Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  “Abdul?”

  “Yes?”

  He had not been listening. Celil fixed him with an impatient gaze. “You must concentrate. You must listen. It is the inspiration of our benefactor that we should kill the infidels who have betrayed our cause.”

  Abdul placed the cap back on his head. He did not immediately understand the significance of what Celil was saying.

  “The attacks will take place six days from now, on the night of Saturday June the 11th. After that, we will not see each other again for many months. They will be simultaneous attacks, inspired by the bravery and the courage of our brothers in New York, our brothers in Egypt and Madrid. It is our destiny not only to bring destruction to the infidel Chinese, but also to the Americans who have made their homes among them. Our attacks will also claim the lives of Miles Coolidge and Shahpour Goodarzi, spies who will pay for their treachery and cunning.”

  “How do you propose this?” Abdul asked. His experience, his gut, immediately reacted against any unnecessary complications.

  Celil paused. Did he sense Abdul’s reservations? To remove Miles and Shahpour had been the initiative of Hasib Qadir. It was the sole condition of the ISI’s co-operation, and one that Celil readily agreed to. The plan was otherwise as straightforward as it was barbarous. It would bring ruin to Hollywood and terror to the streets of Shanghai. On the evening of 11 June, Ansary Tursun was to make his way to Paradise City and purchase a ticket, using cash, for the advertised 8:15 performance in Screen Eight of the Silver Reel Cinema. It would be a Saturday night; the multiplex would be packed. Once the film was under way, nobody would notice when Ansary exited the auditorium after thirty minutes, leaving a rucksack under his seat.

  At the same time, Ablimit would arrange a crash meeting with Miles Coolidge for 8:45 p.m. He would arrive at Screen Four for the 8:25 performance, conceal his IED beneath his seat in the back row, and leave by the western fire exit before the film had begun.

  On the morning of Friday 10 June, Memet Almas was to send a text message to Shahpour Goodarzi, asking him to telephone his grandparents in Sacramento. Memet would then arrange an emergency meeting with Shahpour at Larry’s bar on Nanyang Road. The American would be asked to arrive at eight o’clock. Memet would go to the bar an hour earlier, leave his rucksack in the cloakroom, purchase a drink and a small plate of food, then leave before half-past seven.

  The final member of the cell, Abdul Bary, was to take his wife and daughter to the sixth floor of the Paradise City mall and order a meal at the Teppenyaki Shinju, which was one of four restaurants located immediately beneath the seventh-floor foyer of the Silver Reel multiplex. On a Saturday night, each of the restaurants would be packed with diners, but it would be unusual for an impoverished Uighur family to be among them. Therefore, to avoid drawing the attention of passing security officials, Abdul was to dress as smartly as possible in the hope of passing himself off as a businessman visiting from overseas. At 8:15 he would begin to complain of a stomach cramp and go to the washrooms. He would take his rucksack with him, telling his wife that it contained necessary medicines. He would then withdraw the IED, place the device in the metal bin of the disabled washroom and return to his family. At 8:30, still complaining of sickness, Abdul would ask for the bill and leave the restaurant.

  Celil now looked at each of the four men in turn. He had arrived at the most vital part of the meeting.

  “You will go to the locations in order to prepare yourselves this week,” he told them. “Each of the four devices will be timed to detonate at exactly nine o’clock. You are responsible for this. God has provided us with the tools to carry out his sacred work and now you must perform his task. I leave your bombs with you now.” He indicated the three devices on the table. “Remember,” he said, “this is only the first stage of our battle, a first phase in our work. There is more to come. Now let God be in your hearts. May he bring us together soon in Beijing.”

  47

  PRODUCT

  The conversation with Waterfield had prompted Joe to act. If he was going to engage Isabella’s co-operation in finding Ablimit Celil, this was the moment to do so. He did not feel that he was manipulating her by taking advantage of her mood of candour. On the contrary: she possessed vital information that it was his duty to extract.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much do you know about what Miles has been doing in China since 1997?”

