Charles Cumming - Typhoon

“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.”

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 cafe 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.