“Ablimit Celil?”
Another shake of the head. Joe was bewildered that Shahpour seemed to know so little about the operation. “What makes you think they’re all radicalized?” he asked.
“Just listening to Miles talk. Maybe he’s bought into the whole Chinese state propaganda thing that all Uighurs are terrorists. How do I know? The whole thing’s gotten fucked up.”
“Wang thinks Celil is the head of the cell. He also thinks he might be ISI.”
“He thinks what?”
Shahpour had stopped in his tracks. Joe again asked him to keep walking and put a hand around his back. His body was powerfully built and sweat had collected at the bottom of his shirt. “He told me Celil spent time at an al-Qaeda training camp a few years ago. He thinks the cell may be being controlled from Islamabad.”
“Then Wang is full of shit.” An elderly man in a rocking chair was staring at them from the darkened entrance of a shikumen.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s been full of shit about things in the past so he’ll be full of shit about things in the future.” Joe’s memory was thrown back to the basement of the nightclub in Wan Chai. What was it that Miles had said to him? Wang Kaixuan is a myth, a spook story. Nothing that old fuck told you has any meaning.
“Is that you talking, or Miles?”
Shahpour appeared offended by the criticism implicit in the question. He stepped out in front of a cyclist and separated himself from Joe by crossing the street. They were on a narrow, dimly lit road in the heart of the French Concession, the dark plane trees bending low over their heads and stretching like a tunnel into the distance. Without hurrying, Joe caught up with him and simply picked up where they had left off.
“How do you meet Almas?” he asked.
Shahpour did not hesitate before responding. He was eager to dispense of operational secrets which had been weighing down on him for too long. “We go to a bar on Nanyang Lu. Place called Larry’s.”
Joe knew it. Larry’s was a block behind the Ritz-Carlton, a split-level American-style pub with big-screen sports and pool tables. He had eaten there, watching coverage of a one-day cricket international between England and South Africa. It was popular with twentysomething laowais who liked burgers and French fries. “You meet him in the open? In a restaurant?” He did not want to risk incurring Shahpour’s wrath by asking further questions about the sloppiness of his tradecraft.
“Sure. He blends right in. We sit in the corner, get a cheeseburger, we watch a ball game and act like a couple of Americans a long way from home. Chinese can’t tell the difference. We all look the same to them.”
“How often does this happen?”
“Twice, maybe three times since he came to Shanghai.” From the slightly obstinate tone emerging in Shahpour’s voice, Joe sensed that he was feeling defensive. Best not to push too hard.
“How do you contact him?”
Shahpour scratched an itch on the lobe of his left ear. “Text message.” He waited until he was clear of an elderly lady washing plates in a plastic tub at the edge of the street. “I gave him a cellphone. There’s language I use that indicates a desire to meet. Memet speaks English and we just code the time and date.”
Joe nodded and asked how it worked from Memet’s end.
“Same thing, more or less. He sends a text from a cellphone sourced in the US telling me to contact my grandparents in Sacramento.”
“Because your grandparents in Sacramento are no longer with us?” Joe was always fascinated to glean titbits of Cousin tradecraft.
“No, they’re still with us. But they live in Tehran.”
Joe smiled. “What about Miles?”
“What about him?”
“How does he do it? How does he meet the cell?”
“I have no idea.” Shahpour was shaking his head. Briefly, it looked as though he had no more to say on the subject. Then: “All I know is that he sometimes uses his wife.”
Joe felt a lurch of surprise which quickly turned to indignation. “Isabella?”
“Sure. For cover. You guys know about that, right? Take a chick with you, pretend like you’re going shopping or something, then meet your contact along the way. Isabella makes Miles look normal. But ask me where the hell he takes her and I’ll tell you I have no idea.”
44
SCREEN FOUR
“Where is your wife?”
The whispered voice of Ablimit Celil was audible above the screams and gunfire of an American disaster movie. He had taken the vacant seat beside Miles Coolidge at the far end of row Q, entering the cinema shortly after the film had begun.
