As a sworn enemy of the Communist Party, Ansary Tursun took little interest in the handover celebrations. At around nine o’clock, on what was a typically warm summer evening in Urumqi, he left his parents’ apartment on Tuan Jie Lu and made his way to the bazaar at Shanxi Hangzi. He walked through the narrow channels of the market, past stalls selling vegetables, sweaters, nuts and dried fruit, occasionally stopping to sift through a table of cassettes or to make brief conversation with Uighur friends from the neighbourhood. The market was crowded and noisy: Uighur songs competed with the new popular music from India and combined with the shouts and arguments of the stallholders to create a discordant yet somehow innocuous din. Large crowds were gathered around television screens showing highlights of the fireworks display over Victoria Harbour.
At the western edge of the market, Ansary became aware of a smell that he loved-pieces of lamb being grilled on a kavabtan. As it always did, the odour of cumin and meat and slow-burning charcoal triggered his appetite and he ordered kavab and nan from a young man who took his responsibilities as a chef so seriously that he barely spoke a word in conversation. As a treat, Ansary also purchased a bottle of musdek piva, opening it with his teeth and taking a first, thirst-quenching slug of lager before his lamb had finished cooking.
In order to eat, he was obliged to sit at one of the small wooden tables beside the kavabtan, because his left arm had still not recovered sufficiently from the period of solitary confinement at Lucaogu prison. Ansary had been hung from a wall by his left arm and leg for more than twenty-four hours; as a result, he could not stand up while holding both the kavab and the bottle of beer. Ansary had adjusted quickly to the constraints of a temporary injury and rarely reflected on the injustice of his physical condition; his scars were purely psychological. As he ate, placing his food on the table in order to drink the ice-cold beer, he made conversation with the mother of the young man who had served him, a middle-aged woman who wore a black skirt, a headscarf, a bright red jacket and a pair of thick, knee-length socks in which she kept the stall’s money. When she was not threading chunks of marinated lamb onto metal skewers with practised efficiency, she was scrabbling around inside the socks trying to find change for a customer.
It was only when Ansary turned to observe an argument between two cloth tradesmen at a neighbouring stall that he realized he was sitting no more than a stone’s throw from Abdul Bary. Abdul had been one of Ansary’s fellow prisoners at Lucaogu. A former student of Professor Wang Kaixuan at the University of Xinjiang, Abdul had spoken passionately in prison of his desire to topple the provincial government in Xinjiang. The two men had been released on the same day and had recovered from their ordeal at Wang’s apartment, under pretence of paying their respects for the death of his son, Wang Bin.
Aware that Abdul might be under surveillance, Ansary made no attempt to communicate with him, but calculated that his appearance was more than coincidence. He tried to watch him as carefully as possible. He was buying fruit at a nearby stall. Was he trying to tell him something with his body language? Did he want Ansary to follow him to a new location, or even to pretend that they had accidentally bumped into one another? It was not clear. Yet it would be extremely dangerous for them to be observed-or, worse, photographed-by Chinese surveillance officers or by informers within the Uighur community. The authorities needed only the slightest provocation, backed up by scant evidence, to prosecute Uighur men for treasonable activities.
Ansary finished his kavab and wiped his fingers on a small piece of cloth which he kept in the hip pocket of his trousers. He drank the rest of the beer and watched Abdul pay for a melon and a bag of apples. At no point did his fellow prisoner turn round and attempt to make eye contact. Perhaps his appearance in the market was just coincidence after all. Finally, he walked away from the stall. Ansary noted that he was not limping. The injury to his leg, inflicted by a laughing guard who had torn out the largest toenail of Abdul’s right foot, must have healed. A few metres away, Ansary noticed a Han trying on a doppa, the coloured hats worn by Uighur men throughout the year. It was an incongruous sight: they were at the minority end of town, in an area where Han were rarely seen. As Abdul passed him, disappearing into the narrow alleyways of the bazaar, the man returned the hat to its table and began to follow him. It was as obvious to Ansary as it would have been to Abdul that he was a plain-clothes surveillance officer with the PLA. Ansary turned towards the kavabtan and indicated that he wished to drink some tea.
The note was hidden between the base of the dirty metal pot in which the middle-aged woman had brewed the tea and the tray on which she carried it to Ansary’s table.
“Your friend left this for you,” she said. “Do not come here again.”
Ansary saw the crumpled piece of paper, folded once in half, and looked around to see if he was being watched. When he was sure that there were no eyes upon him, he lifted the pot, poured the tea, and opened the note. His heart was racing, but he was intrigued by Abdul’s sleight of hand. How had he given the note to the woman without being observed?
The words had been written quickly, in black ink:
Our teacher has a new friend who will provide for us. The friend is rich and has our best interests at heart. We are not to meet or to communicate until the teacher instructs us to do so. You have a class with him at dawn on the first morning of August at the place we both know. Tell as many of our brothers as you can. The teacher’s friend has a great and wonderful plan. I am glad to see you. Burn this.
Professor Wang Kaixuan claimed that he watched the Hong Kong celebrations on a small black-and-white television set at his apartment in Urumqi, although I later discovered that this, like so many of his utterings, was a lie. TRABANT had calculated-correctly as it turned out-that the eyes of Chinese Intelligence would be momentarily averted by the handover celebrations and that it would therefore be a good opportunity to hold a meeting in a room at the Holiday Inn to discuss developments with TYPHOON. Wang must have watched highlights of the broadcast when he returned home at about two o’clock in the morning. His wife was ill in bed next door, which gave him the opportunity to mutter insults under his breath whenever Chinese triumphalism threatened to get out of hand. Drinking a beer on the very couch where his slain son had slept for almost every night of his twenty-five-year life, Wang marvelled at the stoicism of the magnificent British soldiers as they paraded in the rain, and raised his glass of beer to Patten as tears fell from the governor’s eyes. How many other Han Chinese, he wondered, on this night of triumph for the Motherland, would be toasting the health of the “Triple Violator” and his “capitalist running dogs” in London?