“I’ll tell you why.” He was speaking into a southern breeze which took his quiet words out over the water. “I joined the Agency in the new year of 2002. I did it because I believed in America. I did it because I believed that I would be an asset to my country, that I could help prevent what had happened to us happening again.” Now he turned, and Joe saw the disillusionment in his young eyes, the conflict of a decent man. “My father came to the United States in 1974. He had a place to study engineering at a college in Detroit, Michigan. You know how he came to choose Detroit?” Joe shook his head. “He was from Sari, a city on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. He looked at a map of America, he saw a big blue lake with a city right beside it, and he thought it looked like home.”
Shahpour turned, scraped his chair towards the table and sank his espresso in a sharp, controlled flick.
“When he arrived there, he saw that it was a good summer and that he’d made a good choice. Then the winter came. He’d never seen snow before, never seen ice on the roads. He had an uncle in Sacramento who invited him over to California. And what does my dad find? That it’s seventy degrees outside in the middle of winter. So he finishes his degree, he moves to Sacramento, he gets a job cleaning dishes in my great-uncle’s pizza parlor. But my dad was smarter than the other guys, you know? He worked hard and started up his own place, his own restaurant. Today he’s a millionaire. He has six children, a grandson, five properties in three different states. He owns twenty-five pizza delivery outlets in the California area.”
“American dream,” Joe said. Shahpour silenced him with a raised hand.
“I’m not trying to sell you America,” he said. “I’m not trying to sell you an ideal. I know that our country has its faults. But I could see past them, you know? I still can. I joined up because I wanted to make a difference, to show that a child of Iran could deal in something more than hate.”
“I can understand that.”
Shahpour looked relieved. “I think you can,” he said. The cry of a bird went up over the Huangpu River. “Everybody heard about what you did, Joe. Everybody heard why you’d quit. I decided to talk to you because you have ideals, because you’ll see the craziness of what’s happening here. Because you’re my best chance of getting out of this.”
So that was it. Waterfield’s plan had worked. The illusion of RUN’s exit from Vauxhall Cross had convinced a compromised American spook that Joe Lennox was the answer to his prayers.
“Getting out of what?” To Joe’s dismay, the waitress appeared again and punctured the conversation at a vital moment. Shah-pour stared back at the entrance to the restaurant, as if to reassure himself that Miles was nowhere to be seen. “Getting out of what?” Joe said again. It had struck him, not for the first time, that at the tender age of thirty-four he was now regarded as a wise old hand by men who looked as young as he still felt.
“Getting out of what’s happening.”
“And what is that? What is happening?”
Shahpour twisted his narrow body to face Joe. He lowered his head. It was as if the open air could not bear the burden of such a heavy secret. Then he leaned towards Joe and looked up into his eyes. “Miles is planning something.” He was whispering. “It has Pentagon approval, covert CIA backing. Funded through Saudi channels. An operation here, on mainland China. We have a Uighur cell asleep in Shanghai which may hit multiple targets this summer.”
“Then you have to go to the police,” Joe said immediately, because the role of a responsible citizen was the simplest role to play. “You have to go to your superiors. You have to try to stop that from happening.”
“How can I? What can I do? I can’t betray my country.”
Isn’t that what you’re doing now, Joe thought. Abruptly, all of the neon, on both sides of the river, every brand and logo from Puxi to Pudong, blacked out. The terrace was cast into near darkness.
“Eleven o’clock,” Shahpour said, without looking at his watch. “Happens every night.”
“Answer my question,” Joe said.
“What question?”
“Why don’t you find a way of alerting the authorities?”
Shahpour actually smiled. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “You’re my way of alerting the authorities. I’ve thought of everything else, every possible way that won’t come back and make me look like a traitor. I even tried with Wang, for Chrissakes. Last time I was in Beijing I spent five hours trying to persuade him to go to the MSS and tell them what was happening.”
“Wang Kaixuan?”
