Joe was perplexed. “Not unless you’ve told them,” he said. “Did you say something to Mark?”
“I never thought to tell him,” Wang replied. “It was not my business. He spoke of a cell in Shanghai but he did not speak of names.”
“Celil?” Joe said, trying to remain thorough and logical. “How would you write that?”
Wang spelled out the letters. “The last I knew of him, he worked in Urumqi as a hotel doorman.” Wang wrote an address on a small piece of paper using a pencil which he had retrieved from the floor. “If you find him, let me know. Because if you find Ablimit Celil, you will find Ansary Tursun. And I would very much like to see him.”
42
PARADISE CITY
Miles Coolidge was going to the movies.
In a city built on commerce, Xujiahui—pronounced Shoo-jahwe—is a modern Mecca of Shanghai shopping. Seven separate malls and department stores are located at the junctions of Hengshan, Hongqiao and Zhaojiabang roads, about a mile south-west of Joe’s apartment in the French Concession. At all hours of the day, but particularly in the early to late evening, Xujiahui teems with tens of thousands of Chinese, buying and selling everything from computers and electrical equipment to children’s toys and the latest clothes from East and West. You would not describe it as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Traffic clogs the packed streets. Subway exits lead to a warren of interconnected underground tunnels which are so hot in summer that to pass through them is to be suffocated by stagnant, putrid air. Horns and jackhammers puncture the atmosphere. A pretty steepled church and an old library, set back from nearby Caoxi Road, are all that remain of the colonial era. Progress has claimed the rest.
Miles pulled up in a cab outside the Paradise City mall, the huge, seven-storey edifice where, just a few weeks later, TYPHOON would reach its horrific zenith. He passed a twenty-yuan note through the driver’s perspex separator and waited as his receipt chugged out of the meter. A vast, fifty-foot-high photograph of David Beckham gazed down at him from an advertising hoarding slung from the facade of the Metro City mall on the opposite side of the intersection. Miles stepped out of the taxi and held the door for two Chinese girls dressed head to toe in Western brands. A moped swept past him, buzzing its horn. He tried giving one of the girls the eye, but she ignored him and slammed the door.
The Paradise City was a sanctuary of air conditioning which released Miles from the cloud-trapped pollution outside. Surveillance footage shows him stepping around a salesman handing out leaflets for skincare products and taking an escalator to the first floor. He bought a latte and a chocolate muffin from a branch of Costa Coffee. Tables were arranged at the perimeter of a balcony which afforded panoramic views of the gleaming white atrium. Ahead of him, Miles could see all seven floors of the mall, the branches of French Connection and Nike Golf, the bubble lifts and sliding banks of escalators, the giggling girls gassing on mobile phones.
The meeting was set for seven-thirty. At half-past six, he walked round to the opposite side of the atrium, where he caught a lift to the seventh floor. Heading to the north-western corner of the mall, Miles entered the Silver Reel cinema multiplex and purchased a ticket for the 6:50 movie showing in Screen Four. There were extensive queues at the popcorn concession but he waited in line under the watchful eye of Elmo and Bugs Bunny, purchasing a tub of salted popcorn and half a litre of Diet Coke. This was his usual routine. There was no security as he handed over his ticket, just a Chinese girl standing at the gate who said, “Hello, sir,” in English, indicating the entrance to Screen Four behind her. Miles made his way along the darkened corridor, entered the cinema and sat in his usual seat at the end of row Q. The advertisements had already started and he leaned back in his chair, waiting for Ablimit Celil.
43
THE FRENCH CONCESSION
London had gone silent. Upon returning to Shanghai, Joe had put in a request for information on Ablimit Celil. Five days had passed and he had heard nothing back.
