The Stone Monkey

Tuesday, the Hour of the Rooster, 6:30 p.m.,

to Wednesday, the Hour of the Rat, 1 am.

Chapter Twenty-three

His wife was getting worse.

It was now early evening and Wu Qichen had sat for the past hour on the floor next to the mattress and bathed his wife's forehead. His daughter had painstakingly brewed the herbal tea he'd bought and together he and the girl had fed the hot liquid to the feverish woman. She'd taken the pills too but there seemed to be no improvement.

He leaned forward again and wiped her skin. Why wasn't she getting better? he raged. Had the herbalist cheated him? And why was his wife so thin to start with? She wouldn't have gotten sick on the voyage if she'd eaten right, gotten more sleep before they left. Yong-Ping, a fragile, pale woman, should have forced herself to take better care of herself. She had responsibilities…

"I'm frightened," she said. "I don't know what's real. It's all a dream to me. My head, the pain…" The woman began muttering and finally fell silent.

And suddenly Wu realized that he was frightened too. For the first time since they'd left Fuzhou, a lifetime ago, Wu Qichen began to think about losing her. Oh, there were many things about Yong-Ping that he didn't understand. They had married impulsively, without knowing much of each other. She was moody, she was sometimes less respectful than his father, say, would have tolerated. But she was a good mother to the children, she was dependable in the kitchen, she deferred to his parents, she was clever in bed. And she was always ready to sit quietly and listen to him – to take him seriously. Not many people did.

The thin man glanced up and saw their son standing in the doorway. Lang's eyes were wide and he had been crying.

"Go back and watch television," Wu told him.

But the boy didn't move. He stared at his mother.

The man stood. "Chin-Mei," he snapped. "Come here."

The girl appeared in the doorway a moment later. "Yes, Baba?"

"Bring me some of the new clothes for your mother."

The girl disappeared and returned a moment later with a pair of blue stretch pants and a T-shirt. Together they dressed the woman. Chin-Mei got a clean cloth and wiped her mother's forehead.

Wu then went to the electronics store next door to the apartment. He asked the clerk where the closest hospital was. The man told him that there was a big clinic not far away. He wrote down the address in English, as Wu asked; he'd decided to spend the money on a taxi to take his wife there and needed the written note to show the driver; his English was very bad. When he returned to the apartment he said to his daughter, "We'll be back soon. Listen to me carefully. You are not to open the door for anyone. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Father."

"You and your brother will stay in the apartment. Do not go outside for any reason."

She nodded.

"Lock the door and put that chain on it after we leave."

Wu opened the door, held his arm out for his wife to cling to and then stepped outside. He paused, heard the door latch and the rattle of the chain. Then they started down Canal Street, filled with so many people, so many opportunities, so much money – none of which meant much of anything to the small, frightened man at the moment.

"There!" the Ghost said urgently, as he turned the corner and eased the Blazer to the curb on Canal Street near Mulberry in Chinatown. "It's the Wus."

Before he and the Turks could find their masks and climb out of the vehicle, though, Wu helped his wife into a taxi. He climbed in after her and the cab drove away. The yellow cab was soon lost in the busy traffic of rush-hour Canal Street.

The Ghost eased back into traffic and parked in a space directly across from the apartment whose address, and front-door key, Mah's real estate broker had given him a half hour ago – just before they'd shot him to death.

"Where do you think they've gone?" one of the Turks asked the Ghost.

"I don't know. She looked sick, his wife. You saw how she was walking. Maybe to a doctor."

The Ghost surveyed the street. He measured distances and noted particularly the number of jewelry stores here at the intersection of Mulberry and Canal. It was a smaller version of the Midtown diamond district. This troubled the Ghost. It meant that there would be dozens of armed security guards on the street – if they killed the Wus before the stores closed they might expect one of them to hear the gunshots and come running to the sound. Even after-hours, though, there would be risks: he could see the square boxes of dozens of security cameras covering the sidewalks. They were out of sight of the cameras here but to approach the Wus, they would be well within range of the lenses. They'd have to move fast and wear the ski masks.

"I think here is how we should handle it," the Ghost said in slow English. "Are you listening?"

Each of the Turks turned his attention to him.

After her father and mother had left, Wu Chin-Mei made some tea for her brother and gave him a tea bun and rice. She reflected how badly her father had embarrassed her in front of a handsome young man in the grocery store by actually bargaining for the food they'd bought this morning when they'd arrived in Chinatown.

Saving a few yuan on tea buns and noodles!

She sat eight-year-old Lang down in front of the television with his food and then walked into the bedroom to change the sweat-stained sheets of their mother's bed.

Glancing at the mirror, she studied herself. She was pleased with what she saw: her long black hair, wide lips, deep eyes.

Several people had remarked that she looked like Lucy Liu, the actress, and Chin-Mei could see that was true. Well, she would look more like her after she lost a few pounds – and fixed her nose, of course. And these ridiculous clothes! A pale green workout suit… how disgusting. Clothes were important to Wu Chin-Mei. She and her girlfriends would raptly study the broadcasts of the fashion shows from Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, the tall models swiveling their hips as they walked down the runway. Then the girls, thirteen and fourteen, would stage their own fashion shows, traipsing down a homemade runway then ducking behind screens to change.

One time, before the party cracked down on her father for opening his loud mouth, the family had gone with him to Xiamen, south of Fuzhou. This was a delightful town, a tourist draw, catering to many Taiwanese and Western travelers. At a tobacco shop where her father had gone to buy cigarettes Chin-Mei had been stunned to see more than thirty fashion magazines in the racks. She'd remained in the store for a half hour while her father did some business nearby and their mother took Lang to a park. She worked her way through all of them. Most were from the West but many were published in Beijing or in other cities in the Free Zones along the coast and showed the latest creations of Chinese designers, which were as stylish as anything produced in Milan or Paris.

The teenager had planned to study fashion in Beijing and become a famous designer herself – possibly after a year or two of modeling.

But now her father had ruined that.

She dropped onto the bed, grabbed the phony cloth of her cheap running suit and tugged at it in a fury, wanted to rip it to pieces.

What would she do with her life now?

Work in a factory, stitching together crappy clothes like this. Making two hundred yuan a month and giving it to her pathetic parents. Maybe that would be how she'd spend the rest of her life.

That would be her career in the fashion business. Slavery… She was -

A sharp knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

Gasping in fright, she sat up fast, picturing the snakehead in the raft, a gun in his hand. The pop of the shots as he killed the drowning victims. She walked into the living room and turned the volume on the TV down. Lang looked up with a frown but she touched his lips to keep him silent.

A woman's voice called, "Mr. Wu? Are you there, Mr. Wu? I have a message from Mr. Chang."

Chang, she recalled, the man who had saved them from the hold of the ship and sailed the raft to shore. She liked him. She liked his son too, the one with the Western name William. He was sullen and lean and handsome. Cute but a risk: he was clearly triad bait.

"It's important," the woman said. "If you're there, open the door. Please. Mr. Chang said you're in danger. I worked with Mr. Mah. He's dead. You're in danger too. You need a new place to stay. I can help you find one. Can you hear me?"

Chin-Mei couldn't get the sound of the gun out of her mind. The terrible man, the Ghost, shooting at them. The explosion in the ship, the water.

Should she go with this woman? Chin-Mei debated.

"Please…" More pounding.

But then she heard her father's words ordering her to stay, not to open the door for anyone. And as angry as she was, as wrong as she thought her father was in so many ways, she couldn't disobey him.

She'd wait here silently and not let anyone in. When her parents returned she would give them the message.

The woman in the alleyway must've gone – there was no more knocking. Chin-Mei turned up the volume on the TV again and fixed a cup of tea for herself.

She sat for a few minutes, studying the outfits of the American actresses on a sitcom.

Then she heard the click of a key in the latch.

Her father was back already? She leapt up, wondering what had been wrong with their mother. Was she all right now? Did she have to stay in hospital?

Just as she got to the door and said "Father -" it opened fast and a small, swarthy man pushed inside, slammed the door behind him and pointed a pistol at her.

Chin-Mei screamed and tried to run to Lang but the man leapt forward and grabbed her around the waist. He flung her to the floor. He took her sobbing brother by the collar and dragged him across the room to the bathroom, pushed him inside. "Stay there, be quiet, brat," he snarled in bad English. He pulled the door shut.

The girl wrapped her arms around her chest and scrabbled away from him. She stared at the key. "How… where did you get that?" Afraid that he'd killed her parents and taken it from them.

He didn't understand her Chinese, though, and she repeated it in English.

"Shut your mouth. If you scream again I'll kill you." He took a cell phone from his pocket and made a call. "I'm inside. The children are here."

The man – dark and Arab-looking, probably from western China – nodded as he listened, looking Chin-Mei up and down. Then he gave a sour sneer. "I don't know, seventeen, eighteen… Pretty enough… All right."

He disconnected the call.

"First," he said in English, "some food." He seized her hair and dragged the sobbing girl into the kitchen. "What do you have to eat here?"

But all she could hear were those three words looping over and over through her mind.

First, some food… first, some food…

And then?

Wu Chin-Mei began to cry.

In Lincoln Rhyme's town house, gray and gloomy thanks to the storm's early dusk, the case wasn't moving at all.

Sachs sat nearby, calmly sipping that disgusting-smelling tea of hers, which irritated the hell out of Rhyme for no particular reason.

Fred Dellray was back, pacing and squeezing his unlit cigarette, not in any better mood than anyone else. "I wasn't happy then and I ain't happy now. Not. A. Happy. Person."

He was referring to what he'd been told were "resource allocation issues" within the bureau, which were delaying their getting more agents on the GHOSTKILL team. The tall man contemptuously spat out, "They ac-tually said 'RAI,' if you kin believe it. Yep, yep. 'It's an RAI situation.'" He rolled his eyes and muttered, "Jesus loves his mother."

Dellray's take was that nobody in the Justice Department thought human smuggling was particularly sexy and therefore worth much time. In fact, despite the executive order in the nineties shifting the jurisdiction, the bureau didn't have as much experience as the INS. Dellray had tried explaining to the assistant special agent in charge that there was also the little matter that the snakehead in question was a mass murderer. The response to that was also tepid. It fell into the category of LSFH, he'd explained.

"Which is?" Rhyme asked.

"'Let somebody else fuckin' handle it. I made that up, butcha get the picture." The SPEC-TAC team too was still cooling their heels down in Quantico, the agent glumly added.

And they were having no better luck with the evidence from any of the crime scenes.

"Okay, what about the Honda he stole at the beach?" Rhyme barked. "It's in the system. Isn't anybody in the hinterland looking for it? I mean, it is on an emergency vehicle locator."

"Sorry, Linc," Sellitto said, after he checked with downtown. "Nothing."

SorryLincnothing…

It was a hell of a lot easier to find a ship in a port in Russia than it was to find ten people in his own backyard.

Then the preliminary crime scene report from the Mah killing came back. Thom held the notes up for Rhyme and turned the pages for him. There was nothing to suggest that the Ghost was behind the killing; no evidence "associated" the Ghost with the scene, the forensics term for "connected." No ballistics were involved – Mah's throat had been cut – and the carpet in his office and the hallways hadn't yielded any footprints. The techs had lifted hundreds of latents and three dozen samples of trace evidence but it would take hours to analyze them all.

All the remaining AFIS requests from the fingerprints that Sachs had lifted at the prior scenes had come back negative, with the exception of Jerry Tang's – but his identity was hardly an issue any longer, of course.

"I want a drink," Rhyme said, discouraged. "It's cocktail hour. Hell, it's after cocktail hour."

"Dr. Weaver said no alcohol before the operation," Thom pointed out.

"She said avoid it, Thom. I'm sure she said avoid. Avoidance is not abstention."

"I'm not going to argue Webster's here, Lincoln. No booze."

"The operation isn't until next week. Give me a goddamn drink."

The aide was adamant. "You've been working way too hard on this case. Your blood pressure's up and your schedule's shot to hell."

Rhyme said, "We'll compromise. A small glass."

"That's not a compromise. That would be a win for you and a loss for me. You can drink after the surgery." He disappeared into the kitchen.

Rhyme closed his eyes, pushed his head back into the chair angrily. Imagining – a moment of absurd fantasy – that the operation would actually fix the nerves that operated his entire arm. He told no one this – not even Amelia Sachs – but, though walking was out of the question, he often fantasized that the surgery would actually let him lift things. He now pictured grabbing the Macallan and taking a hit directly from the bottle. Rhyme could almost feel his hand around the cool, round glass.

A clink on the table beside him made him blink. The astringent smoky smell of whisky rose up and engulfed his head. He opened his eyes. Sachs had placed a small glass of scotch on the wheelchair armrest.

"It's not very full," the criminalist muttered to her. But the subtext of the comment, both Lincoln and she understood, was: thank you.

She winked in reply.

He drank deeply through the straw and felt the warm burn of the liquor in his mouth and throat.

Another sip.

He enjoyed the liquor but found that it did little to dull the urgency and frustration he felt at the slow pace of the case. His eyes fell on the whiteboard. One entry caught his eye.

"Sachs," he called. "Sachs!"

"What?"

"I need a phone number. Fast."

The Ghost held his Model 51 pistol against his cheek.

