Charles Cumming - Typhoon

The voice at the end of the line was impatient and tired. “Yes?”

“This is Joe Lennox.”

“Who?”

An inauspicious start. “I’m a friend of your brother.”

A dawning recognition. “Oh, Mr. Joe.”

They were speaking in Mandarin. If Yun was alarmed by the fact that he was speaking to an undercover British intelligence officer on an open line, he betrayed no sign of anxiety. He asked after Joe’s health and informed him that Jian was at a funeral in Yancheng.

“And what about you? What are you up to this evening?”

“I have a stomach cramp, Mr. Joe,” Yun replied.

“You’ll feel better after a cab ride. How soon can you get to Xujiahui?”

A long pause. Joe felt that he could hear Yun sitting up, stretching, checking his watch. “After eight o’clock?”

“That’s good of you. I have urgent business. Is your other brother there?”

“My other brother also at the funeral.”

Joe had been walking around his apartment as he spoke, filling a shoulder bag with a back-up mobile phone, his wallet and a street plan of Shanghai. “Meet me at the entrance to the Paradise City mall,” he said. He was looking for his keys. “Get there as soon as possible.”

Shahpour was on his way to Larry’s when Joe called with the bad news. He explained that Celil had also called a meeting with Miles at the Silver Reel multiplex. The opportunity was too good to resist: he was going to meet Yun at Paradise City and attempt to follow Celil to his home. Once he had established where he was living, Joe would alert the MSS, anonymously, that Celil was a Uighur separatist planning a terrorist atrocity in Shanghai. After that, he was China’s problem.

“Where does that leave me?” Shahpour asked. He felt a cramp of frustration. This wasn’t what he wanted. This wasn’t what they had planned. “Where does that leave my meet with Almas?”

“It leaves it exactly where it was. Chances are I won’t even get close to Ablimit tonight. He’s too cautious. Neither Yun nor I even know what he looks like. I’m taking a gamble that he’s either going to leave by the western fire exit or take the stairs to the restaurants. You’ll have to try and keep Memet at the bar for as long as you can. Make regular trips to the bathroom. Go out and buy chewing gum if you have to. Get him drunk. Get him a girl. If I haven’t had any luck with Ablimit by quarter-past nine, I’ll jump in a cab and come to you. Is that all right?”

Shahpour looked at the digital clock in his taxi. At most, he would have to kill ninety minutes in Memet’s company. It wasn’t too bad. He had done it before. “That’s all right,” he conceded. “I can take care of it.”

Shahpour soon became snarled in traffic at the edge of the French Concession. The driver was listening to coverage of a ping-pong tournament on the radio. With only five minutes to go until the meeting, Shahpour paid his fare and jogged the last quarter-mile to the bar, arriving in a breathless sweat. Almas usually waited on the second floor, in one of the quieter corners of the bar, away from televisions and the clack of pool, so Shahpour walked upstairs and scanned the customers. There were between thirty and forty of them, almost all exclusively expat males from Europe and North America. Rock music was playing on the sound system. Draught beers and burgers were flowing. He made a complete circuit of the room but saw no sign of Almas. Downstairs it was even busier: Chinese girls in short skirts flirting with customers; Australians watching highlights of a rugby match; Brits and Americans telling stories and quaffing margaritas. Still no sign of Almas. Shahpour checked the bathrooms, checked the street. He told himself to relax and buy a drink. The Kazakh was probably caught in the same traffic which had delayed him on his way from Fuxing Road. Shanghai on a Saturday night was always chaotic. Shanghai on a Saturday night was murder.

Joe took one look at the cars and mopeds clogging up the French Concession and decided to walk to Xujiahui. It was a stifling night, horns and engines adding to the bass notes of heat and pollution which thrummed through the Chinese summer. He headed south along Hengshan Road, passing Zapata’s, passing a strip of bars where girls whistled at him as he walked by, trying to lure him inside for a drink. He made it to the entrance of the Paradise City at 8:15, by which point Abdul Bary, eating sushi with his wife and daughter in the Teppenyaki Shinju, had begun to complain of a stomach ache. His wife, wearing a necklace which her husband had given to her as a birthday present at the start of the meal, placed her chopsticks in their holder and put a protective hand on his back.

“Are you all right?”

The restaurant was almost completely full. Abdul Bary looked up and winced. His daughter was on the far side of the room, gazing into a fish tank.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s your birthday.” He managed a brave smile. “There is medication in my rucksack. I will be fine.”

Moments later, Bary had locked the door of the disabled bathroom. All around him he could hear the steady murmur of laughter and conversation, the lives of the men, women and children his comrades planned to kill.

He lifted the lid of the bin and removed several handfuls of damp paper towels, a crumpled sheet of newspaper and an empty packet of cigarettes. He unzipped the rucksack, removed the IED, and placed it at the base of the bin. The phone, he saw, was active. The read-out said 8:23 p.m. He covered the bomb with the newspaper, camouflaged the device with the towels and closed the lid. Someone was knocking on the door. Bary flushed the toilet and washed his hands. He placed six rolls of toilet paper in the rucksack to give it weight and bulge, and smiled as he opened the door.

On the seventh floor, barely thirty or forty metres away, Ansary Tursun stood up in Screen Eight of the Silver Reel multiplex. The rows surrounding him were almost completely full. He had been among the first people to arrive in the auditorium, placing the rucksack under his seat as soon as he had sat down. As the advertisements began, he could feel the bomb resting against the heels of his shoes. It was wedged against the wall. Nobody would know it was there. Nobody would suspect a thing.

Ablimit Celil saw Miles Coolidge enter the cinema at half-past eight. His wife was with him. The cinema, to his frustration, was half empty, a flaw in the plan which he blamed on the Han appetite for bankrupt American culture. Miles and Isabella sat down. Ablimit was in his usual seat, alone, at the far end of row Q. Just as Ansary had done, he had wedged his rucksack against the rear wall of the cinema. When Miles approached in twenty minutes’ time, he would have no idea that it was there.

A message shown on the screen requested that patrons refrain from using phones during the film. Ablimit smiled and thought that he saw Isabella dutifully switching off her mobile.

The lights in the cinema dimmed like an eye test.

Professor Wang Kaixuan’s email had been sitting on an SIS server for three long days. By a stroke of good fortune, an alert analyst in the Far East Controllerate, one of the few with knowledge of RUN’s operation in Shanghai, had noticed that Joe had failed to download it. Late on the morning of Saturday 11 June he had telephoned David Waterfield and given him the news.

Within two minutes Waterfield was dialling Joe on a scrambled line to Shanghai. There wasn’t time for contemplation or delay. He was enraged.

“Joe?”

Joe had just spotted Zhao Jian’s brother at the entrance to the Paradise City. He was walking up the steps towards him, his clothes and body soaked with sweat.

“David?” He wondered why London was calling on the Quayler mobile and assumed that the conversation was encrypted. “It’s not a great time.”