Typhoon

38

Joe spent the next twenty-four hours trying his best to convince himself that he was ready to see Isabella.

He made dinner for Megan at his apartment, took her for a drink at the Cotton Club, lay awake beside her until almost four o’clock in the morning, then woke at nine to find her standing at the end of his bed bearing a tray of freshly cut mangoes and black coffee.

“I made us breakfast,” she said.

For the first time their lovemaking felt pointless and forced, as if a memory of Isabella had slipped into bed beside them. After watching a bootleg DVD of Troy, Megan left the apartment at midday and Joe paced the rooms, the afternoon passing with a geological slowness. He fixed a leaking tap in the bathroom; he went running in Xujiahui Park; he read the same paragraph of the same article in the Pharmaceutical Journal eight times. How would Isabella react to seeing him? With indifference? With studied cool? He couldn’t bear the prospect of a polite, bourgeois dinner where she asked meaningful questions about “Iraq and the war” while Miles joked about “the good old days in Hong Kong.” He wanted Isabella to himself. He wanted to connect with her again.

Finally, as the sun went down behind the London plane trees of the French Concession, Joe took a shower and changed for dinner. It was six-thirty. Within two hours he would be sitting at a table making conversation with the woman who had colonized his thoughts for the best part of a decade. Pouring himself a drink, he settled in a deep armchair, took out his copy of Gatsby and finished it just before half-past seven.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The traffic running east along Yan’an Road was as slow as the midweek rush hour and Joe was twenty minutes late arriving at M on the Bund. A bald Italian steered him through the glittering dining room to a table on the crowded outdoor terrace which appeared to have been set for only four people. Shahpour was already in situ with his back to the Bund, looking crisp and laundered, but with a certain nervous intensity in his eyes. A cool breeze was blowing south along the river. Miles was seated opposite him and clambered to his feet as Joe came towards them.

“Joe. Buddy. Great to see you.” He was wearing a black Polo shirt and his voice boomed around the terrace. “I believe you two have already met.”

Shahpour also stood up to shake his hand. He looked more anxious and somehow far younger than Joe remembered from the club.

“Yeah, we met in Zapata’s,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

Joe scanned the two vacant places. Where was Isabella? Both napkins were still folded onto white ceramic plates with the chairs neatly pushed in. Making the obvious calculation, he realized that she was not going to be coming to the restaurant. The day had been a prolonged anti-climax. Sensing his confusion, Miles said simply, “Izzy couldn’t make it,” and Joe felt a terrible gnaw of disappointment. “What happened to your date?”

“Ditto. Last-minute crisis.”

He wondered what had gone on behind the scenes. Joe had had no intention of inviting Megan and supposed that Miles had also lied about his plans. Did Isabella even know that he was living in Shanghai? That thought, in itself, was enough to drive him crazy with frustration. Yet the alternative was even worse: that Isabella knew of his presence in the city, but had told Miles she had no desire to see an ex-boyfriend who had lied to her throughout every moment of their relationship. Joe settled into his seat and ordered a vodka and tonic.

“So I guess it’s just the three of us,” he said.

At least it was a glorious evening on the Huangpu. Miles had secured one of the finest views in all Shanghai. From his chair, Joe could look directly across the river at the high-rise lightshow of Pudong while, ahead of him, the grand fluorescent curve of the Bund arced north towards Suzhou Creek. Long ago he had concluded that Asian cities were at their best at night: the chemistry of heat and neon was exhilarating. He lit a cigarette as two young Chinese waiters mournfully cleared away the empty space in which he had longed to find Isabella.

“So tell us about her.”

“About who?”

“Megan,” Miles said.