“She couldn’t make it,” Miles replied. “Women’s troubles.”
He enjoyed taunting Ablimit’s religious beliefs, sexualizing women in his company, occasionally referring to his own agnosticism. He wasn’t going to be dictated to by a fanatic. Miles needed Celil, certainly, but Celil also needed Mike. Without American money and American explosives, he was just another two-bit saboteur.
“You wanted to talk.”
Miles had not yet looked at his agent. Three rows ahead of them, a man wearing a baseball cap was making his way through a tub of ice cream and laughing at a snatch of dialogue on screen. Had he turned around, he would have been met by the incongruous sight of two overweight middle-aged men, one with a thick beard, the other clean shaven, leaning towards one another like lovers in the back row. A vivid montage of flickering light reflected in the blackened eyes of Miles Coolidge and Ablimit Celil as they spoke reverently and quietly, like mourners at a funeral.
“How are you doing?”
“We are fine,” Celil replied. “But we must have more money.”
“So what else is new? Patience, for Christ’s sake.”
“Ansary has been ill. He does not work. He questions the direction we are taking.”
“I saw him last week. Ate a good dinner at Kala Kuer. He looked fine to me.”
Miles popped a single kernel of popcorn into his mouth, allowing it to melt on his tongue.
“I mean he is anxious for action. We all are. We wonder why we are waiting.”
Celil was speaking quickly, in Mandarin, and the whisper of his voice was almost lost amid the wail and crash of an action sequence. The film appalled him, the violence and the blasphemies. He tried not to look at the screen.
“I’ve been working up some possible targets,” Miles said, passing a package across the armrest. Celil placed it on his lap, straining to listen. “Factories. State-owned banks. A Sichuan restaurant in Pudong. I don’t want Americans hit, I don’t want Europeans. We’ve suffered enough.” Not much came back from Celil by way of a reaction, just a blank stare into the middle distance. “I want you to think about switching jobs. Leave Abdul at his factory, but Ansary can take a job washing dishes at the restaurant. I can get you security passes for the banks, access all areas. We have a lot of time.”
Celil sniffed violently. The American’s ignorance of Chinese affairs was still breathtaking to him. “This is not easy for Uighurs,” he said. “We cannot just walk into jobs in such places.”
“It’s all in the file,” Miles replied.
His apparent ignorance was, in fact, a front. After a recent meeting with his contact at the Pentagon, Miles had been persuaded that any successful attack in Shanghai would only strengthen Chinese resolve to protect the Games of 2008. There was also the added, obvious risk of losing the cell entirely. Every Uighur within a hundred miles of Puxi would be arrested and interrogated in the wake of a co-ordinated terrorist strike. Washington therefore had no intention of green-lighting an operation for the forthcoming summer. The information Miles had passed to Celil in the envelope was sketchy, at best; if the members of the cell succeeded in securing the positions he had described, Miles would simply pull them at the last minute, citing intelligence indicating that the operation was blown. He had also slipped fifteen thousand American dollars into the package, which would be more than enou
gh to buy off Celil’s frustrations for several more months. Beijing was now the sole target. Both parties would eventually get what they wanted: the Uighur cause on a global stage; carnage to overshadow China’s precious Olympic Games.
“How are the others?” Miles asked. “How are Abdul and Memet?”
The audience suddenly burst into laughter. Miles looked up at the screen. A character appeared to have fallen over accidentally and was attempting to stand up. The Chinese love a pratfall.
“Memet I never see. Abdul also. It is the way we want it, the way we have always operated. I only know about Ansary because I visit his restaurant and they tell me he is sick. It is too dangerous to be seen with them. We want action. We want to hit the Chinese. We are tired of waiting.”