The hot metal, redolent of oil and sweet grease, gave him reassurance. Yes, he wanted a new weapon, something bigger and more dependable – like the Uzi and the Beretta he'd lost on the Dragon. But this was a good-fortune gun, one he'd had for years. He believed it was lucky because he'd come by the pistol in this way: near Taipei once, he'd gone to a temple to pray. Someone had tipped the police that he was inside and two officers stopped him as he came down the stairs. One of them, though, had hesitated to pull a gun at a Buddhist temple and, flustered, he'd dropped this very weapon on the grass. The Ghost had scooped it up, shot both of the young policemen to death then escaped.

From that day on this gun had been his good-luck charm, a present from his bowman god, Yi.

It had been nearly an hour since Kashgari had gone inside to make sure the Wus' children stayed put. The shops had closed along this part of Canal – the armed guards were gone, he was sure, and the sidewalks were largely deserted. Let's get on with it, the Ghost thought and stretched. He was tired of waiting. Yusuf and the other Turk were too. They'd been complaining about hunger but he guessed that even some of the restaurants and delis here had security cameras and the Ghost was not going to let himself or any associate be recorded on tape for something as frivolous as food. They'd have to -

"Look," he whispered, glancing up the street.

At the end of the block, he saw two people climb from a cab, nervously keeping their heads down. The Wus. The Ghost recognized them clearly from the cheap running suits they wore. They paid the driver and walked into a drugstore on the corner, the husband clutching his wife around the waist. Her arm was in a cast or was wrapped with thick bandages. He carried a shopping bag.

"Get the masks ready. Check your weapons."

The two Turks complied.

Five minutes later the Wus left the drugstore. They were walking as quickly as they could, considering the wife's condition.

He said to Hajip, "You stay with the car. Keep the engine running. He and I" – a nod toward Yusuf – "will follow the Wus inside. We push them into their apartment and close the door. We'll use pillows for silencers. I want to bring the daughter with us. We'll keep her for a while."

Yindao would, he knew, forgive this infidelity.

The Wus were now five meters from their doorway, shuffling fast, heads down, oblivious to the gods of death who fluttered nearby.

The Ghost found his cell phone and called the Turk in the Wus' apartment.

"Yes?" Kashgari answered.

"The Wus're close to the building. Where are the children?"

"The boy's in the bathroom. The girl's with me."

"As soon as they walk into the alley we'll come in right behind them."

He shut off the power to the phone – so there'd be no distracting ring at inopportune moments. The Ghost and Yusuf pulled their masks down over their faces and climbed out. The other Turk slipped behind the wheel of the Blazer.

The Wus were moving closer to the door.

The Ghost stepped off the curb and walked straight toward his victims.

Afraid, you can be brave…

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

• "Bangshou" (assistant) on board; identity unknown.

• Assistant confirmed as drowned body found near site where Dragon sank.

• Ten immigrants escape: seven adults (one elderly, one injured woman), two children, one infant. Steal church van.

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Vehicle awaiting Ghost on beach left without him. One shot believed fired by Ghost at vehicle. Request for vehicle make and model sent out, based on tread marks and wheelbase.

• Vehicle is a BMW X5.

• Driver – Jerry Tang.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

• Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.

• Untraceable satellite secure phone. Hacked Chinese gov't system to use it.

• Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

• Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.

• Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.

• No trace of Honda found.

• Three bodies recovered at sea – two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.

• Drowned individual identified as Victor Au, the Ghost's bangshou.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches on any prints but unusual markings on Sam Chang's fingers and thumbs (injury, rope burn?).

• Profile of immigrants: Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, John Sung, baby of woman who drowned, unidentified man and woman (killed on beach).

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

• Camouflaged by immigrants with "The Home Store" logo.

• Blood spatter suggests injured woman has hand, arm or shoulder injury.

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Jerry Tang Murder

Crime Scene

• Four men kicked door in and tortured him and shot him.

• Two shell casings – match Model 51. Tang shot twice in head.

• Extensive vandalism.

• Some fingerprints.

• No matches except Tang's.

• Three accomplices have smaller shoe size than Ghost, presumably smaller stature.

• Trace suggests Ghost's safehouse is probably downtown, Battery Park City area.

• Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority. Presently pursuing whereabouts.

Chapter Twenty-four

The Wus in the doorway.

The children in the apartment.

The Ghost and Yusuf, masks over their faces and guns at their sides, were sprinting across Canal Street. He felt the rush of excitement he always did before a kill. His hands vibrated slightly but would grow still when he lifted the gun to shoot.

He thought again about Wu's daughter. Seventeen, eighteen… pretty enough. He would -

It was at this moment that a loud crack echoed through the street and a bullet slammed into a parked car just behind the Ghost. The alarm began braying.

"Jesus," a man's voice called from somewhere. "Who fired?"

The Ghost and Yusuf stopped and crouched. They lifted their weapons, scanning the street for their attacker.

"Hell," came another voice. "Cease-fire!"

And another: "Who the fuck -"

The Wus too stopped, crouching down on the pavement.

The Ghost's head was swiveling. He gripped Yusuf's arm.

A man's voice cried through a loudspeaker, "Kwan Ang! Stop. This is the United States Immigration Service!" Followed immediately by a second gunshot – from the man who'd called out, it seemed – and a side window of a nearby parked car exploded in a cloudburst of glass.

His heart vibrating from the shock, the snakehead scrabbled backward, his lucky gun up, as he looked for a target. The INS was here? How?

"It's a trap," he raged to Yusuf. "Back to the car!"

Chaos now filled Canal Street. More shouting, passersby and store clerks diving for cover. Up the block the doors of two white vans opened and men and women in black uniforms, carrying guns, leapt out.

And what was this? The Wus themselves were drawing weapons! The husband pulled a machine pistol from the plastic bag he'd held. The wife was lifting a weapon from her running suit pocket… And then the Ghost realized that they weren't the Wus at all. They were decoys – Chinese-American police officers or agents wearing the Wus' clothing. Somehow the police had found the couple and sent these people back in their place to lure him out of cover. "Drop your weapons!" the man masquerading as Wu shouted.

The Ghost fired five or six shots at random, to keep people down and stoke the panic. He shot out a window in a jewelry store, adding another siren to the tumult of sounds on the street and bolstering the chaos.

The Turk in the driver's seat opened the door and began firing at the white vans. Running, looking for cover and looking for targets, the police scattered on the far side of Canal.

As he crouched beside their four-by-four, the Ghost heard: "Who fired?… Backups aren't in position… What the fuck happened?… Watch the bystanders, for Christ's sake!"

A panicked driver in a car in front of the Wus' apartment started to speed up to get out of the line of fire. The Ghost fired two shots into the front seat. The window glass vanished and the car skidded into a row of parked vehicles with a huge bang.

"Kwan Ang," came an electronic shout from a bullhorn or vehicle loudspeaker, a different voice this time. "This is the FBI. Put down -"

He shut up the agent by firing twice more in his direction and climbed into the Blazer. The Uighurs climbed into the back. "Kashgari! He is inside," Yusuf cried and nodded toward the Wus' apartment, where the third Turk waited.

"He's dead or captured," the Ghost snapped. "Understand? We're not waiting."

Yusuf nodded. But just as the Ghost turned the key and started the engine he noticed a police officer step from a line of cars, motioning bystanders to get back and take cover. He lifted his pistol, aimed toward the front of the four-by-four.

"Get down!" the Ghost cried as the officer fired repeatedly. The three men ducked, expecting the windshield to shatter.

But instead they heard loud ring after loud ring as the bullets struck the front of the vehicle. Eight or nine of them. Finally there was a huge clanging as fan blades were knocked out of alignment and jammed into other parts of the engine, which gave a huge squeal, steam pouring from the pierced radiator. Finally it went silent.

"Out!" the Ghost ordered, jumping out and firing several shots at the officer to drive him under cover behind a row of cars.

The three men crouched on the sidewalk. For a moment there was a lull. The police and agents were holding their fire, probably waiting for the arrival of the backup officers – more emergency cars, sirens howling, were racing down Canal Street toward them right now.

"Drop your weapons and stand up," the staticky voice called through the loudspeaker again. "Kwan, drop your weapons!"

"We give up?" asked Hajip, his eyes huge with fear.

The Ghost ignored him and wiped his sweating hand on his slacks, then slipped another clip of ammunition into his Model 51. He looked behind him. "This way!" He rose and fired several times toward the officers then ran into the fish market behind them. Several patrons and clerks were cowering behind bins of fish and eels, racks of food, freezer cases. The Ghost and the two Turks ran to the back alleyway, where they found an old man standing beside a delivery truck. Seeing the guns and the masks, the man dropped to his knees and lifted his arms. He began wailing, "Don't harm me! Please! I have a family…" His voice trailed off into sobbing.

"Inside," the Ghost shouted to the Turks. They leapt in the truck. The snakehead looked behind them through the doorway and could see several officers cautiously approaching the store. He turned and fired several shots in their direction. They scattered for cover.

The Ghost then spun back and froze. The old man had grabbed a long filleting knife and had taken a step forward. He stopped and blinked in terror. The Ghost lowered his pistol to the old man's age-spotted forehead. The knife fell to the wet cobblestones at his feet. He closed his eyes.

Five minutes later Amelia Sachs arrived at the scene. She ran toward the Wus' apartment, her pistol in her hand.

"What happened?" she called to an officer standing beside a shot-up car. "What the hell happened?"

But the young cop was badly shaken and just glanced at her, numb.

She continued down the street and found Fred Dellray crouched over an officer who'd been shot in the arm, holding an improvised bandage on the man's wound. Medics ran up and took over.

Dellray was furious. "This is bad, Amelia. We were an inch away from him. A half inch."

"Where is he?" she asked, holstering the Glock.

"Stole a delivery van from that fish market 'cross the street. We got ever-body in town with a badge looking for it."

Sachs closed her eyes in dismay. All of Rhyme's brilliant deductions – and the superhuman efforts to put together a takedown team in time had been wasted.

What Rhyme, frustrated by the lack of leads, had noticed on the evidence chart was the reference to the injured immigrant's blood. The number Sachs had found for him was that of the Medical Examiner's office. He realized the lab had never called back with results of the tests. Rhyme had bullied a forensic pathologist into quickly completing the analysis.

The doctor had found several helpful things: the presence of bone marrow in the blood, indicating a severe bone fracture; sepsis, suggesting a deep cut or abrasion, and the presence of Coxiella burnetii, a bacteria responsible for Q fever, a zoonotic disease – one transmitted from animals to people. The bacteria were often picked up in places where animals were kept for long periods of time, like pens at seaports and the holds of ships.

Which meant that the immigrant was one very sick woman.

And that in turn was something that Rhyme believed might be useful.

"Tell me about this Q fever," Rhyme had asked the pathologist.

Though it wasn't contagious or life-threatening, the symptoms of the disease could be severe, he'd learned. Headache, chills, fever, possibly even liver malfunction.

"Is it rare?" Rhyme had asked.

"Very, around here."

"Excellent," Rhyme had announced, buoyed by this news, and had Sellitto and Deng put together a team of canvassers from the Big Building – One Police Plaza downtown – and the Fifth Precinct. They began calling all the hospitals and emergency clinics in Chinatown in Manhattan and the one in Flushing, Queens, to see if any female Chinese patients had been admitted with Q fever and a badly broken, infected arm.

After only ten minutes they'd received a call from one of the officers manning the phones downtown. It turned out that a Chinese man had just brought his wife into the emergency room of a clinic in Chinatown; she fit the profile perfectly – advanced Q fever and multiple fractures. Her name was Wu Yong-Ping. She'd been admitted and her husband was there too.

Officers from the Fifth Precinct had sped to the hospital – along with Sachs and Deng – to interview them. The Wus, shaken badly over their arrest, had told the police where they were living and that their children were still in the apartment. Then Rhyme had called to tell her that he'd just gotten the AFIS results from the Jimmy Mah killing: some of the prints matched those found at prior GHOSTKILL scenes; the snakehead had committed the crime. When Wu explained that Mah's broker had gotten them the apartment Rhyme and Sachs realized that the Ghost knew where the Wus were staying and was probably on his way to kill them at that moment.

Since the bureau's crack SPEC-TAC team was still not on hand to assist on the case, Dellray, Sellitto and Peabody put together a joint takedown team of their own and would have some Chinese-American officers from the Fifth Precinct masquerade as the Wus.

But, because of one premature gunshot, the whole effort was wasted.

Dellray snapped at another agent, "Anything more on the fish-store van? How come nobody's seen it? It's got the fuckin' name of the store on the side in big ugly letters."

The agent made a call on his radio and a moment later reported, "Nothing, sir. No reports of it on the road or abandoned."

Dellray played with the knot of his purple-black tie, just visible above his body armor. "Somethin'. Ain't. Right."

"What do you mean, Fred?" Sachs asked.

But the agent didn't answer. He glanced back at the fish store and strode toward it. Sachs accompanied him. Standing near the large ice bin in the front were three Chinese – store clerks, Sachs assumed – and two NYPD police officers interviewing them.

Dellray looked over the clerks one by one and his gaze settled on an old man, whose eyes dropped immediately to the dozen gray-pink flounders resting on the bed of ice.

He pointed a finger at the man. "He told you the Ghost stole the van, right?"

