Typhoon

52

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.

“Don’t look so upset,” he had the nerve to say. “The Yanks are going through exactly the same routine with Moazed.”

“What do you mean?”

“He realized what he’d done last night and got himself to the consulate sharpish. Nowadays, when a bomb goes off and you look like he does, there’s only one direction the authorities are going to point the finger.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Shahpour is most likely already on his way back to Langley. His actions last night, perhaps Joe’s as well, will be written about in Western blogs, reported in the Western media, but the story will be withheld from the Chinese. You don’t need me to tell you that the government here doesn’t give a flying fuck what the West thinks about China. Just as long as its own people are kept in the dark, Beijing is happy.”

“And what about Miles Coolidge?” I asked.

“What about him?” Bob had reacted to the question as if I was being distasteful.

“Well, wasn’t he involved in all of this? Isn’t he obliged to leave China as well?”

“You didn’t know?” he said, his soft, puffy face colouring with worry. “Did nobody tell you?”