  Isabella had removed her hat because the sun had been obscured by a bank of yellowed clouds. She did not look at Joe as she said, “Very little.”

  “Are you interested in knowing?”

  She touched her face. “Not really.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re not in business together, are we? We’re husband and wife. I think it’s better that I don’t know things like that.”

  “He doesn’t talk to you about his work? He doesn’t complain or celebrate or use you as a shoulder to cry on?”

  “Never.” Isabella touched the fabric of her shirt. “Since when did Miles Coolidge ever need a shoulder to cry on?”

  Joe met the remark with a nod of assent and tried a different, more combative tactic. “What if I told you that he was being investigated? What if I told you that MI6 has sent me to Shanghai to find out what he’s up to?”

  It was an extraordinary gamble, not least because it assumed that Isabella’s loyalties lay with Queen and Country, rather than with her husband, the father of her child. Joe witnessed its impact in a moment of brittle shock which seemed to tighten Isabella’s entire body. She looked at him in a way that she had not looked at him since the eve of wui gwai. With disbelief. With disgust.

  “Are you still not who you appear to be, Joe?” she said quietly, and Joe knew that he would have to be extremely careful with his answer. One false move, one glib remark, one overly defensive plea for understanding, and she would leave the cafe. His only hope lay in complete honesty. His only way of convincing Isabella to help him now was to tell her the truth.

  “I’ll tell you who I am,” he said. His voice was very steady, very controlled. “I have nothing to hide from you any more.” He leaned forward, so that she could see directly into his eyes. “At the end of last year, I was on the point of leaving the Service. I’d been offered a job in Beijing and I was going to take it. I was sick of what was happening in Iraq, sick of the mood of defeat in London. Then David Waterfield came to me and told me that Miles had been at the forefront of a four-year American effort to destabilize Xinjiang.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Isabella said quickly, though the remark was designed not to placate Joe, but somehow to restore her rapidly evaporating self-confidence.

  “The operation was called TYPHOON. It was disbanded after 9/11 when Washington, in its infinite wisdom, more or less decreed that all Uighurs were terrorists. But in the last two years a clandestine unit within the CIA, mounted with Pentagon approval, has been trying to revive TYPHOON in mainland China. Miles has been at the forefront of that effort because he maintains links with Uighur separatists who were involved in acts of sabotage prior to September 11th.” Joe saw that tears had welled in Isabella’s eyes but that she was willing them away. “Elements within the American government, as far as we know without presidential approval, are planning a terrorist atrocity at the Beijing Olympics. Miles is at this moment attempting to recruit the men who will carry out that attack. There is also an al-Qaeda cell somewhere in Shanghai planning a hit this summer. That cell has American backing. It’s what I’m here to try to stop. You ask me who I am. I’ve told you.”

  Isabella tipped her head back and looked at a point in the sky, breathing very slowly. She reached down for the hat and again placed it on her head, as if to shield herself from what Joe was telling her. He wanted to say “I’m sorry,” he wanted to help her, but there was nothing he could do. Her husband was aiding and abetting terror.

  “Why?” she said, shaking her head. S
he was staring at him, as if the whole thing was Joe’s fault, another ghastly, unforeseen consequence of his secret identity.

  “I really don’t know,” he said, and began talking again, because he felt that by doing so he would at least keep Isabella at the cafe. “The Americans want a massive loss of face at the Olympics. That’s the simple answer. They want to show the world that China isn’t as modern and sophisticated and peaceful as she says she is.”

  “How does killing people do that?”

  Joe was briefly silenced, both by the question, with its unarguable logic, and by a passing security guard, who stared at him intently as if he were one of the exhibits at the museum. “The bombs would have a Uighur signature,” he said finally. “They would bring the world’s attention to the plight of the people of Xinjiang, to human rights abuses which have escalated tenfold since 9/11. The Americans would again start pressing for independence in Eastern Turkestan. If that happened, they would ultimately control the flow of oil into China, Japan and Korea.”

