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.
The answer came to him while he was walking in the streets near his home. He had a duty to warn the authorities of what was about to happen in Shanghai. Wang could no more pretend to be a political agnostic than he could return to the Xinjiang of his youth and alter the path that he had taken as an academic and radical. But how to inform the Chinese of what was happening without risking his own wellbeing? An anonymous phone call would likely be ignored. Besides, why give the government the satisfaction of preventing an atrocity that would further undermine the Uighur cause?
Wang was also concerned for his former students. Bary and Tursun might have attached themselves to a religious code which he believed to be both counter-productive and ideologically bankrupt, but they had only embraced radical Islam because there were no further options left open to them. The Chinese, the Americans and, now, the government in Islamabad had effectively turned two idealistic young men into terrorists. All his students had ever wanted was their land back; now they stood to set back the cause of liberation by a generation.
He decided to send the warning in the form of an email. He was taking an extraordinary personal risk in doing so. Trace the message and the Chinese would lock Wang away for life. Send it out into cyberspace and he would have no clue as to its ultimate destination.
He chose a small internet cafe far from his home. For half an hour he watched the entrance from a restaurant across the street, concluding that enough customers passed through the door for his own brief appearance to be ignored or even forgotten. Wang ascertained that there were no surveillance cameras operating near the premises, though he was certain that there would be at least one camera recording activity in the cafe. Leaving the restaurant, he put on a pair of bifocal spectacles but otherwise effected no further changes to his appearance. The trick was not to draw attention to oneself, but to appear as bland and as unremarkable as the millions of other Chinese men who lived and worked in Beijing.
There was one small obstacle. In order to use a public computer in China, it is necessary to present an identity card-a shen fen zheng — to the operator of the internet cafe. Wang had kept only one false ID from the era of TYPHOON, a laminated card, prepared by the CIA’s Graphics and Authentication Division, which stated his name as Zhang Guobao. Upon entering the cafe, Wang presented the card to the young man behind the desk and was relieved when he began recording its details, as required by Chinese law, in the cafe’s log book, without bothering to compare Wang’s bespectacled face with the outdated black-and-white photograph in the shen fen zheng. Wang then purchased a twenty-renminbi card which gave him thirty minutes of screen time. He sat at a terminal with his back facing the small security camera bolted on the rear wall. Settling into his seat, he then accessed a dormant email account which he had used several years earlier to communicate with Kenneth Lenan.
Wang Kaixuan was on the point of composing his message when he looked up and saw that a uniformed officer with the Beijing police had walked into the cafe. The policeman was moving slowly, glancing idly around the room. Suddenly it occurred to Wang that he was at least twenty years older than almost every other customer in the cafe; bored, glassy-eyed teenagers were slumped in front of the other monitors, others huddled in groups of three or four taking turns to play online games. Wang looked out of place among them; he wasn’t a part of the cyber generation.
A less experienced man might have panicked at this point, but the professor ignored the chill he felt on the surface of his skin and simply signed out of the email account and typed in the web address of a local daily newspaper. The policeman was now making idle conversation with the assistant behind the counter. They lit cigarettes and eyed up a girl. The cop began flicking distractedly through the pages of a magazine and did not seem particularly interested in using one of the terminals himself.
Wang looked to his left. There was an exit three metres from his chair. He could make a run for it, but if the police had come for him, chances are they would have already sealed off the rear of the building. Yet there was surely no possibility that they could know what he was doing: Zhang Guobao’s personal details-his place of birth, ID number, the city in which he was registered to live-had been recorded only moments earlier. It was far too soon for the authorities to have noticed. Perhaps the password on his email account had alerted them. Wang knew that Lenan had been murdered in suspicious circumstances, and that most of the networks with which he had been involved had been rolled up by the MSS. It had been foolish to use the account, foolish to use the Zhang Guobao identity. But what other choice did he have?
A further five minutes passed. The professor remained in his seat, watching the cop, watching the doors. He wanted to take his glasses off, because they had begun to hurt his eyes, but it was important not to change his appearance or to draw attention to himself with even the slightest movement. Then, to his horror, he saw the policeman reach for the log book and begin to study the list of recent entries. Wang kept his head down but could sense the policeman looking up and checking activity at the terminals. Was he looking for Zhang Guobao? In time, a woman in her mid-thirties, seated at an opposite terminal, stood up and walked out of the cafe. When the police