Joe looked at Shahpour, who had been drinking steadily since he arrived. Candlelight caught a look of disquiet on his face which suggested to Joe that he was either out of his depth or struggling to suppress feelings of anxiety. Hastily, Shahpour described his meeting with Megan and Joe in Zapata’s, a story that Miles appeared to have heard before. There were predictable jokes about “sharking for chicks” and Joe was glad when his vodka arrived, sinking half of it almost immediately to quench his thirst. He had given some thought to the reasons behind Shahpour’s presence at the dinner. It was possible that he was authentic Microsoft, and therefore a useful ally for Miles in trying to prove the legitimacy of his cover. More likely, however, Shahpour was also CIA and Miles had brought him along as a second pair of eyes. Yet he wondered why a trained intelligence officer would appear at a meeting of such importance looking so edgy. In Zapata’s, Shahpour had seemed impressively self-assured, if somewhat vain and intense, and Joe had been struck by both his intelligence and charm. Either this current mood was an act, the purpose of which would eventually be revealed, or Miles had said something which had momentarily undermined his confidence. If that was the case, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that Miles had belittled a junior colleague.

“So what do you make of Shanghai?” Miles asked. He might have been talking to a tourist just off a long-haul from Heathrow. A few feet behind him, the red flag of China was fluttering in an infrequent breeze and Joe reflected on the irony of the restaurant’s predominantly Western clientele quaffing Martinis and New World Chardonnays beneath an icon of communist repression.

“It’s like a frontier town, isn’t it?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve been impressed with almost everybody I’ve met. People are ambitious here, sometimes reckless, but the intelligence and energy of the average person you come across is amazing.”

“Han or laowai?”

“Both,” Joe replied. “This is Shanghai’s moment, isn’t it? The feeling of tens of thousands of people-Chinese and foreigners-converging on a single city in search of fame and fortune.”

“Try millions,” Miles replied, as if he were only interested in correcting Joe’s mistakes. Shahpour fixed his gaze at a point beyond Joe’s head and broke his silence.

“I think it’s a city of contradictions,” he said, touching the gold necklace at his throat. “You got rich and poor, locals and laowai, the cultured and the hedonistic. All of it existing side by side. It’s amazing like that.”

Was he stoned? Joe looked at his eyes, dark and swimming, then down at the tense, sculpted jaw. There was evident awkwardness in Shahpour’s relationship with Miles, yet the imbalance between them was so pronounced that Joe began to suspect an element of theatre. “So Miles is your boss?” he asked, trying to draw out more background.

“That’s right. Got me my job, actually. I was working in construction out here and he hired me. Tell me about Quayler.”

The immediate change of subject was telling: Shahpour was uncomfortable under questioning, as if he knew that Joe could quickly unravel his cover. Joe duly broke into his rote speech on pharmaceuticals, a performance with which his dining companions seemed predictably bored.

“Gaining sixteen per cent every year, huh?” Joe had finished talking about sector growth.

“That’s right. Sixteen per cent.”

Shahpour saved them. “So how do you guys know each other?”

“We met long ago in Hong Kong.” Here at last was a subject about which Miles could talk for hours.

“We were good friends.”

“Still are,” he barked, resting a hand on Joe’s back. “Miles was always very enthusiastic about doing business with China.” The grip and sweat of his hand was like a dead weight on Joe’s shoulders. “I’m not surprised he’s lasted as long as he has out here.”

Miles frowned at what was an accurate if harmless observation, and promptly withdrew his arm. An Australian waitress brought three menus to their table and began discussing the specials. Joe ordered seared tuna as a starter followed by fillet steak and went to the bathroom to wash his hands. He wondered if Miles had watchers keeping an eye on him in the restaurant. Setting his cellphone to vibrate, he checked his reflection in the mirror, his thoughts returning time and again to Isabella. He had believed that they were only moments from seeing one another; her absence from the dinner was like a broken promise. His work in Shanghai, he realized, was dangerously entwined in the possibility of their reunion; there were times when Joe felt that he could not rest, nor make progress, without knowing, one way or the other, if they had a future together. Was he mad even to think such things? How was it that a person so calm and objective in every other area of his life was held captive by this unrequited desire? He wanted answers. He wanted hope, or to be free of her and to move on.

Back on the terrace, Joe found three glasses of Chablis on the table and Miles waxing lyrical about the moral bankruptcy of Chinese businessmen. Shahpour seemed slightly more alert.

