Typhoon (45 page)

“Here is what we plan. The Americans have paid us in dollars and blood. They believe that they control us. But their government has sided with the pigs of Beijing who occupy our land. We are stronger than the infidels. We will defeat them.”

Abdul Bary was the most intelligent and thoughtful of the four men gathered in Shanghai that evening. He removed his baseball cap and placed it on the table. The edge of the cap touched a detonator and he separated the two objects like a superstition. Bary felt that the language of
jihad
, its grammar and vocabulary, sat uneasily on the tongue of Ablimit Celil, who was no more a man of God than the cats and dogs who roamed the filthy, dilapidated corridors of the anonymous apartment block in which they had found themselves. Every molecule of Celil’s shabby, corrupted face spoke of violence and a zeal for blood. Did he truly believe in the possibility of an Eastern Turkestan, or had he moved beyond politics into the facile, deadly playground of violence for its own sake? Yet what choice did Bary now possess but to follow such men? How else could he bring about change in his country, if not through bombs and terror? It had never mattered to him who bankrolled the safe houses, who smuggled the explosives, who prepared the bombs or drew up the plans. All he wanted was results. He wanted the Chinese to stop shooting unarmed Muslim boys and girls. He wanted to stop innocent Uighurs being suspended from the ceilings of Chinese prisons and beaten repeatedly by their guards. He wanted an end to electric shocks, to torture, to imprisonment without trial. He wanted Uighurs to be free to express themselves without fear of execution for “political crimes.” He wanted justice. This is what the Americans had promised them; this is what their new masters in Islamabad now seemed prepared to guarantee. If the short-term price of independence was an Islamist state, an Eastern Turkestan ruled by shariah law, so be it. The Uighur homeland would, at least, be independent. Chinese Xinjiang would have ceased to exist.

“Abdul?”

“Yes?”

He had not been listening. Celil fixed him with an impatient gaze. “You must concentrate. You must listen. It is the inspiration of our benefactor that we should kill the infidels who have betrayed our cause.”

Abdul placed the cap back on his head. He did not immediately understand the significance of what Celil was saying.

“The attacks will take place six days from now, on the night of Saturday June the 11th. After that, we will not see each other again for many months. They will be simultaneous attacks, inspired by the bravery and the courage of our brothers in New York, our brothers in Egypt and Madrid. It is our destiny not only to bring destruction to the infidel Chinese, but also to the Americans who have made their homes among them. Our attacks will also claim the lives of Miles Coolidge and Shahpour Goodarzi, spies who will pay for their treachery and cunning.”

“How do you propose this?” Abdul asked. His experience, his gut, immediately reacted against any unnecessary complications.

Celil paused. Did he sense Abdul’s reservations? To remove Miles and Shahpour had been the initiative of Hasib Qadir. It was the sole condition of the ISI’s co-operation, and one that Celil readily agreed to. The plan was otherwise as straightforward as it was barbarous. It would bring ruin to Hollywood and terror to the streets of Shanghai. On the evening of 11 June, Ansary Tursun was to make his way to Paradise City and purchase a ticket, using cash, for the advertised 8:15 performance in Screen Eight of the Silver Reel Cinema. It would be a Saturday night; the multiplex would be packed. Once the film was under way, nobody would notice when Ansary exited the auditorium after thirty minutes, leaving a rucksack under his seat.

At the same time, Ablimit would arrange a crash meeting with Miles Coolidge for 8:45 p.m. He would arrive at Screen Four for the 8:25 performance, conceal his IED beneath his seat in the back row, and leave by the western fire exit before the film had begun.

On the morning of Friday 10 June, Memet Almas was to send a text message to Shahpour Goodarzi, asking him to telephone his grandparents in Sacramento. Memet would then arrange an emergency meeting with Shahpour at Larry’s bar on Nanyang Road. The American would be asked to arrive at eight o’clock. Memet would go to the bar an hour earlier, leave his rucksack in the cloakroom, purchase a drink and a small plate of food, then leave before half-past seven.