"That's right, Agent Dellray," one of the cops said.

"Well, he was goddamn lying!"

Dellray and Sachs ran to the back of the shop and into the alleyway behind it. Hidden behind a large Dumpster thirty feet away they found the fish market's van.

Returning to the front of the store Dellray said to the old man, "Listen, skel, tell me what happened and don't fuck with me. We all together on that?"

"He going kill me," the man said, sobbing. "Make me say they stole van, three men. Had gun at my head. They drove down alley, hid van then got out and run. Don't know where go."

Dellray and the policewoman returned to the impromptu command post. "Can't hardly blame him. But still… shit and a half."

"So," she speculated, "they got onto a side street and jacked some wheels."

"Prob'ly. And killed the driver."

A moment later an officer indeed called in, saying that there'd been a report of a carjacking. Three armed men in ski masks had run up to a Lexus at a stoplight, ordered the couple out and sped off. Contrary to Dellray's prediction, though, the driver and passenger were unhurt.

"Why didn't he kill 'em?" Dellray wondered.

"Probably didn't want to fire his gun," Sachs said. "Draw too much attention." She added bitterly, "It would've been inconvenient."

As more emergency vehicles pulled up she asked Dellray, "Who was it? Who fired the shot that spooked him?"

"Dunno yet. But I'ma look this one over with a fuckin' magnifyin' glass."

But he didn't need to look too far, as it turned out. Two uniformed officers walked up to the FBI agent and conferred with him. The agent's face compressed into a frown. Dellray looked up and strode over to the guilty party.

It was Alan Coe.

"What in th'living hell happened?" Dellray barked.

Defensive but defiant, the red-haired agent looked back into the FBI agent's eyes. "I had to fire. The Ghost was going to shoot the decoys, didn't you see?"

"No, I did not. His weapon was at his side."

"Not from my angle."

"Crap on your angle," Dellray snapped. "It was at. His. Side."

"I'm getting sick of you lecturing me, Dellray. It was a fucking judgment call. If you had everybody in position we still could've collared him."

"We set it up to take him down on the sidewalk, without innocents around, not in the middle of a crowded street." Dellray shook his head. "Thirty li'l tiny seconds and he woulda been tied up like a Christmas package." Then the tall agent nodded at the big.45 Glock on Coe's hip. "An' even if he was moving on somebody, how the hell couldja miss with a piece like that from fifty feet? Even I coulda hit him and I don't fire my pissy weapon but once a year. Fuck."

Coe's defiance slipped and he said contritely, "I thought it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. I was worried about saving some lives."

Dellray plucked the unsmoked cigarette from behind his ear, looking like he was about to light it up. "This's gone way far enough. From now on INS is advisory only. No enforcement, no tactical."

"You can't do that," Coe said, an ominous look in his eyes.

" 'Cording to the Executive Order I can, son. I'm going downtown and doing what I gotta to put that in place." He stormed off. Coe muttered something Sachs didn't catch.

She watched Dellray climb into his car, slam the door and speed off. She turned back to Coe. "Did anybody get the children?"

"Children?" the agent asked, absently. "You mean, the Wus' kids? I don't know."

Their parents were frantic that the children be brought to them at the hospital as soon as possible.

"I told downtown about 'em," Coe said dismissively, meaning, she supposed, the INS. "I guess they're sending somebody to take custody. That's procedure."

"Well, I'm not thinking about procedure," she snapped. "There're two children alone in there and they just heard a shoot-out in front of their apartment. Wouldn't you think they'd be a little scared?"

Coe had had enough reprimands for one day. Silently he turned and walked back to his car without a word, pulling out his cell phone as he left. He too drove off angrily, his phone pressed against his ear.

Sachs then called Rhyme and gave him the bad news.

"What happened?" Rhyme asked, even angrier than Dellray.

"One of our people fired before we were in position. The street wasn't sealed and the Ghost shot his way out… Rhyme, it was Alan who fired the shot."

"Coe?"

"Right."

"Oh, no."

"Dellray's bumping the INS down a notch."

" Peabody won't like that."

"At this point Fred's in no mood to care about what people like and don't."

"Good," Rhyme said. "We need somebody to take charge. We're groping around in the dark on this one. I don't like it." Then he asked, "Casualties?"

"A few officers and civies wounded. Nothing serious." She noticed Eddie Deng. "I've got to get the Wus' children, Rhyme. I'll call you back after I run the scene."

She disconnected the call and said to Deng, "Need some translation help, Eddie. With the Wus' kids."

"Sure."

Pointing to the bullet-pocked four-by-four, Sachs said to another officer, "Keep it sealed. I'll run the scene in a minute." The cop nodded in response.

Deng and Sachs walked to the apartment. She said, "I don't want the kids to go downtown to the INS alone, Eddie. Can you sneak 'em out of here and get 'em to their parents at the clinic?"

"Sure."

They walked down the few stairs that led to the basement apartments. Garbage littered the alleyway and Sachs knew the rooms here would be dark, probably infested with roaches and would undoubtedly stink. Imagine, she thought: the Wus had risked death and imprisonment and endured the physical pain of their terrible journey just for the privilege of calling this filthy place their home.

"What's the number?" Deng asked, walking ahead of Sachs.

"One B," she answered.

He started toward the door.

It was then that Sachs noticed a key in the front-door lock of the Wus' apartment.

A key? she wondered.

Deng reached for the knob.

"No," Sachs cried, unholstering her weapon. "Wait!"

But it was too late. Deng was pushing the door open anyway. He leapt back – away from the slight, dark man with his arm around a sobbing teenage girl's waist, holding her in front of him as a shield, a pistol pressed against her neck.

Chapter Twenty-five

"Ting, ting!" Eddie Deng shouted in panic.

The young detective's weaponless hands rose above his spiny hair.

No one moved. Sachs heard a multitude of sounds: the girl's whimpering, the low hiss of traffic, horns from the street. The gunman's desperate orders in a language she didn't understand. Her own heartbeats.

She turned sideways, to present a smaller target, and centered the blade sights of her Glock on as much of his head as presented. The rule was this: as difficult as it was, you never sacrificed yourself. You never gave up your weapon, you never turned it aside in a standoff, you never let a perp draw a target anywhere on your body. You had to make them understand that the hostage wasn't going to save them.

The man started forward very slowly, motioning them back, still muttering in his unintelligible language.

Neither Sachs nor the young detective moved.

"You in armor, Deng?" she whispered.

"Yeah" came the shaky reply.

She was too – an American Body Armor vest with a Super Shok heart plate – but at this range a shot could easily do major damage to an unprotected part of their bodies. A nick in the femoral artery could kill you faster than some chest shots would.

"Back out," she whispered. "I need better light for shooting."

"You going to shoot?" Deng asked uncertainly.

"Just back out."

She took a step behind her. Another. The young cop, sweat gleaming between the thoms of his hair, didn't move. Sachs stopped. He was muttering something, maybe a prayer.

"Eddie, you with me?" she whispered. After a pause: "Eddie, goddamn it!"

He shook his head. "Sorry. Sure."

"Come on, slow." To the man gripping the teenage girl Sachs spoke in a cooing voice and very slowly: "Put the gun down. Let's not anybody get hurt. Do you speak English?"

They backed away. The man followed.

"English?" she tried again.

Nothing.

"Eddie, tell him we'll work something out."

"He's not Han," Deng said. "He won't speak Chinese."

"Try it anyway."

A burst of sounds from Deng's mouth. The staccato words were startling.

The man didn't respond.

The two officers backed toward the front of the alleyway. Not a single goddamn cop or agent noticed them. Sachs thought, Where the hell are all of our people?

The assailant and the terrified girl, the gun tucked against her neck, moved forward and stepped outside too.

"You," the man barked to Sachs in crude English, "on ground. Both on ground."

"No," Sachs said, "we're not lying down. I'm asking you to put your gun down. You can't get away. Hundreds of police. You understand?" As she spoke she adjusted her target – his cheek – in the slightly better light here. But it was a very narrow bull's-eye. And the girl's temple was a scant inch to the right of it. He was of very slim build and Sachs had no body shot at all.

The man glanced behind him, up the dark alley.

"He's going to fire and then make a run for it," Deng said in a quavering voice.

"Listen," Sachs called calmly. "We're not going to hurt you. We -"

"No!" The man shoved the gun harder against the girl's neck. She screamed.

Then Deng reached for his sidearm.

"Eddie, don't!" Sachs cried.

"Bu!" the assailant called and thrust his gun forward, firing into Deng's chest. The detective grunted violently from the impact and fell backward, against Sachs, knocking her to the ground. Deng rolled onto his belly, retching – or coughing blood; she couldn't tell. The round might've pierced the body armor at this range. Stunned, Sachs struggled to her knees. The gunman aimed at her before she could raise her weapon.

But he hesitated. There was some distraction behind him. The shooter looked back. In the darkness of the alleyway Sachs could make out a man speeding forward, a small figure, holding something in his hand.

The perp released the girl and spun around, lifting the gun, but before he could shoot, the running figure clocked him in the side of the head with what he was carrying – a brick.

"Hongse!" Sonny Li called to Sachs, dropping the brick and pulling the girl away from the stunned assailant. Li pushed her to the ground and turned back to the dark man, who clutched his bleeding head. But suddenly he jumped back and lifted his pistol toward Li, who stumbled back against the wall.

Three fast shots from Sachs's gun dropped the attacker like a doll onto the cobblestones and he lay motionless.

"Judges of hell," Sonny Li gasped, staring at the body. He stepped forward, checked the man's pulse then lifted the gun out of his lifeless hand. "Dead, Hongse," he called. Then Li turned back to the girl, helping her up. Sobbing, she ran down the alley, past Sachs, and into the arms of a Chinese officer from the Fifth Precinct, who began comforting her in their common language.

Med techs ran to Deng to check him out. The vest had indeed stopped the slug but the impact might have cracked a rib or two. "I'm sorry," he gasped to Sachs. "I just reacted."

"Your first firefight?"

He nodded.

She smiled. "Welcome to the club." The medic helped him up and they took him out to be examined more thoroughly in an EMS bus.

Sachs and two ESU officers cleared the apartment and found a young, panicked boy, about eight, in the bathroom. With the help of a Chinese-American cop from the Fifth Precinct to translate, the medics checked the siblings out and found that neither of them had been hurt or molested by the Ghost's partner.

Sachs glanced back into the alley, where another medic and two uniformed officers stood over the corpse of the assailant. "I have to process the body," she reminded them. "I don't want it disturbed more than necessary."

"Sure, Officer," came the reply.

Nearby, Sonny Li patted his pockets and finally located his pack of cigarettes. If he hadn't found any she wouldn't've been surprised to see him rifle the dead man's pockets.

Putting on her Tyvek suit to search the crime scenes, Amelia Sachs glanced up to see Li walking toward her.

She laughed to see the cheery grin on the little man. "How?" she asked.

"How what?"

"How the hell d'you figure out the Wus were here?"

"I ask you same thing."

"You tell me first." She sensed he was eager to brag – and she was happy to let him.

"Okay." He finished the cigarette and lit another. "Way I work in China. I go places, talk to people. Tonight I go to gambling halls, three of them. Lose some money, win some money, drink. And talk and talk. Finally meet guy at poker table, carpenter. Fuzhounese. He tell me about man come in earlier, nobody know him. Complaining to everybody about women, about what he had to do for family 'cause wife sick and broke arm. Bragging about money he going make. Then he say he on Dragon this morning and rescue everybody when it sink. Had to be Wu. Liver-spleen disharmony, I'm saying. He say he living nearby. I ask around and find about this block. Lots meet-and-greet snakeheads put people here who just arrive. I come over and look around, ask people, see if anybody know anything and find out family – just like Wus – move in today. I check out building and look through back window and see guy with gun. Hey, you look in back window first, Hongse?"

"No, I didn't."

"Maybe you should done that. That good rule. Always look in back window first."

"I should have, Sonny." She nodded in the direction of the dead shooter.

"Too bad he not alive," Li said glumly. "Could been helpful."

"You don't really torture people to get them to talk, do you?" she asked.

But the Chinese cop just gave a cryptic smile. He asked, "Hongse, how you find Wus?"

Sachs explained to Li how they'd found the Wus through the wife's injury.

Li nodded, impressed with Rhyme's deductions. "But what happen to Ghost?"

Sachs explained about the premature gunshot and the snakehead's escape.

"Coe?"

"That's right," she agreed.

"Big fuck… I not like that man, I'm saying. When he over in China at meeting in Fuzhou we not trust him much. Walk into room and not like us, nobody there. Talk like we children, want to do case against Ghost by himself. Talk bad about immigrants. Disappear at times when we need him." Li looked over the Tyvek overalls. He frowned. "Why you wear that suit, Hongse?"

"So I don't contaminate the evidence."

"Bad color. Shouldn't wear white. Color of death in my country, color of funerals, I'm saying. Throw it out. You get red suit. Red is good-luck color in China. Not blue either. Get red suit."

"It's enough of a target in white."

"Not good," he said. "Bad feelings." He remembered a word that Deng had taught him earlier. "Bad omen, I'm saying."

"I'm not superstitious," Sachs said.

"I am," Li said. "Lots people in China are. Always saying prayers, sacrificing, cutting demon's tail -"

"Cutting what?" she interrupted.