“You’re just in time,” Miles said with mock weariness.

“In time for what?”

“In time to hear me tell young Shahpour here that China will never succeed on the international stage until the guys doing business learn some manners.”

“Manners?” Joe said, placing his napkin on his lap.

“That’s right. The people here have no respect for us, no interest in our history, no understanding of our culture.”

“Which culture would that be?”

“Mine.” Miles swallowed an inch of wine and wiped his beard. “Let me tell you something about the Chinese, Shahpour. Joe, back me up here. For every man, woman and child in this country, it’s about making money. Nothing else matters.”

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ten years ago you were all for it. Let’s make as much dough in China as we can, and to hell with the consequences.”

“That’s because ten years ago I hadn’t experienced Chinese business practices at first hand.” Miles didn’t look too pleased to have been tripped up by forgotten memories of Hong Kong. He directed his next remark at Shahpour. “Fact is the Cultural Revolution stripped out individuality as you or I would understand it. So what are we left with? An organized, upwardly mobile, dedicated workforce that will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

“The American dream,” Shahpour muttered. Joe was beginning to like him.

“Don’t be a smart ass.” Miles gestured towards the glistening gold facade of the Aurora building. “Look at this place. Look at Pudong. What’s it built on?”

“Marshland?” Joe suggested. The vodka was beginning to take effect and he had decided to try to enjoy himself.

“I’ll tell you what it’s built on. Corruption and lies.” Shahpour caught Joe’s eye and there was a shared beat of understanding between them. Both had sat through Miles Coolidge monologues many times before. “A Chinese real-estate developer comes along, he pays a bribe to a city official, then the police forcibly remove all the residents from the area on his behalf. Any people refuse, the developer sends in hired thugs who break their hands. This is happening right across China. Farmers ordered off their land with no compensation. Peasant workers who’ve been farming the same ten acres all their lives suddenly told to move fifty kilometres away where there’s no agriculture, no community, no jobs. If they complain, they get fined or jailed. Then up goes a high-rise development built on soil they’d been working for generations. And who gets the profits? The developer.”

Joe was stunned. In Hong Kong, Miles would have described such injustice as the natural consequences of rapid economic growth. Is that what TYPHOON had done to him? Had he developed a conscience?

“Is this your standard line at the moment?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“In the old days, you always had a theory on every subject. You were like a politician on the stump, trotting out a favourite speech to anyone who would listen.”

Miles did not seem offended. “You wanna talk politics? You wanna talk about capitalism with Chinese characteristics?” Most of Miles Coolidge’s questions were rhetorical and he certainly wasn’t expecting an answer to that one. He gestured towards the infinite skyscrapers of Pudong. “This is what it looks like. It looks like apartments that sell for a hundred dollars per square foot and fuck the men that died building them. Modern China is an entity of supercities built on the sweat of migrant workers who get paid less than ten bucks a day for doing it and told to sleep in a room the size of my bathtub. That’s what they call progress here.”

“What’s your point?” Joe asked.

“My point, Joe, is that morality, the Judeo-Christian principle of love thy neighbor, is an alien concept to the Chinese.”

“Well, I should be OK then,” said Shahpour.

“How’s that?”

“I’m Muslim.”

That stopped the conversation dead. Joe sipped his wine and grinned at the Bund. Miles made an embarrassing remark about “how we’re all trying to forget that” and struggled on. “Will somebody listen to what I’m saying, please?” He drained his Chablis. Their starters arrived and Joe began eating. His tuna had been rolled in sesame seeds which crunched between his teeth. “The Chinese have no natural sympathy for their fellow man. Once you understand that, anything is possible.”

“If you say so, Miles. If you say so.”

