“How are the others?” Miles asked. “How are Abdul and Memet?”
The audience suddenly burst into laughter. Miles looked up at the screen. A character appeared to have fallen over accidentally and was attempting to stand up. The Chinese love a pratfall.
“Memet I never see. Abdul also. It is the way we want it, the way we have always operated. I only know about Ansary because I visit his restaurant and they tell me he is sick. It is too dangerous to be seen with them. We want action. We want to hit the Chinese. We are tired of waiting.”
“And action’s what you’ll get.” Miles was irritated by these repeated calls for progress. The cell’s bloodlust was entirely of Celil’s making; he had brought a new fanaticism to their work. At the high tide of TYPHOON, there had been no undercurrent of religious fervour. The men had regarded themselves as soldiers, fighting for a just cause. Now stalwarts such as Tursun and Bary were no better than the maniacs of Baghdad and Atocha. “You just have to trust me,” he said. “You have to listen.”
“I will listen,” Celil replied.
A hiss went up from somewhere in the cinema. Their conversation had gone on too long. “You’d better get going,” Miles whispered. “Read the file.”
Celil placed the package in a plastic bag and walked out of the cinema. The lobby was empty and he was soon in the main atrium of the mall, descending by lift to the ground floor.
Each of his visits to Paradise City was now of vital importance to the cell. Why? Because they were indeed under new instructions, just as Wang had disclosed. Celil’s apparent obeisance in the presence of Miles Coolidge had been an act; the Americans were yesterday’s men. By allying the Uighur cause to the ISI, Celil had guaranteed frequent and effective action on the ground.
I don’t want Americans hit, I don’t want Europeans. We’ve suffered enough. Wasn’t that just like the hypocrisy of the West? They wreak havoc in foreign lands and then make efforts only to protect themselves. For too long, Ablimit had allowed himself to be blinded by American promises that had never borne fruit. The CIA had aided the cause of Uighur separatism not because they believed in the right of his Muslim brothers to live in their own land, free of Han oppression, but because they coveted yet more oil, yet more gas, to fuel their bankrupt economy.
He looked around him. He looked at the mall. Ablimit Celil saw the evidence of another defunct culture, a China imitative of all that was worst in the West. He thought ahead to the glorious release of 6/11, and was never more certain that he had taken the correct decision.
45
Let’s face it: Joe didn’t need to go and see Isabella. He could have asked Zhao Jian to track her. He could have waited patiently for London to contact him with the information he had requested about Ablimit Celil. Shahpour’s disclosure that Miles used her as cover for his meetings with the cell was valuable product, certainly, but it didn’t necessitate a visit to her home in Jinqiao. What was Joe expecting? A confession? A full report on Miles’s clandestine movements in China? Isabella was hardly going to betray the man she had married, particularly to a former boyfriend who had once betrayed her himself. Yet the temptation proved too hard for Joe to resist. It was the perfect opportunity to see her. After all, Waterfield had tasked him with getting close to Miles Coolidge. Well, getting close to Miles Coolidge meant getting close to Isabella. And who knows a man better than his own wife? From a certain point of view, Joe was just doing his job.
Jian gave him the details. Every weekday morning, regular as clockwork, Isabella bicycled to Century Park where she joined a public tai-chi session between eight-fifteen and nine o’clock. By then, Miles had left for the office. She was always alone. It would simply be a case of finding her and taking things from there.
Travelling east on the Line 2 Metro into Pudong, Joe realized that he was blurring a dangerous professional and personal boundary which could only end in disappointment. He had hardly slept. He had deliberately avoided Megan for days. He had not prepared what he was going to say, nor thought through the consequences of his actions.
The train was packed. He stood in the pristine, swaying compartment, a laowai spy of thirty-four, thousands of miles from home, racing towards his destiny. It was 7:45 in the morning. What if Isabella simply turned on her heels, ignoring his entreaties? What if she phoned Miles and told him that Joe had been to see her? How would he explain that one? He was supposed to be an employee of a niche pharmaceutical company, not a British spook asking sensitive questions about the activities of the CIA. If she asked him what he was doing in Shanghai, Joe was going to tell her. He had already decided that. He could not lie. It was lies, after all, which had brought about their undoing eight years earlier. But to tell her was to jeopardize everything: the operation, his cover, the successful pursuit of the cell. If Joe had possessed even an ounce of common sense on that humid mid-May morning, he would surely have turned round at Dongfanglu and headed straight back to Puxi.
He found the location easily. He had no need of the map which he had brought with him. The tai-chi session was taking place at the southern edge of an artificial lake, a short walk from Century Park station. In the distance Joe could see a large group of exercising Chinese, mostly men and women of retirement age, stretching and revolving in slow motion, communing with invisible gods. He moved towards them. He saw a bearded Western man in his late fifties, and another laowai woman of a similar age wearing tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt which appeared to have been dyed pink in the wash. They looked out of place in a group of perhaps thirty or forty Han, with no sign of Isabella among them. Joe sat on a bench in the shade of a tallow tree. He wondered if he was observing the correct group. Had Zhao Jian sent him to the wrong section of the park? It would take at least forty minutes to scout the entire area, a period in which Isabella might easily return home.
An aeroplane flew in low overhead, descending east towards the airport. The decelerating noise of its engines smothered the wail of Chinese folk music issuing from a portable CD player at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up. To the north he could discern the faint outline of the Jin Mao Tower, obscured by smog. He lowered his gaze and stared again at the group, moving two paces to his left so that his line of sight was no longer blocked by four men wielding wooden swords.
And then he saw her, the haunting, seductive revelation of Isabella Aubert, her face and body as familiar to him as the morning breeze. She was wearing black cotton yoga trousers with a band in her hair, bare slender arms stretched out in front of her, shoeless feet rotating on the dew-kissed grass. Joe’s first reaction was to smile, because there was a look of intense, almost childlike concentration on Isabella’s face as she geared through the complex movements of the tai-chi. In this first instant he realized that all of his pain, all of his heartache and longing, had not been wasted. She was still as vivid and as beautiful to him as she had ever been, and it had been right to come back to her. He returned to the bench. Joe’s heart was racing and he lost himself in a flood of memories, recalling the first time that they had seen one another at the wedding, their first hypnotic nights in Kentish Town, the arguments which had raged between them in the desperate week of wui gwai. He continued to watch her, thinking of Miles and Linda and the lies in their lives, and it was almost impossible to imagine how close Isabella was living to a terrible secret. How was he going to break it to her? What the hell was he going to say?