Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  Joe stopped at the bottom of the escalators and felt a jab at the base of his gut. Mr. Richards. The professor was trying to contact him. Why the hell hadn’t he checked his emails? “Can you repeat that?” he said.

  “Of course.” There was a controlled superciliousness in Water-field’s voice as he read the message a second time. “Wasn’t Richards the name by which you were known to our friend?” he asked.

  “Yes it was,” Joe admitted.

  “So you have been to see him?”

  Joe was wondering how to play it, working out if he had the time to lie. “Attack?” he replied, ignoring the question. “He says an attack is set for Saturday?”

  “That is correct. And the code associated is this word ‘ZIKAWEI.’ “

  The full meaning of the email was beginning to dawn on him. “Can you Google it?”

  Waterfield had to admire RUN’s nerve. Sitting down in front of a Vauxhall Cross computer, he opened Internet Explorer, hit a Favorite for Google and typed “Zikawei” into the search bar. “Sorry,” he found himself muttering. “Should have done this before.”

  “What does it say?” Joe asked.

  Waterfield read out the contents of the top line:

  The Xujiahui Library of Shanghai. Pronounced “Zikawei” in the local dialect.

  “Must be Shanghainese,” Waterfield said. “Do you want me to go on?”

  50

  6 / 11

  Joe Lennox froze in the blinding white atrium of the Paradise City mall.

  Zikawei. Xujiahui.

  9/11. 3/11. 6/11.

  The attack was happening now.

  He should have gone to the fire alarms first, should have immediately alerted a guard. Instead, his first overwhelming instinct was to protect Isabella. Joe hung up on Waterfield and dialled her number.

  Her phone was switched off.

  Zhao Jian’s brother was staring at him as if he had lost his mind. Joe dialled the number again. He swore aloud when he heard the message a second time and offered a silent prayer that Isabella had decided to remain at home.

  “Izzy, it’s Joe. If you get this, call me. Straight away. It’s not safe. For God’s sake, stay away from Xujiahui. Tell Miles to get out of there. There are bombs. It’s a trap. For Christ’s sake, stay away.”

  He turned to Yun.

  “There’s going to be an attack.” He was holding Zhao Jian’s brother by the arms, hands gripping his shoulders. “Find a fire alarm,” he said. “Alert the guards. Tell them to evacuate all the malls in Xujiahui as soon as possible. Do this as fast as you can.”

  Joe did not wait for a reply. He was already pounding up the escalators, desperate to reach the cinema. Between the fourth and fifth floors, hordes of Chinese shoppers staring at him as he pushed past, he realized that Shahpour was also in danger. Almas, after all, had called the meeting. How could he have been so stupid, so short-sighted, as to ignore that coincidence?

  Shahpour was on the ground floor of Larry’s when his mobile lit up on the bar. Alice Cooper was screaming out of the sound system. He moved his gin and tonic to one side and looked at the read-out.

  “Joe. Hey buddy. What’s going on?”

  Joe had to shout against the pounding rock music. “Shahpour?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Memet hasn’t shown up, has he?”

  Shahpour frowned. He could barely hear what was being said. He picked up his drink and moved towards the entrance. It would be easier to talk out on the street. “How did you know that?” he shouted.

  Joe prayed that Shahpour would have the courage to do what he was now going to ask him to do. “I think he’s already been and gone …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen to me. Don’t interrupt and don’t question what I’m going to tell you. There’s going to be an attack on Larry’s. At any moment. You’ve been lured into a trap. Xujiahui is going too. It’s a multiple strike. Get everybody out of there as soon as possible. And I mean everybody. Do it now and do it fast.”

  “Joe, man.” Shahpour had started to laugh, but he felt a fear inside him as cold as the condensation on the rim of his glass. “Are you sure about this? Are you sure?”

  “Do it, Shahpour. Hit the fire alarm. Do it now.”

  At that moment, fifty metres short of the Silver Reel lobby, exhausted by his race to the seventh floor, Joe heard the Paradise City alarm. Yun had done his job. The vast white atrium screamed.

