At approximately 5:05 p.m. Joe became aware of a man standing close to the table, about two metres away, talking in Mandarin into a mobile phone. He was a middle-aged Han wearing cheap leather slip-on shoes, high-waisted black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. His demeanour roughly fitted the cheerful, portly description of Jian which Waterfield had provided in London. To be certain, Joe glanced at the man’s right hand and saw a thick scar running from the top of his wrist to the knuckle of his middle finger. (“Fishing accident,” Waterfield had explained.) In the same hand, Jian was carrying a slim, black attache case. Joe finished his coffee, placed the book in the rucksack and pushed his chair back from the table. As a formal signal, he bent down to tighten the laces on his shoes, and by the time he had stood up, Jian was already twenty metres away, heading into the park.
Joe’s task was simple: to follow his contact and to ensure that he was not being tailed. In due course, it had been arranged that Jian would stop at a clearing beside a small lotus-covered pond where local men and women played cards and majiang. At this point their roles would be reversed: Joe would continue ahead while Jian followed at a discreet distance, ensuring that he too was clean. The chances of either man having been compromised were minimal, but it was partly because they had exercised caution of this kind in the past that they had survived so long undetected in their respective careers.
Jian was walking in a westerly direction towards the new Grand Theatre and, very quickly, the noise of Shanghai became no more than a distant hum. To scout the location, Joe had visited Renmin Park on four previous occasions and he always enjoyed this sudden, miraculous tranquillity. It was as if the narrow paths and the branches of the trees around him somehow closed up to absorb the city’s perpetual din. Even the usually choking, polluted air seemed, for once, blessedly clean. After about three minutes Jian stopped and made a call on his mobile phone from the centre of the path in a standing position. This allowed Joe to observe the men and women around him for any matching behaviour. If they also stopped suddenly, or attempted to conceal themselves, Joe would abandon the meeting by walking directly out of the park. Jian would then be obliged to make emergency contact with his embassy handler and the operation against TYPHOON would almost certainly be shelved. Yet there was nothing unusual to report. During the conversation, a pair of young lovers, walking shyly, hand-in-hand, moved off the path and laid out a rug on the grass. An elderly Chinese lady, catching sight of a friend sitting on a nearby bench, waved and walked across to join her. Having closed his phone, Jian continued on his way. After about four minutes he came to a halt beside the lotus-covered pond and joined a small group of standing spectators who had gathered to watch a game of chudadi. Joe saw a movement in the trees beyond them, but it was just an elderly man practising taichi in the shade of a gingko. Joe moved past their group and was obliged to walk around an old wooden cart into which a gardener was throwing litter and weeds. The atmosphere was peaceful and he could hear only the murmur of talk, the slap of playing cards on the hard concrete tables, the plastic click of tiles. He then continued in a counter-clockwise direction towards the Shanghai Museum, sipping from a bottle of Evian and listening to the sound of singing birds. Joe knew that Jian was following him, that his experienced Chinese eyes had not detected a problem, because twice he used the reflective metal surface of the park bins to locate Jian’s position behind him. He had the easy, loose-hipped walk characteristic of Chinese men of a certain build and moved at a steady pace. When Joe had reached the south-eastern corner of the park, he waited at the circle of secluded benches where the meeting was scheduled to take place.
Joe saw that two of the four benches were occupied, but he was not concerned by this. The principal advantage of the location was the presence of a number of public address speakers in the vicinity which piped classical music into the surrounding area. Conversation was therefore almost completely smothered, negating any concerns about audio surveillance. Looking up from the path, Jian made eye contact with Joe for the first time and moved towards the furthest of the four benches, a broad smile on his cheerful face.
“Mr. Joe,” he called out. “Very good to see you again.”
The benches were situated in a small clearing, about half the size of a tennis court, and surrounded on three sides by a thick screen of acacia trees and peony bushes. Joe and Jian could be observed from the main path that runs along the southern perimeter of Renmin Park, but the sight of a middle-class Han conversing with a Westerner in this part of town was not at all incongruous. Their body language suggested that they knew one another reasonably well and had probably chosen to conduct an informal business meeting out of doors, taking advantage of the warm weekend weather. Jian shook Joe’s hand, pointed out a couple of half-finished skyscrapers and mentioned that Renmin Park had once been a racecourse. He then extracted a slim laptop computer from his attache case and settled down to business.
“What have you got for me today?” Joe asked.
A Chinese student, seated at the closest of the three benches, was listening to rock music at high volume on an mp3 player. A tinny, synthetic din of drums and guitars emerged from the moulded white earpieces. The second occupied bench was more than ten feet away and situated directly beneath one of the speakers. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” had just replaced the aria from the Goldberg Variations and Joe tried to remember the name of the film in which the music had featured.
“Your American friend goes out of town a lot,” Jian began. It had been decided that they would speak in English. “We have followed his car to the airport seven times.”
“Destinations?” Joe asked. It felt liberating finally to be discussing Miles Coolidge’s movements in the city where the American had made his home. After weeks of careful planning, the operation was finally under way.
“I have found it best in my years of long association with your company to be honest about my shortcomings,” Jian said. He was smiling, but his round eyes were plain and serious. “So I must say that we are only absolutely certain of his destination on two occasions. Our resources are small, you see.”
Joe appreciated his honesty and knew that he would enjoy working with Jian. It was the ones who had all the answers that you had to be wary of. “Of course,” he said.
“On both those occasions your friend flew to Urumqi.”
Joe concealed his surprised reaction by offering Jian a cigarette. The older man declined and Joe replaced the packet in the pocket of his trousers, having lit one of his own.
“And the other five? Were they all domestic flights out of Hongqiao?”
“No.” Jian shook his head. He was about fifty-five, with smooth, pouchy cheeks which reminded Joe of a squirrel storing up nuts for winter. “Twice he was collected by car from his apartment very early in the morning and driven to the airport at Pudong. If I was to speculate on the nature of these journeys, I would say that he was travelling to the United States.”