Celil had been fortunate in the timing of his contact with Miles Coolidge. He had sent a text message earlier in the day requesting a crash meeting at the Silver Reel cinema. Miles had been standing in the master bedroom of his villa in Jinqiao, preparing to leave on a five-day business trip to Beijing. Had Celil sent the message just three hours later, Miles would have been taxiing on the runway at Hongqiao and his planned demise amid the carnage of the Paradise City mall would have been rendered impossible.
Jesse was in his father’s arms as the phone beeped in his pocket. Isabella was washing her hands in the bathroom. Two of Miles’s battered leather suitcases were packed and waiting in the hall. To his startled, frustrated eyes, the contents of the message were straightforward enough; to anyone who happened to be looking in-a Chinese spook, say, or a paranoid, nosey wife-they were at best a number plate, at worst a line of garbled cyber nonsense.
SR4J 825M
“SR4” was Screen Four of the Silver Reel multiplex, their habitual meeting place. “J” was the first letter of J nw n, the Mandarin word for “tonight.” “825” was the time of the screening, to which Miles routinely added twenty minutes in order to allow Celil time to find his seat. “M” was an arranged code to imply that the meeting was urgent.
“Fuck,” Miles said, lowering the boy to the ground.
Turning her face from the sink, Isabella shot her husband a look of frustrated annoyance and eyeballed their sleepy son. Jesse was three years old. Use that kind of language in his presence and he’d be repeating it until Christmas.
Miles pressed “Reply” and began texting his response. Jesse said, “Carry me, Daddy,” as his father typed the simple word “OK.”
“Looks like I’m not going to Beijing after all.” Miles looked up. “You feel like going to the movies tonight, honey?”
For Shahpour Moazed and Joe Lennox, the evening of Saturday 11 June had also assumed a vital importance.
As soon as Shahpour had received the text message mentioning his grandparents, he had contacted Joe and arranged to meet him for a late Friday drink at Bar Rouge. A stylish lounge where beautiful Chinese girls sip cocktails and size up the wallets of Western businessmen, Bar Rouge has a large outdoor terrace overlooking the Huangpu River, with clientele as fashionable-and frequently as vacuous-as any you will encounter in Shanghai.
“Memet wants to meet,” Shahpour said. “At Larry’s. His suggestion.”
Joe, looking out at the warm neon river, took a sip of his vodka and tonic and said, “When?”
“Tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. I got a call at my office this afternoon.”
The plan that Joe had devised was straightforward. Shahpour would go to the bar at eight. He would meet Almas and listen to what he had to say. He would buy him some drinks, order some food, tutor him in the ways of American football. Meanwhile, Joe would occupy a nearby table and follow Almas when he left the bar. At a suitable opportunity he would confront him, attempt to lead him to one of the quieter establishments near Nanyang Road and declare himself as an officer of the British SIS. This seemingly wild strategy possessed an absolute logic and coherence. While Almas struggled to work out what was happening to him, Joe would reveal that MI6 knew of the cell’s plans to carry out an attack in Shanghai. He would name Ablimit Celil and Ansary Tursun as two of his co-conspirators. He would then present Almas with a choice: to become an agent of British intelligence, informing on the activities of the cell, or to face immediate incarceration, and probable execution, at the hands of the Chinese authorities. Joe was in a position to offer Almas’s wife, whom he knew was currently living in Kashgar, residence in the United Kingdom. In due course, if he so wished, Almas would be able to join her. All that Joe required in return for a comfortable life in the West was three years of co-operation: product on the Shanghai operation and full details of any subsequent activities in the run-up to the Olympics of 2008.
It was the sort of snap recruitment in which Joe Lennox specialized and, in different circumstances, it might well have worked. It was just that it was happening far too late. This time, Joe Lennox was behind the game.
As he had been preparing to leave the Agosto Language School on Yuanda Road four days earlier, Professor Wang Kaixuan had been called into the secretary’s office to receive a telephone call. He had assumed that it was a student contacting him to discuss a recent assignment or to arrange private tuition. He had assumed wrong.
“Teacher.”
The low, hollow voice of Abdul Bary cut short his breath.
“Abdul?”
“Say nothing more.” Bary was whispering. “I have a warning.”
Wang, his back turned to a group of American students paying fees in the office, had covered the mouthpiece and stepped closer to the wall.
“An operation is in motion. An operation for Saturday. It is the plan to start a new era and to destroy our former friends. I am calling only to warn you. If you are travelling to Zikawei, turn back. Do not come to Shanghai this weekend. If anybody from our past has invited you, they are traitors. Do not trust them. I am telling you this only to protect you. I am telling you this in thanks for all that you have done.”
“Zikawei?” Wang had replied. “Zikawei?” Nobody had invited him to Shanghai. He had not even spoken of TYPHOON since John Richards’s visit in May. “Are you there?”
The line had gone dead. Behind him, an American was shouting, “Dude! No way! Dude!”
Bary was gone.
Ablimit Celil left the Xiaotaoyuan mosque at half-past six. He had decided to walk the relatively short distance south to the confluence of shopping malls at Xujiahui. It was a close, humid evening, gluey sweat forming beneath the straps of his cheap polyester rucksack, yet the weight of the bomb, the pressure of the operation, had been lifted by his hour of prayer. It had been Celil’s first visit to a mosque in more than two years; breaking his self-imposed exile had remade him.
In Jinqiao, in the kitchen of their villa, Miles and Isabella were edging round an argument.
“So what movie are we going to see?” she asked.
Miles was replacing a broken plug on a microwave oven and flashed his wife a look of impatience. Isabella knew as well as he did that his trip to Beijing had been cancelled because there was an emergency in Shanghai. He needed to get to the Silver Reel by half-past eight. It would look better if she went with him.
“It’s Chinese,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
“What’s it about?”
Isabella must have been in one of her moods; she didn’t normally ask so many questions. Lately she’d been behaving strangely. He wondered if she knew about Linda. He had checked the Silver Reel listings online and now proceeded to describe the basic outline of the film.
“What else is on?” she asked when he had finished.
He dropped the screwdriver. “Honey, if we were going on a date, we’d be going to Xintiandi, right?” Miles was referring to the cinema complex at the Xintiandi development, which was closer to Pudong and more popular with expats. “Now, do you wanna come, or don’t you? I gotta leave in twenty minutes.”
“Do you need me to come?” she asked. She was wondering how she was going to alert Joe.
“Sure I need you to come. So will you make up your mind? There’s gonna be traffic.”
Professor Wang Kaixuan was haunted by the conversation with Abdul Bary. He tried, as best he could, to recall every word of their brief and disturbing exchange.
It is the plan to start a new era and to destroy our former friends.
What exactly had Bary meant by this? What was the nature of the new era? By “friends,” had Bary meant the Americans, or did the word now carry a different meaning? In the middle of a language class, or during a work-out in Jingshan Park, the professor would find himself thinking about the conversation. Was it a trap? Had Bary betrayed him? He could not work out what it was that he was expected to do.