“What do you mean?”
“He realized what he’d done last night and got himself to the consulate sharpish. Nowadays, when a bomb goes off and you look like he does, there’s only one direction the authorities are going to point the finger.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that Shahpour is most likely already on his way back to Langley. His actions last night, perhaps Joe’s as well, will be written about in Western blogs, reported in the Western media, but the story will be withheld from the Chinese. You don’t need me to tell you that the government here doesn’t give a flying fuck what the West thinks about China. Just as long as its own people are kept in the dark, Beijing is happy.”
“And what about Miles Coolidge?” I asked.
“What about him?” Bob had reacted to the question as if I was being distasteful.
“Well, wasn’t he involved in all of this? Isn’t he obliged to leave China as well?”
“You didn’t know?” he said, his soft, puffy face colouring with worry. “Did nobody tell you?”
53
They came for Wang Kaixuan at night, when he was asleep in his bed. Six armed PLA stooges and a quartet of MSS officers sprinting down the damp, narrow alleys of a Beijing hutong, bursting through his front door with a single, well-aimed strike from the stock of a gun. Then torches in his face, handcuffs on his wrists, and a bewildered old man being led out into the Chinese night to face an imminent execution.
Joe regained consciousness at 10:25 on the morning of 13 June.
His first memory was of a conversation between two Chinese nurses standing in the corridor outside his room. He heard one of them saying something about being late for a seminar, to which the other replied, “I’ll cover for you.” Joe then became aware of an intense, brittle dryness at the back of his throat and called for water.
As luck would have it, I was downstairs in the canteen eating a sandwich when the younger of the two nurses telephoned and told me that Joe was awake. The doctors were going to run some tests, but I would be able to speak to him within two or three hours. The Worldlink was swarming with MSS, so any conversation with Joe would have to be brief.
There was that same sickly sweet smell again as I made my way up to his room. An elderly Chinese man was dragging a floor polisher up and down the same section of the fifth-floor corridor, again and again. I looked through the small window in the door of Joe’s room and saw that he was sitting up in bed, looking out of the window. He had a clear view of three unfinished skyscrapers, green-netted scaff olding capping their summits like mould. I knocked gently on the glass with my ring and his eyes were slow to turn towards me. There was a little more colour in his face now that he was awake. A nurse who was inside the room said, “Yes?” and then left immediately.
“You’re up,” I said. I was wondering how to begin, how to pace things. I didn’t know where to start. A flicker of a smile passed across Joe’s dried lips. He was glad to see me. “How do you feel?” I asked.
I looked at his left leg, raised from the bed and encased in plaster. A drop of blood had seeped through the bandages swaddling his scalp. Overnight, the doctors had taken him off the ventilator which had been running throughout Sunday. Whatever had fallen onto Joe in the cinema, whatever had partially crushed him, had also saved his life.
“I have a headache,” he replied. “Otherwise I feel fine.” Both of us knew that this wasn’t going to be a conversation about his health. In an effort to find something to do with my hands, I started playing with a cord on the curtains.
“What happened?” Joe said quietly. It was a strangely open-ended question. I felt that he was giving me the opportunity to tell him what I had to tell him in my own good time.
“Shahpour saved everyone at Larry’s,” I began. His face flickered with relief. “He’s on his way back to America. He’s Beijing Red.” A tiny nod of understanding. “You did the same thing at Xujiahui. They’re estimating that there were about four hundred people in the cinema. Thanks to you, all but twenty of them got out.”
“Isabella,” he said immediately, the quietest, most desperate word I have ever heard. It was the door into Joe’s future and I was the one who was going to open it.
“She made it,” I said. “She’s going to be fine.” I remember making a conscious effort to look away at this point, because I thought that Joe would want to absorb the news without feeling as though he was being watched. Very quickly, however, he said, “Miles?”
I felt his eyes come up to mine and we met each other’s gaze. It was immediately clear from his expression that he was hopeful of Miles’s survival. I did not know how he was going to respond to what I was about to tell him. What Miles had done in the cinema was in many ways as brave as Joe’s own actions; his instincts and courage had provided a kind of redemption.
“We think that Miles may have saved Isabella’s life,” I said. “The American consulate has been informed that he tried to protect her.”
Joe asked me to explain. I said that Celil, upon hearing the alarm and seeing the audience streaming out of the cinema, had panicked and detonated his IED several minutes before nine o’clock. He had taken his own life in doing so. Miles, alerted by Joe’s warnings, had pulled Isabella out of her seat and dragged her towards him. An eyewitness reported that he pushed his wife into Joe’s arms with the words, “Take her, look after her,” and then turned and ran back into the panic and gloom of the cinema, either to confront Celil directly, to try to prevent him from detonating the bomb, or to assist in the evacuation. Shortly after this point, the bomb went off.
“Miles is dead,” I said. “You and Isabella were found very close together. You were shielding her at the exit. You did what Miles asked.”
It was odd. On my way up to Joe’s room, I had thought that the loss of Miles might in some way have pleased him, but of course there was only sadness in his eyes. Isabella had lost a husband. Jesse had lost a father. The rest was just politics.
“Who’s looking after her?” he said. Something beeped on the cardiac monitor beside Joe’s bed. I could hear the floor polisher going up and down in the corridor outside. I said that Isabella’s injuries were not thought to be serious and that her mother had flown out from England as soon as she’d heard about the explosion.
“That’s good,” he said, but his voice was very low and he seemed distracted. The energy was going out of him. “Will you tell her that I was asking for her?” His eyes were suddenly black with exhaustion. “Will you tell her that I’m very sorry for everything that’s happened?”
A few days later we discovered the extent to which Miles had been keeping his masters at Langley in the dark. Lenan’s murder, Celil’s involvement with the cell, the plan to bomb the Olympics-all of it had been cooked up by a cluster of hawks in the Pentagon, most of them the same bunch of fanatics who had made such a mess of things in Iraq. It was at this point that Joe asked me to write the book, so I contacted my boss in Beijing and requested a six-month sabbatical. By the end of the month, Joe was well enough to leave hospital and Waterfield asked me to accompany him on his flight back to London. Isabella had already taken Jesse to the States to be with Miles’s family. Nobody knew, at that stage, whether she had any plans to return to Europe.
On 30 June, eight years to the day since the handover of Hong Kong, Joe and I were escorted to Pudong International Airport by enough police and military to start a small revolution. Joe was waved through passport control and put onto our BA flight about forty minutes before any of the other passengers. A plain-clothes MSS man accompanied me to the check-in desk, passed through security and then sat by my side in the departures hall for a full two hours before making sure that I took my seat beside Joe. We barely spoke to one another during that time. As we were ordering drinks after take-off, Joe turned to me and said that he had not received a word of thanks, at any stage, from any of the Chinese authorities.
At Heathrow we went our separate ways: Joe to a safe house in Hampstead, me to the cottage I was renting near Salisbury, where I planned to begin working on the book. A week later, four brainwashed young British Muslims blew themselves up in the London rush hour, killing fifty-two people, and it felt as though the whole thing was starting all over again.
What happened that day forced some questions into my mind which have never really gone away. What would have happened if SIS hadn’t become involved with Miles back in Hong Kong? How would things have been