“And action’s what you’ll get.” Miles was irritated by these repeated calls for progress. The cell’s bloodlust was entirely of Celil’s making; he had brought a new fanaticism to their work. At the high tide of TYPHOON, there had been no undercurrent of religious fervour. The men had regarded themselves as soldiers, fighting for a just cause. Now stalwarts such as Tursun and Bary were no better than the maniacs of Baghdad and Atocha. “You just have to trust me,” he said. “You have to listen.”
“I will listen,” Celil replied.
A hiss went up from somewhere in the cinema. Their conversation had gone on too long. “You’d better get going,” Miles whispered. “Read the file.”
Celil placed the package in a plastic bag and walked out of the cinema. The lobby was empty and he was soon in the main atrium of the mall, descending by lift to the ground floor.
Each of his visits to Paradise City was now of vital importance to the cell. Why? Because they were indeed under new instructions, just as Wang had disclosed. Celil’s apparent obeisance in the presence of Miles Coolidge had been an act; the Americans were yesterday’s men. By allying the Uighur cause to the ISI, Celil had guaranteed frequent and effective action on the ground.
I don’t want Americans hit, I don’t want Europeans. We’ve suffered enough. Wasn’t that just like the hypocrisy of the West? They wreak havoc in foreign lands and then make efforts only to protect themselves. For too long, Ablimit had allowed himself to be blinded by American promises that had never borne fruit. The CIA had aided the cause of Uighur separatism not because they believed in the right of his Muslim brothers to live in their own land, free of Han oppression, but because they coveted yet more oil, yet more gas, to fuel their bankrupt economy.
He looked around him. He looked at the mall. Ablimit Celil saw the evidence of another defunct culture, a China imitative of all that was worst in the West. He thought ahead to the glorious release of 6/11, and was never more certain that he had taken the correct decision.
45
BORNE BACK
Let’s face it: Joe didn’t need to go and see Isabella. He could have asked Zhao Jian to track her. He could have waited patiently for London to contact him with the information he had requested about Ablimit Celil. Shahpour’s disclosure that Miles used her as cover for his meetings with the cell was valuable product, certainly, but it didn’t necessitate a visit to her home in Jinqiao. What was Joe expecting? A confession? A full report on Miles’s clandestine movements in China? Isabella was hardly going to betray the man she had married, particularly to a former boyfriend who had once betrayed her himself. Yet the temptation proved too hard for Joe to resist. It was the perfect opportunity to see her. After all, Waterfield had tasked him with getting close to Miles Coolidge. Well, getting close to Miles Coolidge meant getting close to Isabella. And who knows a man better than his own wife? From a certain point of view, Joe was just doing his job.
Jian gave him the details. Every weekday morning, regular as clockwork, Isabella bicycled to Century Park where she joined a public tai-chi session between eight-fifteen and nine o’clock. By then, Miles had left for the office. She was always alone. It would simply be a case of finding her and taking things from there.
Travelling east on the Line 2 Metro into Pudong, Joe realized that he was blurring a dangerous professional and personal boundary which could only end in disappointment. He had hardly slept. He had deliberately avoided Megan for days. He had not prepared what he was going to say, nor thought through the consequences of his actions.
The train was packed. He stood in the pristine, swaying compartment, a laowai spy of thirty-four, thousands of miles from home, racing towards his destiny. It was 7:45 in the morning. What if Isabella simply turned on her heels, ignoring his entreaties? What if she phoned Miles and told him that Joe had been to see her? How would he explain that one? He was supposed to be an employee of a niche pharmaceutical company, not a British spook asking sensitive questions about the activities of the CIA. If she asked him what he was doing in Shanghai, Joe was going to tell her. He had already decided that. He could not lie. It was lies, after all, which had brought about their undoing eight years earlier. But to tell her was to jeopardize everything: the operation, his cover, the successful pursuit of the cell. If Joe had possessed even an ounce of common sense on that humid mid-May morning, he would surely have turned round at Dongfanglu and headed straight back to Puxi.
