“Never.” Isabella touched the fabric of her shirt. “Since when did Miles Coolidge ever need a shoulder to cry on?”
Joe met the remark with a nod of assent and tried a different, more combative tactic. “What if I told you that he was being investigated? What if I told you that MI6 has sent me to Shanghai to find out what he’s up to?”
It was an extraordinary gamble, not least because it assumed that Isabella’s loyalties lay with Queen and Country, rather than with her husband, the father of her child. Joe witnessed its impact in a moment of brittle shock which seemed to tighten Isabella’s entire body. She looked at him in a way that she had not looked at him since the eve of wui gwai. With disbelief. With disgust.
“Are you still not who you appear to be, Joe?” she said quietly, and Joe knew that he would have to be extremely careful with his answer. One false move, one glib remark, one overly defensive plea for understanding, and she would leave the cafe. His only hope lay in complete honesty. His only way of convincing Isabella to help him now was to tell her the truth.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” he said. His voice was very steady, very controlled. “I have nothing to hide from you any more.” He leaned forward, so that she could see directly into his eyes. “At the end of last year, I was on the point of leaving the Service. I’d been offered a job in Beijing and I was going to take it. I was sick of what was happening in Iraq, sick of the mood of defeat in London. Then David Waterfield came to me and told me that Miles had been at the forefront of a four-year American effort to destabilize Xinjiang.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Isabella said quickly, though the remark was designed not to placate Joe, but somehow to restore her rapidly evaporating self-confidence.
“The operation was called TYPHOON. It was disbanded after 9/11 when Washington, in its infinite wisdom, more or less decreed that all Uighurs were terrorists. But in the last two years a clandestine unit within the CIA, mounted with Pentagon approval, has been trying to revive TYPHOON in mainland China. Miles has been at the forefront of that effort because he maintains links with Uighur separatists who were involved in acts of sabotage prior to September 11th.” Joe saw that tears had welled in Isabella’s eyes but that she was willing them away. “Elements within the American government, as far as we know without presidential approval, are planning a terrorist atrocity at the Beijing Olympics. Miles is at this moment attempting to recruit the men who will carry out that attack. There is also an al-Qaeda cell somewhere in Shanghai planning a hit this summer. That cell has American backing. It’s what I’m here to try to stop. You ask me who I am. I’ve told you.”
Isabella tipped her head back and looked at a point in the sky, breathing very slowly. She reached down for the hat and again placed it on her head, as if to shield herself from what Joe was telling her. He wanted to say “I’m sorry,” he wanted to help her, but there was nothing he could do. Her husband was aiding and abetting terror.
“Why?” she said, shaking her head. She was staring at him, as if the whole thing was Joe’s fault, another ghastly, unforeseen consequence of his secret identity.
“I really don’t know,” he said, and began talking again, because he felt that by doing so he would at least keep Isabella at the cafe. “The Americans want a massive loss of face at the Olympics. That’s the simple answer. They want to show the world that China isn’t as modern and sophisticated and peaceful as she says she is.”
“How does killing people do that?”
Joe was briefly silenced, both by the question, with its unarguable logic, and by a passing security guard, who stared at him intently as if he were one of the exhibits at the museum. “The bombs would have a Uighur signature,” he said finally. “They would bring the world’s attention to the plight of the people of Xinjiang, to human rights abuses which have escalated tenfold since 9/11. The Americans would again start pressing for independence in Eastern Turkestan. If that happened, they would ultimately control the flow of oil into China, Japan and Korea.”
“Are you mad? Do you believe this stuff? Have you listened to what you’re saying?”
“Izzy, I’m not the guy who thought this up.” He had briefly lost his temper, but the effect of his words was startling. Isabella made a gesture of apology, muttering, “All right, sorry, OK,” as she sat back. Joe realized that he might quickly become her sanctuary. Who else, after all, did she have to turn to? “It’s a new version of the Great Game,” he said. “Who knows what Washington ultimately wants? To break up China? To make China more authoritarian? To bring sympathy to the Uighur people or to tar them with the same brush as al-Qaeda?” He unscrewed a bottle of water and poured its contents into a plastic cup. Isabella picked it up and drank from it without saying a word. “It’s like Iraq. They’ve ended up with the exact opposite of everything they said they hoped to achieve, so maybe chaos and instability is what they wanted in the first place.”
An announcement came over the public address system, praising “The Motherland, the Party, the Great Advance of Chinese Technology.” Joe saw that Isabella understood what was being said and realized, with a feeling of almost sibling pride, that she had learned to speak Mandarin. He waited until the announcement had ended before continuing.
“Have you heard of a man called Shahpour Moazed?”
“Of course I have. I know Shahpour.”
“Do you know what he does for a living?” Joe hoped that Isabella already knew about the CIA’s arrangement with Microsoft, or things were going to get even more complicated.
“I know what he does for a living,” she replied quietly.
“And what do you make of him?”
“What do I make of him?” She plainly regarded the question as an almost complete irrelevance. Nevertheless her response helped, in small measure, to lift the air of gloom which had descended on the conversation. “I think he’s the sort of person Miles would like to be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Not Shahpour, specifically. I mean the lifestyle of the Iranian male. Iranian wives do all the cooking, keep the house spotless, raise the children. They’re completely subservient to their husbands. It’s Miles’s idea of paradise.” A dog began barking in the distance. “So is that who you’re following? Is Shahpour the traitor? Please don’t tell me that or I think I might be sick.”
Joe extracted a cigarette. He offered one to Isabella, who declined with a rapid shake of the head. She was grinding her teeth, the bones at the back of her jaw bulging like pearls. Had he been wrong to tell her? Had an impulse of cruel power, the wrath of his damaged subconscious, forced him to shatter what little happiness Isabella still possessed? Joe felt the sudden heat of guilt, as if he had deliberately exacted his revenge on a woman simply because she had failed to love him.
“Shahpour is one of the good guys,” he said, a statement which appeared to make no impact upon her at all. Isabella was trying to be brave, trying to maintain her dignity in the face of his revelations, but she was pale and drawn with worry. He longed to hold her. “There are two reasons why I came here today,” he said. “I wanted to see you because I needed to know that you were all right. I knew about Miles and I knew about Linda. I had some strange idea in my head that I could help you.” Isabella was absolutely still and made no reaction. Joe could not tell if she wanted him to stay and to keep talking, or to leave and never to see her again. It occurred to him that she had no idea of the depth of his love for her, no idea of the extent to which she had haunted his dreams for eight long years. “The second reason is that I think you can help to stop what’s going on. Shahpour has told me that Miles sometimes takes you when he meets the leader of the cell.”
Her lovely eyes flicked up at him like a frightened animal. Joe saw the pain that he had caused her and which he longed to take back. “What do you mean by that?” she said.
“I mean that Miles uses you as cover when he contacts a man named Ablimit Celil. You may not be aware that he’s doing it. Sometimes wives are informed, sometimes they’re-”
“I’m aware of it.”
Joe was startled. He had assumed that Isabella had remained completely unblemished by the tricks and prisms of tradecraft. “So you know Celil?”
She shook her head.
“But you’re aware when Miles meets him?”
“I can guess when it happens.”
A line of schoolchildren funnelled out of the cafe and colonized a nearby table. They were dressed in identical uniforms, navy blue satchels slung over their backs. One of them, a tall nine-or ten-year-old boy, slapped a classmate over the head and was reprimanded by his teacher. Isabella looked at the child and closed her eyes. She had sat up in a crouch on the chair, resting her chin on her knees.
“Would you be prepared to tell me about that?”
