Western brands. A moped swept past him, buzzing its horn. He tried giving one of the girls the eye, but she ignored him and slammed the door.
The Paradise City was a sanctuary of air conditioning which released Miles from the cloud-trapped pollution outside. Surveillance footage shows him stepping around a salesman handing out leaflets for skincare products and taking an escalator to the first floor. He bought a latte and a chocolate muffin from a branch of Costa Coffee. Tables were arranged at the perimeter of a balcony which afforded panoramic views of the gleaming white atrium. Ahead of him, Miles could see all seven floors of the mall, the branches of French Connection and Nike Golf, the bubble lifts and sliding banks of escalators, the giggling girls gassing on mobile phones.
The meeting was set for seven-thirty. At half-past six, he walked round to the opposite side of the atrium, where he caught a lift to the seventh floor. Heading to the north-western corner of the mall, Miles entered the Silver Reel cinema multiplex and purchased a ticket for the 6:50 movie showing in Screen Four. There were extensive queues at the popcorn concession but he waited in line under the watchful eye of Elmo and Bugs Bunny, purchasing a tub of salted popcorn and half a litre of Diet Coke. This was his usual routine. There was no security as he handed over his ticket, just a Chinese girl standing at the gate who said, “Hello, sir,” in English, indicating the entrance to Screen Four behind her. Miles made his way along the darkened corridor, entered the cinema and sat in his usual seat at the end of row Q. The advertisements had already started and he leaned back in his chair, waiting for Ablimit Celil.
43
London had gone silent. Upon returning to Shanghai, Joe had put in a request for information on Ablimit Celil. Five days had passed and he had heard nothing back.
It was partly his fault. Under normal circumstances, Joe would have filed a CX report about his meeting with Wang Kaixuan, detailing the significant allegation that Celil maintained links to the Pakistani ISI. But Waterfield had effectively forbidden him from pursuing Wang as a line of enquiry; until Joe had firm intelligence that the professor was telling the truth, he could hardly admit to having ignored London’s basic instructions. That was the trouble with the secret world; only on very rare occasions did all the rumours and the leads and the theories converge to paint a perfect picture. There was no such thing as the truth. There was only product.
Joe had also been in touch with Zhao Jian, who had never heard of Ablimit Celil, far less seen him in the company of Miles Coolidge. As for Shahpour Moazed, Zhao Jian’s brothers joked that they had developed bunions waiting for him to emerge from his apartment building on Fuxing Road. Miles’s right-hand man had gone to ground. Nobody had seen hide nor hair of Moazed for almost a week. When Jian had telephoned the Microsoft office in Pudong, a secretary had informed him that Shahpour was sick. They were expecting him back at work on Monday.
Shahpour was indeed sick, but not with stomach cramps brought on by dodgy tofu, or with a nasty dose of the flu. He was suffering from a sustained bout of regret and paranoia. For five long days he had bunkered down in his apartment, surviving on a diet of counterfeit DVDs, Thai marijuana, Chinese hookers and takeaway food. To his longstanding doubts about the moral rectitude of TYPHOON was now added a second, shaming regret that he had spilled his guts to Joe Lennox. Prior to leaving for M on the Bund, Shahpour had smoked a pre-dinner joint, then sunk two bottles of white wine, a cognac and a vodka Martini at dinner before calmly informing a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service that the CIA was bankrolling terrorism in China. He had somehow persuaded himself that Joe Lennox was his saviour. The reality, of course, was that Joe was now a private citizen who would surely have gone straight to SIS Station in Shanghai and informed them about the plot. Shahpour was amazed that he had not yet been called home. He was stunned that he had not, at the very least, received a visit from an irate Miles Coolidge. He had already drafted his letter of resignation and was preparing to pack.
“So nobody’s seen him for a week?” Joe asked Zhao Jian.
“That is correct, sir. Nobody has seen him since your dinner on the Bund.”
“And you’re convinced that he’s still in his apartment? You’re sure he hasn’t flown the nest?”
“Convinced, sir. Convinced.”
There was only one thing for it. On a damp Friday evening, Joe walked the short distance from his apartment in the French Concession to Central Fuxing Road. He paused outside a barber’s shop where an exhausted-looking businessman was receiving a head massage and called Shahpour’s mobile.
“Hello?” The voice was gravelly, only half-alert.
“Shahpour? This is Joe. Joe Lennox. How are you doing?”
Shahpour thought about hanging up, but was intrigued. He had heard nothing from Joe since their conversation at dinner, only a rumour that he had left town for a few days on Quayler business. He looked at the clock on his kitchen wall. A dried chunk of spaghetti sauce obscured one of the digits but he could see that it was after eight o’clock.
“Hi, Joe. I guess I’m doing fine. It’s good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“Well, I was just passing your door and I wondered if you fancied a drink? It’s Friday, Megan’s away and I hoped you might be at a loose end.”
“How did you know where I live?”
It was the first indicator of his paranoid state. “You told me. At dinner. Fuxing Road, right?”
Ten minutes later Joe was in a lift riding to the fourth floor of an apartment block built in the hideous neo- Grecian style which is considered luxurious by certain Chinese architects. Shahpour lived alone at the end of a long corridor crowded with old boxes and plastic bags. Joe rang the doorbell and waited up to a minute for the American to answer.
A stewardess once described to me the smell which emerges from an aeroplane when the doors are opened for the first time after a long-haul flight. Joe experienced a comparable odor as he stepped into Shahpour’s apartment to be greeted by a noxious cocktail of stale air, farts and socks which almost made him gag with its intensity. Shahpour had grown a substantial beard and was dressed only in a pair of torn jeans and a Puma T-shirt. He had taken on the countenance of a brilliant, insomniac postgraduate student who has been toiling in a laboratory for days. The air conditioning in the apartment had been switched off, and there was no natural light to speak of. Plastic DVD cases and pizza cartons were scattered on a kilim, dirty clothes strewn on an L-shaped white leather sofa. On the table nearest the door Shahpour had placed a laptop computer and a Tupperware box containing enough marijuana to earn him a seven-year prison sentence. An iPod glowed in the corner.
“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