He found the location easily. He had no need of the map which he had brought with him. The tai-chi session was taking place at the southern edge of an artificial lake, a short walk from Century Park station. In the distance Joe could see a large group of exercising Chinese, mostly men and women of retirement age, stretching and revolving in slow motion, communing with invisible gods. He moved towards them. He saw a bearded Western man in his late fifties, and another laowai woman of a similar age wearing tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt which appeared to have been dyed pink in the wash. They looked out of place in a group of perhaps thirty or forty Han, with no sign of Isabella among them. Joe sat on a bench in the shade of a tallow tree. He wondered if he was observing the correct group. Had Zhao Jian sent him to the wrong section of the park? It would take at least forty minutes to scout the entire area, a period in which Isabella might easily return home.
An aeroplane flew in low overhead, descending east towards the airport. The decelerating noise of its engines smothered the wail of Chinese folk music issuing from a portable CD player at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up. To the north he could discern the faint outline of the Jin Mao Tower, obscured by smog. He lowered his gaze and stared again at the group, moving two paces to his left so that his line of sight was no longer blocked by four men wielding wooden swords.
And then he saw her, the haunting, seductive revelation of Isabella Aubert, her face and body as familiar to him as the morning breeze. She was wearing black cotton yoga trousers with a band in her hair, bare slender arms stretched out in front of her, shoeless feet rotating on the dew-kissed grass. Joe’s first reaction was to smile, because there was a look of intense, almost childlike concentration on Isabella’s face as she geared through the complex movements of the tai-chi. In this first instant he realized that all of his pain, all of his heartache and longing, had not been wasted. She was still as vivid and as beautiful to him as she had ever been, and it had been right to come back to her. He returned to the bench. Joe’s heart was racing and he lost himself in a flood of memories, recalling the first time that they had seen one another at the wedding, their first hypnotic nights in Kentish Town, the arguments which had raged between them in the desperate week of wui gwai. He continued to watch her, thinking of Miles and Linda and the lies in their lives, and it was almost impossible to imagine how close Isabella was living to a terrible secret. How was he going to break it to her? What the hell was he going to say?
The music stopped. There was laughter and a coming together of friends. Isabella appeared to know one of the elderly Chinese ladies on her left because they immediately fell into conversation when the exercise ended. A gull flew in front of them and settled at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up and began walking through the crowds. He was forty metres away. Thirty. Isabella put on a pair of soft
shoes and shook out the long dark curls of her hair, movements that were almost melancholy in their practised simplicity. It was at this point that she seemed to sense his approach and it surprised Joe that Isabella smiled as he came towards her, as if they had made an arrangement to meet, almost as if she had been expecting him.
“Oh my God.” The smell of her as they hugged was an opiate of memories. She was on tiptoes, squeezing his back, saying things into his body that he could barely hear. “What are you doing in Shanghai? I don’t believe this.”
They parted and looked at one another. Isabella’s face was flushed with exercise, but it was also alive to the pleasure and surprise of seeing him. The final, dreadful months in Hong Kong appeared to have been forgotten. Time had erased all ill feeling between them.
“What are you doing in Shanghai?” she said again. “This is so unbelievable.”
“It’s a long story.”
It was only after several seconds that Joe realized what she had revealed: that Miles had told her nothing. Had he deliberately withheld the fact that Joe was living in the city? Or was what Shahpour and Zhao Jian had told him correct? That Mr. and Mrs. Miles Coolidge no longer lived together, no longer shared the same bed?
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “Didn’t Miles say anything? Didn’t he tell you I was living here?”
Isabella shook her head, the rueful smile on her lips providing him with the answer to his question. Miles doesn’t tell me anything. My husband is a basement of secrets.
Joe lowered his gaze. He saw the battered gold wedding band on her finger. “Well, that’s not what I expected,” he said. Isabella spluttered out a laugh. “I had dinner with him in April. We bumped into each other on Huaihai. He never said anything?”
“Nothing,” Isabella replied.
Typhoon (2008) Page 33