  “Are you mad? Do you believe this stuff? Have you listened to what you’re saying?”

  “Izzy, I’m not the guy who thought this up.” He had briefly lost his temper, but the effect of his words was startling. Isabella made a gesture of apology, muttering, “All right, sorry, OK,” as she sat back. Joe realized that he might quickly become her sanctuary. Who else, after all, did she have to turn to? “It’s a new version of the Great Game,” he said. “Who knows what Washington ultimately wants? To break up China? To make China more authoritarian? To bring sympathy to the Uighur people or to tar them with the same brush as al-Qaeda?” He unscrewed a bottle of water and poured its contents into a plastic cup. Isabella picked it up and drank from it without saying a word. “It’s like Iraq. They’ve ended up with the exact opposite of everything they said they hoped to achieve, so maybe chaos and instability is what they wanted in the first place.”

  An announcement came over the public address system, praising “The Motherland, the Party, the Great Advance of Chinese Technology.” Joe saw that Isabella understood what was being said and realized, with a feeling of almost sibling pride, that she had learned to speak Mandarin. He waited until the announcement had ended before continuing.

  “Have you heard of a man called Shahpour Moazed?”

  “Of course I have. I know Shahpour.”

  “Do you know what he does for a living?” Joe hoped that Isabella already knew about the CIA’s arrangement with Microsoft, or things were going to get even more complicated.

  “I know what he does for a living,” she replied quietly.

  “And what do you make of him?”

  “What do I make of him?” She plainly regarded the question as an almost complete irrelevance. Nevertheless her response helped, in small measure, to lift the air of gloom which had descended on the conversation. “I think he’s the sort of person Miles would like to be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Not Shahpour, specifically. I mean the lifestyle of the Iranian male. Iranian wives do all the cooking, keep the house spotless, raise the children. They’re completely subservient to their husbands. It’s Miles’s idea of paradise.” A dog began barking in the distance. “So is that who you’re following? Is Shahpour the traitor? Please don’t tell me that or I think I might be sick.”

  Joe extracted a cigarette. He offered one to Isabella, who declined with a rapid shake of the head. She was grinding her teeth, the bones at the back of her jaw bulging like pearls. Had he been wrong to tell her? Had an impulse of cruel power, the wrath of his damaged subconscious, forced him to shatter what little happiness Isabella still possessed? Joe felt the sudden heat of guilt, as if he had deliberately exacted his revenge on a woman simply because she had failed to love him.

  “Shahpour is one of the good guys,” he said, a statement which appeared to make no impact upon her at all. Isabella was trying to be brave, trying to maintain her dignity in the face of his revelations, but she was pale and drawn with worry. He longed to hold her. “There are two reasons why I came here today,” he said. “I wanted to see you because I needed to know that you were all right. I knew about Miles and I knew about Linda. I had some strange idea in my head that I could help you.” Isabella was absolutely still and made no reaction. Joe could not tell if she wanted him to stay and to keep talking, or to leave and never to see her again. It occurred to him that she had no idea of the depth of his love for her, no idea of the extent to which she had haunted his dreams for eight long years. “The second reason is that I think you can help to stop what’s going on. Shahpour has told me that Miles sometimes takes you when he meets the leader of the cell.”

  Her lovely eyes flicked up at him like a frightened animal. Joe saw the pain that he had caused her and which he longed to take back. “What do you mean by that?” she said.

  “I mean that Miles uses you as cover when he contacts a man named Ablimit Celil. You may not be aware that he’s doing it. Sometimes wives are informed, sometimes they’re-“

  “I’m aware of it.”

  Joe was startled. He had assumed that Isabella had remained completely unblemished by the tricks and prisms of tradecraft. “So you know Celil?”

  She shook her head.

  “But you’re aware when Miles meets him?”

  “I can guess when it happens.”

