“Done.”
Joe put Shahpour’s card back in his pocket. “So how are things in the old country?”
“Same old, same old. You’ve heard about Rebiya Kadeer?”
Kadeer was a Uighur businesswoman who was arrested in 1999 while en route to meet a US Congressional delegation which had arrived in Xinjiang to investigate human rights abuses. Kadeer had sent newspaper clippings to her husband, a Uighur exile resident in the United States, and was subsequently charged with “leaking state secrets” by the PRC. The Chinese also alleged that Kadeer had been in possession of a list of ten Uighur dissidents with “connections to national separatist activities.”
“She’s been freed, hasn’t she?” Joe replied. The Kadeer story had been covered in the International Herald Tribune, copies of which were available to overseas guests in the business lounge of the Ritz-Carlton.
“Released last week as a sop to Condoleezza, officially on medical grounds. In reality, Beijing struck a deal to ensure that the Yanks dropped a resolution on Chinese human rights abuses at the UN.”
“What a lovely story.”
“Heartening, isn’t it? And there’s been a bus bomb in Jiangxi province.”
“Yes. We heard about that one.” On 17 March a double-decker bus had exploded in Shangrao, killing all thirty people on board.
“Who are the Chinese blaming?” Waterfield asked.
“Party line seems to be that it was a case of mishandled explosives. A worker travelling with some dynamite in his suitcase who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Was a pig flying past at the time?”
Joe laughed. “Several,” he said.
Humour was the simplest way of acknowledging the possibility that explosions of this sort could be linked to separatist activity. Waterfield sneezed, blew his nose and remembered something, saying, “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Coolidge went to a funeral on a trip home six months ago. Young officer from the Directorate of Operations called Josh Pinnegar. Gave the address at the service, spoke about their ‘close personal and professional’ relationship, that sort of thing. Pinnegar was murdered by a Triad gang in San Francisco. Our source indicates that he also had links to TYPHOON. There may be a connection there.”
“I’ll look into it.” Joe needed to put in an appearance at the Quayler office before the day was out and brought the conversation to an end.
“I’d better be off.”
“Of course. Just a quick request before you go.” Waterfield’s voice briefly became a stern paternal rebuke. “Can you for God’s sake move out of the Ritz bloody Carlton? Fifteen grand on board and lodging is in the general arena of taking the piss. Bean counters not amused. End of lecture.”
The information Joe had requested arrived by diplomatic bag seventy-two hours later. It was sent to Beijing, where it was passed to me in Fish Nation, a tiny, British-style fish-and-chip shop, by the head of media and public affairs at the British embassy. To my knowledge, she thought she was handing over documents relating to Britain’s recent decision to lift an embargo on the sale of arms to China. The package consisted of a padded A4 envelope in which Waterfield had placed two typewritten sheets of paper and a compact disc. I flew to Shanghai that night, placed the papers inside an edition of the China Daily, hid the disc inside a bootlegged copy of Blood on the Tracks, and presented both items to Joe at dinner. At about midnight, he left me in Park 97 with Tom and Ricky and returned to his hotel.
He soon discovered that London had been unable to trace a Shahpour Goodarzi either to Langley or to the Macklinson Corporation. All known aliases for Iranian-American Cousins under the age of thirty-five had been investigated. A database match of a photograph of “Sammy,” provided by Zhao Jian, had also been attempted, without success. It was the same story with Ansary Tursun. Nothing from Amnesty, nothing from Human Rights Watch. London apologized for “any frustration this might cause.”
The compact disc looked more promising. Booting up his laptop, Joe sat on the bed, inserted a pair of headphones, opened iTunes and was swiftly returned to the innocent spring of 1997.
Professor Wang, this is Mr. John Richards from Government House. The man I tell you about. He has come to see you.
It was the live recording of the interrogation. Joe pressed the headphones against his ears and felt his skin prickle at the sound of Lee’s voice. The take quality was poor; the room sounded faded and lifeless. Joe heard a creak of springs and remembered Wang rising slowly to his feet. He could picture the benign, intelligent face, the face that he had warmed to, the face that had later encouraged young Uighur men to kill.
Mr. Richards. I am very glad to make your acquaintance. Thank you for coming to see me so late at night. I hope I have not been any inconvenience to you or to your organization.
Joe turned up the sound as Shanghai closed in around him. Now he was alone in the safe house, twenty-six years old again, and the pitch of his confident, entitled voice embarrassed him. This younger self was so innocent, so ambitious, so free of the pressures of age.
So I would say that you are a very lucky man, Mr. Wang … You survive a very dangerous swim. You are surprised on the beach not by Hong Kong immigration, who would almost certainly have turned you back to China, but by a British soldier. You claim to have information about a possible defection. The army believes your story, contacts Government House, we send a nice, air-conditioned car to pick you up and less than twenty-four hours after leaving China here you are sitting in a furnished apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui watching Lawrence of Arabia. I’d say that qualifies as luck.