  A Chinese guard in a pale blue shirt was standing in front of him. When he heard the piercing siren, his eyebrows wormed with frustration. Another false alarm. Another problem.

  “Listen to me,” Joe said. To his despair, he saw only a typical Chinese ambivalence in the guard’s exhausted eyes. He held him at the elbows, as if trying to shake him from a deep sleep. “You have to evacuate the area.” He was speaking in Mandarin. “You have to help me. Will they hear the alarm in the cinemas?”

  It was useless. It was like talking to a child. Joe released him and sprinted into the cinema.

  In the lobby, lined with posters of Harrison Ford, of Humphrey Bogart and Bruce Willis, staff were staring up at the ceiling, convinced that the alarm was a momentary problem that would soon go away. Customers, covering their ears, continued to queue up at the popcorn concession. Teenagers continued to kiss.

  “Get out of here!” Joe shouted, a madman, a laowai. At first nobody seemed to know what to do. One woman actually laughed. Joe screamed at a member of staff to help him as the guard came up behind, raising his voice now, trying to grab Joe and to pin him down.

  He shook himself free. The alarm was unrelenting. Up ahead, to Joe’s relief, he saw a bewildered shoal of people apparently filing out of the cinemas, moving in bored slow motion along the darkened corridor. The ticket girl looked confused. Everybody looked confused. Joe went past them, shouting at them to hurry, urging them to get down the stairs and out onto the street. He ran down the multiplex corridor, past the numbers of the screens glowing like lights on a runway. He burst into Four, eyes blacked out by the darkness, his senses adjusting to the deafening noise of the cinema.

  “Get out of here!” he screamed in Mandarin. “Everybody, everybody get out!”

  He realized that the volume of the film had rendered the alarm inaudible. The audience tutted at him to sit down.

  “Isabella!” Joe now tried shouting in English. “Isabella! There’s a bomb in the cinema. It’s a trap. Get out of here! Move! Run!”

  51

  BEIJING RED

  Two of the four bombs exploded.

  Shahpour Moazed’s first reaction to Joe’s warning had been to close his phone and to stand stock still in the entrance of the bar, in what he would later describe as a state of suspended animation. He was just a few feet away from the cloakroom. Shahpour caught the eye of a young British man making his way up the steps from Nanyang Road. He wanted to reach out and grab him, to warn him to stay away, but his courage was lacking. It was 8:47 p.m.

  “Christ,” he whispered and, with the resigned deliberation of a man with no choice other than to make a fool of himself, he placed his gin and tonic on a nearby step and walked back into the bar. Alice Cooper was still wailing from the stereo. Standing between two waitresses, Shahpour spoke to the oldest of the four bartenders, a New Zealander wearing an All Blacks T-shirt.

  “Turn the music off,” he shouted. He was still trying to find his courage. His voice lacked impact.

  “What’s that, mate?”

  “You’ve got to turn the music off. Get everybody out of here. There’s a bomb in the bar.”

  The Kiwi was shaking his head. Either he couldn’t hear what Shahpour was saying or had written him off as a drunk. Neither of the waitresses, both of whom were Chinese, reacted to what Shahpour was saying. He could see the hi-fi system on a shelf behind the bar, obscured by a pile of napkins.

  “I’m serious, man. Turn the fucking music off. We have to get everybody out of here.”

  An America
n woman, paying for a round of drinks, turned towards him and said, “Did you say there was a bomb in here?”

  “Yes I did.” At last Shahpour felt as though he was being listened to. He was now committed to what he had to do. Lifting himself onto the bar, he swung his legs over into the service area and killed the power on the sound system. One of the staff grabbed him and shouted: “Hey!” but Shahpour pushed him back and shouted as loudly as he could.

  “Listen to me. Everybody. We have a very serious situation. I am not kidding around. Everybody needs to clear this area as quickly as possible.” The Kiwi attempted to restore the sound on the hi-fi and Shahpour swore at him. The American woman later told me that this was the moment when she realized that something was seriously wrong. Shahpour then ran out into the main area of the bar and began physically manhandling customers in what must have looked like an act of lunacy. But the music remained switched off. People began to react. Shahpour heard stools and chairs scraping back, confused, murmured conversations. Several customers on the upper level were staring down at him from the balcony, trying to work out what was going on. Shahpour went from face to face, group to group, saying the same thing to each of them, over and over again.

