Typhoon (2008) Read online

  Wang breathed very deeply so that his chin lifted to the ceiling. Joe’s sudden shift in mood had forced his hand and he was now at the edge of his luck. He would have to confide in this Mr. John Richards, whoever he was, and run the risk that his revelation would simply be ignored by an indifferent British spy.

  “Why don’t …”

  Both men had started speaking at the same time. Joe said, “Go ahead.”

  “You first, please.”

  “Fine.” Joe wanted to light a cigarette but decided against it. The air in the tiny room was already stale and unpleasant enough. “When you were first interrogated by Lance Corporal Anderson, you mentioned an apartment here in Kowloon.” He thought back to Barber’s report and recalled the address from memory. “Number 19, 71 Hoi Wang Road. What was the significance of that?”

  “There was no significance. I made it up.”

  “Just like that?”

  Wang did not understand the idiom and asked for a translation in Mandarin. Joe provided it and the conversation briefly continued in Chinese.

  “So Hoi Wang Road is not the address of someone you know here in Hong Kong? It’s not an apartment at which you have stayed on any previous visit to the colony?”

  “I have never been to Hong Kong before.”

  Joe made a mental note to have the address investigated before reverting to English. “And why now?” he said. “Why do you have to see Governor Patten in person?”

  Wang stood up. When he turned towards the window and leaned against the curtains, Joe had a sudden mental image of the popular professor organizing his notes in a packed Urumqi lecture hall, preparing to address a room full of eager students. “Because he is the only man in any Western government who has demonstrated an interest in the preservation of our basic human rights. Because he is the only man who might have the power to do something about this.”

  “About what? We’re talking about human rights now? I thought you wanted to talk about a defection?”

  Wang turned round and stepped closer to Joe. He looked angry, as if finally exasperated by a long day of pressure and lies. “Mr. Richards, you are clearly an intelligent man. You know as well as I do that I know nothing about any plans for any member of the Chinese state apparatus to defect. You know as well as I do that this was a story I invented to assist my journey to Hong Kong.”

  “So what do you know?” Joe wasn’t surprised by the sudden confession. It had been coming for some time. “What is this pressing story you want to share with us? What makes you think that the British government is in any sort of position to grant political asylum to a man like you? What makes Professor Wang Kaixuan so special?”

  And Wang fixed him hard in the eyes and said, “I will tell you.”

  8

  XINJIANG

  “My father’s name was Wang Jin Song.” On the surveillance recording you can hear an eerie silence in that cramped, air-starved safe house, as if all of Hong Kong were suddenly listening in. “He was born in Shanghai and worked as a schoolteacher in the Luwan district, close to People’s Square. He married my mother, Liu Dong Mei, in 1948. She was the daughter of a Kuomintang soldier killed during the Japanese invasion. I was born in 1949, Mr. Richards, so at least I share a birthday with the People’s Republic of China, if nothing else. When I was five years old, my parents were obliged to relocate to Xinjiang province as part of Mao’s policy of mass Han immigration. Perhaps you have heard of this? Perhaps it was mentioned in one of your lectures at Oxford? Sinicization, I think they call it in English. I apologize if I am not correct in my pronunciation. Based on a Soviet model, the Stalinist idea of diluting a native people with the dominant imperial race, so that this native population is gradually destroyed. My parents were two of perhaps half a million Han who settled in Xinjiang during this period. My father was given a job as a schoolteacher in Kashgar and we lived in a house that had been owned by a Uighur landowner whom my father believed had been executed by the communists. This was part of Mao’s gradual purging of the Muslim elite, the execution of imams and noblemen, the confiscation of Uighur properties and the seizure of lands. All of this is a matter of historical record.”

  “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Joe said, trying to sound clever, but Wang produced a look of reproach which corrected him.

  “That came later.” There was an edge of disappointment in the professor’s voice, as if a favourite student had let him down. “Of course, when my family had been living in Kashgar for two or three years, they became aware of the policy that we now know as the hundred flowers bloom. The Party’s seemingly admirable desire to listen to the opinions of its people, of Party members, in this case the Uighur population. But Mao did not like what he heard. He did not like it, for example, that Turkic Muslims resented the presence of millions of Han in their country. He did not like it that Uighurs complained that they were given only nominal positions of power, while their Han deputies were the ones who were trusted and rewarded by Beijing. In short, the people demanded independence from communist China. They demanded the creation of an Eastern Turkestan.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened is what always happens in China when the people confront the government. What happened was a purge.” Wang helped himself to another glass of water. Joe had the feeling that the story had been told many times before, and that it was perhaps best to avoid any further interruptions. “A Party conference was called in Urumqi, but rather than listen to their complaints, the provincial government took the opportunity to arrest hundreds of Uighur officials. Fifty were executed. Without trial, of course. Trials do not exist in my country. This is what became of the flowers that bloomed, this is what became of Mao’s promise to create an independent Uighur republic. Instead, Xinjiang became an ‘autonomous region,’ which it remains to this day, much as Tibet is ‘autonomous,’ and I surely do not need to educate you about that.”