In Joe’s experience, there were two default conversations whenever groups of Western men gathered for dinner in China. The first, which usually took place in the earlier part of an evening, was a complex if largely theoretical discussion about the future of the country. Would China become the great economic superpower that the West had long feared, or would the economy overheat and go the way of the other Asian tigers? Had Beijing been wise to buy up $300 billion of US debt, and could America afford to pay it back? Would the country’s increasingly well-educated, Westernized middle class eventually topple the communist government, having tired of the endemic corruption and repression of the one-party state, or were the great mass of Chinese too obedient, perhaps even too savvy, to undermine the political status quo? Miles ticked almost every one of these conversational boxes as the dinner continued, and Joe eventually realized that little had changed: the man who had taken Isabella from him was just as stubborn, just as confused and cynical about China as he had always been. One minute he was writing off an entire race on the basis that they didn’t think like Americans; the next he was siding with disenfranchised Chinese workers because their plight handed him a convenient stick with which to rail at Beijing. Close his eyes and Joe could have been back at Rico’s, defending Governor Patten against the latest Coolidge onslaught, or listening to one of his stock speeches about “the fucking futility of communism.” Yet was there really that much difference between their two positions? Joe was equally jaded about the government in Beijing. He despaired for a country so contemptuous of its own citizens. But at least he loved China; at least he could see that to impose Western values on a country as complex and as historically damaged as the Middle Kingdom was a policy every bit as lunatic as the invasion of Iraq. Miles, on the other hand, had nothing but contempt for the place: his enthusiasm for TYPHOON, for example, had not been born of a desire to free the Uighurs of Xinjiang, or the migrant workers of Gansu, from the shackles of totalitarian repression; it had been born of a desire to undermine China, to bring bloodshed to the streets, and to profit from the ensuing chaos.

For his part, Shahpour remained on the periphery of the conversation, drinking heavily and offering only the occasional contribution to the intellectual slanging match taking place in front of him. At first, Joe put this down to a younger man’s natural reticence in the presence of two age-old rivals. As the evening progressed, however, he began to sense that Shahpour shared few of his master’s beliefs; indeed, he referred affectionately to his “many Chinese friends” and spoke with admiration of the way the country had “pulled itself up by its own bootstraps” in the previous fifteen years. It simply didn’t make sense that Shahpour could be fighting alongside Miles on the same fool’s errand as TYPHOON. Besides, surely Langley would have preferred to have one of their few Farsi-speaking officers operating in Iran? Maybe Shahpour was Microsoft after all.

The second default conversation, which usually takes place towards the end of dinner, concerns sex. Unsurprisingly, if unwittingly, it was Miles who instigated it when the mobile phone resting on the table beside him lit up and produced the opening bars of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Joe had just finished eating his main course. He could hear a woman’s voice at the other end of the line when Miles picked up. He was certain that it was Isabella until Miles began replying in Mandarin and aimed a conspiratorial look at Shahpour.

“I gotta take this. Work,” he said, and stood up from the table.

As he walked off the terrace, Shahpour leaned forward and said, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“His ernai.”

Ernai is a Mandarin term for mistress or concubine. Shahpour’s candour surprised Joe but he maintained an expression of vague disinterest. “Really? How do you know?”

“Her name is Linda. She has her own special ring. When she calls, you get the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ When it’s work, you get the CTU phone from 24. If his wife ever phones up, it’s the training anthem from Rocky.”

Joe found himself laughing, even as he noted that Zhao Jian had been correct about Linda’s identity. “How long have they been seeing each other?”

“How do I know? Guy’s some kind of sex addict. I never saw anything like it, not even by Asian standards. No disrespect to his wife, right, but Miles is running chicks all over town.”

It was well past ten o’clock. The terrace was still packed with diners, most of whom had donned jackets or sweaters against the chill of the late evening. Cargo ships were moaning on the Huangpu. The lights of Pudong were as romantic and as breathtaking as any sight in China and Shahpour Goodarzi was casually shopping his boss to the Secret Intelligence Service.

“He doesn’t try to keep any of this under wraps?”

Shahpour looked confused. “Why would he? He’s not British, Joe. Every other guy in this restaurant probably has a chick shacked up in an apartment in Gubei. You know how things work over here.” He ran a finger along the surface of the table. “Still, I gotta say that Miles is operating at a whole other level. He’s tried to screw every Chinese girl from here to Beijing. One of my buddies calls him an MBA.”