"Called cutting demon's tail. See, demons follow you always so when you cross traffic you run fast in front of car. That cut off demon's tail and take his power away."

"Don't people ever get hit?"

"Sometimes."

"Then don't they know it doesn't work?"

"No, only know that sometimes you cut his tail, sometimes demon get you."

Cutting the demon's tail…

Sachs got Li to promise he'd stay out of the crime scene – at least until she was finished – and then processed the dead gunman's body, walked the grid inside the apartment and finally searched the Ghost's bullet-riddled SUV. She bagged and tagged all the evidence and finally stripped off the space suit.

Then she and Li drove back to the clinic, where she found the Wu family reunited in a room guarded by two uniformed cops and a stony-faced woman INS agent. With Li and the agent translating, Sachs got as much information as she could. Though Wu Qichen knew nothing about the Ghost's whereabouts in the city, the scrawny, embittered man gave her some information about the Changs, including the name of the infant with them, Po-Yee, which meant Treasured Child.

What a lovely name, thought Amelia Sachs.

She said to the INS agent, "They're going to detention?"

"Right. Until the hearing."

"Do you have a problem putting them in one of our safehouses?" The NYPD had several nondescript, high-security town houses in the city, used for witness protection. INS detention centers for illegal immigrants were notoriously lax. Besides, the Ghost would be expecting them to go to an Immigration facility and, with his guanxi, might pay someone in the detention center to let him or a bangshou inside to try to kill the family again.

"Fine with us."

The town house in Murray Hill was free, Sachs knew. She gave the agent the address and the name of the NYPD officer who oversaw the houses.

The INS agent then looked at Wu and, like a bad-tempered schoolteacher, said, "Why don't you people just stay at home? Fix your problems there. You almost got your wife and family killed."

Wu's English wasn't good but apparently he understood her. He rose from his wife's bedside and gestured broadly. "Not our fault!" he snapped, leaning toward the sour woman. "Coming here not our fault!"

Amused, the INS agent asked, "Not your fault? Who do you want to blame?"

"You country!"

"How do you figure that?"

"You not see? Look around! All you money and richnesses, you advertising, you computers, you Nikes and Levis, cars, hair spray… You Leonardo DiCaprio, you beautiful women. You pills for everything, you makeup, you television! You tell whole world you got fuck everything here! Meiguo is all money, all freedom, all safe. You tell us everybody how good is here. You take our money, but you say to us mei-you, go away! You tell us our human rights terrible, but when we try come here you say mei-you!"

The thin man lapsed into Chinese then calmed. He looked the woman up and down, nodded at her blond hair. "What your ancestor? Italians, Englishes, Germans? They in this country first? Huh, tell me." He waved angrily and sat down on the bed, put his hand on his wife's uninjured arm.

The agent shook her head, smiling in a condescending way, as if astonished that the immigrant couldn't figure out the obvious.

Sachs left the somber family behind and motioned Li after her to the clinic exit. They paused at the curb then jogged between two fast-moving taxis. Sachs wondered if she'd been close enough to the second one to cut the tail off any demons pursuing her.

The building and the garage beneath it were virtually impregnable but the parking garage annex in an underground structure across the street was far less so.

Concern about terrorist bombs had prompted the Government Services Administration to limit access to the garage under Manhattan Federal Plaza. There were so many federal employees that it would create huge bottlenecks to check every vehicle that entered the garage under the building itself, so that facility was closed to all but the most senior government officials and the one next door constructed for other employees. There was still security in the annex, of course, but since the garage sat beneath a small park, even the worst bomb damage would be limited.

In fact, tonight at 9 p.m. the security was not at its best because the one guard on duty at the entrance booth was watching some excitement: a car fire on Broadway. An old van was burning down to its tires – a conflagration observed by hundreds of happy passersby.

The chunky guard had stepped out of his booth, watching the black smoke and orange flames dancing through the windows of the van.

So he didn't notice the slight man dressed in a suit and carrying an attaché case step quickly into the "autos only" entrance and hurry down the ramp into the half-deserted garage.

The man had memorized the license plate number of the car he sought and it took him only five minutes to find it. The navy blue government-issue vehicle was very close to the main exit door; the driver had this choice spot because he'd arrived only a half hour ago – long after the offices had closed and most of the federal employees had left for the day.

Like nearly all federal cars – the man had been assured – there was no alarm. After a fast glance around the garage he pulled on cloth gloves, quickly drove a wedge between the window and the side of the door, slipped a slim-jim tool inside the space and popped the lock. He opened his attaché case and took out a heavy paper bag, glanced inside for one final check. He saw the cluster of foot-long yellow sticks on whose side were the words: EXPLOSIVE. DANGER. SEE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE. Wires ran from a detonator in one of the sticks to a battery box and from there to a simple pressure switch. He placed the bag under the driver's seat, unwound a length of wire, then slipped the pressure switch betweEN THE SPRINGS OF THE SEAT. ANYONE WHO WEIGHED more than ninety pounds would complete the circuit and set off the detonator simply by sitting down.

The man clicked the power switch on the battery box from off to on and locked the door of the car, closed it as quietly as he could and left the garage, walking matter-of-factly past the still-oblivious security guard, raptly watching the NYFD douse the flames of the burning van though with a little disappointment in his face – as if he was sorry that the gas tank hadn't blown up spectacularly, as they always did in action flicks and TV shows.

Chapter Twenty-six

They sat in silence, watching the small television set, William translating those words that his parents didn't understand.

The special news report didn't give the names of the people who'd nearly been killed on Canal Street but there was no doubt that it was Wu Qichen and his family; the story said they'd been passengers on the Fuzhou Dragon that morning. One of the Ghost's confederates had been killed but the snakehead himself had escaped with one or two others.

The story ended and commercials came on the television screen. William rose and walked to the window, looked out at the dark street.

"Get back," Chang snapped to his son. But the boy remained where he was for a defiant moment.

Children… Chang thought.

"William!"

The boy finally stepped away and walked into the bedroom. Ronald flipped through channels on the television.

"No," Sam Chang told his younger son. "Read. Get a book and practice your English."

The boy dutifully stood. He went to the shelf and found a volume and returned to the couch to read.

Mei-Mei finished stitching together a small stuffed animal for Po-Yee – a cat, it seemed. The woman made the toy pounce onto the arm of her chair and the girl took it in both hands, studying it with happy eyes. Together they played with the cat, laughing.

Chang heard a moan on the couch, where his own father rested, curled in a blanket that was virtually the same gray shade as his skin.

"Baba," Chang whispered and rose immediately. He found the man's medicine, opened it and gave him a tablet of morphine. He held the cup of cold tea so that the man could take the pill. When he'd first gotten sick – the heat and dampness spreading quickly through the yang organs of his body, the stomach and intestines – they'd gone to their local doctor, who'd given them herbs and tonics. Soon, though, that hadn't been enough for the pain and another doctor had diagnosed cancer. But Chang's dissident status had kept his father waiting on the bottom of the list at the hospitals' huge queues for treatment. Medical care in China was changing. The state hospitals were giving way to private clinics but they were extremely expensive – a single visit could cost two months' salary and treating cancer would have been out of the question for a family struggling to survive. The best Chang had been able to find was a "barefoot doctor" in the countryside north of Fuzhou, one of those individuals simply proclaimed by the government to be paramedics and practicing with minimal training. The man had prescribed morphine to ease Chang Jiechi's pain but there was little else he could do.

The bottle of the drug was large but it wouldn't last more than a month and his father was quickly worsening. On the Internet Chang had done a lot of research on the United States. There was a famous hospital in New York that did nothing but treat cancer patients. He knew that his father's condition was advanced but the man wasn't old – not by American standards – only sixty-nine, and he was strong from daily walks and exercise. Surgeons could operate and remove those portions of his body destroyed by the cancerous dampness and give him radiation and medicine to keep the disease at bay. He could live for many more years.

As he gazed at his father the old man suddenly opened his eyes. "The Ghost is angry now that they've killed one of his own people. And that he's failed to kill the Wus. He'll come after us. I know his sort. He won't stop until he finds us."

This was his father's way. To sit and to absorb then give his assessments, which were invariably right. For instance, he'd always considered Mao Zedong a psychopath and had predicted some cataclysm would descend upon the country under his reign. And he'd been right: the near annihilation of the Chinese economy in the fifties thanks to Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution a decade later, of which his father – like all open-minded artists and thinkers – was a victim.

But Chang Jiechi had survived the disasters. He'd said to his family in the 1960s, "This will pass. The madness cannot be sustained. We have only to stay alive and wait. That is our goal."

Within ten years, Mao was dead, the Gang of Four was imprisoned, and Chang Jiechi had been proven right.

And he was right now too, Sam Chang thought in despair. The Ghost would come after them.

The very name "snakehead" comes from the image of the smugglers crawling furtively through borders to deliver their human cargo to their final destination. Chang sensed the Ghost was doing this now – prowling, calling in favors, wielding his guanxi, threatening, perhaps even torturing people to find the Changs' whereabouts. He might -

Outside, a screech of brakes.

Chang, his wife and father all froze.

Footsteps.

"Shut the lights out. Quickly," Chang ordered. Mei-Mei scurried through the apartment, dowsing them.

Chang walked quickly to the closet, pulled William's pistol out from its hiding place and walked to the curtained front window. Hands trembling, he looked outside.

Across the street was a delivery truck – with a large sign for pizza hanging from the window. The driver was carrying a cardboard carton up to an apartment.

"It's all right," he said. "A delivery across the street."

But then he looked through the dim apartment, detecting the vague forms of his father, his wife and the infant, illuminated only by the blue light of the television screen. His smile of relief faded and, like the black cloud from an ink stick in a calligraphy well, he was consumed with intense regret for what his decisions had done to these people he loved so much. In America, Chang had learned, guilt for transgressions tortures one's psyche; in China, though, shame at letting down family and friends is the essential torment. And that is what he now felt: searing shame.

So this is to be the life I've brought to my father and my family: fear and darkness. Nothing but fear and darkness…

The madness cannot be sustained.

Perhaps not, Chang thought. But that doesn't mean that it's not any less deadly while it persists.

Sitting on a bench in Battery Park City, the Ghost was watching the lights of the ships on the Hudson River, far more peaceful but less picturesque than the waterfront in Hong Kong. There was a break in the rain but the wind was still rowdy, pushing low purple clouds quickly overhead, their bellies lit by the vast spectrum of city lights.

How had the police found the Wus? the Ghost wondered.

He considered this question but could come to no answer. Probably through the broker they'd killed and through Mah – the investigators hadn't believed that the Italians had killed the tong leader, despite the message he'd written in Mah's blood. The news had reported that the one Uighur they'd left behind was dead and that would mean a big reparation payment to the head of the cultural center.

How had they found the family?

Maybe it was magic…

No, not magic at all. He had yet more proof that his adversary and those working with him were relentless and talented. There was something very different about the people who were after him this time. Better than the Taiwanese, better than the French, better than your typical INS agent. If not for the first gunshot on Canal Street he would now be in custody or dead.

And who exactly was this Lincoln Rhyme that his intelligence source had reported to him about?

Well, he believed he was safe now. He and the Turks had taken great care to hide the Lexus, which they'd carjacked to escape in, hidden it better than the Honda he'd stolen at the beach, in fact. They'd split up immediately. He'd worn the mask at the Wus, no one had followed them from the shooting and Kashgari had had no identification on him to link him to either the Ghost or the cultural center in Queens.

Tomorrow, he would find the Changs.

Two young American women slowly walked past, enjoying the view and chatting in a way he found irritating, but the Ghost tuned out their words and stared at their bodies.

Resist? he wondered.

No, the Ghost thought decisively. He pulled out his phone and, before his will stopped him, called Yindao and they arranged to meet later. She was, he noted, pleased to hear from him. Who was she with at the moment? he wondered. What was she doing and saying? He wouldn't have much time tonight to see her – he was exhausted from this endless day and needed sleep. But how badly he wanted to be close to her, to feel her firm body beneath his hands, watch her lying underneath him… Touching her, eradicating the shock and anger of the near-disaster from earlier on Canal Street.

After he hung up he held the memory of the woman's sultry voice in his mind, as he continued to watch the fast clouds, the choppy waves…

Disappointed, you can be fulfilled.

Hungry, you can be satiated.

Defeated, you can be victorious.

At 9:30 P.M. Fred Dellray stood and stretched, then plucked four empty coffee containers off his desk in the FBI's Manhattan office. He pitched them into his brimming trash can.

Time to call it a night.

He flipped through the report about the shoot-out on Canal Street. It was mostly finished but he knew he'd have to revise it tomorrow. Dellray enjoyed writing and he was good at it (under a pseudonym he'd contributed to various historical and philosophical magazines on many different topics over the years) but this particular opus was going to require some serious massaging.

Hunched over the desk, he glanced at the pages, compulsively jotting changes here and there and all the while wondering why exactly he was working on GHOSTKILL.

Frederick Dellray, with degrees in criminology, psychology and philosophy tucked under his belt, eschewed brainy law enforcement. He was to undercover work what Rhyme was to criminalistics. Known as the Chameleon, he could portray anybody from any culture, provided, of course, that the role could be played by someone well over six feet with skin dark as an Ethiopian's. Which still left an amazing range of parts for the agent – crime being perhaps the only aspect of society where one is judged solely on skill and not on race.

