The doorman was Ablimit Celil. The chef was a nickname for Memet Almas. “Sally” was agreed language for the database at Vauxhall Cross. Joe leaned his elbows on the table and took a chance.
“Have you tried asking in Pakistan?” He wanted to verify Wang’s theory about the ISI. “I heard a rumour they’d worked in Islamabad. Might be worth checking.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Not entirely.”
Waterfield coughed. “I thought it was American owned?”
It amused Joe to hear him improvising with the coded language. Waterfield was part of the tele gram generation. Speaking about an operation on an open line was contrary to every instinct he possessed for secrecy.
“I thought so too,” he replied. “That still might be the case. It would just be interesting to know if the doorman ever had a job there.”
Isabella was coming out of the museum. When she saw that Joe was on the phone, she stopped, offering to grant him some privacy. Seeing this, he shook his head and waved her over, telling Waterfield that he had to go.
“I’m having a coffee with Isabella,” he said, because it would raise his stock in London.
“You are? Well, good for you. Be sure not to send her my love.”
“Work?” Isabella asked when he had hung up. She had bought two bottles of water and a brace of dehydrated croissants.
“Work,” Joe replied.
46
On the fifth floor of a Minxing Road apartment block, seven kilometres from downtown Puxi at the edge of a featureless, traffic-clogged freeway, Ablimit Celil set out the plan for the coordinated attacks of Saturday 11 June, codenamed ZIKAWEI.
It was 9 p.m. on the evening of Sunday the 5th. The one-bedroomed apartment was rented in the name Chan Chi-yung, a known associate of Mohammed Hasib Qadir, an officer of the Pakistani ISI. Celil was seated at the head of a low rectangular table in the living room. To his left was Memet Almas, unshaven and sipping from a bottle of water. To his right, Ansary Tursun was smoking a cigarette, dressed in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and denim jeans. Abdul Bary was directly opposite Celil, his pale face partly obscured by a baseball cap pulled low over the eyes. An hour earlier, the four members of the cell had been eating kurdak, a sweet and sour Uighur stew prepared with lamb, carrots and potatoes. The plates and cutlery had now been cleared away from the table and replaced by three improvised explosive devices, each consisting of 22 pounds of Goma-2 ECO gelignite, three detonators and three mobile telephones. Celil had spent forty minutes explaining how to arm the IED and to trigger it using the alarm clock on the phone. He reminded the men that an unexploded bomb from El Pozo station in Madrid had failed to detonate on 11 March 2004 because the alarm had accidentally been set twelve hours late.
Standing up from the table, he started to detail the specifics of the plan.
“Remember this,” he began. “Our brother Ansary was arrested by the Chinese authorities for owning a newspaper.” He looked at Tursun and briefly clasped his hand. “He was tortured and brutalized for this harmless offence.” Celil looked across the room and found Bary’s eyes beneath the shadow of his cap. “Our brother Abdul was imprisoned for insulting a Han.” Celil appeared to wince, as if somehow sharing the memory. “He was tortured and beaten for exercising his right to speak.” Moving behind Almas, Celil now squeezed the muscles of the Kazakh’s shoulders and stared directly ahead at Tursun. “Our brother Memet has come to us to free his Turkic brothers from the yoke of Chinese oppression.” Almas bowed his head. “And we remember those who have died for our cause, who now regard us from paradise. We remember, in par tic ular, our brother Enver Semed, a proud Uighur fighter held in the gulag of Guantanamo and later betrayed by the American infidel. We remember our Muslim brothers and sisters who are tortured daily at Abu Ghraib. We fight on behalf of all Muslims who find their lands occupied by imperial powers.”
Celil picked up the pad. Five floors down, in a dusty Chinese courtyard, children were laughing.
“Here is what we plan. The Americans have paid us in dollars and blood. They believe that they control us. But their government has sided with the pigs of Beijing who occupy our land. We are stronger than the infidels. We will defeat them.”
Abdul Bary was the most intelligent and thoughtful of the four men gathered in Shanghai that evening. He removed his baseball cap and placed it on the table. The edge of the cap touched a detonator and he separated the two objects like a superstition. Bary felt that the language of jihad, its grammar and vocabulary, sat uneasily on the tongue of Ablimit Celil, who was no more a man of God than the cats and dogs who roamed the filthy, dilapidated corridors of the anonymous apartment block in which they had found themselves. Every molecule of Celil’s shabby, corrupted face spoke of violence and a zeal for blood. Did he truly believe in the possibility of an Eastern Turkestan, or had he moved beyond politics into the facile, deadly playground of violence for its own sake? Yet what choice did Bary now possess but to follow such men? How else could he bring about change in his country, if not through bombs and terror? It had never mattered to him who bankrolled the safe houses, who smuggled the explosives, who prepared the bombs or drew up the plans. All he wanted was results. He wanted the Chinese to stop shooting unarmed Muslim boys and girls. He wanted to stop innocent Uighurs being suspended from the ceilings of Chinese prisons and beaten repeatedly by their guards. He wanted an end to electric shocks, to torture, to imprisonment without trial. He wanted Uighurs to be free to express themselves without fear of execution for “political crimes.” He wanted justice. This is what the Americans had promised them; this is what their new masters in Islamabad now seemed prepared to guarantee. If the short-term price of independence was an Islamist state, an Eastern Turkestan ruled by shariah law, so be it. The Uighur homeland would, at least, be independent. Chinese Xinjiang would have ceased to exist.
“Abdul?”
“Yes?”
He had not been listening. Celil fixed him with an impatient gaze. “You must concentrate. You must listen. It is the inspiration of our benefactor that we should kill the infidels who have betrayed our cause.”
Abdul placed the cap back on his head. He did not immediately understand the significance of what Celil was saying.
“The attacks will take place six days from now, on the night of Saturday June the 11th. After that, we will not see each other again for many months. They will be simultaneous attacks, inspired by the bravery and the courage of our brothers in New York, our brothers in Egypt and Madrid. It is our destiny not only to bring destruction to the infidel Chinese, but also to the Americans who have made their homes among them. Our attacks will also claim the lives of Miles Coolidge and Shahpour Goodarzi, spies who will pay for their treachery and cunning.”
“How do you propose this?” Abdul asked. His experience, his gut, immediately reacted against any unnecessary complications.
Celil paused. Did he sense Abdul’s reservations? To remove Miles and Shahpour had been the initiative of Hasib Qadir. It was the sole condition of the ISI’s co-operation, and one that Celil readily agreed to. The plan was otherwise as straightforward as it was barbarous. It would bring ruin to Hollywood and terror to the streets of Shanghai. On the evening of 11 June, Ansary Tursun was to make his way to Paradise City and purchase a ticket, using cash, for the advertised 8:15 performance in Screen Eight of the Silver Reel Cinema. It would be a Saturday night; the multiplex would be packed. Once the film was under way, nobody would notice when Ansary exited the auditorium after thirty minutes, leaving a rucksack under his seat.
At the same time, Ablimit would arrange a crash meeting with Miles Coolidge for 8:45 p.m. He would arrive at Screen Four for the 8:25 performance, conceal his IED beneath his seat in the back row, and leave by the western fire exit before the film had begun.