I am regarded as a political undesirable, a threat to the Motherland. My actions as an academic drew me to the attention of the authorities in Xinjiang, who jailed me along with many of my students.
The plan to get to Wang was straightforward: to keep a watch on the entrance of the Agosto Language School on Yuanda Road and to follow him to a point where Joe could make secure contact. Given that SIS Station in Beijing had been told, along with everybody else in the intelligence fraternity, that Joe Lennox had quit the Service, we could not call on the British embassy for additional operational support. Nor was Zhao Jian available: Joe had left him and his brothers in Shanghai with instructions to gather more information about Shahpour Moazed and Ansary Tursun. Besides, Joe couldn’t risk a rumour filtering back to Vauxhall Cross that three of their finest Shanghai pavement artists had suddenly been called to Beijing. So it was to be just the two of us, a pair of white faces in a crowded sea of Chinese, trying to follow a renegade academic with years of counter-surveillance experience in one of the busiest and most populous cities on earth. I had long ago received basic training in foot surveillance at a course in Bristol, but Joe knew that I was out of practice; indeed, if the truth be told, I don’t think he fancied our chances that much. On the Tuesday evening, after he had sat through what he characterized as a “skull-numbing” meeting at Quayler, we met for dinner at Li Qun, a Peking duck restaurant off Qianmen East Road, and Joe could speak about little else but the task which lay ahead of us.
“We have to be prepared for every eventuality,” he said. “Does Wang ride a bike? Has he got a car? Does he live within walking distance of the school or, more likely, is he going to want to get on a bus and ride across the city? This is how it’s going to work. He knows what I look like so I can’t get close to him. You, on the other hand, can be standing outside the school entrance with a bike speaking to me on the phone when he comes out. I’ll identify him for you and we can work it from there. We’ve got to hope he has some kind of hat on, or a distinguishing characteristic in his dress, because he’s going to get lost in the rush-hour crowds within seconds of being on the street. If he’s on a bike or in a car, you’ll have to try to stay on his tail. Don’t worry about getting too close-it’s normal to ride in packs and you’ll get lost in the vehicles surrounding him. If he runs a red light, follow. If you sense that he’s about to stop, try to get directly behind him so that he’s not aware of a Caucasian hanging on his shoulder.”
“What if he walks?”
“Take the bike but follow on foot. Again, try to anticipate when he’s going to stop. Get on the opposite side of the road as much as you can. If he doubles back more than once, chances are he’s conscious of you and will try to shake you at a choke point. But if he walks, it’s probably because he’s heading for a bus stop. If that’s the case, hang well back and, once he gets on board, just tail the bus for as long as you can. I’ll have a cab waiting on the corner outside the school. Once you have a good idea of the mode of transport he’s using and the direction he’s heading in, I’ll follow in the vehicle. More than likely I’ll try to get close to where you are and we can work him in parallel.”
“How do you know the cab will stick around?” I asked, beginning to feel anxious about the demands Joe was placing on me. “Wang might not come out of the school for an hour. The driver could get itchy feet.”
“Because I’ll pay him to stick around,” Joe said, as if my basic understanding of the pathology of taxi drivers needed fine-tuning. A ragged Chinese boy, no older than five or six, came into the restaurant and handed one of the waiters a few coins in exchange for a bagged-up duck carcass. His family would use it for soup. “Another thing,” Joe said. “Charge your phones up overnight so they don’t run out of juice.”
“Phones?” I replied. “Plural?”
“We could be talking for up to three hours. If one of them drops, I need to know that I can reach you quickly. To blend in, wear a plain white T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses. If Wang turns round, you don’t want him looking into your eyes.”
This went on for another half-hour. Every angle was covered, every nuance of Wang’s possible behaviour anticipated and thought through. Then Joe settled the bill and headed back to his hotel for an early night. The next morning he was at my apartment by eight and we travelled north to scout the immediate area around the language school. Feeling somewhat ridiculous, I practised cycling around while talking to Joe on the phone, using an earpiece and a microphone clipped to my shirt. By midday, I knew every bus stop, restaurant and traffic light within a two-block radius. That said, Haidian is the university district in Beijing and I did not feel that I knew the rest of the area particularly well. Having lived in the city for just a few months, I was still frequently spun round by the grid system of seemingly identical streets; there are very few landmarks in Beijing, no hills, nothing to give you a bearing. My worry was that Wang would vanish in a section of the city that I simply did not know or recognize. There were times when every corner in the capital looked the same. How would I then be able to give Wang’s location to Joe, who might be five or six blocks away in a cab?
As things turned out, we got lucky. At 4:45 p.m. on the Wednesday, I leaned my bicycle against the exterior wall of the Agosto and dialled Joe’s mobile. We were both using clean phones purchased the previous day. He was fifty metres away, on the opposite side of the street, sitting on a metal railing with a street map of Beijing open on his lap.
“You look like a tourist,” I told him.
“And you look like a sad middle-aged man who can’t afford to buy a decent bicycle.”
It was a grey, smoggy day and there was plenty of traffic between us. When Wang came out, he would be unlikely to spot Joe through what amounted to a permanent, moving screen of dust and cars. The cab driver was waiting on the next corner, reckoning it was his lucky day, because Joe had picked him from five different drivers that he’d spoken to at the rank outside his hotel and handed him the equivalent of a hundred and fifty dollars to be his chauffeur-on-call all day. At about five to five, a gorgeous Chinese girl wearing a knee-length qipao walked past me and Joe made a joke about giving me the rest of the day off to follow her. I was grateful for his easy humour because it cut through the tension of the long wait. I was ashamed by how edgy I was feeling; at this early stage, to avoid drawing attention to myself, I had my phone in my hand and the hard plastic casing was sticky and damp against my ear.
“Not long now,” Joe said. “Try to look as though you’re waiting for your girlfriend. A lot of washed-up European perverts get lucky at foreign-language schools.”
I looked across the street and Joe was smiling at me, looking extraordinarily relaxed; he’d done this sort of thing dozens of times before. Just then, the first of the students started trickling out of the entrance and he said “Here we go” in a way that made my pulse kick. About five of them hung around on the pavement in front of me, all Caucasians in their late twenties, and they were soon joined by a flood of others. This went on for about ten minutes until I was lost in a thick swarm of foreigners.
“I can’t see you,” Joe said. “That’s good. Blend in. Try to keep the camouflage. And don’t look at the door. When he comes out, I’ll tell you.”
I must confess that Professor Wang Kaixuan had become so mythologized in my imagination that I was half-expecting him to look like Pat Mo rita, the wizened martial arts guru who offers instruction to Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. I had said as much to Joe over dinner and he had attempted to describe Wang’s basic physical characteristics.
“He’s stocky and fit. At least he used to be. A broad face with smooth, dark skin. No distinguishing characteristics except intelligent, contemplative eyes, the sort that encourage young people to do things that they shouldn’t be doing. I probably wasn’t the last person to fall for them.”