Dellray's talent, and lifelong passion for law enforcement, however, had proved his undoing. He'd been too good. In addition to working undercover jobs for his own outfit, the FBI, he'd been borrowed regularly by the Drug Enforcement Administration; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the police departments in New York, L.A., Washington, D.C. Bad guys have computers, cell phones and email too, of course, and little by little Dellray's reputation spread within the underworld. It became too dangerous to put him into the field.

He was promoted and put in charge of running undercover agents and CIs, confidential informants, in New York.

For his part, Dellray would've preferred a different assignment. His partner, Special Agent Toby Doolittle, had been killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the death had sent Dellray on a perennial quest to be reassigned to the bureau's antiterrorist unit. But he reluctantly recognized that a passion to collar a perp wasn't enough to excel at that area of law enforcement – look at Alan Coe, for instance – and so he was content to remain where his talents lay.

Being assigned to what would become GHOSTKILL had confused Dellray at first; he'd never run any human smuggling cases before. He'd assumed that he was recruited because of his extensive undercover network in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn – where the Chinese-American communities in this area were located. But Dellray soon learned that his traditional techniques for running snitches and under-cover agents didn't work. A viewer of thoughtful movies, Dellray had seen the famous film Chinatown, which made the point that the namesake neighborhood in old-time Los Angeles operated outside of Western laws. This, he found, wasn't a scriptwriter's device. And it was true about New York 's Chinatowns as well. Justice was administered through the tongs, and the number of calls to 911 and to the local police stations in Chinese communities of New York was much lower than in other neighborhoods. Nobody snitched to outsiders, and undercover agents were sniffed out almost immediately.

So, with GHOSTKILL, he found himself running a complicated operation dealing with a type of crime he had little experience with. But after his efforts tonight at the office he felt much better. Tomorrow he was going to meet with the special agents in charge of the Southern and Eastern Districts and one of the assistant directors from Washington. He'd get himself named supervising special agent, which would open up a lot of the bureaus resources to him and the GHOSTKILL team. As SSA, he'd bully and connive his way into getting what they needed for the case: the FBI's – i.e., his – complete jurisdiction, the SPEC-TAC team in town and the INS relegated to an exclusively advisory role, which meant virtually cutting them out of the case altogether. Peabody and Coe would be pissed but that was just too bad. He'd already framed his argument. Yes, the INS was vital in gathering intelligence about snakeheads and smuggling operations and interdicting their ships. But now GHOSTKILL was a full-out manhunt for a killer. That was the bureau's expertise.

He was confident the brass would buy his pitch; undercover agents like himself, Dellray had learned; are among the best persuaders – and extorters – in the world.

Dellray snagged his office phone and called his own number, his apartment in Brooklyn.

"Hello?" a woman's voice answered.

"I'll be home in thirty," he said softly. With Serena he never used the unique patois he'd developed working on the streets of New York and slung about as his trademark on the job.

"See you then, love."

He hung up. No one in the bureau or the NYPD knew a single thing about Dellray's personal life – nothing about Serena, a choreographer with the Brooklyn Academy of Music he'd been seeing off and on for years. She worked long hours and traveled. He worked long hours and traveled.

The arrangement suited them.

Walking through the halls of the bureau's headquarters, which resembled the digs of a big, moderately unsuccessful corporation, he nodded at two agents in shirtsleeves, ties loose in a way that the Boss, J. Edgar Hoover, would not have tolerated (just as, Dellray reflected, he himself wouldn't have been tolerated by the old G-man, now that he thought about it).

"So much crime," Dellray intoned as he stalked past them on his long legs, "so little time." They waved good night.

Then down the elevator and out the front door. He crossed the street, heading for the federal parking annex.

He noticed the scorched frame of a van that had burned earlier in the evening, still smoldering. He remembered hearing the sirens, wondered what had happened.

Past the guard, down the ramp into the dim garage, which smelled of wet concrete and car exhaust.

Dellray found his government-issue Ford and unlocked the door. He opened it and tossed in his battered briefcase, which contained a box of 9mm ammunition, a yellow pad filled with his jottings, various memos on the Kwan Ang case and a well-read book of Goethe's poems.

As Dellray started to climb inside the Ford he noticed on the driver's side of the car the window weather stripping was unsealed, which told him immediately somebody had wedged the window to open the door. Shit! He glanced down and saw the wires protruding from under his seat. He lunged for the top of the door with his right hand to keep from putting all his weight on the seat and compressing what he knew was the bomb's pressure switch.

But it was too late.

The tips of his long fingers flapped against the open door frame and slipped off. He began to fall sideways onto the seat beneath him.

Save your eyes! he thought instinctively, lifting his long hands toward his face.

Chapter Twenty-seven

"The Changs're somewhere in Queens," Sachs said, writing this bit of information on the whiteboard. "Driving a blue van, no tag, no make."

"Do we have anything specific about it?" Rhyme muttered. "Cerulean, navy, sky, baby blue?"

"Wu couldn't remember."

"Oh, my, now, that's helpful."

As Sachs paced, Thom took over as the scribe.

The information about the Ghost's four-by-four, which the snakehead had abandoned at the site of the Wu shoot-out, wasn't any better. The Blazer had been stolen and had current but fake dealer tags. Tracing the vehicle identification number revealed only that it had been stolen in Ohio months ago.

Sonny Li sat nearby but wasn't offering his Asian detective insights at the moment; he was rummaging through a large shopping bag he'd brought back from Chinatown a short while before. Lon Sellitto was on his phone, apparently learning that the Ghost had successfully vanished after the shoot-out, to judge from his scowl.

Sachs, Mel Cooper and the criminalist turned to the trace evidence she'd found in the Blazer. She'd located a few small grayish carpet fibers under the brake and accelerator pedals and two matching fibers in the cuff of the dead shooter outside the Wus' apartment. The fibers didn't match the carpet in the Blazer or any of the prior scenes and therefore might've come from the Ghost's safehouse.

"Burn 'em and let's check the database."

Cooper ran two of the fibers through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, which produced a record of the exact substances that went into this type of carpet.

As they waited for the results there was a knock on the door outside and a moment later Thom ushered in the visitor.

It was Harold Peabody.

Rhyme assumed that he'd come here to talk to them about Coe's carelessness at the Wus' apartment. But there was a grimness on his face that suggested something more. Then behind him another man appeared. Rhyme recognized him as the assistant special agent in charge – the ASAC – of the Manhattan office of the FBI, a too-handsome man with a perfect chin and smug manners. Rhyme had worked with him several times and found him efficient and unimaginative – and given, as Dellray had complained, to bureauspeak thick as honey. He too was grim-faced.

Then a third man appeared. His crisp navy-blue suit and white shirt suggested to Rhyme that he was bureau as well, but he identified himself tersely as Webley from State.

So, the State Department was now involved, Rhyme thought. That was a good sign. Dellray must've indeed used his guanxi in high places to get them reinforcements.

"Sorry to intrude, Lincoln," Peabody said.

The ASAC: "We need to talk to you. Something happened downtown tonight."

"What?"

"About the case?" Sachs asked.

"We don't think it's related. But it's going to have some implications, I'm afraid."

Well, get on with it, Rhyme thought and hoped his impatient glare conveyed this message.

"Someone planted a bomb in the garage across from the federal building tonight."

"My God," Mel Cooper whispered.

"It was in Fred Dellray's car."

Oh, Lord, no, thought Rhyme, "No!" Sachs cried.

"A bomb?" Sellitto blurted, snapping closed his cell phone.

"He's okay," the ASAC said quickly. "The main charge didn't go off."

Rhyme closed his eyes. Both he and Dellray had lost people close to them thanks to explosive devices. It was, even unemotional Rhyme believed, the most insidious and cowardly way to kill someone.

"Not hurt?" Li asked, concerned.

"No."

The Chinese cop muttered something, a prayer perhaps.

"What happened?" the criminalist asked.

"Dynamite with a pressure switch. Dellray triggered it but only the detonator fired. Maybe the cap wasn't seated right. They don't know yet."

The ASAC said, "Our bomb unit rendered safe and handed the parts over to PERT."

Rhyme knew most of the agents and the techs in the bureau's Physical Evidence Response Team and respected them. If there was anything to find he had confidence that they would. "Why don't you think it's related?"

"Anonymous nine-one-one call about twenty minutes before the blast. Male voice, undetermined accent, said the Cherenko family was planning some retaliation for the bust last week. It said more would follow."

Dellray, Rhyme recalled, had just finished running a huge covert operation in Brooklyn, the home of the Russian mob. They'd nailed three international money launderers, their staffs and several supposed hitmen and had confiscated millions of dollars and rubles.

"Origin of the call?"

"Pay phone in Brighton Beach."

The largest Russian community in the area.

"I don't believe in coincidences," Rhyme said. "The Ghost spent some time in Russia, remember? To pick up the immigrants."

He glanced at Sachs, an inquiring eyebrow raised. She answered, "The Ghost and his buddies were pretty hot to get the hell away from the scene of the Wu shooting. I can't see them detouring down to the federal building to set up a bombing. Not to say they couldn't have hired somebody."

Rhyme observed that Webley from State had said not a word since the three men arrived. He was standing, silent, arms crossed, in front of the evidence charts, staring at them.

"How'd they plant the device?" Sellitto asked the ASAC.

"Team of two, we think. Somebody set a van on fire in front of the parking garage. Distracted the guard. The other guy got into the garage and set it."

Dismayed, Rhyme suddenly understood what "implications" the ASAC had been referring to. "And Fred wants off the Ghost case, right?"

The ASAC nodded. "The thing with his partner, you know."

Toby Doolittle, Rhyme recalled, the partner killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

"He's already cleared the decks and's calling in markers from his snitches in Brighton Beach."

Rhyme could hardly blame the agent. But he said, "We need some help, Harold. Fred was getting a SPEC-TAC team together and some more agents." He knew too that Dellray had been arranging to have the INS's role cut down to intelligence gathering and advising, a fact which even Rhyme – never a practitioner of diplomacy – decided it was best not to mention at the moment. "The Ghost's network is too good. He's too far underground. We need more people, better support."

The ASAC said reassuringly, "Oh, we're downcourt with that one, Lincoln. We'll have a new field ops agent for you in the morning and some more news about SPEC-TAC."

Peabody unbuttoned his suit jacket, revealing a badly sweat-stained shirt. He said, "I heard what happened with Alan Coe – at the Wus' apartment, I mean. I'm sorry."

"We would've catch the Ghost," Li said, "if Coe not fire shot."

"I know. Look, he's a good man. I don't have many agents as dedicated as he is. He works twice as hard as most of my people. He's just impulsive. I try to cut him some slack. Had a tough time after that informant of his disappeared. I guess he blamed himself. After his suspension he took a leave of absence. He won't talk about it but I heard he went overseas to find out what happened to her. On his own nickel. Finally came back to work and's been going like a greyhound ever since. One of my best agents."

Except for minor flaws like letting suspects escape, Rhyme thought wryly.

Peabody and the ASAC left, reassuring Rhyme and Sellitto once again that they'd have a new FBI liaison agent in the morning and the SPEC-TAC team en route. "It's definitely agendaed," the ASAC called.

"Good night," said Webley from State formally and followed the men out the door.

"Okay, back to work," the criminalist said to Sellitto, Sachs, Cooper and Li. Eddie Deng was at home, nursing his badly bruised chest. "What else did the Wus tell you, Sachs?"

She gave them the details she'd learned at the clinic. The Wus included Qichen; his wife, Yong-Ping; a teenage daughter named Chin-Mei and a young son, Lang. The Changs were Sam, Mei-Mei, William and Ronald, as well as Chang's father, who was known by his full Chinese name, Chang Jiechi. In China, Sam had arranged for jobs for himself and William but Wu didn't know where or even in what line of work. Then she said that the family also had a baby whose mother had drowned on the Dragon. "Po-Yee. It means 'Treasured Child.'"

Rhyme noticed a certain look in Sachs's eyes when she mentioned the infant. He knew how much Sachs wanted a child – and wanted a child with him. As bizarre as this idea would have seemed to him several years ago he now secretly liked it. Part of his motive wasn't completely paternal, though. Amelia Sachs was one of the best crime scene searchers he'd ever seen. Most important was her empathy. She, more than any other CS professional he'd known, except himself, had the ability to transport herself into the mind of the perpetrator at the scene and, in that persona, find evidence that most other officers would have missed. Sachs, however, had another aspect to her psyche. What drove her to perfection at crime scenes drove her into danger. A champion pistol shot, an expert driver, she was often first on the scene at takedowns, ready to pull her weapon and engage a perp. Just like tonight, in the alleyway beside the Wus' apartment.

Rhyme would never ask her to give that up. But with a child at home he hoped she'd restrict herself to the crime scene work, where her true talent as a cop lay.

Then Mel Cooper interrupted his thoughts. "Chromatograph results from the carpet." He explained that it was a wool-nylon blend. He determined the color temperature of the gray shade and then went online, logging into the FBI's carpet-fiber database.