“What’s that?”

“Married but available.”

Joe laughed, because he knew that it was vital to appear unfazed by what Shahpour was telling him. The more relaxed he appeared, the more information he would be able to glean. “So Isabella knows?” he asked.

Shahpour shrugged. He was aware that Joe and Isabella had once been involved, but was clearly working on the assumption that Joe no longer harboured feelings for her. “I have no idea what she knows. I’ve never met her. I’m not even sure they still live together.”

The revelation sent a fizz of satisfaction through Joe’s body. That would explain why Jian had never photographed her. He offered Shahpour a cigarette, which the American lit from the candle at the edge of the table. His eyes caught Miles coming back from the restaurant’s interior and Joe turned to find a rather forced look of regret on his face.

“Guys. I got a problem.”

He was behind Joe’s chair. The hot dead weight of his hand again.

“What’s that?” Shahpour seemed to have anticipated what was coming.

“Goddam conference call from Redmond, starting in thirty minutes. I have to get to the office.”

Joe balled his napkin onto the table and grinned in a way that was visible only to Shahpour. A waitress was clearing away their plates. “You have to leave?”

“ ‘Fraid so. But listen, it shouldn’t take long. Maybe I can catch you guys later? We got a lot of catching up to do. Shahpour, will you take care of this? Put it on Gates?”

“Yes, sir.”

And with that he was gone, shaking Joe’s hand and slipping off into the night. It seemed extraordinary that Miles should choose a few hours with Linda over the opportunity to probe more deeply into Joe’s cover. His departure had either been prearranged, as part of a rather obvious American trap, or Miles was still as craven and as selfish as he had ever been. Zhao Jian had a fixed camera outside Linda’s apartment complex which would at least provide Joe with evidence of whether he was telling the truth.

“Coffee?” he suggested, because he was tired after the sleepless night and needed a jolt to his wits.

“Sure. That’d be great.”

He waved the waitress over, ordered two espressos and lit a cigarette. Shahpour had settled back in his chair, visibly relaxing in the absence of his boss. Two red kites appeared in the night sky above his head, the ropes attaching them to the ground invisible to the naked eye.

“So does he do that sort of thing a lot?”

“What? Take off like that? Sure. I’ve sat in on meetings where Miles excuses himself for an hour, gets a massage and comes back smelling of Chanel No. 5. He calls it ‘sport fucking.’ ”

“What does Isabella call it?”

Shahpour acknowledged his point with a nod and said, “So what about you?”

“What about me?”

“What’s your story with Megan? Is that serious? Is it something you hope might develop?”

Two hours earlier, Shahpour would not have dared ask such a question, but it was an indication both of how much alcohol he had consumed, and of his growing confidence in Joe’s company, that he was now prepared to do so.

“It’s early days,” Joe replied. “I hope she was nice to you in Zapata’s.”

Shahpour exhaled smoke through a broad, self-confident smile. “That was funny that night. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“Not at all. To be perfectly honest, Megan and I weren’t together at that point. In fact I’d only just met her.”

“And yet she ends up talking to the one guy in the room who knows Miles Coolidge.”

“I know. Amazing coincidence.”

“Was it?”

The air went out of the conversation. Shahpour lowered his cigarette and fixed Joe with a look of such intensity that it forced his eyes to the table.

“Was it what?”

Everything was sober and still.

“Was it just coincidence?”

There are many ways that a spy is trained to deal with the unexpected, but mostly he must rely on his own judgment and common sense. Joe had been startled by what Shahpour had said, certainly, but he was not about to fold under pressure. He looked down at the fleets of ships on the Huangpu, boats so weighed down by cargo that they resembled submarines nosing south towards the East China Sea.

“You think I was trying to get to Miles?”

The American leaned forward. His gold necklace rocked against the base of his throat and Joe could see the sincerity, the seriousness which was at the very core of his character. What was striking was not so much the intensity of Shahpour’s mood, but the sudden air of expectancy about him, as if he was trying to broker an understanding. He had about him the air of a man who wished to confess something.

