“Have I come at a bad time?”
“The place needs to be cleaned up,” Shahpour muttered, walking into the kitchen. Joe saw that he had already begun to make a start on five days of washing up. A bin bag in the corner had been hastily tied together and the floor was sticky under his feet. “I haven’t been out much.”
“Let’s go out now,” Joe suggested, as much to relieve his own discomfort as to offer Shahpour a release from his torpor. “Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll take you out for dinner?”
“OK.” Shahpour sounded like a drunk preparing to sober up. “Might be a good idea. Give me five minutes.”
It took fifteen. Joe waited in the deep-litter sitting room, sipping from a can of lukewarm Tsingtao and flicking through a copy of City Weekend. He wanted to draw the curtains, to open a window, to tidy some of the detritus from the floor, but it was not his place to do so. Eventually Shahpour appeared, with the beard slightly trimmed, wearing a clean T-shirt, worn jeans and a pair of trainers. The transformation was remarkable.
“I needed that,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
At first they walked in near-silence, heading west in the general direction of Joe’s apartment. He felt like a visitor to a sanatorium, strolling in the grounds with a patient on day release. Cyclists and passers-by cast strange looks at the tall, bearded Persian in Joe’s company, and he was concerned that they would soon attract the wrong sort of attention from the wrong sort of Chinese. Joe suggested going to Face, a bar in the Rui Jin Guest House a few blocks away, where expats could blend into a gin and tonic in relative obscurity, but Shahpour was apparently enjoying the fresh air.
“Do you mind if we just walk a while?” he said. “I haven’t been outside in a long time.”
“What’s the matter?” Joe asked. “What happened?”
The answer was a long time coming, and its content did not surprise him.
“I guess I feel like I owe you an apology,” Shahpour said finally. “I was out of line the other night.”
“How so? I had a great time.”
Shahpour’s humid eyes stared into Joe’s, who saw that there was no energy left in them for British politesse.
“I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I’d heard things about you that I had misinterpreted.”
“What kind of things?”
“That you were the only man left on either side of the Atlantic with any principles. That all the secretaries at Vauxhall Cross were crying in the restrooms at your farewell party. That Joe Lennox was a guy I could talk to, whether or not he was working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals.”
“What if I’m not working for Quayler Pharmaceuticals?”
They were standing beside a fruit stall on the corner of Shanxi Road. A gap-toothed Mongolian was preparing slices of watermelon on a chopping board erected in the street. Shahpour came to a halt beside her and turned to look at Joe.
“Keep walking,” Joe said quietly. “Keep walking.”
They went north.
“What did you mean by that?” Shahpour was running a hand through his hair, looking behind him, as if concerned that they were being followed. They had not passed another foreigner since leaving the apartment.
“Tell me about Beijing,” Joe said.
“What about it?”
“Tell me about the Olympics.”
Shahpour stared at him. “You’ve seen Wang, haven’t you?”
Right on cue, a phalanx of uniformed PLA guards turned the corner ahead of them and marched two abreast along the opposite side of the street. Shahpour swore under his breath.
“I’m going to take a chance,” Joe told him. He had prepared precisely what he was going to say. A passer-by, observing their conversation, would have suspected that Joe was talking about nothing more pressing than the weather. “If my instincts are correct, you and I can possibly save a lot of innocent lives. If they’re wrong, I’m going to look like the biggest idiot this side of the Yangtze River.” A man stepped in front of them and opened up a briefcase of counterfeit watches, following for several paces until Joe waved him away. “You were right about Zapata’s. Our meeting was not an accident. I used Megan to draw you on.”
“I knew it!” Shahpour was like an excited child. Joe would have told him to calm down if he had not quickly done so himself. This wasn’t a game. He needed Shahpour to concentrate.
“But you neglected to mention Beijing. I want to know what’s being planned for the Olympics.”
There is a certain, undeniable thrill in running a successful agent, a feeling of absolute control over the destiny of another human being. Joe experienced something of the same pleasure as he observed the gradual shift in Shahpour’s body language, the softening of his demeanour. It was obvious that he trusted Joe implicitly. He had found the one man who offered him release from his wretched predicament.
“The only reason I didn’t tell you is that there didn’t seem any point. I bought your story, man. I really thought you were out. I can’t believe this.”
They had come to an intersection. Shahpour was a decent man, erratic of temperament and occasionally immature, but Joe liked him. He had concluded that he had been selected in haste by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11 and rushed through training at the Farm, probably for reasons of racial profiling. He would have been more suited to a career in sales or, indeed, computing. As if to confirm this basic impression, Shahpour now lit a cigarette and walked straight into what appeared to be a clear road, having apparently forgotten that in China it is best to look left and right, up and down, front and back, before stepping out into traffic. He was quickly assaulted by the horn of an oncoming cab, angling towards him on the wrong side of the road. Joe grabbed his shirt and pulled him back.
“Jesus!”
“Let’s try to keep you alive.”
Safely on the opposite side of the street, Shahpour began to extrapolate on Wang’s description of the CIA’s plans for Beijing. Miles apparently wanted several incidents, at least one “on the scale of Atlanta,” which would concentrate media attention on casualties and civil unrest, rather than on the gleaming economic miracle of modern China. Using his cover at Microsoft, Shahpour had been tasked with recruiting underpaid, overworked Chinese employees inside the stadium complex, as well as television and advertising personnel in the city. He was due to move to the capital in the late summer. Meanwhile, Miles was working on a plan to bring a Uighur cell into Beijing to bomb the Olympic village.
“The same cell that’s in Shanghai?”
“I have no idea. Miles only tells me what I need to know. But it’s compartmentalized. There could be hundreds of officers working on this, could be just me and him.”
Joe shook his head and lit a cigarette. That the operation appeared so chaotic was, he concluded, an indication of its absolute secrecy, rather than an illustration of CIA or Pentagon incompetence. Shahpour continued.
“Miles thinks it’s gonna be easy falsifying documentation to get into the village. I told him the Chinese won’t let anybody move in there unless they can prove they’re legitimate. How the fuck are we supposed to get a bunch of out-of-shape Turkic Muslims into an elite training area for the world’s finest athletes? I’m telling you, the whole plan is a mess.”
“It can’t be the same cell that’s here in Shanghai,” Joe concluded. “If they carry out an attack this summer, they’ll be arrested. Miles can’t expect the cell to survive undetected for three more years.”
Shahpour tossed his cigarette into the street. “I guess you’re right,” he said.
“How much do you know about the cell?” They were forced to walk around a pool of water flooding out of a canteen halfway down Xinle Road. Crowds of Chinese were hunched over tables, shovelling rice and cuts of pork into their mouths, oblivious to the chaos around them. “When did Miles recruit them?”
“I think they’re the dregs,” Shahpour replied. “I only look out for one of them. Memet Almas. He’s Kazakh, kind of devout, so he likes it that I’m a fellow Muslim, you know? Has a wife back in Kashgar. Miles doesn’t give me any other names. The less people that know, the better, right?” Joe asked for a spelling of Memet Almas. “But I get the impression he’s using fanatics. In the old days, TYPHOON was what you might call a secular operation. They were lapsed Sufis, fighting for a political cause. Far as I can work out, a guy like Memet just wants to blow things up. The whole thing has become radicalized.”