“And will you stop them?”
Wang flinched at the question, tired of Western temptations. He stood up and went back into the kitchen, preparing himself a second cup of tea.
“I no longer believe that terror is the answer,” he said, pausing in the tiny kitchen, as if delivering one of his lectures. “I looked back and added up the cost of every Uighur bomb on every bus and in every restaurant in China. What was the result? The people of Xinjiang are now worse off than they were when you and I first met, Mr. Richards. I have looked at New York and Bali and Madrid, and I have seen that nobody has gained from terror, not the victims nor the perpetrators. So my attitude to what is being planned for Beijing is pessimistic. If attacks are successful, the Chinese government will lose face, certainly. The Olympics will be remembered as a tragedy, a fiasco, and the world’s press will move on. But China will soon recover. Nations are larger than bombs. Meanwhile, any atrocity will be blamed on external forces, almost certainly Uighur separatists with tenuous links to al-Qaeda. As a result, innocent Muslims throughout Xinjiang will continue to suffer.”
“If you believe all that, then why didn’t you agree to help?” Joe asked.
“Help who? Mark? Let him help himself. I am finished with politics. My wife abandoned me because of politics. She believed we would be arrested and sent to a gulag. My son is dead because of politics. My only concern now is to wake up tomorrow morning and to go to work.”
“I’m afraid I cannot allow you the luxury of that decision,” Joe said, arriving at the most distasteful part of his chosen trade. “If you don’t give me the information I need, the British government will find a way of letting their Chinese counterparts know the full extent of your activities over the past eight years.”
Wang was in the process of sitting down as Joe spoke and he was silent as he absorbed the threat. He drew the palm of his hand across the smooth shaved expanse of his scalp and breathed slowly.
“I have two reactions to that,” he said finally. Birds were singing in the hutong. “The first is that I do not have the information that you require. The second is that I do not believe you are the sort of man who would carry out a threat of that nature. Blackmail does not become you, Mr. Richards.”
“Try me,” Joe said.
Wang smiled. He was like a disappointed father with a reckless son. He had faith enough in Joe’s decency, but the effort was costing him something in terms of his own patience. “Not far from here, at the eastern side of Tiananmen Square, a clock is ticking down to the start of the Games,” he said. “No doubt you have seen it on your visit to Beijing. I credit the Chinese MSS with enough common sense and intelligence to put a stop to whatever operations the Americans are planning between now and then. They have already had great success in dismantling TYPHOON. I see no reason why they should not succeed again.”
“And what about Shanghai?” Joe asked.
“What about it?” Wang actually looked bored.
“There is a Uighur sleeper cell in Shanghai.”
“You are only telling me what I already know. You are only repeating what Mark has already said.”
“Did he tell you that Ansary Tursun may be a part of it?”
Wang had been in the process of taking an apple out of a bowl. His hand froze and he replaced the fruit, turning to face Joe. “Ansary is alive?” It was as if Joe had spoken of Wang’s son. Any lingering doubts he may have held about the wisdom of his decision to come to Beijing were dispelled in this moment.
“Alive and well and working in a Muslim restaurant in Shanghai. Given that he has suffered as much as anyone else at the hands of the Chinese, it seems logical to me that he might be involved in a plot to harm them.”
“What do you mean by that?” Wang’s question carried a false note. It was possible that he was testing the extent of Joe’s knowledge.
“Eight years ago, you told me that Ansary had been tortured in a Chinese prison. I suspect that he was one of the first people you turned to when the Americans engaged your services. You also mentioned a second man, a student of yours, Abdul Bary. I suspect that he, too, became instrumental in the struggle for an in de pen-dent Eastern Turkestan. Am I correct?”
Wang nodded admiringly. “You are not incorrect,” he replied. There was a sound outside the door. It would not have surprised Joe if uniformed officers of the PLA had suddenly burst into the room. He had exercised the minimum precaution in reaching Wang’s home and had acted with wild impulsiveness in seeking him out. But it was just an animal scratching around in the dusty passage outside. “I did not know that Ansary was still alive,” Wang said quietly. “We were once very close. It is true. But we have not spoken for a number of years. We had what you might describe as a falling out.”
“What sort of falling out?”
“It was the same with Abdul,” Wang continued. He was nervously scratching his arm. “They became radicalized after 9/11 and fell under the influence of a Uighur fighter named Ablimit Celil. They are not the men they once were. It is one of the unfortunate consequences of your war on terror that it obliges good men into alliances they would once have considered foolish. It becomes more important to fight the war than to fight the war for a meaningful purpose. Does that make sense to you?” Joe nodded. Wang brushed an insect from his sleeve. “I never trusted Celil,” he said. “I never liked him. He was the kind who was emboldened by the actions of al-Qaeda and who allowed the independence movement to be infiltrated by external elements. We had a fight, a series of arguments. I believed that they had lost sight of the cause for which we were all once fighting. You say that this cell has American backing?”
Joe was confused by the inference behind the question. “Possibly,” he said.
“I doubt this.”
An expression of profound concern had formed on Wang’s face. He looked like an organized, resourceful man who had allowed a moment of stupidity to cloud his thinking.
“What do you mean?”
“Ansary and Abdul would have no business with Americans,” Wang said. “On the day of September 11th I was sitting with them in a hotel room in Kashgar. Tears were streaming down Ansary’s face as the second plane hit the tower. I looked at him and I saw in his eyes that they were tears of happiness.” Joe wiped a droplet of sweat from his forehead. “Ablimit spent a year at a training camp in the Pamir mountains. He became an agent of the Pakistani ISI. Surely the Americans know this?”
Joe was perplexed. “Not unless you’ve told them,” he said. “Did you say something to Mark?”
“I never thought to tell him,” Wang replied. “It was not my business. He spoke of a cell in Shanghai but he did not speak of names.”
“Celil?” Joe said, trying to remain thorough and logical. “How would you write that?”
Wang spelled out the letters. “The last I knew of him, he worked in Urumqi as a hotel doorman.” Wang wrote an address on a small piece of paper using a pencil which he had retrieved from the floor. “If you find him, let me know. Because if you find Ablimit Celil, you will find Ansary Tursun. And I would very much like to see him.”
42
Miles Coolidge was going to the movies.
In a city built on commerce, Xujiahui-pronounced Shoo-jahwe — is a modern Mecca of Shanghai shopping. Seven separate malls and department stores are located at the junctions of Hengshan, Hongqiao and Zhaojiabang roads, about a mile south-west of Joe’s apartment in the French Concession. At all hours of the day, but particularly in the early to late evening, Xujiahui teems with tens of thousands of Chinese, buying and selling everything from computers and electrical equipment to children’s toys and the latest clothes from East and West. You would not describe it as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Traffic clogs the packed streets. Subway exits lead to a warren of interconnected underground tunnels which are so hot in summer that to pass through them is to be suffocated by stagnant, putrid air. Horns and jackhammers puncture the atmosphere. A pretty steepled church and an old library, set back from nearby Caoxi Road, are all that remain of the colonial era. Progress has claimed the rest.