The final member of the cell, Abdul Bary, was to take his wife and daughter to the sixth floor of the Paradise City mall and order a meal at the Teppenyaki Shinju, which was one of four restaurants located immediately beneath the seventh-floor foyer of the Silver Reel multiplex. On a Saturday night, each of the restaurants would be packed with diners, but it would be unusual for an impoverished Uighur family to be among them. Therefore, to avoid drawing the attention of passing security officials, Abdul was to dress as smartly as possible in the hope of passing himself off as a businessman visiting from overseas. At 8:15 he would begin to complain of a stomach cramp and go to the washrooms. He would take his rucksack with him, telling his wife that it contained necessary medicines. He would then withdraw the IED, place the device in the metal bin of the disabled washroom and return to his family. At 8:30, still complaining of sickness, Abdul would ask for the bill and leave the restaurant.

Celil now looked at each of the four men in turn. He had arrived at the most vital part of the meeting.

“You will go to the locations in order to prepare yourselves this week,” he told them. “Each of the four devices will be timed to detonate at exactly nine o’clock. You are responsible for this. God has provided us with the tools to carry out his sacred work and now you must perform his task. I leave your bombs with you now.” He indicated the three devices on the table. “Remember,” he said, “this is only the first stage of our battle, a first phase in our work. There is more to come. Now let God be in your hearts. May he bring us together soon in Beijing.”

The conversation with
Waterfield had prompted Joe to act. If he was going to engage Isabella’s co-operation in finding Ablimit Celil, this was the moment to do so. He did not feel that he was manipulating her by taking advantage of her mood of candour. On the contrary: she possessed vital information that it was his duty to extract.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How much do you know about what Miles has been doing in China since 1997?”

Isabella had removed her hat because the sun had been obscured by a bank of yellowed clouds. She did not look at Joe as she said, “Very little.”

“Are you interested in knowing?”

She touched her face. “Not really.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not in business together, are we? We’re husband and wife. I think it’s better that I don’t know things like that.”

“He doesn’t talk to you about his work? He doesn’t complain or celebrate or use you as a shoulder to cry on?”

“Never.” Isabella touched the fabric of her shirt. “Since when did Miles Coolidge ever need a shoulder to cry on?”

Joe met the remark with a nod of assent and tried a different, more combative tactic. “What if I told you that he was being investigated? What if I told you that MI6 has sent me to Shanghai to find out what he’s up to?”

It was an extraordinary gamble, not least because it assumed that Isabella’s loyalties lay with Queen and Country, rather than with her husband, the father of her child. Joe witnessed its impact in a moment of brittle shock which seemed to tighten Isabella’s entire body. She looked at him in a way that she had not looked at him since the eve of
wui gwai
. With disbelief. With disgust.

“Are you still not who you appear to be, Joe?” she said quietly, and Joe knew that he would have to be extremely careful with his answer. One false move, one glib remark, one overly defensive plea for understanding, and she would leave the café. His only hope lay in complete honesty. His only way of convincing Isabella to help him now was to tell her the truth.

“I’ll tell you who I am,” he said. His voice was very steady, very controlled. “I have nothing to hide from you any more.” He leaned forward, so that she could see directly into his eyes. “At the end of last year, I was on the point of leaving the Service. I’d been offered a job in Beijing and I was going to take it. I was sick of what was happening in Iraq, sick of the mood of defeat in London. Then David Waterfield came to me and told me that Miles had been at the forefront of a four-year American effort to destabilize Xinjiang.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Isabella said quickly, though the remark was designed not to placate Joe, but somehow to restore her rapidly evaporating self-confidence.

“The operation was called TYPHOON. It was disbanded after 9/11 when Washington, in its infinite wisdom, more or less decreed that all Uighurs were terrorists. But in the last two years a clandestine unit within the CIA, mounted with Pentagon approval, has been trying to revive TYPHOON in mainland China. Miles has been at the forefront of that effort because he maintains links with Uighur separatists who were involved in acts of sabotage prior to September 11th.” Joe saw that tears had welled in Isabella’s eyes but that she was willing them away. “Elements within the American government, as far as we know without presidential approval, are planning a terrorist atrocity at the Beijing Olympics. Miles is at this moment attempting to recruit the men who will carry out that attack. There is also an al-Qaeda cell somewhere in Shanghai planning a hit this summer. That cell has American backing. It’s what I’m here to try to stop. You ask me who I am. I’ve told you.”

