Charles Cumming - Typhoon

Shahpour Moazed was hailing a taxi on Fuxing Road just as Almas was walking out of the bar. He had cleaned his apartment. He had shaved off his beard. The prospect of the meeting filled him with an excitement that was as new as it was unexpected. This was the impact that Joe Lennox had had on his life; there was now vigour and meaning to his work. If Joe succeeded in his recruitment of Almas, Shahpour’s years in China would not have been wasted. Together they would put a stop to the bombs. Together they would bring Miles Coolidge to his knees. Shahpour had adjusted to the probing, thorough approach of the British. He trusted Joe implicitly and believed that the evening would be an unqualified success.

For his part, Joe had spent most of the day fielding Quayler-related calls at his apartment in the French Concession. In mid-afternoon, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was a Saturday, a representative from a German pharmaceutical company had telephoned requesting detailed information about Chinese patent law. At 4:50 Joe had taken a call from his father. At about 5:15 he had switched off his phone and taken a nap, waking an hour later to discover a text message from Megan-“Dinner?”-and a follow-up from Tom which convinced him that they were working in tandem. He had broken things off with Megan ten days earlier. She had taken the news calmly, but appeared to be trying to hold on to the possibility of a reconciliation. As things turned out, it would be several months before they would see one another again.

Isabella rang just after seven. Her number was programmed into Joe’s mobile and his excitement at seeing the read-out was tempered only by the thought that she might be calling with bad news.

“Joe? It’s me. Izzy.”

Her voice had a quality of defiance perhaps even of mischief. She was standing in Jesse’s bedroom at the villa in Jinqiao, watching Miles drinking a glass of white wine in the garden below. For days now she had been looking at her husband as if he were an apparition. Even given all that she knew about Miles Coolidge, it was impossible to imagine that the man she had once loved had organized an operation on the scale of TYPHOON, given his blessing to a terrorist cell which planned to kill thousands of innocent Chinese.

“It might be happening tonight,” she said. She was betraying the father of her child and yet her words felt like an act of liberation. “He’s taking me to the cinema.”

In view of Joe’s plans for Larry’s, the timing was disastrous. Yet to hear Isabella’s voice was thrilling. She had kept her word.

“Where?” Joe said.

“Silver Reel. Eight twenty-five in Screen Four. It’s the usual place.”

“That’s in less than two hours. When did this get decided?”

“This afternoon. Miles got a text message. He was on his way to the airport. Cancelled everything.”

Isabella looked outside. To her horror she saw that Miles was no longer in the garden. She looked directly below the window but saw no sign of him on the patio. How long had he been gone? Was he already in the house, listening to everything she had said? For a moment she froze, unable to know what to say or do.

“Isabella?”

“I have to go,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I said I have to go. He’s coming.”

Joe ignored her concerns. He was frustrated that it had taken her so long to ring him. Why had she waited? What was the reason for the delay? “Screen Four?” he said.

Isabella was listening at the door of the bedroom, torn between her loyalty to Joe and the pure fear of losing everything. She crossed the room and again looked out of the window. Miles’s empty wine glass was toppled over on the grass. Against her better judgment she whispered, “Yes. Screen Four.”

Footsteps on the staircase. At the top or the bottom? It sounded as though Miles was already upstairs. Jesse, God bless him, was splashing and shouting in the bath. Miles would surely have assumed that Isabella was with him. And there was indeed a look of surprise on his face when she emerged from their son’s bedroom, holding the phone.

“Who you been talking to, honey?”

She longed to say the single word “Joe,” just to see the look on Miles’s face, just to let him know that the game was up. Instead she lied and told her husband that a friend had called from England.

“So you ready to go?” he asked. Mary, the ayi, emerged from the bathroom with Jesse wrapped in a towel. “The driver’s waiting downstairs.”

“I’m ready to go,” she replied. “I’ve been ready for ages.”

By the time Isabella and Miles were on the Yan’an Road, making their way through Saturday night traffic towards Xujiahui, Abdul Bary had told his wife that, as a surprise on her twenty-seventh birthday, he was taking her to the Teppenyaki Shinju restaurant on the sixth floor of the Paradise City mall. He explained that he had been saving up for weeks, although the money to pay for the dinner had actually come from Ablimit Celil. He said that he knew how much she loved Japanese restaurants; this one had a fish tank which their daughter would adore.

Ansary Tursun had bought his ticket, using cash, for Screen Eight of the Silver Reel multiplex. He saw to his satisfaction that the cinema was going to be packed. Unusually for China, two American summer blockbusters had been released in the space of two weeks: the first was showing in Screen Three, the auditorium immediately adjacent to Screen Four, the second in Screen Eight. Under the disinterested eyes of an elderly guard, Tursun wandered out of the lobby, past the life-size cut-outs of Elmo and Bugs Bunny, and headed down to the fifth floor. He looked idly at some shirts in French Connection and spent half an hour browsing in a branch of the Xinhua bookshop. Closed-circuit television recordings suggest that he read the first few pages of a historical study of ancient Egypt before replacing the book on a shelf.

As he returned to the seventh floor, walking back into the cinema, it is possible that Ansary Tursun would have passed Ablimit Celil. Did they look at one another? Did they find some way of acknowledging the enormity of what they were about to set in motion? The lobby was packed with teenagers on dates, students queuing for popcorn, laowais trying to work out which films were dubbed and which ones had English subtitles. Beneath a bank of television screens playing trailers for forthcoming features, Celil paid for his ticket using a credit card. The card had been registered in a false name, to a Dubai postal address, by Mohammed Hasib Qadir. Ablimit had used it many times and it had never given him any problems.

It was 8:15 p.m.

Joe Lennox had a decision to make. He had gone directly to the Silver Reel on the afternoon of his meeting with Isabella. He knew that there were three separate exits from Screen Four, all of which it would be impossible to cover alone. Without the assistance of Zhao Jian, he was stymied. With a man covering the western fire exit, another in the lobby and a third on the staircase which linked the multiplex to the restaurants on the sixth floor, it might be possible to track Celil. But he had been counting on Shahpour’s assistance when the day came. It seemed an act of the cruellest fate that both Almas and Celil had requested crash meetings at the same time. Perhaps there was a problem with the cell, an ideological conflict, a clash of personalities. He would be fascinated to learn what Almas told Shahpour during their meeting at the bar.

He rang Zhao Jian’s number. There was no reply. He waited two minutes and tried again. An answering machine kicked in and Joe left a message, requesting that Jian contact the offices of Quayler pharmaceuticals as soon as possible.

Joe had a second number for Jian’s brother, Yun, which he had never had cause to use. He dialled it. This time, someone answered.