  “I work for the American government. Get out of here. There may be a bomb in the bar. Larry’s has been targeted as a place where Westerners drink. Leave quickly. Leave now.”

  Several customers—those of a more credulous and biddable nature—began moving slowly towards the exit. Others—those, for example, who had just bought an expensive round of drinks, or waited patiently for their turn at a game of pool—swore at Shahpour and told him to leave them in peace. One of them said, “Sit down you fucking idiot, this isn’t funny,” but was met with a stare of such intensity that he immediately began encouraging his friends to leave. At the same time, somebody had the presence of mind to hit the fire alarm. As Shahpour ran upstairs, he could hear the Kiwi barman saying: “OK, let’s do this. Everybody leave,” in a steady, level voice. It was now a matter of Shahpour’s personal pride, as much as it was of saving lives, that he should succeed in evacuating the building.

  “Didn’t you fucking hear me?” he shouted at a group of bewildered customers huddled at the top of the stairs. They were holding bottles of beer, pool cues, staring at him as if determined to make a point. “Get out of here. There’s a fucking bomb.”

  Others were still eating. They had belongings. In all, it took about three minutes to clear the upper level and a further four to search every nook and cranny of the building—including the kitchen, the bathrooms, the office at the back—and to be certain that Larry’s was empty. This was an act of extraordinary bravery on Shahpour’s part because, for all he knew, the bomb could have gone off at any moment. Finally, when he was done, he walked out onto Nanyang Road and saw to his disbelief that most of the customers were standing within ten feet of the entrance. Still fired with adrenalin, he shouted at them to move “at least one hundred meters back down the street.” Staff from a neighbouring Chinese bar received the same instruction in Mandarin when he saw them staring blankly outside through an open door.

  “Get inside!” he shouted, a raised voice in China as rare as it was potentially humiliating. “Get to the back of your building! It’s not a fire!” and while three of them joined the crush of bemused local residents and Westerners on the road, two remained rooted to the spot, not prepared to lose face at the hands of a wild-eyed, screaming Arab.

  They were two of the eighteen people who suffered minor injuries as a result of the subsequent explosion. Shahpour remembers feeling the eyes of perhaps 200 people boring into him as he began to suffer the awful, humiliating possibility of being wrong. He cursed Joe Lennox, staring at a street of dumb faces. Seconds later he was wrapped in a different kind of silence, his ears howling, his body covered in debris, a hero who had saved at least 150 people from the wreckage of a Shanghai bomb.

  Memet Almas returned to his home in Astana, where he was seized by Kazakh police.

  Five hours after paramedics and rescue crews had hospitalized the survivors in Screen Four, police discovered an unexploded bomb wedged beneath a seat in the back row of Screen Eight of the Silver Reel multiplex. A technical fault with the IED had prevented the bomb from exploding. Ansary Tursun was subsequently arrested in Guiyang on 17 June, his role in the attacks having been leaked to the Chinese authorities by a source in MI6.

  The device planted by Abdul Bary in the metal bin on the sixth floor of the Paradise City mall was never found, because Bary had removed it at the last minute, having suffered a change of heart. Surveillance footage showed that he returned to the disabled toilet with his rucksack, then left the mall minutes later in the company of his wife and daughter.

  He is still at large.

  52

  BOB

  Joe Lennox was taken first to the Rui Jin Hospital in Luwan and then to a private room at the Worldlink on Nanjing Road. For the first thirty-six hours he was unconscious.

  Waterfield had called me in Beijing late on the night of 11 June to tell me that he had been unable to reach Joe by telephone and was concerned that he might have been caught up in the Xujiahui bomb. At that early stage, the explosion at Larry’s had not been linked to what had happened in Paradise City. For all anyone knew, the two incidents were unrelated.

