suspect that he was himself the father of a girl.
“Miles is seeing both these women at once?”
Jian produced a curious glottal noise in the base of his throat which might have been the laughter of male camaraderie, but might equally have been the sound of an older man’s disapproval. “Yes. Again, we believe so.” A bird settled on the grass in front of them before quickly flying away. “This one lives in an apartment not far from here and has a number of different boyfriends.”
“You mean she’s a prostitute?”
Jian shrugged. Western men preyed on Chinese girls; Chinese girls preyed on Western men. Sometimes money changed hands; sometimes it didn’t. It was the way of things. The music emerging from the speakers had changed to the waltz from Sleeping Beauty. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of yellowed clouds but the temperature in the clearing was still warm. Joe remembered that the “Adagio” had featured in the film Platoon and found that the tune had stuck in his mind.
“There are many more photographs,” Jian told him. Joe was surprised when the next picture showed Miles himself standing at what appeared to be the bar of a smart hotel. It had been so long since Joe had seen a contemporary shot of his face that he found himself squinting at the image in near-disbelief. Miles’s weight had ballooned to fourteen or fifteen stone and, perhaps to compensate for the commensurate swelling in his face, he had grown a wild black beard which somehow amplified his natural charisma. Miles was surrounded at the bar by three Caucasians-a man and two women-all of whom were younger than he was and laughing uproariously at something he had said. It was both reassuring and debilitating to see this. Joe stubbed out his cigarette.
“Click through these,” Jian said, pointing at the keyboard. As Joe moved through a slide show, Jian produced a detailed running commentary. These are your friend’s colleagues from work. This is an American lawyer who he meets at least twice a week. This is his gym. This is his car. This is where he goes to the movies. Like the bullet in Russian roulette, Joe was waiting for his first glimpse of Isabella, but it was the bullet that never comes.
After perhaps thirty or forty photographs, he said, “What about his wife?”
“What about her, please?”
“Well, where is she?”
It was the only moment of awkwardness between them. Jian reacted as though SIS were questioning the quality of his work. Joe felt obliged to reassure him.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “It’s just that they don’t seem to be spending much time together.”
“They don’t,” Jian replied flatly. “She is hardly ever with him.”
This, Joe supposed, was good news, but he could feel no elation. He had always known that Isabella’s marriage to Miles would be a sham, that the American would betray her, that she would be unhappy. To see it played out as he had predicted was grim and dispiriting. “Hardly ever?” he asked. “They don’t go out?”
“Hardly ever.”
There were a great many photographs of Miles at night. In a sequence of backlit images taken inside what Jian described, somewhat mysteriously, as “a Mexican nightclub,” Miles could be seen in heated conversation with a young man, no older than twenty-six twenty-seven, who looked of Pakistani or north Indian origin. It was quite rare in Shanghai to see Asians from the subcontinent, and Joe began to speculate on a possible link with TYPHOON.
“Who’s this guy?” he asked, pressing the screen so that his fingertip blurred the man’s face.
“We don’t know,” Jian replied quickly. “These images were very difficult for us, because the light was so low. My brother could only use his telephone.”
“He’s not a diplomat? Is he resident here?” Joe was thinking about the Pamir mountains which separate Xinjiang from India and Pakistan. Waterfield’s source in Beijing had told him that explosives which were later used by TYPHOON cells in terrorist incidents had been smuggled through the Khunjerab Pass in the summer of 1999.
“We know nothing. I am sorry. This photograph you are looking at was taken only one week ago, maybe ten days. But I have seen him with your friend several times and he is always in this place. We call him ‘Sammy’ because he reminds us of somebody in our family.”
“Sammy?”
“Yes. He is part of your friend’s group who go out at night to the bars and clubs. He is younger than most of them. That is all I can tell you.”
By coincidence, the next photograph was a medium close-up of a mustachioed Uighur man, slightly out of focus and taken from waist height, possibly from below a table in a restaurant. He was wearing a traditional embroidered yellow shirt and a doppa.
“Who’s this?” Joe asked immediately. “Is there any connection between them?”
“No, this man is just a waiter.” Jian sensed Joe’s quickening interest.
“If he’s just a waiter, why did you take his photograph?”
“Your friend goes to Urumqi,” Jian replied quietly. “He also eats at the Kala Kuer restaurant where he speaks to this man a great deal. I have seen them together. And I have been in this business long enough to know that when foreigners take an interest in Xinjiang, it is not always because of the food.”
Joe smiled. There was a nice curl of irony at the perimeter of Jian’s grin. Perhaps he knew why Joe had come to Shanghai, after all. A man with Jian’s contacts-his guanxi — had probably caught a whiff of TYPHOON long ago.
“So do you know the waiter’s name?” he asked.
“Of course.” Jian seemed pleased finally to have a correct answer. The slide show was over and he reached across to retrieve his laptop. “The waiter’s name is Ansary Tursun.”
34
All the way back to the hotel, in the lift to his room, down to the spa and through twenty laps of the Ritz- Carlton’s outdoor pool, Joe Lennox tried to remember where he had heard the name Ansary Tursun. Switching on CNN at eight o’clock, he watched a news report about a car bomb in Iraq and contemplated sending a message to Vauxhall Cross asking them to comb the files for mention of Tursun’s name. But Joe was a stubborn man and it became a point of operational pride that he should remember where he had heard the name before London woke in the morning. If he could not come up with an answer, he would admit defeat and contact Waterfield. Yet he had retrieved Platoon from his memory, and the violins of Barber’s “Adagio” still soared in his mind. What was the difference? It was just a question of locating the melody of Ansary Tursun.
The phone rang beside his bed. Joe muted the television and picked up.
“Joe? It’s Tom. What are you doing for dinner?”
He had seen Tom Harper three times in the previous week. In other contexts, this might have been considered excessive, but it was quite normal in Shanghai, where groups of Western expats met up sometimes three or four nights a week. The alternative was bleak: to stay at home watching cheap, pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters with a takeaway from Sherpa’s for company. Most of the interesting overseas radio stations were banned by the Chinese internet censor and state television consisted largely of game shows, military parades and historical soap operas. When Joe had lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, expats had also clung together in gangs, and life was lived to an excess which would have been unthinkable back home. It was one of the things he had found most frustrating about returning to London: his social life had somehow seemed stale and predictable by comparison.
“I hadn’t got any plans,” he replied.
Tom explained that half a dozen of his friends were going to Paradise Gardens, a Thai restaurant on Fumin Lu. Joe was pleased to be invited, and not simply because of the operational advantage to being seen out in Shanghai. He had also begun to feel the restrictions of life in the hotel. He had no desire for women, but neither did he want to spend every waking moment thinking about Miles and Isabella. Although it was in the nature of his profession to exist in what might be described as a perpetual artificial state, Joe was no different from most people