It was partly his fault. Under normal circumstances, Joe would have filed a CX report about his meeting with Wang Kaixuan, detailing the significant allegation that Celil maintained links to the Pakistani ISI. But Waterfield had effectively forbidden him from pursuing Wang as a line of enquiry; until Joe had firm intelligence that the professor was telling the truth, he could hardly admit to having ignored London’s basic instructions. That was the trouble with the secret world; only on very rare occasions did all the rumours and the leads and the theories converge to paint a perfect picture. There was no such thing as the truth. There was only product.
Joe had also been in touch with Zhao Jian, who had never heard of Ablimit Celil, far less seen him in the company of Miles Coolidge. As for Shahpour Moazed, Zhao Jian’s brothers joked that they had developed bunions waiting for him to emerge from his apartment building on Fuxing Road. Miles’s right-hand man had gone to ground. Nobody had seen hide nor hair of Moazed for almost a week. When Jian had telephoned the Microsoft office in Pudong, a secretary had informed him that Shahpour was sick. They were expecting him back at work on Monday.
Shahpour was indeed sick, but not with stomach cramps brought on by dodgy tofu, or with a nasty dose of the flu. He was suffering from a sustained bout of regret and paranoia. For five long days he had bunkered down in his apartment, surviving on a diet of counterfeit DVDs, Thai marijuana, Chinese hookers and takeaway food. To his longstanding doubts about the moral rectitude of TYPHOON was now added a second, shaming regret that he had spilled his guts to Joe Lennox. Prior to leaving for M on the Bund, Shahpour had smoked a pre-dinner joint, then sunk two bottles of white wine, a cognac and a vodka Martini at dinner before calmly informing a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service that the CIA was bankrolling terrorism in China. He had somehow persuaded himself that Joe Lennox was his saviour. The reality, of course, was that Joe was now a private citizen who would surely have gone straight to SIS Station in Shanghai and informed them about the plot. Shahpour was amazed that he had not yet been called home. He was stunned that he had not, at the very least, received a visit from an irate Miles Coolidge. He had already drafted his letter of resignation and was preparing to pack.
“So nobody’s seen him for a week?” Joe asked Zhao Jian.
“That is correct, sir. Nobody has seen him since your dinner on the Bund.”
“And you’re convinced that he’s still in his apartment? You’re sure he hasn’t flown the nest?”
“Convinced, sir. Convinced.”
There was only one thing for it. On a damp Friday evening, Joe walked the short distance from his apartment in the French Concession to Central Fuxing Road. He paused outside a barber’s shop where an exhausted-looking businessman was receiving a head massage and called Shahpour’s mobile.
“Hello?” The voice was gravelly, only half-alert.
“Shahpour? This is Joe. Joe Lennox. How are you doing?”
Shahpour thought about hanging up, but was intrigued. He had heard nothing from Joe since their conversation at dinner, only a rumour that he had left town for a few days on Quayler business. He looked at the clock on his kitchen wall. A dried chunk of spaghetti sauce obscured one of the digits but he could see that it was after eight o’clock.
“Hi, Joe. I guess I’m doing fine. It’s good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“Well, I was just passing your door and I wondered if you fancied a drink? It’s Friday, Megan’s away and I hoped you might be at a loose end.”
“How did you know where I live?”
It was the first indicator of his paranoid state. “You told me. At dinner. Fuxing Road, right?”
Ten minutes later Joe was in a lift riding to the fourth floor of an apartment block built in the hideous neo-Grecian style which is considered luxurious by certain Chinese architects. Shahpour lived alone at the end of a long corridor crowded with old boxes and plastic bags. Joe rang the doorbell and waited up to a minute for the American to answer.
A
stewardess once described to me the smell which emerges from an aeroplane when the doors are opened for the first time after a long-haul flight. Joe experienced a comparable odor as he stepped into Shahpour’s apartment to be greeted by a noxious cocktail of stale air, farts and socks which almost made him gag with its intensity. Shahpour had grown a substantial beard and was dressed only in a pair of torn jeans and a Puma T-shirt. He had taken on the countenance of a brilliant, insomniac postgraduate student who has been toiling in a laboratory for days. The air conditioning in the apartment had been switched off, and there was no natural light to speak of. Plastic DVD cases and pizza cartons were scattered on a kilim, dirty clothes strewn on an L-shaped white leather sofa. On the table nearest the door Shahpour had placed a laptop computer and a Tupperware box containing enough marijuana to earn him a seven-year prison sentence. An iPod glowed in the corner.
