Typhoon (46 page)

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 café 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.”

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.

Celil had been fortunate in the timing of his contact with Miles Coolidge. He had sent a text message earlier in the day requesting a crash meeting at the Silver Reel cinema. Miles had been standing in the master bedroom of his villa in Jinqiao, preparing to leave on a five-day business trip to Beijing. Had Celil sent the message just three hours later, Miles would have been taxiing on the runway at Hongqiao and his planned demise amid the carnage of the Paradise City mall would have been rendered impossible.

Jesse was in his father’s arms as the phone beeped in his pocket. Isabella was washing her hands in the bathroom. Two of Miles’s battered leather suitcases were packed and waiting in the hall. To his startled, frustrated eyes, the contents of the message were straightforward enough; to anyone who happened to be looking in—a Chinese spook, say, or a paranoid, nosey wife—they were at best a number plate, at worst a line of garbled cyber nonsense.

SR4J 825M

“SR4” was Screen Four of the Silver Reel multiplex, their habitual meeting place. “J” was the first letter of
J
nw
n
, the Mandarin word for “tonight.” “825” was the time of the screening, to which Miles routinely added twenty minutes in order to allow Celil time to find his seat. “M” was an arranged code to imply that the meeting was urgent.

“Fuck,” Miles said, lowering the boy to the ground.

Turning her face from the sink, Isabella shot her husband a look of frustrated annoyance and eyeballed their sleepy son. Jesse was three years old. Use that kind of language in his presence and he’d be repeating it until Christmas.

Miles pressed “Reply” and began texting his response. Jesse said, “Carry me, Daddy,” as his father typed the simple word “OK.”

“Looks like I’m not going to Beijing after all.” Miles looked up. “You feel like going to the movies tonight, honey?”

For Shahpour Moazed and Joe Lennox, the evening of Saturday 11 June had also assumed a vital importance.

As soon as Shahpour had received the text message mentioning his grandparents, he had contacted Joe and arranged to meet him for a late Friday drink at Bar Rouge. A stylish lounge where beautiful Chinese girls sip cocktails and size up the wallets of Western businessmen, Bar Rouge has a large outdoor terrace overlooking the Huangpu River, with clientele as fashionable—and frequently as vacuous—as any you will encounter in Shanghai.

“Memet wants to meet,” Shahpour said. “At Larry’s. His suggestion.”

Joe, looking out at the warm neon river, took a sip of his vodka and tonic and said, “When?”

“Tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. I got a call at my office this afternoon.”

The plan that Joe had devised was straightforward. Shahpour would go to the bar at eight. He would meet Almas and listen to what he had to say. He would buy him some drinks, order some food, tutor him in the ways of American football. Meanwhile, Joe would occupy a nearby table and follow Almas when he left the bar. At a suitable opportunity he would confront him, attempt to lead him to one of the quieter establishments near Nanyang Road and declare himself as an officer of the British SIS. This seemingly wild strategy possessed an absolute logic and coherence. While Almas struggled to work out what was happening to him, Joe would reveal that MI6 knew of the cell’s plans to carry out an attack in Shanghai. He would name Ablimit Celil and Ansary Tursun as two of his co-conspirators. He would then present Almas with a choice: to become an agent of British intelligence, informing on the activities of the cell, or to face immediate incarceration, and probable execution, at the hands of the Chinese authorities. Joe was in a position to offer Almas’s wife, whom he knew was currently living in Kashgar, residence in the United Kingdom. In due course, if he so wished, Almas would be able to join her. All that Joe required in return for a comfortable life in the West was three years of co-operation: product on the Shanghai operation and full details of any subsequent activities in the run-up to the Olympics of 2008.

It was the sort of snap recruitment in which Joe Lennox specialized and, in different circumstances, it might well have worked. It was just that it was happening far too late. This time, Joe Lennox was behind the game.

As he had been preparing to leave the Agosto Language School on Yuanda Road four days earlier, Professor Wang Kaixuan had been called into the secretary’s office to receive a telephone call. He had assumed that it was a student contacting him to discuss a recent assignment or to arrange private tuition. He had assumed wrong.

“Teacher.”

The low, hollow voice of Abdul Bary cut short his breath.

“Abdul?”

“Say nothing more.” Bary was whispering. “I have a warning.”

Wang, his back turned to a group of American students paying fees in the office, had covered the mouthpiece and stepped closer to the wall.

“An operation is in motion. An operation for Saturday. It is the plan to start a new era and to destroy our former friends. I am calling only to warn you. If you are travelling to Zikawei, turn back. Do not come to Shanghai this weekend. If anybody from our past has invited you, they are traitors. Do not trust them. I am telling you this only to protect you. I am telling you this in thanks for all that you have done.”

“Zikawei?” Wang had replied. “Zikawei?” Nobody had invited him to Shanghai. He had not even spoken of TYPHOON since John Richards’s visit in May. “Are you there?”

The line had gone dead. Behind him, an American was shouting, “Dude! No way! Dude!”

Bary was gone.

Ablimit Celil left the Xiaotaoyuan mosque at half-past six. He had decided to walk the relatively short distance south to the confluence of shopping malls at Xujiahui. It was a close, humid evening, gluey sweat forming beneath the straps of his cheap polyester rucksack, yet the weight of the bomb, the pressure of the operation, had been lifted by his hour of prayer. It had been Celil’s first visit to a mosque in more than two years; breaking his self-imposed exile had remade him.

In Jinqiao, in the kitchen of their villa, Miles and Isabella were edging round an argument.

“So what movie are we going to see?” she asked.

Miles was replacing a broken plug on a microwave oven and flashed his wife a look of impatience. Isabella knew as well as he did that his trip to Beijing had been cancelled because there was an emergency in Shanghai. He needed to get to the Silver Reel by half-past eight. It would look better if she went with him.

“It’s Chinese,” he said. “You’ll like it.”

“What’s it about?”

Isabella must have been in one of her moods; she didn’t normally ask so many questions. Lately she’d been behaving strangely. He wondered if she knew about Linda. He had checked the Silver Reel listings online and now proceeded to describe the basic outline of the film.