The Stone Monkey

Tuesday, the Hour of the Tiger, 4:30 A.M.,

to the Hour of the Dragon, 8 a.m.

Chapter One

They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.

To the human smugglers – the snakeheads – who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods; they were ju-jia, piglets.

To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.

They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.

Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.

They were his fragile cargo.

And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, Captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.

It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon as camouflage and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children's plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.

Despite the pitching waves, Captain Sen – a thirty-year veteran of the seas – walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold. He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who'd lived for two weeks in close proximity.

Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated "buckets" – human smuggling ships – and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Sen didn't mistreat them. Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in America, Meiguo in Chinese, which means the "Beautiful Country."

On this particular voyage, however, most of the immigrants distrusted him. And why not? They assumed he was in league with the snakehead who'd chartered the Dragon: Kwan Ang, known universally by his nickname, Gui, the Ghost. Tainted by the snakehead's reputation for violence, Captain Sen's efforts to engage the immigrants in conversation had been rebuffed and had yielded only one friend. Chang Jingerzi – who preferred his Western name of Sam Chang – was a forty-five-year-old former college professor from a suburb of the huge port city of Fuzhou in southeastern China. He was bringing his entire family to America: his wife, two sons and Changs widower father.

A half-dozen times on the trip Chang and Sen had sat in the hold, sipped the potent mao-tai that the captain always had in good supply on his ship and talked about life in China and in the United States.

Captain Sen now saw Chang sitting on a cot in a forward corner of the hold. The tall, placid man frowned, a reaction to the look in the captain's eyes. Chang handed his teenage son the book he'd been reading to his family and rose to meet the captain.

Everyone around them fell silent.

"Our radar shows a fast-moving ship on course to intercept us."

Dismay blossomed in the faces of those who'd overheard.

"The Americans?" Chang asked. "Their Coast Guard?"

"I think it must be," the captain answered. "We're in U.S. waters."

Sen looked at the frightened faces of the immigrants around him. Like most shiploads of illegals that Sen had transported, these people – many of them strangers before they'd met – had formed a close bond of friendship. And they now gripped hands or whispered among themselves, some seeking, some offering reassurance. The captain's eyes settled on a woman holding an eighteen-month-old girl in her arms. Her mother – whose face was scarred from a beating at a reeducation camp – lowered her head and began to cry.

"What can we do?" Chang asked, troubled.

Captain Sen knew he was a vocal dissident in China and had been desperate to flee the country. If he was deported by U.S. Immigration he'd probably end up in one of the infamous jails in western China as a political prisoner.

"We're not far from the drop-off spot. We're running at full speed. It may be possible to get close enough to put you ashore in rafts."

"No, no," Chang said. "In these waves? We'd all die."

"There's a natural harbor I'm steering for. It should be calm enough for you to board the rafts. At the beach there'll be trucks to take you to New York."

"And what about you?" Chang asked.

"I'll head back into the storm. By the time it's safe for them to board you'll be on highways of gold, heading toward the city of diamonds… Now tell everyone to get their belongings together. But only the most important things. Your money, your pictures. Leave everything else. It will be a race to the shore. Stay below until the Ghost or I tell you to come up top."

Captain Sen hurried up the steep ladder, on his way to the bridge. As he climbed he said a brief prayer for their survival to Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, then dodged a wall of gray water that vaulted the side of the ship.

On the bridge he found the Ghost standing over the radar unit, staring into the rubber glare shade. The man stood completely still, bracing himself against the rolling of the sea.

Some snakeheads dressed as if they were wealthy Cantonese gangsters from a John Woo film but the Ghost always wore the standard outfit of most Chinese men – simple slacks and short-sleeved shirts. He was muscular but diminutive, clean-shaven, hair longer than a typical businessman's but never styled with cream or spray.

"They will intercept us in fifteen minutes," the snakehead said. Even now, facing interdiction and arrest, he seemed as lethargic as a ticket seller in a rural long-distance bus station.

"Fifteen?" the captain replied. "Impossible. How many knots are they making?"

Sen walked to the chart table, the centerpiece of all ocean-crossing vessels. On it sat a U.S. Defense Mapping Agency nautical chart of the area. He had to judge the two ships' relative positions from this and from the radar; because of the risk of being traced, the Dragon's global positioning system and her EPIRB emergency beacon and Global Maritime Distress and Safety System were disconnected.

"I think it will be at least forty minutes," the captain said.

"No, I timed the distance they've traveled since we spotted them."

Captain Sen glanced at the crewman piloting the Fuzhou Dragon, sweating as he gripped the wheel in his struggle to keep the Turk's head knot of twine, tied around a spoke, straight up, indicating that the rudder was aligned with the hull. The throttles were full forward. If the Ghost was right in his assessment of when the cutter would intercept them they would not be able to make the protected harbor in time. At best they could get within a half mile of the nearby rocky shore – close enough to launch the rafts but subjecting them to merciless pounding by the tempestuous seas.