Isabella tipped her head back and looked at a point in the sky, breathing very slowly. She reached down for the hat and again placed it on her head, as if to shield herself from what Joe was telling her. He wanted to say “I’m sorry,” he wanted to help her, but there was nothing he could do. Her husband was aiding and abetting terror.

“Why?” she said, shaking her head. She was staring at him, as if the whole thing was Joe’s fault, another ghastly, unforeseen consequence of his secret identity.

“I really don’t know,” he said, and began talking again, because he felt that by doing so he would at least keep Isabella at the café. “The Americans want a massive loss of face at the Olympics. That’s the simple answer. They want to show the world that China isn’t as modern and sophisticated and peaceful as she says she is.”

“How does killing people do that?”

Joe was briefly silenced, both by the question, with its unarguable logic, and by a passing security guard, who stared at him intently as if he were one of the exhibits at the museum. “The bombs would have a Uighur signature,” he said finally. “They would bring the world’s attention to the plight of the people of Xinjiang, to human rights abuses which have escalated tenfold since 9/11. The Americans would again start pressing for independence in Eastern Turkestan. If that happened, they would ultimately control the flow of oil into China, Japan and Korea.”

“Are you mad? Do you believe this stuff? Have you listened to what you’re saying?”

“Izzy, I’m not the guy who thought this up.” He had briefly lost his temper, but the effect of his words was startling. Isabella made a gesture of apology, muttering, “All right, sorry, OK,” as she sat back. Joe realized that he might quickly become her sanctuary. Who else, after all, did she have to turn to? “It’s a new version of the Great Game,” he said. “Who knows what Washington ultimately wants? To break up China? To make China more authoritarian? To bring sympathy to the Uighur people or to tar them with the same brush as al-Qaeda?” He unscrewed a bottle of water and poured its contents into a plastic cup. Isabella picked it up and drank from it without saying a word. “It’s like Iraq. They’ve ended up with the exact opposite of everything they said they hoped to achieve, so maybe chaos and instability is what they wanted in the first place.”

An announcement came over the public address system, praising “The Motherland, the Party, the Great Advance of Chinese Technology.” Joe saw that Isabella understood what was being said and realized, with a feeling of almost sibling pride, that she had learned to speak Mandarin. He waited until the announcement had ended before continuing.

“Have you heard of a man called Shahpour Moazed?”

“Of course I have. I know Shahpour.”

“Do you know what he does for a living?” Joe hoped that Isabella already knew about the CIA’s arrangement with Microsoft, or things were going to get even more complicated.

“I know what he does for a living,” she replied quietly.

“And what do you make of him?”

“What do
I
make of him?” She plainly regarded the question as an almost complete irrelevance. Nevertheless her response helped, in small measure, to lift the air of gloom which had descended on the conversation. “I think he’s the sort of person Miles would like to be.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Not Shahpour, specifically. I mean the lifestyle of the Iranian male. Iranian wives do all the cooking, keep the house spotless, raise the children. They’re completely subservient to their husbands. It’s Miles’s idea of paradise.” A dog began barking in the distance. “So is that who you’re following? Is Shahpour the traitor? Please don’t tell me that or I think I might be sick.”

Joe extracted a cigarette. He offered one to Isabella, who declined with a rapid shake of the head. She was grinding her teeth, the bones at the back of her jaw bulging like pearls. Had he been wrong to tell her? Had an impulse of cruel power, the wrath of his damaged subconscious, forced him to shatter what little happiness Isabella still possessed? Joe felt the sudden heat of guilt, as if he had deliberately exacted his revenge on a woman simply because she had failed to love him.

“Shahpour is one of the good guys,” he said, a statement which appeared to make no impact upon her at all. Isabella was trying to be brave, trying to maintain her dignity in the face of his revelations, but she was pale and drawn with worry. He longed to hold her. “There are two reasons why I came here today,” he said. “I wanted to see you because I needed to know that you were all right. I knew about Miles and I knew about Linda. I had some strange idea in my head that I could help you.” Isabella was absolutely still and made no reaction. Joe could not tell if she wanted him to stay and to keep talking, or to leave and never to see her again. It occurred to him that she had no idea of the depth of his love for her, no idea of the extent to which she had haunted his dreams for eight long years. “The second reason is that I think you can help to stop what’s going on. Shahpour has told me that Miles sometimes takes you when he meets the leader of the cell.”