Shahpour stopped. “Of course,” he said, as if he had forgotten a vital piece in the puzzle. “You were the first person to meet him, weren’t you? That’s quite a serious mark on your resume, Joe.”
“Professor Wang Kaixuan?” Joe said again, because he needed time to think. “What does he have to do with this?”
Calling for the bill, Shahpour spent ten minutes outlining Wang’s role in TYPHOON, an account of the operation so close in character to Waterfield’s own descriptions that Joe began to suspect that Shahpour was London’s source at Langley.
“And now he’s in Beijing?” he said, the only question he allowed himself to ask about Wang’s predicament. “You’ve seen him up there?”
“Sure.” Shahpour seemed bored by the detail. “Teaches Chinese to corporate suits at one of those language schools in Haidian. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. He doesn’t want anything to do with Miles. For professional purposes he’s changed his name to Liu Gongyi. Says he’s lost faith in the concept of armed struggle. But the only people he hates more than Americans are the Chinese, so he won’t tell them about the cell.”
Language school? Joe remembered that Macklinson had set up free language schools on construction sites as a means of recruiting disenchanted labourers. Were the two connected, or was this yet more obvious bait? “And who’s in the cell?” he asked, his desire for information briefly causing him to forget that he was supposed to be playing the role of a disinterested observer.
“What do you care?” Shahpour had poured himself the last of the wine, which he finished in three long gulps. “Uighurs. Kazakhs. Guys with nothing to lose.” The wine caught in his throat and he coughed. “All I know is that in Christmas 2002 I was getting ready to move to Tehran when I was told to pack my bags for China. Have SIS check me out if you’re in any doubt. My real name is Shahpour Moazed. My father’s name is Hamid Moazed. I also have an American name—Mark—because that’s what all good Iranian-American boys do so that they can get along in California. Ask your people in London to check the employee register at Macklinson Corporation. They’ll tell you that a Mark Moazed was working in Xi’an between 2002 and 2004. What they won’t be able to tell you is that the CIA spent three years routing weapons and explosives through Macklinson to Uighur separatists who blew up innocent women and children all over China. What they won’t be able to tell you is that I spent two years trying to clean up the mess. Tell them to give Microsoft a call while they’re doing that. They’ll tell you that Mark Moazed joined them late last year. They might even be surprised to learn that two of their employees are in league with clandestine elements within the Pentagon and have recruited a cell of Islamist radicals prepared to kill hundreds of innocent people in Shanghai. And why? Why have we decided to do this? Why am I dedicating my life to an operation with no value or purpose or principle? I really have no idea at all.”
39
PERSUASION
As soon as he left the restaurant, Joe took a cab back to his apartment, telephoned Waterfield on a secure line and gave him chapter and verse on Shahpour’s extraordinary gamble.
“It’s a trap,” Waterfield said when he had finished, and Joe knew that he would now be alone. Whatever he told them, London would never believe that Shahpour Moazed had just dropped out of the sky to make a hero of Joe Lennox. “Think about it,” Waterfield said. “I know you want product, Joe. I know you’re looking for answers. But this is too simple. He’s a poiso
ned pawn.”
Joe was not a chess player and ignored the metaphor. “So you don’t think Miles had Lenan killed?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t think there’s a cell planning a hit in Shanghai?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“Then what are you saying? It seems perfectly obvious to me that Miles couldn’t give a flying fuck what I’m up to out here. He has bigger things on his mind. I sent a text to Zhao Jian on my way home. Guess what? Miles really did leave in the middle of dinner so he could get his cock sucked in Gubei. That’s how much my presence in Shanghai means to him. He doesn’t care that we might find out what happened to Ken. What are we going to do? Arrest him? Run crying to Washington? The Office is irrelevant in all this. A bit-part player. Even if half of what Shahpour just told me is correct, this thing has taken on its own momentum and is going to happen, with or without British interference.”