“Have I come at a bad time?”
“The place needs to be cleaned up,” Shahpour muttered, walking into the kitchen. Joe saw that he had already begun to make a start on five days of washing up. A bin bag in the corner had been hastily tied together and the floor was sticky under his feet. “I haven’t been out much.”
“Let’s go out now,” Joe suggested, as much to relieve his own discomfort as to offer Shahpour a release from his torpor. “Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll take you out for dinner?”
“OK.” Shahpour sounded like a drunk preparing to sober up. “Might be a good idea. Give me five minutes.”
It took fifteen. Joe waited in the deep-litter sitting room, sipping from a can of lukewarm Tsingtao and flicking through a copy of City Weekend. He wanted to draw the curtains, to open a window, to tidy some of the detritus from the floor, but it was not his place to do so. Eventually Shahpour appeared, with the beard slightly trimmed, wearing a clean T-shirt, worn jeans and a pair of trainers. The transformation was remarkable.
“I needed that,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
At first they walked in near-silence, heading west in the general direction of Joe’s apartment. He felt like a visitor to a sanatorium, strolling in the grounds with a patient on day release. Cyclists and passers-by cast strange looks at the tall, bearded Persian in Joe’s company, and he was concerned that they would soon attract the wrong sort of attention from the wrong sort of Chinese. Joe suggested going to Face, a bar in the Rui Jin Guest House a few blocks away, where expats could blend into a gin and tonic in relative obscurity, but Shahpour was apparently enjoying the fresh air.
“Do you mind if we just walk a while?” he said. “I haven’t been outside in a long time.”
“What’s the matter?” Joe asked. “What happened?”
The answer was a long time coming, and its content did not surprise him.
“I guess I feel like I owe you an apology,” Shahpour said finally. “I was out of line the other night.”
“How so? I had a great time.”
Shahpour’s humid eyes stared into Joe’s, who saw that there was no energy left in them for British politesse.
“I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I’d heard things about you that I had misinterpreted.”
“What kind of things?”
“That you were the only man left on either side of the Atlantic with any principles. That all the secretaries at Vauxhall Cross were crying in the restrooms at your farewell party. That Joe Lennox was a guy I could talk to, whether or not he was working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals.”
“What if I’m not working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals?”
They were standing beside a fruit stall on the corner of Shanxi Road. A gap-toothed Mongolian was preparing slices of watermelon on a chopping board erected in the street. Shahpour came to a halt beside her and turned to look at Joe.
“Keep walking,” Joe said quietly. “Keep walking.”
They went north.
“What did you mean by that?” Shahpour was running a hand through his hair, looking behind him, as if concerned that they were being followed. They had not passed another foreigner since leaving the apartment.
“Tell me about Beijing,” Joe said.
“What about it?”
“Tell me about the Olympics.”
Shahpour stared at him. “You’ve seen Wang, haven’t you?”
Right on cue, a phalanx of uniformed PLA guards turned the corner ahead of them and marched two abreast along the opposite side of the street. Shahpour swore under his breath.
“I’m going to take a chance,” Joe told him. He had prepared precisely what he was going to say. A passer-by, observing their conversation, would have suspected that Joe was talking about nothing more pressing than the weather. “If my instincts are correct, you and I can possibly save a lot of innocent lives. If they’re wrong, I’m going to look like the biggest idiot this side of the Yangtze River.” A man stepped in front of them and opened up a briefcase of counterfeit watches, following for several paces until Joe waved him away. “You were right about Zapata’s. Our meeting was not an accident. I used Megan to draw you on.”
