On the phone the other day you were asking about Quayler, which seems to be up and running. When he first arrived I put Joe in touch with a letting agency contact of mine from restaurant days who had an office free in a building looking out over Xintiandi. Joe’s found himself two Chinese staff and I think they moved in there last week. I also introduced him to an Australian girl who has an apartment to rent in the French Concession. If things work out, he should be in there by the end of March, and might be able to sublet for a year or even 18 months because the girl is going home to look after her mother who has cancer or something. So don’t say I don’t look after my friends, OK? My performance has been nothing short of heroic.
One small complaint: he has a habit of droning on about his job, but I suppose he’s new here and that’s what we all did when we first arrived, so I can’t really blame him. And he certainly seems to know what he’s talking about. You’d warned me that he could be a bit intellectual and withdrawn, but he hasn’t seemed that way to me. The guy can drink like Sue Ellen. I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned, but I’ve found him very open and funny and easy to hang out with. There’s obviously a big brain whirring away back there and I’d like to know more about his story. He says he’s lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, but always seems to change the subject whenever you try to delve too deeply into his past. (Christ, maybe he WAS a spy…)
Anyway, give me a call and fill me in. Better still, tell your newspaper you have to come down to do a story. We all want to know the truth about Joe Lennox…
Love Tom
Tom probably won’t thank me for reproducing his private correspondence, but I’m fascinated by these letters for what they reveal about Joe’s tradecraft. “Droning on” about Quayler, for example, would have been a deliberate tactic that he employed to prevent people digging around in his cover. The purpose behind it was simple: to bore anyone who happened to be listening to the edge of coma. Believe me, once you’d heard Joe’s ten-minute monologue about the future of niche pharmaceuticals- China has twenty per cent of the world’s population but only one point five per cent of the global pharmaceuticals market… The sector is growing by sixteen per cent a year, largely because drug use is rising among the Chinese middle classes… — you never wanted to ask him about his work ever again.
There are other details from the Westin letter that interest me: offering to pick up the bill; taking the time to talk to the elderly cleaning lady in the lobby; demonstrating a fluency in Mandarin. All of these things would have been premeditated tactics designed to impress upon Tom the idea that Joe Lennox was a generous, intelligent man, experienced in Chinese affairs, but without airs and graces, who would be worth cultivating as a friend. It’s also interesting that Joe was “three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne” not long after sitting down for brunch. Joe rarely drank alcohol during the day, but he must have intuited that Tom was the sort of person for whom booze was a semi-religion, and acted accordingly. Sipping mineral water wouldn’t have conveyed the right image. You can also guarantee that when Joe was supposedly “sleeping off a hangover at the Ritz-Carlton” he was in reality investigating the police and media reports into Kenneth Lenan’s murder and further waterproofing his cover. His decision to reveal that he had quit the Foreign Office on moral grounds would also have been intentional. If anything was designed to set off a firestorm of rumour and half-truth, it was that. I had told Joe that Tom Harper was one of the epicentres of Shanghai gossip, but I had no idea that he was going to give him so much to work with.
Then, of course, there is that mysterious line in the second letter: “I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned.” For some reason, Joe wasn’t telling anybody about his relationship with Isabella. This may have been tactical-he didn’t mention Miles by name to any of Tom’s friends, either-but neither was he responding to the myriad sexual opportunities which are part and parcel of life in Shanghai. The slight possibility of reconciliation with Isabella was one of the principal catalysts which drove Joe’s work in China. He told me later that summer that he had dreaded what he described as “the Zhivago moment,” when, passing in a bus or taxi, he might catch sight of Isabella on a busy Shanghai street or, worse, find himself standing in front of her at a party and seeing only vague recollection in her eyes. Despite all this, the hold she exerted over him continued to be unhealthy. I told him as much, of course, but he wouldn’t listen. When it came to Isabella Aubert, Joe was closed and distant, seemingly hell-bent on a collision between the two of them which I was convinced would end in tragedy.
32
All that remained of TYPHOON was four Uighur men living 2,000 miles apart, on opposite sides of China. A terrorist cell. A time bomb.
Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary lived and worked in Shanghai, but were never seen together in public. Abdul was married with a son and worked fourteen-hour days packaging parts for children’s toys at a factory in Putuo district.
Ansary had no girlfriend, nor any blood family to speak of. He had a part-time job as a waiter at a Uighur restaurant on Yishan Lu. Both men, under the guidance and tutelage of Professor Wang Kaixuan, had been responsible for carrying out low-level terrorist attacks against Han targets between October 1997 and late 2001. On Wang’s advice, they had curtailed their activities as TYPHOON disintegrated in 2002. Miles Coolidge had recruited them back two years later.
The third member of the cell was a twenty-nine-year-old Kazakh named Memet Almas who had bombed four Beijing taxis in successive weeks in 2000 using explosives shipped into China by the Macklinson Corporation. In January 2001, to the CIA’s dismay, Almas was arrested on unrelated charges of petty theft and sent to Beijing Second Prison for two years. In the circumstances, it was the best thing that could have happened to him. While he languished in jail, nine Uighur radicals, with whom he would almost certainly have been linked, were arrested and executed by the Chinese authorities. Upon his release in 2004, Memet met Miles Coolidge during a football match at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing and was instructed to move to Xinjiang and await further instructions. The cell, Miles told him, would perform only one or two large-scale terrorist attacks in China over the course of the next five years. Those attacks, he said, would draw unprecedented attention to the Uighur cause. Memet bided his time working on a clothing stall at a market in Kashgar. He was regarded as a quiet, hard-working man with little interest in religion or politics. His wife, Niyasam, was a schoolteacher who knew nothing about his revolutionary past. They did not have children. Ansary, Abdul and Memet were all practising Muslims, but Miles had forbidden them to attend mosque for fear of drawing the attention of the authorities. They were also ordered to shave off their beards.
The leader of the cell, and its oldest member, was Ablimit Celil. As a teenager in the 1980s, Ablimit had been arrested and imprisoned for stealing a Kalashnikov rifle from police headquarters in his home town of Hotan. In prison, he came under the influence of a Uighur imam who developed both his Islamic faith and his hatred of the ruling Han. Later Ablimit joined an underground group which bombed train lines, office blocks and other “soft” targets in Xinjiang. He took part in the Baren riot of April 1990 and fled into the Kunlun mountains alongside hundreds of other activists as Chinese troops poured in. Many of these activists, as well as villagers sympathetic to the separatist cause, were subsequently rounded up and imprisoned. However, Ablimit evaded capture and, two years later, planted a bomb on an Urumqi bus packed with Han revellers celebrating the Chinese New Year. Six people were killed when the device exploded. In 1997 he had been responsible for the deaths of eight soldiers and four catering staff at an army barracks in Turpan when a bomb he had planted in a store cupboard blew up during the evening meal.