  A line of schoolchildren funnelled out of the cafe and colonized a nearby table. They were dressed in identical uniforms, navy blue satchels slung over their backs. One of them, a tall nine-or ten-year-old boy, slapped a classmate over the head and was reprimanded by his teacher. Isabella looked at the child and closed her eyes. She had sat up in a crouch on the chair, resting her chin on her knees.

  “Would you be prepared to tell me about that?”

  There was a flicker of a smile, an irony. So this is what Joe had come for. He wasn’t a friend. He wasn’t an ally. He was just a spy tapping her for information. Joe saw this and tried to defend himself.

  “You must know that I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t completely necessary and important.” He looked down at his cigarette and felt as though he was smoking in church. “Nobody is using you, Izzy.” He let it fall to the concrete. “The last person in the world I want to hurt is-“

  “We go to the cinema,” she said. Her voice was a flat, low confession, a whisper of secrets. It was like Wang breaking his silence in the safe house. Joe felt the familiar twin motors of elation and self-disgust.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Miles must meet this man in the cinema.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  She looked at the ground. “Because we always go to the same place, to the same screen, the same mall. The Silver Reel at Paradise City.” She released her legs and let them drop to the floor. There was an odd sort of defiance in her mood now, a preparedness to play things out. “Halfway through the movie, Miles gets up and goes to the back. I never ask him what he’s doing, he never tells. Afterwards, when the film’s finished, we meet for dinner downstairs. There’s a Vietnamese restaurant there. A good one. On the sixth floor.”

  “You’re sure?” Joe said.

  “I’m sure.”

  48

  CLOSING IN

  Everything happens quickly now. The cell is in play.

  On the late afternoon of Saturday 11 June, Ansary Tursun strolled along the broad walkway of the Bund, smoking a cigarette, his mind turning over the final details of the plan. Secured on his back, pulling down on his shoulders like the dead hard weight of a stone, was a small polyester rucksack in which he had placed a detonator, a telephone and a bomb.

  Less than a mile to the south, amid the crowds and stalls of the ancient market at Yunyuan, Abdul Bary was buying a coconut. He removed his own rucksack from his back and extracted a small leather purse from the side pocket. He passed a crumpled twenty-yuan note to the stallholder and received a handful of coins in change. The husk of the coconut had been punctured with a
pink straw and he handed it to his smiling daughter, who sucked hungrily at the cooling milk. His wife, who was on the eve of celebrating her twenty-seventh birthday, smiled at the child and reached for her outstretched hand.

  The third member of the cell, the Kazakh Memet Almas, was in Nanshi district, waiting in the bored, miserable straggle of a bus queue. Twenty-four hours earlier he had sent a text message to Shahpour Goodarzi requesting that he contact his grandparents in Sacramento at the first available opportunity. Almas saw the bus coming towards him. It turned in the road, moving slowly towards the bus stop through a thin, shiftless mist of pollution. He spotted a seat towards the back of the packed interior, claimed it and sat down.

  All three men had been captured on closed-circuit television, though it would be many weeks before the team investigating the events of 11 June were able to put together an exact picture of the cell’s movements at this early stage of the evening. Ablimit Celil, for example, was seen for the first time stepping out of a taxi near the Xiaotaoyuan mosque, not far from Shahpour Moazed’s apartment on Fuxing Road. The driver of the taxi, who happened to be a Hui Muslim, was interrogated for four subsequent days under suspicion of consorting with the plotters. He told a female officer of the People’s Armed Police that Celil had recognized him as a fellow Muslim and that they had discussed a passage in the Koran during their short and otherwise uneventful journey. A surveillance camera, positioned in the roof of the Xiaotaoyuan, had photographed Celil at prayer, but the plain-clothes officer of the MSS, prostrated no more than ten feet away from him, had assumed from Celil’s dress that he was a Turkic businessman or tourist visiting Shanghai from overseas. As a result, he had taken no further steps to follow him.