  “We are aware of the parallels with Tibet,” Joe said, a statement as empty, as devoid of meaning, as any he had uttered all night. What did he mean by “we?” In three years as an SIS officer he had heard Xinjiang mentioned—what?—two or three times at official level, and then only in connection to oil supplies or gas fields. Xinjiang was just too far away. Xinjiang was somebody else’s problem. Xinjiang was one of those places, like Somalia or Rwanda, where it was better that you just didn’t get involved.

  “Let me continue my little history lesson,” Wang suggested, “because it is important in the context of what I will tell you later. In 1962, driven by hunger and loss of their land and property, many Uighur families crossed the border into the Soviet Union, into areas that we now know as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This was a shaming moment for Beijing, a terrible loss of face in the eyes of their sworn enemy in Moscow, and it created problems for any Uighur family who remained in Xinjiang with relatives in the Soviet Union. In the madness of the Cultural Revolution, for example, a man could be imprisoned simply for having a brother living in Alma-Ata. I was by now a teenager, a diligent student, and it was in this period that I began to understand something of these historical injustices and to see my father for the man he was. You see, it is difficult to be brave in China, Mr. Richards. It is difficult to speak out, to have what you in the West would call ‘principles.’ To do these things is to risk annihilation.” Wang rolled his neck theatrically. “But my father believed in small gestures. It is these gestures which kept him sane. When he saw examples of disrespect, for example of racism, of the typical Han contempt for Uighur or Kazakh people, he would admonish the guilty, in the street if necessary. I once witnessed my father punch a man who had insulted a Uighur woman as she queued to buy bread. He made presents of food and clothing for impoverished native families, he listened to their ills. All of these things were dangerous at that time. All of these things could have led to my father’s imprisonment, to a life in the gulag for our family. But he taught me the most valuable lesson of my life, Mr. Richards. Respect for your fellow man.”


  “That is a valuable lesson,” Joe said, and the remark again sounded like a platitude, although in his defence he was growing restless. In Chinese storytelling there is a tradition of long-windedness of which Wang was taking full advantage.

  “But gradually things improved after the death of Mao. When I was a student, studying at the university in Urumqi, it seemed that the Party developed a more sympathetic attitude to the native peoples. During the previous decade, mosques had been shut down or converted into barracks, even into stables for pigs and cattle. Mullahs had been tortured, some ordered to clean the streets and the sewers. Loyalty to a communist system was demanded of these men of God. But the bad times briefly passed. For once I was not ashamed to be Han, and it was a source of deep regret to me that my parents had not lived to see this period for themselves. For the first time under communism, China officially acknowledged that the Uighurs of Xinjiang were a Turkic people. Nomads who had roamed the region for centuries were allowed to continue their traditional way of life as the Marxist ideologues realized that these men of the land would never be loyal state workers, could never alter their lives to suit a political system. At the same time, the Arabic language was restored to the Uighurs, their history once again studied in schools. Koranic literature was circulated without fear of arrest or punishment and many of those who had had land or property confiscated by the state were compensated. It was a better time, Mr. Richards. A better time.”

  Joe was conflicted. As a student of China, a Sinophile, to hear the history of the region related so intimately by one who had lived through it was a rare and valuable experience: the scholar in him was enthralled. The spy, on the other hand, was frustrated: RUN was failing in his Lenan-appointed task to squeeze the truth out of a man who had risked his life in the waters of Dapeng Bay to bear a potentially priceless secret into the arms of British intelligence. But Wang seemed no closer to revealing it.

  “And what was your role at this time?” he asked, in an attempt to push the conversation along.

  “I was in my thirties. I was teaching and lecturing at the university. I had completed postgraduate work at Fudan University and was determined only to succeed in my career as an academic. In other words, I was a moral coward. I did nothing for the separatist movement, even as Uighur students protested the barbarism of nuclear testing, even as they took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the Uighur governor of Xinjiang who had been forcibly and unfairly removed from power.”

  “And then came Tiananmen Square. Is that what changed you?”

  The question had been no more than an instinctive lunge for information, but Wang reacted as though Joe had unlocked a code. “Yes, Mr. Richards,” he said, nodding his head. “You are correct.” He looked almost startled. As Wang cast his mind back to the events of 1989, recalling all of the horror and the shock of that fateful summer, his face assumed a dark, contemplative mask of grief. “Yes,” he said. “The massacre in Tiananmen changed everything.”

  9

  CLUB 64

  By coincidence, Miles, Isabella and I were drinking at Club 64 in Wing Wah Lane, a Hong Kong institution named after the date of the Tiananmen massacre, which took place on the fourth day of the sixth month of 1989. Shortly after midnight, in the middle of a conversation about Isabella’s new job—she was working for a French television company in the run-up to the handover—Miles excused himself from our table and went downstairs to make a phone call.

  On the consulate recording of the conversation, the official who picks up sounds startled and sleepy.