A few minutes later the results popped onto the screen. "It's Lustre-Rite brand and the manufacturer's Arnold Textile and Carpeting in Wallingham, Mass. I've got phone numbers," the slim man said.

"Get somebody calling them," Rhyme said. "We want to know about installations in Lower Manhattan. Recent, you think, Mel?"

"Probably. With this many fibers."

"Why that?" Li asked.

The tech explained, "Most fiber loss from carpets happens within six months of installation, give or take."

"I'll do it," Sellitto said. "Only don't hope for miracles, considering the company's probably been closed for hours." He nodded at the clock. It was nearly 11 p.m.

Rhyme said, "It's a manufacturing company. And what does that mean?"

"I don't know, Linc. Why don't you tell me?" Sellitto grumbled. Nobody was in the mood for object lessons.

"That there's probably a night shift. And a night shift means a foreman, and a foreman'll have the boss's number at home. In case of fire or some such."

"I'll see what I can do."

Cooper was testing the trace Sachs had found in the Blazer. "More of the bentonite," he said. "On both the Ghost's shoes and on his partners'." The slim man turned to the microscope and examined another bit of material. "What do you think, Lincoln. Is this mulch?" He looked up from the scope. "Came from the SUV's carpet, driver's side."

"Command, input, microscope," Rhyme ordered. The image that Cooper was looking at in the microscope came up on Rhyme's computer screen. The criminalist saw what he recognized immediately as traces of fresh cedar mulch, the sort used in decorative gardens. "Good."

"Lot of landscaping around Battery Park City," Sellito pointed out, referring to the large residential development in downtown Manhattan, where the trace evidence they'd found earlier had suggested the Ghost might maintain his safehouse.

Too much landscaping, though, thought Rhyme. "Trace it to a particular manufacturer?"

"Nup," Cooper said. "Generic."

Well, this sample alone wouldn't pin down a particular location. The fact that the mulch was still damp, however, might help. "If we find a number of possible locations we can eliminate the ones that didn't have mulching done in the past few days. Long shot, but it's something." Then Rhyme asked, "How about the body?"

"Not much," she said. She explained that the man had had no identification on him – only some cash, about $900, extra ammo for his weapon, cigarettes and a lighter. "Oh, and a knife, which had traces of blood on it."

Cooper had already ordered the typing test on the blood. But Rhyme knew it would match Jerry Tang's or Jimmy Mah's.

AFIS results came back on the prints from the Blazer and from the dead man. All negative.

Sonny Li pointed to a Polaroid of the face of the corpse. "Hey, I got it right, Loaban. His face – check it out. He's Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uighur. A minority, like I telling you, remember?"

"I remember, Sonny," Rhyme said to him. "Call our friend from the tong – Cai. Tell him that we think the gang is of those minorities you mentioned, Sonny. Might help him narrow things down." Then he asked, "Ballistics?"

"The Ghost was still using his Model 51," Sachs said.

Li offered, "I'm saying, very solid-rock gun."

"I found some nine-millimeter casings too." She held the evidence bag up. "But no distinctive ejection marks. Probably a new Beretta, SIG Sauer, Smittie or Colt."

"And the dead guy's weapon?"

"I processed it," she explained. "His prints only. It was an old Walther PPK. Seven-point-six-five."

"Where is it?" Rhyme studied the evidence bag and saw no sign of the weapon.

A look passed between Sachs and Sonny Li – a look decidedly not for Detective Lon Sellitto. She said, "I think the feds have it."

"Ah."

Li looked away from Rhyme and he knew immediately that Sachs had slipped the Chinese cop the weapon after she was through processing it.

Well, good for him, the criminalist thought. If not for the Chinese detective, then Deng, Sachs and the Wus' daughter might've been killed tonight. Let him have some protection.

Sachs gave Cooper the serial number of the Walther and he ran it through the firearms database. "Zip," he said. "Made in the 1960s. Probably's been stolen a dozen times since then."

Sellitto called, "Just got through to a senior VP at Arnold Textile. Woke him up but he was pretty cooperative, considering. That particular carpeting is for commercial sale only – original developers and installers – and it's the top of their line. He gave me a list of twelve big developers in the area who buy directly from the manufacturer and twenty-six distributors who market to installers and subcontractors."

"Hell," Rhyme said. It would be a marathon of canvassing to find the addresses of buildings where Lustre-Rite had been installed. He said, "Get somebody on it."

Sellitto said, "I'll have 'em start waking people up. Fuck – I'm awake; why the hell shouldn't the rest of the world be?" He made a call to the Big Building to line up some detectives to help and faxed the list downtown to them.

Then Rhyme's private line rang and he answered it.

"Lincoln?" a woman's voice asked through the speakerphone.

He was thrilled to hear the caller's voice. "Dr. Weaver."

Rhyme's neurosurgeon, who'd be performing the operation next week.

"I know it's late. Am I interrupting anything? You busy?"

"Not a thing," Rhyme said and ignored Thom's exaggerated glance at the whiteboard, which attested to the fact that he was somewhat occupied at the moment.

"I've got the details for the surgery. Manhattan Hospital. Week from Friday at 10 A.M. Neurosurgery pre-op. Third floor."

"Excellent," he replied.

Thom jotted the information down and Rhyme and the doctor said good night.

"You going to doctor, Loaban?"

"Yes," he said.

"About…" The Chinese cop couldn't seem to think of a way to summarize Rhyme's condition and he waved toward his body.

"That's right."

Sachs said nothing, just stared at the sheet of instructions that Dr. Weaver had dictated to Thom. Rhyme knew that she would prefer he not have the operation. Most of the successes with the technique had occurred with patients whose injuries were far less severe than Rhymes, those with the damage much lower on the spinal cord, at the lumbar or thoracic level. The surgery, as she'd told him, would probably produce no discernible benefit and was risky – it might even make him worse. And, given his lung impairment, it was possible that he could die on the table. But Sachs understood how important it was to him and was going to support him.

"So," she finally said, a stoic smile on her face, "we'll make sure we nail the Ghost before next Friday."

Rhyme noticed that Thom had been studying him closely.

"What?" the criminalist snapped.

The aide took Rhyme's blood pressure. "Too high. And you don't look good."

"Well, thank you very much," he snapped back, "but I don't think my appearance has anything to do -"

"It's quitting time," the aide said firmly. And he wasn't speaking to his boss.

Sellitto and Cooper also voted to call it a night.

"Mutiny," Rhyme muttered.

"No," Thom retorted. "Common sense."

Sellitto made a call to check on the Wus and John Sung. The family was now in the NYPD safehouse in the Murray Hill section of New York. John Sung had declined Sachs's invitation to join them, afraid that it would remind him too much of the many Chinese security bureau facilities he'd been detained in as a dissident. Instead, Sellitto added another cop to the team guarding him. All of the protective officers reported that the immigrants were safe.

Rhyme said to Sachs, "You taking those herbs with you? I hope you are. They stink."

"I was going to leave them as air freshener but if you don't like them…" She leaned close. "How are you feeling? You look pale."

"Just tired," he said. Which was the truth. Oddly tired. He supposed he should be concerned about it but he believed his exhaustion was nothing more than the demands of the case, which had been consuming him for days. But the fatigue was something that he knew he should pay attention to – did it indicate anything more serious? One of the major problems plaguing SCI patients, of course, isn't just paralysis. There are related problems because the nerves aren't responding – lung impairment and resulting infections – but perhaps the worst problem is the absence of pain. You have no early warning system of pain from cancer, say, which Rhymes own father had died of – as had Sachs's. He remembered that his dad had first learned of the disease after he'd gone to the doctor complaining about stomach pain.

"Good night," Mel Cooper called.

"Wan an," Li called.

"Whatever," Sellitto grumbled and walked into the corridor.

"Sonny," Rhyme said. "You'll stay here tonight."

"Not got other place to go, Loaban. Sure."

"Thom'll make up a room. I'll be upstairs, taking care of a few things. Come up and visit if you feel like it. Give me twenty minutes."

Li nodded then turned back to the whiteboard.

"I'll take you up," Sachs said. Rhyme wheeled into the tiny elevator that ran between the first and second floors, formerly a closet. She joined him and closed the door. Rhyme glanced at her face. It was thoughtful but in a way that didn't have to do with the case, he sensed.

"Anything you want to talk about, Sachs?"

Without answering, she closed the elevator door and pressed the UP button.

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

• "Bangshou" (assistant) on board; identity unknown.

• Assistant confirmed as drowned body found near site where Dragon sank.

• Ten immigrants escape: seven adults (one elderly, one injured woman), two children, one infant. Steal church van.

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Vehicle awaiting Ghost on beach left without him. One shot believed fired by Ghost at vehicle. Request for vehicle make and model sent out, based on tread marks and wheelbase.

• Vehicle is a BMW X5.

• Driver – Jerry Tang.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

• Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.

• Untraceable satellite secure phone. Hacked Chinese gov't system to use it.

• Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

• Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.

• Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.

• No trace of Honda found.

• Three bodies recovered at sea – two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.

• Drowned individual identified as Victor Au, the Ghost's bangshou.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches on any prints but unusual markings on Sam Chang's fingers and thumbs (injury, rope burn?).

• Profile of immigrants: Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, John Sung, baby of woman who drowned, unidentified man and woman (killed on beach).

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

• Camouflaged by immigrants with "The Home Store" logo.

• Blood spatter suggests injured woman has hand, arm or shoulder injury.

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Jerry Tang Murder

Crime Scene

• Four men kicked door in and tortured him and shot him.

• Two shell casings – match Model 51. Tang shot twice in head.

• Extensive vandalism.

• Some fingerprints.

• No matches except Tang's.

• Three accomplices have smaller shoe size than Ghost, presumably smaller stature.

• Trace suggests Ghost's safehouse is probably downtown, in Battery Park City area.

• Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority. Presently pursuing whereabouts.

Canal Street Shooting

Crime Scene

• Additional trace suggesting safehouse is in Battery Park City area.

• Stolen Chevrolet Blazer, untraceable.

• No match on prints.

• Safehouse carpet: Arnold company's Lustre-Rite, installed in past six months; calling contractors to get list of installations.

• Fresh gardening mulch found.

• Body of Ghost's accomplice: ethnic minority from west or northwest China. Negative on prints. Weapon was Walther PPK.

• Details on immigrants:

• The Changs: Sam, Mei-Mei, William and Ronald; Sam's father, Chang Jiechi, and infant, Po-Yee. Sam has job arranged but employer and location unknown. Driving blue van, no make, no tag number. Changs' apartment is in Queens.

• The Wus: Qichen, Yong-Ping, Chin-Mei and Lang.

Chapter Twenty-eight

In Chinese many words are combinations of their opposites. For instance, "advance-retreat" means "to move."

One of these is the word for "doing business," which is literally translated as "buy-sell."

And this was what the four men sitting in the smoky storefront office of the East Broadway Workers' Association were now engaged in, late on this stormy August night: buying and selling.

That the object of the negotiations was human life – selling the Ghost the location of Sam Changs family – didn't appear to give these men any pause at all.

There were, of course, many legitimate tongs in Chinatown and they provided important services for their members – resolving conflicts among competing businesses, protecting schoolchildren from gangs, running centers for senior citizen and child day care, discouraging inroads by the restaurant and garment workers unions and serving as a liaison to the "Other Government," that is, city hall and the NYPD.

But this particular tong did none of these. It had one specialty only and that was to serve as a base of snakehead operations in the New York area.

Now, nearly midnight, the three leaders of the workers' association – all in their forties or fifties – sat on one side of the table, across from a man whom none of them knew. But he was a man who could be very valuable – since he knew where the Changs were hiding.

"How do you know these people?" the director of the association asked the man, who'd given only his family name, Tan, presumably so that the Ghost couldn't track him down and torture him to find the Changs' location.

"Chang is a friend of my brother's in China. I got them an apartment and Chang and his boy a job."

"Where is the apartment?" the director of the tong asked casually.

Tan, gesturing abruptly, said, "That's what I'm here to sell. If the Ghost wants it he has to pay for it."

"You can tell us," an associate said, smiling. "We'll keep it to ourselves."

"I deal only with the Ghost."

Of course the tong bosses knew this. But it was always worth a try. There were many stupid people in this world.

"You have to understand," one of the associates offered, "the Ghost is hard to find."

"Ah," Tan scoffed, "you're not the only ones I can deal with, you know."

"Then why are you here?" the other associate asked quickly.

Tan paused. "Because I'm told you are the most informed."

"It's dangerous," the director said to Tan. "The police are after the Ghost. If they find out that we've contacted him… well, they could disrupt our organization."

Tan shrugged. "You have ways to get in touch with him that are secure, don't you?"

"Let's get to the money. What will you pay us to put you in touch with the Ghost?"

"Ten percent of whatever he pays me."

The director waved his arm. "This meeting is over. Go find your other sources."

Laughing in ridicule at the director's comment, Tan said, "And how much did you want?"

"Half."

"You are making a poor joke."

The battle lines being drawn, they got down to business. The buy-sell continued for nearly a half hour. Finally, they agreed on thirty percent, provided it was U.S. dollars.

The director pulled out a cell phone and placed a call. The Ghost came on the line and the director identified himself.

"Yes?" the snakehead asked.

"I have someone here who rented an apartment to some of the survivors of the Dragon, the Changs. He wants to sell you that information."