There was a long silence. Joe sensed that he had found a route through Waterfield’s objections, but he was mistaken.
“Let’s suppose that it is true. How do you know the cell isn’t penetrated? Every other Miles Coolidge operation in China has gone tits up. What’s so different about this one? The man has an inverse Midas touch. Besides, Cousins don’t suddenly walk off the plantation and start baring their souls. Your American friends were trying to provoke exactly this sort of reaction. They’ll be watching you from now on. They’ll want to find out whether you respond to what you’ve been told. This is basic stuff. Page one.”
“Then at the very least let’s try to find Wang.”
“No. Aren’t you listening to me? They’ll have eyes all over him. You try to flush Wang, you’ll draw MSS, CIA, and God knows how many other services into a shitstorm of unimaginable proportions. Leave well alone. Your assignment is to get close to Coolidge. Your operation is to discover how much local liaison knew about Lenan’s activities and whether they can be traced back to London. Now I have to go into a meeting.”
“David, with the greatest respect, those are side issues now …”
“I said I have to go into a meeting. You’re obviously very tired, Joe. It’s late out there. Get some sleep.”
Joe heard the hollow click of Waterfield hanging up and shook his head with frustration. He was sitting at his desk in the second bedroom of his apartment, which he had turned into a makeshift office. The walls were uncovered save for a large National Geographic map of China and a pin board onto which Joe had tacked documents relating to Quayler. The conversation with Waterfield had served only to remind him of the pettiness and obstructive bureaucracy which had characterized the Office in recent years. Where was Waterfield’s willingness to take a risk? What was the purpose of Joe’s being in Shanghai if not to discover what America was up to? Taking a drawing pin out of the board, he pushed it repeatedly into the soft wooden surface of his desk and felt the utter frustration of his solitary trade. He would never make progress. He would never see Isabella. Joe was convinced that Shahpour was telling the truth, that he was trying to find a way of destabilizing the cell which would bring dishonour neither upon himself nor upon the American government. But how to convince Waterfield of that when he was thousands of miles away?
Just before 2:30 in the morning, with a glass of whisky at his side, Joe sent me a text message in Beijing. He had made the decision to ignore Waterfield and to follow his instincts. If he was wrong, so be it; he was deniable to London. If he was right, Waterfield could take credit for his foresight in sending RUN to Shanghai.
I was sitting in the lounge bar of the Kerry Centre Hotel with a government official who was helping me with a story I was writing about the Olympics. A group of Japanese businessmen were sitting on the sofa next to mine drinking Californian Merlots and watching coverage of a golf tournament on ESPN. Jumbo Osaki sank a monster putt at the seventeenth and a roar went up as my phone beeped.
“Ring your sister,” the message said, and I experienced one of those strange, out-of-body surges which are the perks of life as a support agent. Making my excuses, I took a cab back to my apartment, found a clean SIM and called Joe in Shanghai.
His instructions were simple: to find Professor Wang Kaixuan. He was teaching English as a foreign language at one of the schools in Haidian district. What was the name of the school? Where was it located?
As tasks go, it was not particularly taxing, certainly for a reporter of long and weary experience in investigative journalism. A quick search of the internet provided me with an exhaustive list of language schools in the Beijing metropolitan area and I simply cold-called each and every one of them in Haidian throughout the course of the next morning. Joe had given me a simple cover story: to pretend that I was a former student in Mr. Liu Gongyi’s class who wanted to send him a book through the post. Predictably enough, the first eighteen receptionists insisted that they had nobody of that name teaching at their school and that I had dialled an incorrect number. The nineteenth school, however, was only too happy to provide me with a full postal address and were certain that “Mr. Liu” would be delighted to receive his gift.
I called Joe with the good news.
“Not bad for an ageing hack with a drink problem,” he said. “I’m coming to Beijing.”