He was so sure of himself! Was that the man Isabella would remember? Had he changed so much that he would no longer be of interest to her? Joe lay back on the bed, his eyes closed, the side of his face resting on a fresh white pillow. Every trace of Megan had been erased by chambermaids and air conditioning.
At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper.
On it went. As Joe listened to the recording, images flooded back from the discovered cave of his memory; he had arrived at the name Abdul Bary before he even heard it. Wang said that Bary had been imprisoned, that a toenail had been torn from his foot by a laughing guard. It was like listening to an account of an execution.
Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons. Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr. Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.
The phone rang beside the bed. Joe was shaken from his semi-hypnotic state and tore off the headphones, as if somebody had burst into the room.
“Joe?”
It was Megan. He looked at his watch. “Are you OK?”
“Did I wake you?”
He stopped the playback. “No. It’s almost two. What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
He was still under the spell of the recording, yet the prospect of seeing her again was immediately enticing. He was thirsty and stood up off the bed. “I’m wide awake,” he said. “Do you want to come over?”
“Would that be OK?”
They had spent two of the previous three nights together, always at the hotel, always sleeping late into the morning. Increasingly, Joe was living on London time. That was what Shanghai did to you. “I have to check out tomorrow,” he sa
id. “I have to move into my new apartment. But I’d love to see you.”
I have often wondered if Joe had Megan vetted. He was never prepared to say. When a spy meets a strange girl in a strange restaurant, and that girl turns out to be as forthcoming as Megan, the spy has a right to feel suspicious. Why was she calling him at two o’clock in the morning? Why was it so important to Megan that they spend the night together? Joe was certain that she was legitimate, but as soon as he had hung up the phone, he removed the CD from the laptop and placed it in the small black safe located in the main wardrobe of his room. Afterwards, switching on the hot water in both the bath and shower, he created a room of steam to defeat the hotel fire alarm and burned the pages of Waterfield’s report in the sink.
You could never be too careful. You never knew who you were dealing with.
37
AN OLD FRIEND
Joe checked out the following morning.
His two-bedroomed apartment was part of a colonial art-deco complex set back from a dusty, tree-lined avenue in the heart of the French Concession. The contrast with the bustle and noise of Nanjing Road was stark: in Joe’s new neighbourhood, traffic was more subdued and there was scarcely a high-rise in sight. The pace of life also slowed to a crawl: two blocks from his front door a carpenter sold lutes and handmade violins. All along the street middle-aged Chinese men played majiang and slumbered through long afternoons in the backs of wooden carts. From the window of his new kitchen Joe could hear birdsong and neighbourhood conversations. He was within walking distance of several small European-style cafes, as well as the Shanghai Library, the Ding Xiang Gardens and—more by accident than design—the main building of the Consulate General of the United States of America. The apartment was already fully furnished, with shelves of paperback books, broadband wireless internet, IKEA pictures on the walls and spices in the cupboards. Joe didn’t need to buy sheets or pillows, lightbulbs or soap: everything was already in place. It must have felt like stepping into another person’s life.
Two days after checking out of the hotel he went shopping for groceries in Xiangyang Market. It was raining heavily and Joe was carrying an umbrella as well as a briefcase full of documents from Quayler. The market, which has since been razed to the ground to make way for a shopping centre, was a crowded sea of stalls protected only by flimsy tarpaulin coverings which dripped water onto the ground. Butchers in white chef’s hats took meat cleavers to joints of pork and chicken and failed to meet Joe’s eye when he paid for them. At a vegetable stall he bought radishes and husks of white corn, beetroot for homemade borscht, as well as mangoes, bananas and apples to eat for breakfast. One of the pleasures of renting the flat was the opportunity he now had to prepare and cook his own food; from vast hessian sacks at the perimeter of the market Joe scooped dried mushrooms and black beans, nuts and rice, planning to host a flat-warming dinner party to which he would invite Tom and Megan and their friends. Weighed down with plastic bags, he eventually walked out onto Huaihai Road at about six o’clock, in the hopeless aspiration of hailing a cab. Every other shopper had the same idea. It was as if all of Shanghai was sheltering from the tropical rain beneath the eaves and awnings on the street. As the thick wet traffic fizzed past, Joe swore under his breath and knew that it would be hours before he saw a vacant taxi.
Sixty metres away, Miles Coolidge emerged from a branch of the Lawson’s con ve nience store carrying a rucksack in which he had placed a box of Camel cigarettes, a bar of Hershey’s chocolate, some aspirin and a packet of Style condoms. He had heard rumours of Joe Lennox’s presence in Shanghai from two sources: a friend at the United States embassy in London who had attended his leaving party at Vauxhall Cross, and a young Chinese corporate lawyer who happened to mention that she had bumped into “a really interesting guy called Joe” at a bi-weekly meeting of the British Chamber of Commerce. The lawyer, who worked part-time for Microsoft—and full-time trying to fend off the advances of Miles Coolidge—was unable to recall anything about Joe’s profession except that he “was a chemist or something.” Miles had eventually discovered that Joe was staying at the Ritz-Carlton, only to be informed twenty-four hours earlier that Mr. Lennox had checked out, leaving no forwarding address. It was a measure of how busy Miles was that he had given little further thought to Joe’s whereabouts until he glimpsed the tall, slim figure, weighed down by plastic bags, sheltering under an umbrella on the opposite side of Huaihai Road.