The Ghost asked the captain, "What sort of weapons will they have?"

"Don't you know?"

"I've never been interdicted," the Ghost replied. "Tell me."

Ships under Sen's command had been stopped and boarded twice before – fortunately on legitimate voyages, not when he was running immigrants for snakeheads. But the experience had been harrowing. A dozen armed Coast Guard sailors had streamed onto the vessel while another one, on the deck of the cutter, had trained a two-barreled machine gun on him and his crew. There'd been a small cannon too.

He now told the Ghost what they might expect.

The Ghost nodded. "We need to consider our options."

"What options?" Captain Sen now asked. "You're not thinking of fighting them, are you? No. I won't allow it."

But the snakehead didn't answer. He remained braced at the radar stand, staring at the screen.

The man seemed placid but, Sen supposed, he must've been enraged. No snakehead he'd ever worked with had taken so many precautions to avoid capture and detection as the Ghost on this voyage. The two-dozen immigrants had met in an abandoned warehouse outside of Fuzhou and waited there for two days, under the watch of a partner of the Ghost's – a "little snakehead." The man had then loaded the Chinese onto a chartered Tupolev 154, which had flown to a deserted military airfield near St. Petersburg in Russia. There they'd climbed into a shipping container, been driven 120 kilometers to the town of Vyborg and boarded the Fuzhou Dragon, which Sen had sailed into the Russian port just the day before. He himself had meticulously filled out the customs documents and manifests – everything according to the book, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Ghost had joined them at the last minute and the ship had sailed on schedule. Through the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel, then the Dragon had crossed the famous starting point of transatlantic voyages in the Celtic Sea – 49°N 7°W – and had begun steaming southwest toward Long Island, New York.

There was not a single thing about the voyage that would arouse the suspicion of the U.S. authorities. "How did the Coast Guard do it?" the captain asked.

"What?" the Ghost responded absently.

"Find us. No one could have. It's impossible."

The Ghost straightened up and pushed outside into the raging wind, calling back, "Who knows? Maybe it was magic."

Chapter Two

"We're right on top of 'em, Lincoln. The boat's headin' for land but are they gonna make it? Nosir, nohow. Wait, do I hafta call it a 'ship'? I think I do. It's too big for a boat."

"I don't know," Lincoln Rhyme said absently to Fred Dellray. "I don't really do much sailing."

The tall, lanky Dellray was the FBI agent in charge of the federal side of the efforts to find and arrest the Ghost. Neither Dellray's canary yellow shirt nor his black suit, as dark as the man's lustrous skin, had been ironed recently – but then no one in the room looked particularly well rested. These half-dozen people clustered around Rhyme had spent the past twenty-four hours virtually living here, in this improbable headquarters – the living room of Rhyme's Central Park West town house, which resembled not the Victorian drawing room it had once been but a forensics laboratory, chock-full of tables, equipment, computers, chemicals, wires and hundreds of forensics books and magazines.

The team included both federal and state law enforcers. On the state side was Lieutenant Lon Sellitto, homicide detective for the NYPD, far more rumpled than Dellray – stockier too (he'd just moved in with his girlfriend in Brooklyn, who, the cop announced with rueful pride, cooked like Emeril). Young Eddie Deng, a Chinese-American detective from the NYPD's Fifth Precinct, which covered Chinatown, was present too. Deng was trim and athletic and stylish, sporting glasses framed by Armani and black hair spiked up like a hedgehog's. He was serving as Sellitto's temporary partner; the big detective's usual coworker, Roland Bell, had gone down to his native North Carolina for a family reunion with his two sons a week ago and, as it turned out, had struck up a friendship with a local policewoman, Lucy Kerr. He'd extended his vacation another few days.

Assisting on the federal portion of the team was fifty-something Harold Peabody, a pear-shaped, clever middle manager who held a senior spot at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Manhattan office. Peabody was close-lipped about himself, as are all bureaucrats narrowing in on their retirement pension, but his far-ranging knowledge of immigration issues attested to a lengthy and successful stint in the service.

Peabody and Dellray had faced off more than once during this investigation. After the Golden Venture incident – in which ten illegal immigrants drowned after a smuggling vessel of that name ran aground off Brooklyn – the president of the United States had ordered that the FBI take over primary jurisdiction from the INS on major human smuggling cases, with backup from the CIA. The immigration service had far more experience with snakeheads and their human smuggling activities than the FBI and didn't take kindly to yielding jurisdiction to other agencies – especially one that insisted on working shoulder-to-shoulder with the NYPD and, well, alternative consultants like Lincoln Rhyme.