“I knew it!” Shahpour was like an excited child. Joe would have told him to calm down if he had not quickly done so himself. This wasn’t a game. He needed Shahpour to concentrate.
“But you neglected to mention Beijing. I want to know what’s being planned for the Olympics.”
There is a certain, undeniable thrill in running a successful agent, a feeling of absolute control over the destiny of another human being. Joe experienced something of the same pleasure as he observed the gradual shift in Shahpour’s body language, the softening of his demeanour. It was obvious that he trusted Joe implicitly. He had found the one man who offered him release from his wretched predicament.
“The only reason I didn’t tell you is that there didn’t seem any point. I bought your story, man. I really thought you were out. I can’t believe this.”
They had come to an intersection. Shahpour was a decent man, erratic of temperament and occasionally immature, but Joe liked him. He had concluded that he had been selected in haste by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11 and rushed through training at the Farm, probably for reasons of racial profiling. He would have been more suited to a career in sales or, indeed, computing. As if to confirm this basic impression, Shahpour now lit a cigarette and walked straight into what appeared to be a clear road, having apparently forgotten that in China it is best to look left and right, up and down, front and back, before stepping out into traffic. He was quickly assaulted by the horn of an oncoming cab, angling towards him on the wrong side of the road. Joe grabbed his shirt and pulled him back.
“Jesus!”
“Let’s try to keep you alive.”
Safely on the opposite side of the street, Shahpour began to extrapolate on Wang’s description of the CIA’s plans for Beijing. Miles apparently wanted several incidents, at least one “on the scale of Atlanta,” which would concentrate media attention on casualties and civil unrest, rather than on the gleaming economic miracle of modern China. Using his cover at Microsoft, Shahpour had been tasked with recruiting underpaid, overworked Chinese employees inside the stadium complex, as well as television and advertising personnel in the city. He was due to move to the capital in the late summer. Meanwhile, Miles was working on a plan to bring a Uighur cell into Beijing to bomb the Olympic village.
“The same cell that’s in Shanghai?”
“I have no idea. Miles only tells me what I need to know. But it’s compartmentalized. There could be hundreds of officers working on this, could be just me and him.”
Joe shook his head and lit a cigarette. That the operation appeared so chaotic was, he concluded, an indication of its absolute secrecy, rather than an illustration of CIA or Pentagon incompetence. Shahpour continued.
“Miles thinks it’s gonna be easy falsifying documentation to get into the village. I told him the Chinese won’t let anybody move in there unless they can prove they’re legitimate. How the fuck are we supposed to
get a bunch of out-of-shape Turkic Muslims into an elite training area for the world’s finest athletes? I’m telling you, the whole plan is a mess.”
“It can’t be the same cell that’s here in Shanghai,” Joe concluded. “If they carry out an attack this summer, they’ll be arrested. Miles can’t expect the cell to survive undetected for three more years.”
Shahpour tossed his cigarette into the street. “I guess you’re right,” he said.
“How much do you know about the cell?” They were forced to walk around a pool of water flooding out of a canteen halfway down Xinle Road. Crowds of Chinese were hunched over tables, shovelling rice and cuts of pork into their mouths, oblivious to the chaos around them. “When did Miles recruit them?”
“I think they’re the dregs,” Shahpour replied. “I only look out for one of them. Memet Almas. He’s Kazakh, kind of devout, so he likes it that I’m a fellow Muslim, you know? Has a wife back in Kashgar. Miles doesn’t give me any other names. The less people that know, the better, right?” Joe asked for a spelling of Memet Almas. “But I get the impression he’s using fanatics. In the old days, TYPHOON was what you might call a secular operation. They were lapsed Sufis, fighting for a political cause. Far as I can work out, a guy like Memet just wants to blow things up. The whole thing has become radicalized.”
“What about Ansary Tursun? Abdul Bary? Do those names mean anything to you?”
Shahpour shook his head. It was dark and two mopeds without headlights were coming towards them on the opposite side of the street.
Typhoon (2008) Page 32