hand side of the balcony, about twenty feet away, looking down at the chaos below. Sammy. The likeness was unmistakable, although Joe could now see that he was probably Persian or Arabic, not Pakistani, as Jian’s photograph had initially suggested; a trick of the light had given the man’s face a false structure and colouring. He was in his late twenties, good looking, well built and smooth, wearing a gold necklace, a smart, collared shirt, jeans and an expensive watch. He also appeared to be alone.
“Another drink?” Tom shouted.
“Sure. Can I have a beer?”
It was time to go to work. As Tom pushed his way back to the bar of the cantina, Joe kept his eye on Sammy, trying to make a rapid assessment of his circumstances and character. His body language—tight, withdrawn—continued to suggest that he was not with a friend nor part of any group. The bottle of Heineken he was holding was almost full, so it seemed unlikely that someone was fetching him a drink. He did not appear to be communicating with anybody down on the dance floor, but instead kept his gaze fixed on the activity at the bar, occasionally flicking his eyes back up to the balcony, as if scoping for girls. This seemed to be the most likely explanation for his presence in Zapata’s: young Chinese women, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, were standing all around him. Joe knew that some of them would be looking for a rich Western boyfriend, while others would be prepared to go home with a foreigner in return for money. They were not full-time hookers, but students or workers looking to supplement meagre incomes. It was the same story in almost every Western nightspot in China.
Five minutes went by. Nothing appeared to change. Sammy didn’t check his mobile phone or give any other obvious sign that he was waiting for company. Instead, he slowly sipped his beer, smoked a Marlboro Light and arranged his hair several times in a manner that Joe thought of as nervous and self-conscious. There were two Chinese girls to his left, close to the far wall, one of whom appeared to be building up the courage to speak to him. It was dark and crowded on the balcony, but Joe could see that the girls were not particularly attractive, and that Sammy seemed to have little interest in approaching them.
“You all on your own, mister?”
Megan had appeared beside him. She slipped her hand around Joe’s back and he felt her fingers briefly move across his skin. The sudden contact surprised him, but he returned the gesture, placing his hand on the small of her back. It occurred to him that this was his first sustained physical contact with another person since he had embraced his mother on Christmas Day.
“Crazy in here, no?” she said.
“Crazy.”
Sammy was about halfway through his beer and still scanning the room for girls. He seemed completely at ease in the Zapata’s environment and Joe was f
airly sure by now that he was a naturalized European or American. As Megan curled her hand further around his back, resting her fingers against the edge of his stomach, an idea came to him which combined a certain ruthlessness with the benefits of long experience in the secret world. He would use her for bait. She was by far the most attractive woman in the upper section of the club, and if he could manoeuvre her closer to Sammy, her looks and natural flirtatiousness might prompt him to make conversation. Joe could then introduce himself at a later point without arousing suspicion.
“Let’s go over there,” he said, nodding to his left, “where it’s a bit less crowded.”
Holding Megan by the hand, he waited until Sammy was looking down at the bar, then led her to within two or three feet of where he was standing. There was a Chinese girl positioned between them, but Joe knew that she had been waiting there, un-approached, for at least ten minutes.
“What happened to Tom?” he asked, releasing Megan’s hand and formalizing his body language so that they would not look like a couple. Megan leaned against the balustrade and started moving her body to the music.
“No idea,” she replied.
“He said he was getting me a drink. Wait here, will you? I’ll see if he needs help.”
Megan did not suspect a thing. As Joe walked off, making his way back towards the bar, she continued to look down at the dance floor, mouthing along to the lyrics of “The House that Jack Built.” For the next five minutes Joe gave her the opportunity to work her magic, purporting to search Zapata’s for Tom, but in reality killing time in the ground-floor bathroom. Walking back upstairs, he found Tom and Ricky at the bar of the cantina, took his bottle of beer and led them back to the interior door. As they emerged onto the balcony, Joe looked across and saw what he had wanted to see: Sammy, God bless him, smoothing back his hair and making awkward conversation with Megan.
Typhoon (2008) Page 24