40
BEIJING
Fourteen hours later, the old Shanghai sleeper rumbled into Beijing station like a faithful dog. I was waiting at the end of the platform with a cup of coffee and saw Joe emerge from the train in conversation with a stewardess who had her hair in a bun. She laughed at something he said as weary passengers disembarked all around them. Then Joe caught my eye and shook her by the hand, rolling his suitcase towards me like the anonymous, nondescript pharmaceuticals salesman he was supposed to be.
“Nice day for the time of year.”
“Welcome to Peking, Mr. Lennox.”
We escaped the pressing crowds in the great vault of the old station and went into a virtually deserted shopping mall nearby, where I told Joe what I knew: that I had been to the language school the previous evening and discovered that Wang gave classes every afternoon, Monday to Friday, beginning at two o’clock and ending at five. Joe was noticeably more intense than he had been on my recent visit to Shanghai, and seemed to be calculating moves and implications all the time. At this early stage, he said very little about his dinner with Miles and Shahpour and nothing at all about the cell. As far as he was concerned, I was just a support agent of the Secret Intelligence Service doing the job that I was paid to do. It was neither my concern, nor my particular business, to know anything more than I needed to. At such times, Joe had a way of keeping our friendship at arm’s length and I knew not to press him on operational details. There was a lot at stake, after all. For a start, RUN would almost certainly be blown if Joe was observed talking to Wang; if Waterfield found out about it, he would be called home. Looking back on the two eventful days that followed, it occurs to me that Joe still didn’t know to what extent Wang was involved in separatist activities. In spite of what Shahpour had told him, there was still a more than plausible chance that he was an American agent. If that was the case, Joe was ruined.
“There are known knowns,” he said, lightening the mood with a joke as we walked to his hotel on Jianguomen Road. It was a typically hot, dry spring day in the capital, traffic and cyclists warring on the wide, featureless streets. “There are things we know that we know. There are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.”
Two days had passed since the dinner at M on the Bund, a period in which Joe had laid the foundations for his trip to Beijing. On his way to the railway station in Shanghai, for example, he had carried out a two-hour counter-surveillance exercise designed to flush out any American watchers before he departed for the capital. On the train itself, he had called Guy Coates from the dining car to arrange a meeting at the nascent Quayler representative office in Beijing, just in case Miles had put eyes on it. He then stayed up mo
st of the night on the top bunk of his four-berth compartment listening once again to the recording of the safe house interrogation with Wang. All of this was a way of preparing himself for their inevitable second encounter. There might be clues in the conversation; there might be leads.
I am regarded as a political undesirable, a threat to the Motherland. My actions as an academic drew me to the attention of the authorities in Xinjiang, who jailed me along with many of my students.
The plan to get to Wang was straightforward: to keep a watch on the entrance of the Agosto Language School on Yuanda Road and to follow him to a point where Joe could make secure contact. Given that SIS Station in Beijing had been told, along with everybody else in the intelligence fraternity, that Joe Lennox had quit the Service, we could not call on the British embassy for additional operational support. Nor was Zhao Jian available: Joe had left him and his brothers in Shanghai with instructions to gather more information about Shahpour Moazed and Ansary Tursun. Besides, Joe couldn’t risk a rumour filtering back to Vauxhall Cross that three of their finest Shanghai pavement artists had suddenly been called to Beijing. So it was to be just the two of us, a pair of white faces in a crowded sea of Chinese, trying to follow a renegade academic with years of counter-surveillance experience in one of the busiest and most populous cities on earth. I had long ago received basic training in foot surveillance at a course in Bristol, but Joe knew that I was out of practice; indeed, if the truth be told, I don’t think he fancied our chances that much. On the Tuesday evening, after he had sat through what he characterized as a “skull-numbing” meeting at Quayler, we met for dinner at Li Qun, a Peking duck restaurant off Qianmen East Road, and Joe could speak about little else but the task which lay ahead of us.
Typhoon (2008) Page 29