“That’s what Miles thinks,” he said.

Joe dismissed the theory with a practised look of astonishment. “Miles still thinks I work for the British government?”

“Do you still work for the British government?”

“No.”

Shahpour looked around him. The terrace was beginning to empty. He appeared to be weighing up the risks of his next remark. There were clearly consequences to what he was about to say and he did not wish to be overheard.

“What I’m about to tell you could get me fired.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t tell me.”

He leaned forward. “I’m like you used to be, Joe. Deep cover. I’m a NOC. I don’t work for Microsoft.” It was the drink talking. Alcohol and circumstance had handed a nervous, inexperienced spy the chance to confide in a colleague whose word he thought he could trust. “Same goes for our so-called buddy. Miles Coolidge knows as much about software as my Uncle Ahmed. We’re both Company. We’re both undercover. Miles has told me everything about your past.”

“Shahpour, you shouldn’t be telling me this. I am not who you think I am. I’m not with the Office any more…”

“Well, you see I just don’t believe that.” Joe’s denial had been persuasively sincere, but Shahpour was sticking to his strategy. “I think you’re here because of what happened to Ken. I think you’re here because you know what we did to him.”

“You’re talking about Kenneth Lenan?”

Joe was mesmerized by the confession of CIA culpability in his murder, but there was barely a blink of surprise.

“Of course that’s who I’m talking about. You wanna know why he was killed?”

Joe said nothing.

Shahpour wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Kenneth Lenan worked for us, OK? He came over. Six months ago he gave up a Uighur CIA asset to the MSS because he had conflicted loyalties with his bank balance. Lenan identified the Agency officer who had recruited that asset out of Guantanamo and told the MSS where he was living in San Francisco. That officer got his body dismembered by a Triad gang in Chinatown.”

“Shahpour, you’re being unprofessional…”

Goodarzi shook his head. “The officer’s name was Josh Pinnegar. You’re telling me you never heard of him?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” Joe was trying to keep his mood light and detached, but the flood of information, confirming every detail of Waterfield’s TYPHOON product, was breathtaking. “I work for a small pharmaceutical company because I got tired of this sort of-”

“Don’t lie to me, man.” There was a risk that Shahpour might shut down. Joe had to keep him talking. “My career is on the line here. My life. Now you came to me, Joe. I know why you’ve come to Shanghai. I know what it is that you need and I want to help you.”

What perplexed Joe about Shahpour’s entreaty was its extraordinary sincerity. He knew, with the vivid conviction of a blameless man proclaiming his innocence, that the American was telling him the truth. Somehow it couldn’t be any other way. Yet Joe could not risk the obvious possibility that RUN was being flushed out as part of a clumsy, second-rate plot. He had to believe that Shahpour was putting on an elaborate performance.

“I can help you,” he said. What was the best way of proceeding? He did not want to let go of the rope which now connected them. “I know British officials in China who will talk to you about this. I can put you in touch with-”

“I want it to be you.”

“I’m out.” For the first time, Joe raised his voice, as if he was offended by the repeated accusation. He had to play the role. He had to stay in character. “I’ve handed in my notice. I don’t have the keys to the shop any more. I’m private sector. Why do you think I’d be any use to you?”

“Forget it then.”

Their waitress had been waiting for a natural pause in the conversation and she now approached the table as Shahpour turned and stared at the lights of Pudong. The espressos were placed on the table and Joe spooned sugar into his cup as he hit on a possible tactic. Somehow he had to draw Shahpour out without compromising his own position.

“Listen, what do you expect me to say? If I’d come out here under operational cover, I’d hardly be likely to blow that cover on the basis of what you’ve just told me. Why are you doing this? Why would you be so uneasy?”

A burst of sulphurous pollution drifted over the terrace, yet it did not disturb Shahpour from his mood. He continued to stare out over the river like a scolded teenager. It was as if he had played his final hand and there was nobody left to confide in. Then, a breakthrough.

“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.”