The Ghost was silent for a moment. He asked, "Tell him to prove it."

The director relayed this request to Tan, who replied, "The fathers western name is Sam. There is an old man too, Chang's father. And two boys. Oh, a wife. Mei-Mei. And they have a baby. She isn't theirs. She was on the ship. Her mother drowned."

"How does he know them?"

The director explained, "He's the brother of a friend of Changs in China."

The Ghost considered. "Tell him I'll pay one hundred thousand one-color for the information."

The director asked Tan if this was acceptable. He said immediately that it was. Some people you do not buy-sell with.

Keeping a straight face, despite his pleasure at this sum, the director added delicately to the Ghost, "He's agreed to pay us a fee. Perhaps, sir, if it wouldn't be too much trouble…"

"Yes, I'll pay you your portion directly. If the information's accurate. What is your cut?"

"Thirty percent."

"You're a fool," the Ghost scoffed. "You were robbed. I would've taken sixty-five percent if I'd been you."

The director flushed and began to defend himself but the Ghost cut him off. "Send him to see me tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. You know where." He hung up.

The director told Tan the arrangement and they shook hands.

In the Confucian order of duty to others, friendships were on the lowest rung – after ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife and older brother-younger brother. Still, there was something abhorrent, the director thought, about this kind of betrayal.

But no matter. Whenever he arrived in hell, Tan would be judged for his acts. And as for the director and his associates – well, $30,000 was not bad for an hour's work.

His hands shaking, his breath fast, Sam Chang left the storefront of the East Broadway Workers' Association and had to walk three blocks before he found a bar, which are rare in Chinatown. He sat on an uneven stool and ordered a Tsingtao beer. He drank it fast and ordered another.

He was still surprised – no, astonished – that the three men at the tong had believed that he was Joseph Tan and had actually told him where he could meet the Ghost in the morning.

He laughed to himself. What an appalling idea – he was actually bargaining with these men over the price of his family's life.

Sitting in their dark apartment in Brooklyn several hours before, Chang had been thinking: So this is to be our life. Darkness and fear…

And his father's keen eyes had narrowed. "What are you thinking of doing?" he'd asked his son.

"The Ghost is looking for us."

"Yes."

"He won't expect me to be looking for him."

Chang Jiechi's eyes remained on his son for a long moment then slid to the name plaque on the improvised altar. Chang… archer. "And what would you do if you found him?"

He said to the old man, "Kill him."

"Why not go to the police?"

Chang laughed sourly. "Do you trust the police here any more than in China?"

"No," his father answered.

"I will kill him," Chang repeated. He had never in his life disobeyed his father and he wondered if the man would now forbid him to do what he'd decided must be done.

But, to his surprise, his father asked only, "You would be able to do that?"

"Yes, for my family. Yes." Chang then pulled his windbreaker on. "I'll go to Chinatown. I'll see what I can do to find him."

"Listen to me," his father said, whispering. "Do you know how to find a man?"

"How, Baba?"

"You find a man through his weaknesses."

"What's the Ghost's weakness?"

"He cannot accept failure," Chang Jiechi said. "He must kill us or his life will suffer from great disharmony."

And so Sam Chang had done just what his father had suggested – offered the Ghost the chance to find his prey. And it had worked.

Holding the cold beer bottle to his face, Chang now reflected that he himself would probably die. He'd shoot the Ghost immediately – as soon as he opened the door. But the man would have associates and bodyguards, who would in turn kill him.

And thinking this, the first image in his mind was William, his firstborn son, the young man who would, sooner than anyone thought, inherit the mantle of the Changs.

The father now heard the son's insolence, saw the contempt in his eyes…

Oh, William, he thought. Yes, I neglected you. But if only you understood that I did so solely in the hopes of making a better homeland for you and your children. And when it grew too dangerous in China I brought you here, leaving my beloved country behind, to give you what I couldn't back home.

Love, son, is not manifest in the gift of gadgets or coddling foods or rooms of one's own. Love shows itself in discipline and example and sacrifice – even giving up one's life.

Oh, my son…

Sam Chang paid for the beer and left the bar.

Though the hour was late some stores were still open to tempt the last of the tourists. Chang went into a variety and gift shop and bought a small shrine box, a brass plate, electric candles with red bulbs, some incense. He spent some time trying to find the right Buddha statue. He picked a smiling one because – even though he would kill a man tomorrow and would himself die – a cheerful Buddha would bring comfort and solace and ultimately good fortune to the family he was leaving behind.

"The thing is, Amie…"

Amelia Sachs was driving downtown, uncharacteristically close to the posted speed limit.

"The thing is, honey," her father had said to her in his dissipated state, ravaged by the greedy cells that were dismantling his body, "you got to look out for yourself."

"Sure, Pop."

"Naw, naw, you say, 'Sure,' but you don't really mean 'sure.' You mean I'm agreeing with the old man 'cause he looks like you know what."

Even lying in West Brooklyn Hospice on Fort Hamilton Parkway, near death, the man hadn't let her get away with a single thing.

"I don't think I mean that at all."

"Ah, listen, Amie, listen."

"I'm listening."

"I hear your stories about walking the beat."

Sachs, like her father, had been a "portable" at the time, a beat patrolman. In fact her nickname was "PD," for the Portable's Daughter.

"I make up a lot of stuff, Pop."

"Be serious."

Her smile faded and she indeed grew serious, feeling the dusty summer breeze flow through the half-open window, tousling her unencumbered red hair and her father's overwashed sheets as they sat, and lay, in that difficult place.

"Go on," she said.

"Thank you… I hear your stories about your beat. You don't look out for yourself enough. But you've got to, Amie."

"Where's all this coming from, Pop?"

They both knew it was coming from the cancer that would soon kill him and from the urgency to pass along to his only child something more substantive than an NYPD shield, a nickel-plated Colt pistol and an old Dodge Charger in need of a transmission and cylinder heads. But his role as father required him to say, "Humor an old man."

"So let's tell jokes."

"Remember the first time you flew?"

"We went to see Grandma Sachs in Florida. It was a hundred and eighty degrees by the pool and a chameleon attacked me."

Unfazed, Herman Sachs continued. "And the stewardess, or whatever you call them nowadays, said, 'In case of emergency put your oxygen mask on and then assist anyone who needs help.' That's the rule."

"They say that," she conceded, buffeted by the emotions she felt.

The old cop, with stains of axle grease permanently seated in the lattice of his hands, continued. "That's gotta be a patrolman's philosophy on the street. You first, then the vic. And it's gotta be your personal philosophy too. Whatever it takes, look out for yourself first. If you're not whole, you'll never be able to take care of anybody else."

Driving now through the faint rain, she heard her fathers voice fade and another replace it. The doctor from several weeks ago.

"Ah, Ms. Sachs. Here you are."

"Hello, Doctor."

"I've just been meeting with Lincoln Rhyme's physician."

"Yes?"

"I've got to talk to you about something."

"You're looking like it's bad news, Doctor."

"Why don't we sit down over there in the corner?"

"Here's fine. Tell me. Let me have it straight."

Her whole world in turmoil, everything she'd planned for the future altered completely.

What could she do about it?

Well, she reflected, pulling to a stop at the curb, here's one thing…

Amelia Sachs sat for a long moment. This is crazy, she thought. But then, impulsively, she climbed out of the Camaro and, head down, walked quickly around the corner and into an apartment building. She climbed the stairs. And knocked on the door.

When it opened she smiled at John Sung. He smiled back and nodded her inside.

Whatever it takes, look out for yourself first. If you're not whole, you'll never be able to take care of anybody else.…

Suddenly she felt a huge weight lifted off her shoulders.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Midnight.

But, despite the exhausting day, which had led him from a sinking ship to a Central Park West apartment half the globe away from his home, Sonny Li didn't seem tired.

He walked into Lincoln Rhyme's bedroom, carrying a shopping bag. "When I down in Chinatown with Hongse, Loaban, I buy some things. Got present for you."

"Present?" Rhyme asked from his throne, the new Hill-Rom Flexicair bed, which – he'd been told – was exceedingly comfortable.

Li took an object from the bag and began unwrapping a small wad of paper. "Look what I got here." In his hands was a jade figurine of a man with a bow and arrow and looking fierce. Li looked around the room. "Which way north?"

"That's north." Rhyme nodded.

Li put the figurine on top of a table against the wall. Then returned to the bag and took out some sticks of incense.

"You're not going to burn that in here."

"Have to, Loaban. Not kill you."

Despite Li's assertion that Chinese have a difficult time saying no, this was not a trait the cop apparently shared.

He set the incense into a holder and lit it. He then found a Dixie cup in the bathroom and filled it with some liquor from a light green bottle, which had also appeared from the shopping bag.

"What're you doing, making a temple?"

"Shrine, Loaban. Not a temple." Li was amused by Rhyme's failure to miss the obvious distinction.

"Who is that? Buddha? Confucius?"

"With a bow and arrow?" Li scoffed. "Loaban, you know so much about so little, and so little about so much."

Rhyme laughed, thinking that when he'd been married his wife had often said much the same, though at a higher volume and less articulately.

Li continued. "This is Guan Di – god of war. We make sacrifice to him. He like sweet wine and that what I bought for him."

Rhyme wondered how Sellitto and Dellray, not to mention Sachs, would react when they saw the transformation of his room into a shrine to the god of war.

Li bowed toward the icon and whispered some words in Chinese. He extracted a white bottle from the shopping bag and sat in the rattan chair by Rhyme's bed. He filled a Dixie cup for himself and then fiddled with one of Rhyme's tumblers, taking off the lid, filling it halfway up and then replacing the lid and fitting a straw inside.

"And that?" Rhyme asked.

"Good stuff, Loaban. Chu yeh ching chiew. We make sacrifice to us now. This stuff good. Like whisky."

No, it wasn't like whisky at all, definitely not delicately peat-smoked eighteen-year-old scotch. But, although the taste was pretty bad, it had one hell of a kick to it.

Li nodded toward the impromptu sacristy. "I find Guan Di at store in Chinatown. He very popular god. Thousands shrines all over China devoted to him. But I not buy him because of war. He is god of detectives too, I'm saying."

"You're making that up."

"Joke? No, I'm saying, is true. Every security bureau I ever been in has Guan Di there. Case don't go so good, detectives burn offerings, just like we do." Another shot of the liquor. Li sniffed. "That strong stuff, I'm saying. The baijiu."

"The what?"

He nodded at the bottle of chu yeh ching chiew.

"What was your prayer?" Rhyme asked.

"I translate: 'Guan Di, please let us find the Changs and catch the fuck Ghost."'

"That's a good prayer, Sonny." Rhyme drank more of the liquor. It grew better with every sip – or maybe it was that you tended to forget how bad it was.

The Chinese cop continued, "That surgery you talk about. That make you better?"

"It might. A little. I won't be able to walk but I could regain a little movement."

"How it work?"

He explained to Li about Dr. Cheryl Weaver, whose neurology unit at a branch of the University of North Carolina was performing experimental surgery on spinal cord injury patients. He could still remember almost verbatim the doctor's explanation of how the technique worked.

The nervous system is made up of axons, which carry nerve impulses. In a spinal cord injury those axons're cut or crushed and they die. So they stop carrying impulses and the message doesn't get from the brain to the rest of the body. Now, you hear that nerves don't regenerate. That's not completely true. In the peripheral nervous system – like our arms or legs – damaged axons can grow back. But in the central nervous system – the brain and the spinal cord – they don't. At least they don't on their own. So, when you cut your finger, your skin grows back and you regain your sense of touch. In the spinal cord that doesn't happen. But there are things that we're learning to do that can help regrowth.

Our approach at the Institute here is an all-out assault on the site of the injury. We attack SCI on all fronts. We use traditional decompression surgery to reconstruct the bony structure of the vertebrae themselves and to protect the site where your injury occurred. Then we graft two things into the site of the injury: one is some of the patient's own peripheral nervous system tissue and the other substance we graft is some embryonic central nervous system cells.

"From a shark," Rhyme added to Sonny Li.

The cop laughed. "Fish?"

"Exactly. Sharks are more compatible with humans than other animals are. Then," the criminalist continued, "I'll take drugs to help the spinal cord regenerate."

"Hey, Loaban," Li said, looking him over carefully, "this operation, it dangerous?"

Again, Rhyme heard Dr. Weaver's voice.

Of course there are risks. The drugs themselves aren't particularly dangerous. But there're risks associated with the treatment. Any C4 quad is going to have lung impairment. You're off a ventilator but with the anesthetic there's a chance of respiratory failure. Then the stress of the procedure could lead to autonomic dysreflexia and the resulting severe blood pressure elevation – I'm sure you're familiar with that – which in turn could lead to a stroke or a cerebral event. There's a risk of surgical trauma to the site of your initial injury – you don't have any cysts now and no shunts – but the operation and resulting fluid buildup could increase that pressure and cause additional damage.

"Yes, it's dangerous," Rhyme told him.

"Sound to me like 'yi luan tou shi.'"

"Which means?"

Li considered then said, "Words translate: 'throwing eggs against rocks.' Means doing something bound to fail, I'm saying. So why you do this operation?"

