Shahpour turned, scraped his chair towards the table and sank his espresso in a sharp, controlled flick.
“When he arrived there, he saw that it was a good summer and that he’d made a good choice. Then the winter came. He’d never seen snow before, never seen ice on the roads. He had an uncle in Sacramento who invited him over to California. And what does my dad find? That it’s seventy degrees outside in the middle of winter. So he finishes his degree, he moves to Sacramento, he gets a job cleaning dishes in my great-uncle’s pizza parlor. But my dad was smarter than the other guys, you know? He worked hard and started up his own place, his own restaurant. Today he’s a millionaire. He has six children, a grandson, five properties in three different states. He owns twenty-five pizza delivery outlets in the California area.”
“American dream,” Joe said. Shahpour silenced him with a raised hand.
“I’m not trying to sell you America,” he said. “I’m not trying to sell you an ideal. I know that our country has its faults. But I could see past them, you know? I still can. I joined up because I wanted to make a difference, to show that a child of Iran could deal in something more than hate.”
“I can understand that.”
Shahpour looked relieved. “I think you can,” he said. The cry of a bird went up over the Huangpu River. “Everybody heard about what you did, Joe. Everybody heard why you’d quit. I decided to talk to you because you have ideals, because you’ll see the craziness of what’s happening here. Because you’re my best chance of getting out of this.”
So that was it. Waterfield’s plan had worked. The illusion of RUN’s exit from Vauxhall Cross had convinced a compromised American spook that Joe Lennox was the answer to his prayers.
“Getting out of what?” To Joe’s dismay, the waitress appeared again and punctured the conversation at a vital moment. Shah-pour stared back at the entrance to the restaurant, as if to reassure himself that Miles was nowhere to be seen. “Getting out of what?” Joe said again. It had struck him, not for the first time, that at the tender age of thirty-four he was now regarded as a wise old hand by men who looked as young as he still felt.
“Getting out of what’s happening.”
“And what is that? What is happening?”
Shahpour twisted his narrow body to face Joe. He lowered his head. It was as if the open air could not bear the burden of such a heavy secret. Then he leaned towards Joe and looked up into his eyes. “Miles is planning something.” He was whispering. “It has Pentagon approval, covert CIA backing. Funded through Saudi channels. An operation here, on mainland China. We have a Uighur cell asleep in Shanghai which may hit multiple targets this summer.”
“Then you have to go to the police,” Joe said immediately, because the role of a responsible citizen was the simplest role to play. “You have to go to your superiors. You have to try to stop that from happening.”
“How can I? What can I do? I can’t betray my country.”
Isn’t that what you’re doing now, Joe thought. Abruptly, all of the neon, on both sides of the river, every brand and logo from Puxi to Pudong, blacked out. The terrace was cast into near darkness.
“Eleven o’clock,” Shahpour said, without looking at his watch. “Happens every night.”
“Answer my question,” Joe said.
“What question?”
“Why don’t you find a way of alerting the authorities?”
Shahpour actually smiled. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “ You’re my way of alerting the authorities. I’ve thought of everything else, every possible way that won’t come back and make me look like a traitor. I even tried with Wang, for Chrissakes. Last time I was in Beijing I spent five hours trying to persuade him to go to the MSS and tell them what was happening.”
“Wang Kaixuan?”
Shahpour stopped. “Of course,” he said, as if he had forgotten a vital piece in the puzzle. “You were the first person to meet him, weren’t you? That’s quite a serious mark on your resume, Joe.”
“Professor Wang Kaixuan?” Joe said again, because he needed time to think. “What does he have to do with this?”
Calling for the bill, Shahpour spent ten minutes outlining Wang’s role in TYPHOON, an account of the operation so close in character to Waterfield’s own descriptions that Joe began to suspect that Shahpour was London’s source at Langley.
“And now he’s in Beijing?” he said, the only question he allowed himself to ask about Wang’s predicament. “You’ve seen him up there?”
“Sure.” Shahpour seemed bored by the detail. “Teaches Chinese to corporate suits at one of those language schools in Haidian. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. He doesn’t want anything to do with Miles. For professional purposes he’s changed his name to Liu Gongyi. Says he’s lost faith in the concept of armed struggle. But the only people he hates more than Americans are the Chinese, so he won’t tell them about the cell.”
Language school? Joe remembered that Macklinson had set up free language schools on construction sites as a means of recruiting disenchanted labourers. Were the two connected, or was this yet more obvious bait? “And who’s in the cell?” he asked, his desire for information briefly causing him to forget that he was supposed to be playing the role of a disinterested observer.
“What do you care?” Shahpour had poured himself the last of the wine, which he finished in three long gulps. “Uighurs. Kazakhs. Guys with nothing to lose.” The wine caught in his throat and he coughed. “All I know is that in Christmas 2002 I was getting ready to move to Tehran when I was told to pack my bags for China. Have SIS check me out if you’re in any doubt. My real name is Shahpour Moazed. My father’s name is Hamid Moazed. I also have an American name-Mark-because that’s what all good Iranian-American boys do so that they can get along in California. Ask your people in London to check the employee register at Macklinson Corporation. They’ll tell you that a Mark Moazed was working in Xi’an between 2002 and 2004. What they won’t be able to tell you is that the CIA spent three years routing weapons and explosives through Macklinson to Uighur separatists who blew up innocent women and children all over China. What they won’t be able to tell you is that I spent two years trying to clean up the mess. Tell them to give Microsoft a call while they’re doing that. They’ll tell you that Mark Moazed joined them late last year. They might even be surprised to learn that two of their employees are in league with clandestine elements within the Pentagon and have recruited a cell of Islamist radicals prepared to kill hundreds of innocent people in Shanghai. And why? Why have we decided to do this? Why am I dedicating my life to an operation with no value or purpose or principle? I really have no idea at all.”
39
As soon as he left the restaurant, Joe took a cab back to his apartment, telephoned Waterfield on a secure line and gave him chapter and verse on Shahpour’s extraordinary gamble.
“It’s a trap,” Waterfield said when he had finished, and Joe knew that he would now be alone. Whatever he told them, London would never believe that Shahpour Moazed had just dropped out of the sky to make a hero of Joe Lennox. “Think about it,” Waterfield said. “I know you want product, Joe. I know you’re looking for answers. But this is too simple. He’s a poisoned pawn.”
Joe was not a chess player and ignored the metaphor. “So you don’t think Miles had Lenan killed?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t think there’s a cell planning a hit in Shanghai?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“Then what are you saying? It seems perfectly obvious to me that Miles couldn’t give a flying fuck what I’m up to out here. He has bigger things on his mind. I sent a text to Zhao Jian on my way home. Guess what? Miles really did leave in the middle of dinner so he could get his cock sucked in Gubei. That’s how much my presence in Shanghai means to him. He doesn’t care that we might find out what happened to Ken. What are we going to do? Arrest him? Run crying to Washington? The Office is irrelevant in all this. A bit-part player. Even if half of what Shahpour just told me is correct, this thing has taken on its own momentum and is going to happen, with or without British interference.”