Typhoon

43

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.

“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.”