  I flew to Shanghai at dawn on Sunday and was at Joe’s bedside by eleven o’clock. An undeclared SIS officer from the embassy—let’s call him Bob—almost beat me to it, and before I had a chance to find anything out about Joe’s condition I was being ushered downstairs to the canteen, where Bob bought me “a quiet cup of coffee” and proceeded to lay out what he described as “the respective positions of the British and Chinese governments.”

  “Here’s the thing. It’s obvious to local liaison that Joe was one of us.” Bob was an overweight man in his mid-forties with a tense, persuasive manner. I thought that I recognized his face but couldn’t place him. “They’ve got closed-circuit of RUN going bananas in the mall ten minutes before the bomb went off. There are dozens of eyewitnesses. At the same time, you’ve got a CIA officer going through the same routine in Nanyang Road. The Chinese are obviously keen to find out how the hell we knew what was going on.”

  I was about to speak when Bob silenced me with his eyes. A young Chinese doctor walked past our table. There was a smell of sickly sweet cakes in the canteen and I started to feel nauseous.

  “What happened in Nanyang Road?” I asked.

  Bob told me about Larry’s. Until further notice, he said, the Chinese were calling it a gas explosion. Then there was an eyebrow, a half-smile, and he gave me what bureaucrats like to call “the bigger picture.”

  “Look. About nine hours ago a second IED was found in Screen Eight at the cinema. Unexploded. Rucksack. That makes what happened last night a co-ordinated terrorist strike on the Chinese mainland. And who tried to stop it? We did. The Brits did. One point three billion Chinese and not a single one of them knew what the hell was happening in their own back yard. Now it doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to understand how that makes the Chinese feel. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Do you follow?” Bob must have thought that he wasn’t getting through to me because he added, “I’m talking about a loss of face, Will.”

  I nodded. He was going to ask me to agree to something. It felt like I was getting out my cheque book for a plot of land I didn’t want to buy.

  “Joe is a bloody hero,” he said, with what seemed like genuine professional admiration. “He’s also persona non grata. The Chinese want him out of the country as soon as he recovers. Far as they’re concerned, what happened at the Silver Reel was an isolated incident, a grudge. You’ve seen today’s papers. They’re blaming a single Uighur fanatic. Ablimit Celil. Apparently he’s got previous. Joe Lennox, the second IED, the bomb at Larry’s, all of them will be airbrushed from the historical record.”

  In the canteen, somebody dropped a tray of cups. There was a hole of silence into which we all
turned. I had a sudden mental image of tapes being erased, of witnesses threatened, of surveillance recordings being consigned to a vault in Beijing. Everything would have to comply with the myth of modern China. Everything would be twisted, manipulated and spun.

  Bob leaned forward.

  “Over the past few weeks, Joe gave London a number of names which he believed were linked to Uighur separatism.” He produced a crumpled piece of paper from his trouser pocket and proceeded to decipher his own seemingly illegible script. “Ansary Tursun. Memet Almas. Abdul Bary. We’ve now given these names to the Chinese authorities. Professor Wang Kaixuan as well. I’d bet my house they were responsible for what happened at Larry’s and Xujiahui.”

  “And what does Joe get in return?” I was appalled that SIS were prepared to give up Wang before they knew the full story, but couldn’t say anything about Joe’s meeting with him in May because he had sworn me to secrecy.

  “What Joe gets in return is a first-class air ticket to Heathrow and the chance to recuperate in London. What he gets is no awkward questions asked about a supposed employee of Quayler pharmaceuticals nosing around Shanghai under non-official cover. He’s Beijing Red, of course, but there’s not much any of us can do about that, is there?”

  It was a typical British climbdown in the face of Chinese power. Don’t upset Beijing. Think of the contracts. Think of the money. It made me intensely angry. Five floors above us was a man who had risked his life to save hundreds of innocent people, a man lying in a coma who was unable to play any part in negotiations which would effectively decide the next twenty years of his life. It seemed absurd, against the background of everything that had happened, that SIS were trying to protect the integrity of their operations in China at Joe’s expense. Bob—and probably Joe, too—would have argued that the Office had no choice, but it still felt like a rushed and shoddy compromise.