It seemed obvious to Rhyme. To move a step closer to independence. Perhaps to be able to close his hand around the tumbler, for instance, and lift it to his lips. To scratch his head. To become more normal – using the term that was very politically incorrect within the disabled community. To be closer to Amelia Sachs. To be a better father to the child that Sachs wanted so badly.

He said, "It's just something I have to do, Sonny." Then he nodded at the nearby bottle of Macallan scotch. "Let's try my baifu now."

Li barked a laugh. "Baijiu, Loaban. What you just say was 'Let's try my department store.'"

"Baijiu," Rhyme corrected himself.

Li filled the cup and the tumbler with the aged scotch.

Rhyme sipped from the straw. Ah, yes, much better.

Li tossed down a whole Dixie cup of scotch. He shook his head. "I'm saying, you should not do this operation."

"I've weighed the risks and -"

"No, no. Embrace who you are! Embrace your limitations."

"But why? When I don't have to?"

"I see all this science shit you have here in Meiguo. We not have science everywhere in China like you do. Oh, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangdong, Fuzhou, sure, sure – we got mostly everything you got, a little behind, thank you, Chairman Mao, but we got computers, we got Internet, we got missiles – yeah, sometime they blow up but usually they go in space okay. But doctors, they not use so much science. They put us back in harmony. In China, doctors not gods."

"We have a different view here."

"Yeah, yeah," Li scoffed. "Doctors make you look younger. Give you hair. Give women bigger xiong, you know -" He pointed to his chest. "We not understand that. That not in harmony."

"You think I'm in harmony like this?" Rhyme asked with an exasperated laugh.

"Fate make you this way, Loaban. And make you this way for purpose. Maybe you best detective you can be because of what happen. Your life balanced now, I'm saying."

Rhyme had to laugh. "I can't walk, I can't pick up evidence… How the hell is that better?"

"Maybe your brain, it work better now, I'm saying. Maybe you have stronger will. Your jizhong, your focus, maybe is better."

"Sorry, Sonny, I don't buy it."

But, as he'd learned, once Sonny Li took a position on an issue, he didn't let go. "Let me explain you, Loaban. You remembering John Sung? Has that good-luck stone of Monkey King?"

"I remember."

"You are Monkey."

"I'm what?"

"You are like Monkey, I'm saying. Monkey do miracle things, magic, smart, tough – had temper too, I'm saying. Like you. But he ignore nature – look for ways to cheat gods and stay alive forever. He steal peaches of immortality, got names erased from Register of Living and Dead. That when he got in trouble. Got burned and beat up and buried under mountain. Finally Monkey give up wanting to live forever. Found some friends and they all make pilgrimage to holy land in the west. He was happy. In harmony, I'm saying."

"I want to walk again," Rhyme whispered adamantly, wondering why he was baring his soul to this strange little man. "That's not too much to ask."

"But maybe is too much ask," Li responded. "Listen, Loaban, look at me. I could wish to be tall and look like Chow Yun-Fat, have all girls chase me. Could wish to run big commune and have hundreds productivity awards so everybody respect me. Could wish to be Hong Kong banker. But not my nature. My nature is being fuck good cop. Maybe you start walking again, you lose some other else – something more important. Why you drink this crap?" He nodded at the scotch.

"It's my favorite baijiu."

"Yeah? How much it cost?"

"About seventy dollars a bottle."

Li made a sour face. Still he downed the glass and poured another. "Listen, Loaban, you know the Tao?"

"Me? That New Age crap? You're talking to the wrong person."

"Okay, I am telling you something. In China we got two big philosophs. Confucius and Lao-tzu. Confucius think what is best is for people to obey superiors, follow orders, kow tow to betters, keep quiet. But Lao-tzu, he say opposite. What is best is for each person follow the way of life on his own. Find harmony and nature. English name of Tao is Way of Life. He write something I try to say. It all about you, Loaban."

"About me?" Rhyme asked, reminding himself that his interest in the man's words must've had its source in the well of alcohol within him at the moment.

Li squinted as he translated, "In Tao, Lao-tzu say, 'There no need to leave house for better seeing. No need to peer from window. Instead, live in the center of your being. The way to do is to be.'"

"Does everybody in China have a goddamn saying for everything?" Rhyme snapped.

"We got lots sayings, true. You should have Thom write that down and put up on wall, next to altar to Guan Di."

The men fell silent for a minute. There is no need to leave house for better seeing. No need to peer from window…

Finally the conversation resumed and Li talked at length about life in China.

Rhyme asked, "And what's your house like?"

"Apartment. Whole place small, size this room."

"Where is it?"

"My town, Liu Guoyuan. Means 'six orchards,' but they all gone now, all cut down. Maybe fifty thousands people. Outside Fuzhou. Many people there. Over million, I'm saying."

"I don't know the area."

"In Fujian Province, southeast China. Taiwan is just off coast. Many mountains. Min River, big one, run through it. We independent place. Beijing worried about us lots. Fujian was home of first triad – organized gang, I'm saying. The San Lian Hui. Very powerful. Lots smuggling: salt, opium, silk. Lots sailors in Fujian. Merchants, importers. Not so many farmers. Communist Party is powerful in my town but that because the party secretary is private capitalist. Has Internet company like AOL. Real success. Ha, running dog lackey capitalist! His collective make good, good money. His stock not fall like NASDAQ."

"What kind of crime is there in Liu Guoyuan?" Rhyme asked.

Li nodded. "Lots bribes, protection money. In China, you cheat business and people, that okay. But cheat the party or the government, then you fuck die. Convict you, shoot in back of head. We got lots other crime too. Same stuff happen here. Murder and robbery and rape." Li sipped more liquor. "I find man killing women. Kill four of them, going to kill more. I got him." He laughed. "One drop blood. I find one drop on his bicycle tire, small as grain of sand. That what place him at scene. He confess. See, Loaban, not all woo-woo."

"I'm sure it isn't, Sonny."

"Kidnapping women big problem in China – have more men than women. For every hundred women, we got a hundred twenty men. People not want baby girls, I'm saying, only boys. But then where brides come from? So lots kidnappers take girls and women, sell them. Sad, families come to us and ask us find their wives or daughters been kidnap. Lot security officers don't bother – hard cases. Sometimes they take women thousands miles away. I find six last year. Record in our office. Good feeling to find kidnapper, arrest him."

Rhyme said, "That's what it's all about."

Li lifted his cup at this and then they drank in silence for a moment. Rhyme, thinking that he was feeling content. Most of the people who came to visit treated him like a freak. Oh, they meant no unkindness. But either they struggled to ignore his "condition," as most of them referred to it or they celebrated his disability, making jokes and comments about it to show how closely they connected with him. When in fact they didn't connect at all and as soon as they caught a glimpse of the catheter or the box of adult diapers in the corner of the bedroom they started counting down the minutes until they could escape. These people would never disagree with him, they'd never fight back. They never got below the appearance of a relationship.

But in Sonny Li's face Rhyme could see complete indifference to Rhyme's state. As if it were, well, indeed natural.

He realized then that nearly all the people he'd met over the past few years, with the exception of Amelia Sachs, had been merely acquaintances. He'd known the man for less than a day but Sonny Li already seemed more than that.

"You mentioned your father," Rhyme said. "When you called him before, it didn't sound like a good conversation. What's his story?"

"Ah, my father…" He drank more scotch, which was apparently growing on the cop the way Rhyme had gotten used to the baijiu. Globalization through liquor, Rhyme reflected wryly.

Li poured another shot.

"You might want to sip it," Rhyme suggested.

"Time to sip is after you dead," the cop said and emptied the pink Dixie cup emblazoned with flowers. "My father… He not like me much. I am, what is meaning… Not live up to what he wants."

"Disappointment?"

"Yes, I am disappointment."

"Why?"

"Ah, lots things. Give you our history in acorn."

"Nutshell."

"Dr. Sun Yat-sen in the 1920s, he unify China but civil war happened. Kuomintangs – the National Party – were under Chiang Kai-shek. But Gongchantang – the communists – they fight against them. Then Japan invade, bad time for everybody. After Japan lose, we have more civil war in China and finally Mao Zedong and communists win, drive the nationalists to Taiwan. My father, he fought with Mao. October 1949, he standing with Chairman Mao at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Oh, Loa-ban, I hear that story a million times. How he stood there and bands was playing 'The March of the Volunteers.' Big fuck patriotic time.

"So my father, he got guanxi. Connections high up. He become big guy in Communist Party down in Fujian. Want me to be too. But I see what communists do in sixty-six – Historically Unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – destroy everything, hurt people, kill people. Government and party not doing right things."

"It wasn't natural," Rhyme said. "Wasn't in harmony."

"Exact right, Loaban." Li laughed. "My father want me to join party. Order me to. Threaten me. But I not care about party. Not care about collectives." He waved his arms. "Not care about great ideas. What I like is police work. I like catch criminals… Always puzzles, always challenge, I'm saying. My sister, she big and high in the party. Our father proud of her even though she a woman. He say she not bring disgrace on him like me. Say that all the time." His face grew dark. "Other bad thing too is I not have a son – no children – when I married."

"You're divorced?" Rhyme asked.

"My wife, she die. Got sick and die. Some fever, bad thing. Only married few years but no children. My father say it my fault. We try, just not have child. Then she die." He rose and paced to the window, stared at the lights of the city. "My father, he lot strict. Hit me all time growing up. Never what I did was good enough for him. Good grades… I good student. Got medals in army. Marry nice, respectful girl, get job at security bureau, become detective, not just traffic, I'm saying. Come visit my father every week, give him money, pay respect at mother's grave. But never anything I do is enough. Your parents, Loaban?"

"Both dead."

"My mother, she not so strict as father but she never say much. He not let her… Here, in Beautiful Country, you not so much, what you say, under gravity of your parents?"

Good way to put it, thought Rhyme. "Maybe not so much. Some people are."

"Respect for parents, that number one for us." He nodded toward Guan Di's statue. "Of all gods, most important are our ancestors."

"Maybe your father thinks more of you than he's letting on. A facade, you know. Because he thinks it's good for you."

"No, he just not like me. Nobody to carry on family name, I'm saying. That very bad thing."

"You'll meet somebody and have a family."

"A man like me?" Li scoffed. "No, no. I just cop, got no money. Most men my age in Fuzhou, they work business, got lots money. Money all over place. Remember, I tell you many more men than women? Why a woman pick poor old man when they can have rich young one?"

"You're my age," Rhyme said. "You're not old."

Li looked out the window again. "Maybe I stay here. I speak English good. I be security officer here. Work in Chinatown. Undercover."

He seemed serious. But then Sonny Li laughed and said what they were both thinking. "No, no, too late for that. Lots too late… No, we get the Ghost, I go home and keep being fuck good detective. Guan Di and I solve big crime and get my picture in paper in Fuzhou. Maybe chairman give me medal. Maybe my father watch news and see and he think I not be such bad son." He drained the cup of scotch. "Okay, I drunk enough now – you and me, we play game, Loaban."

"I don't play games."

"But what that game on your computer?" Li said quickly. "Chess. I saw it."

"I don't play very often," Rhyme qualified.

"Games improve you. I am show you how to play best game." He returned to the magic shopping bag.

"I can't play most games, Sonny. Can't exactly hold the cards, you know."

"Ah, card games?" Li said, sneering. "They games of chance. Only good for make money. See, those, you keep secrets by turning cards away from opponents. Best games are games where you keep secrets in head, I'm saying. Wei-chi? You ever hear it? Also called Go."

Rhyme believed he had. "Like checkers or something?"

Li laughed. "Checkers, no, no."

Rhyme surveyed the board that Li took from the shopping bag and set up on the table beside the bed. It was a grid with a number of perpendicular lines on it. He then took out two bags, one containing hundreds of tiny white pebbles, the other black ones.

Suddenly Rhyme had a huge desire to play and he forced himself to pay careful attention to Sonny Li's animated voice as he explained the rules and object of wei-chi.

"Seems simple enough," Rhyme said. Players alternated putting their stones on the board in an attempt to surround the opponent's and eliminate them from play.

"Wei-chi like all great games: rules simple but winning hard." Li separated the stones into two piles. As he did he said, "Game go back many years. I am study best player of all time. Name was Fan Si-pin. Lived in 1700s – your dates. There nobody better than him ever live. He have match after match with Su Ting-an, who was almost as good. The games were usually draws but Fan had few points more so he was overall better player. Know why he better?"

"Why?"

"Su was defense player – but Fan… he play always offense. He charge forward always, was impulsive, crazy, I'm saying."

Rhyme felt the man's enthusiasm. "Do you play much?"

"I am in club at home. I play much, yes." His voice faded for a moment and a wistfulness came over him. Rhyme wondered why. Then Li swept his oily hair back and said, "Okay, we play. You see how you like. Can last long time."

"I'm not tired," Rhyme said.

"Not either," Li said. "Now, you never play before so I give advantage. Give you three piece extra. Seem like not much but big, big advantage in wei-chi."

"No," Rhyme said. "I don't want any advantages."

Li glanced at him and must have thought this had to do with his disability and added gravely, "Only give you advantage because you not play before. That only reason. Experience players do that always. Is customary."

Rhyme understood and appreciated Li's reassurance. Still, he said adamantly, "No. You make the first move. Go ahead." And watched Li's eyes lower and focus on the wooden grid between them.