Sixty seconds later, the bottom of his trousers soaked with rain and grime, Joe was preparing to trudge home when he felt a presence behind him, a hand on his back, then a head popping up under his umbrella like a jack-in-the-box.
“You just never know who you’re gonna run into in this town.”
Miles was just as Zhao Jian had described, just as he had looked in the photos: thickset and shaven headed, only now with a heavy black beard that aged in white streaks around the neck and ears. This was it; the moment London had been waiting for. Joe had rehearsed dialogue for their first chance encounter, but he was so taken aback that it was three or four seconds before he was able to remember his lines.
“Jesus Christ. Miles. I didn’t recognize you with the beard. What the fuck are you doing here?”
The umbrella had fallen to one side and the warm rain was drenching his face. It ran through the tangle of Miles’s beard; it glistened the teeth of his grin.
“I was gonna ask you the same question.”
“I live here.”
“Well I do too.”
They stepped off the street for shelter and found themselves in a dumpling restaurant that smelled of rain and spilled vinegar. A huddle of pedestrians were gathered in the entrance but Miles barged through them like a commuter running late for a train. Joe could see that he had no choice but to join him and followed the American to a table at the back of the restaurant.
“You got time to talk, right?”
“Of course.”
The table was constructed out of moulded orange plastic. A waitress in a navy blue apron came over and Miles said, “Just tea,” without looking at her. Joe put his bags on the floor and tried to work out what was happening. Had Miles been following him? Was this just coincidence? It was impossible to tell.
“I’m trying to remember how I feel about you,” he said, which was the first of the lines he had rehearsed. Miles, taking off his jacket, said, “Cute,” and threw it on the chair beside him. Joe stared at his stomach, fat as an empathy belly, full of booze and lunches, and felt an immediate, visceral hatred of the man who had betrayed him. As he had long suspected, these first instincts were purely personal; they had nothing to do with the operation. He tried to arrange his face so that it would not reflect his anger and picked at a scratch on the table. He was forced to concede that Miles’s beard gave his face a certain rugged grandeur, but the eyes had gone. Age had beaten the truth out of them: they were now just sockets of greed and lies.
“So you live here?”
Either man might have asked the question but Joe got there first. Miles nodded as he wiped a paper napkin over the dome of his head. He was staring at Joe, as if relieved that a long wait was over.
“That’s right. I’m in software now,” he said. “A free marketeer. You?”
“Pharmaceuticals.”
“Oh come on.” Miles laughed and shook his head, as if Joe had blundered the lie.
“Seriously. I got out six months ago.”
“Pharmaceuticals? It’s cover, Joe. Come on. You can tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I’m serious.” He looked around at the neighbouring tables, suggesting with his eyes that Miles was being childish. He wondered if Shahpour had shown him his card, or whether the rumours had filtered through from Grosvenor Square. Perhaps the whole thing really was just coincidence and every one of his carefully laid plans in Shanghai had proved pointless. “I got sick of working for an organization in thrall to a bunch of corrupt neocons, so I handed in my notice. If that makes you feel
bad, I apologize. It’s not personal.”
Miles reared back in his seat. “Why would I give a shit?”
“I’m glad you don’t.”
There was a pause while Miles seemed to contemplate the philosophical implications of what Joe had told him. Finally, shaking his head, he said, “Seriously? You resigned out of moral disgust?” as if ethical behaviour should be anathema to men of their calling.
“People do braver things every day.”
It looked as though Miles believed him, because a glint of guilt briefly flashed across his eyes. Joe had always been the principled one. The competitive rage of Hong Kong would soon return, because even marrying Isabella had not been enough.
“What about you?” Joe asked.
“What about me?”
“Why did you leave?”
The waitress set a pot of Lipton’s tea on the table, looked quickly at Joe and walked away. Miles sniffed. “Why do you think?” he said.
“Money?”
“You got it.”
Simultaneously they reached for cigarettes: Joe for a packet of Zhong Nan Hai, Miles for a soft pack of Camel Filters. Joe’s pulse had settled now. He was able to relax and concentrate on the strategy he had put together with Waterfield.
“So what does ‘software’ mean?”
“I guess it means the same as ‘pharmaceuticals.’ “
What Joe had not anticipated was the abrasiveness of the conversation. Either Miles was working to a prepared script of his own, hoping to catch Joe off balance, or the years had rendered him even blunter and more aggressive than before.
“So you’re not in computers? You’re still working for the government?”
Typhoon (2008) Page 26