  “I wake you?”

  “Hey, Mr. Coolidge. What’s happening?”

  Miles was using the bar landline, feeding coins into the slot. “Just a question. You guys have any idea where Joe Lennox went tonight? He got a call at dinner and took off pretty quick.”

  “Heppner Joe?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Let me check.”

  There was a long pause. I walked downstairs on my way to the gents just as Miles was taking the opportunity to check his reflection in a nearby mirror. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead, then ducked his nose into his armpits to check for BO. He saw me looking at him and we exchanged a nod as I passed.

  “Mr. Coolidge?”

  “Still here.”

  “We’re not getting anything from the computer, but Sarah says somebody’s using Yuk Choi Road.”

  “The safe house?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “Hold on.”

  Another lengthy delay. Miles had another look in the mirror.

  “Mr. Coolidge?”

  “Yup.”

  “From the audio it sounds like just Joe and one other guy.”

  “British or Chinese?”

  “Chinese. But they’re speaking English. You know anything about this?”

  “No,” Miles said. “But I know somebody who will.”

  10

  ABLIMIT CELIL

  The Uighur, Ablimit Celil, drove the maintenance truck though the gates of the People’s Liberation Army barracks at Turpan at approximately 6:15 a.m. A soldier, not much older than nineteen or twenty, stepped out of his hutch and waved the truck to a stop.

  “What is your business?”

  “To clean,” Celil replied. He did not make eye contact with the soldier. The uniform was the embodiment of Han oppression and control and Celil always tried to maintain his dignity when confronted by it. “Please direct me to the kitchens.”

  Asleep on the seats beside him were two other Uighur men, both well-known faces around the barracks. The young soldier shone a torch into their eyes.

  “Wake up!”

  The order was a shrill, authoritarian bark. The men stirred, shielding their faces from the light. It was a cold morning in eastern Xinjiang and the open window of the truck had quickly robbed the cabin of heat and comfort. The soldier appeared to recognize both men before returning his gaze to Celil.

  “Who are you?” he said. He shone the torch into Celil’s face, then down into his lap.

  “He’s the new cleaner,” one of the men replied. Celil had been pestering them for months to find him a job. “It’s all been cleared with your superiors.”

  “Shen fen zheng!”

  Another barked command, this time a request for identification. There was distrust and mutual suspicion in almost every encounter between the PLA and members of the local Uighur population who worked on the barracks. Celil reached into the back pocket of his trousers and produced the fake ID prepared for him in the back streets of Hami. There followed the obligatory ten-minute delay while the soldier returned to his hutch to record the details of the shen fen zheng in a logbook. He then walked back to the truck, returned the papers to Celil and instructed one of his comrades, who operated the security barrier separating the barracks from the main road, to allow the vehicle to pass. A minute later, Celil had parked the truck beneath the first-floor window of the catering block.

  For the rest of the day, the three men went about their business. They cleaned toilets, urinals, ovens. They polished floors, windows, pictures. The soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army ignored them as they went about their business.

  Celil, a more devout Muslim than the two men with whom he had travelled to work, was prevented from praying during the day. There was, of course, no mosque at the barracks, nor any area set aside for the salaah. For half an hour at lunch the three men were allowed to return to their truck, where they ate bread and sheep’s cheese, washed down with tea kindly provided by a Han woman who prepared soup in the kitchens.

  At approximately 1:30 p.m., when his Uighur colleagues had returned to work in the dormitory building on the western edge of the barracks, Celil opened the rear doors of the truck and stepped inside. He picked up a large cardboard box and carried it into the kitchens. Bottles of sprays and cream cleaners protruded from the top; old rags, stained and torn, had been wedged between them. Nobody pai
d any attention as he walked into the hall which separated the kitchens from the main dining area and walked downstairs towards the basement. The floors still smelled of cleaning fluid; he had washed them just an hour earlier.

  Celil knew that there was a store cupboard located on the landing between the basement and the ground floor. It contained overalls, brooms and various cleaning products. He unlocked the door, placed the cardboard box at the back of the cupboard and concealed it with a screen of buckets and mops. The timer had been set for 8 p.m. He then switched off the light, locked the door behind him and returned to the second floor, where he spent the next three hours cleaning windows.

  Ablimit Celil’s first and last day at the barracks ended at dusk. He had wanted to check the device at least once to ensure that the timer was running, but could not risk being seen by a passing soldier. Instead he climbed into the truck with his colleagues at seven o’clock and drove towards the gates.

  There were two new soldiers on duty at the barrier. As Celil approached, the Uighurs beside him said that they had not seen either man before.

  “Shen fen zheng!”

  “We are going home,” Celil replied. “Your colleague checked our IDs this morning.”

  “Shen fen zheng!”

  It was part of the game. Wearily the three men produced their papers and passed them through the open window. The soldier, more experienced and intelligent than the colleague who had allowed them through at dawn, flicked through the documents with a lazy ruthlessness.