Assisting Peabody was a young INS agent named Alan Coe, a man in his thirties with close-cropped dark red hair. Energetic but sour and moody, Coe too was an enigma, saying not a word about his personal life and little about his career aside from the Ghost case. Rhyme had observed that Coe's suits were outlet-mall chic – flashy but stitched with obvious thread – and his dusty black shoes had the thick rubber soles of security guard footwear: perfect for running down shoplifters. The only time he grew talkative was when he'd give one of his spontaneous – and tedious – lectures on the evils of illegal immigration. Still, Coe worked tirelessly and was zealous about collaring the Ghost.

Several other underlings, federal and state, had appeared and disappeared over the past week on various errands relating to the case.

Goddamn Grand Central Station, Lincoln Rhyme had thought – and said – frequently in the past day or so.

Now, at 4:45 a.m. on this stormy morning, he maneuvered his battery-powered Storm Arrow wheelchair through the cluttered room toward the case status board, on which was taped one of the few existing pictures of the Ghost, a very bad surveillance shot, as well as a picture of Sen Zi-jun, the captain of the Fuzhou Dragon, and a map of eastern Long Island and the ocean surrounding it. Unlike during his bedridden days of self-imposed retirement after a crime scene accident turned him into a C4 quadriplegic, Rhyme now spent half of his waking hours in his cherry red Storm Arrow, outfitted with a new state-of-the-art MKIV touchpad drive controller that his aide, Thom, had found at Invacare. The controller, on which his one working finger rested, gave him far more flexibility in driving the chair than the older sip-and-puff controller.

"How far offshore?" he called, staring at the map.

Lon Sellitto, on the phone, glanced up. "I'm finding out."

Rhyme frequently worked as a consultant for the NYPD but most of his efforts were in classic forensic detection – criminalistics, as the jargon-happy law enforcement world now preferred to call it; this assignment was unusual. Four days ago Sellitto, Dellray, Peabody and taciturn young Alan Coe had come to him at his town house. Rhyme had been distracted – the consuming event in his life at the moment was an impending medical procedure – but Dellray had snagged his attention by saying, "You're our last hope, Linc. We got us a big problem and don't have a single idea where else to turn."

"Go on."

Interpol – the international clearinghouse on criminal intelligence – had issued one of its infamous Red Notices about the Ghost. According to informants, the elusive snakehead had surfaced in Fuzhou, China, flown to the south of France then gone to some port in Russia to pick up a load of illegal Chinese immigrants – among whom was the Ghost's bangshou, or assistant, a spy masquerading as one of the passengers. Their destination was supposedly New York. But then he'd disappeared. The Taiwanese, French and Russian police and the FBI and INS could find him nowhere.

Dellray had brought with him the only evidence they had – a briefcase containing some of the Ghost's personal effects from his safehouse in France – in hopes that Rhyme could give them ideas where his trail might lead.

"Why all hands on deck?" Rhyme had asked, surveying the group, which represented three major law enforcement organizations.

Coe said, "He's a fucking sociopath."

Peabody gave a more measured response. "The Ghost's probably the most dangerous human smuggler in the world. He's wanted for eleven deaths – immigrants and police and agents. But we know he's killed more. Illegals're called 'the vanished' – if they try to cheat a snakehead, they're killed. If they complain, they're killed. They just disappear forever."

Coe added, "And he's raped at least fifteen women immigrants – that we know of. I'm sure there're more."

Dellray said, "Looks like mosta the high-level snakeheads like him don't make the trips themselves. Th' only reason he's bringing these folk over personally is 'cause he's expandin' his operation here."

"If he gets into the country," Coe said, "people're going to die. A lot of people."

"Well, why me?" Rhyme asked. "I don't know a thing about human smuggling."

The FBI agent said, "We tried ever-thing else, Lincoln. But we came up with nothin'. We don't have any personal info 'bout him, no good photos, no prints. Zee-row. 'Cept that." A nod toward the attaché case containing the Ghost's effects.

Rhyme glanced at it with a skeptical expression. "And where exactly did he go in Russia? Do you have a city? A state or province or whatever they have over there? It's a rather big country, so I'm told."

Sellitto replied with a lifted eyebrow, which seemed to mean: We have no idea.

"I'll do what I can. But don't expect miracles."

Two days later Rhyme had summoned them back. Thom handed Agent Coe the attaché case.

"Was there anything helpful in it?" the young man asked.

"Nup," Rhyme replied cheerfully.

"Hell," muttered Dellray. "So we're outta luck."

Which had been a good enough cue for Lincoln Rhyme. He'd leaned his head back into the luxurious pillow Thom had mounted to the wheelchair and spoke rapidly. "The Ghost and approximately twenty to thirty illegal Chinese immigrants are on board a ship called the Fuzhou Dragon, out of Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. It's a seventy-two-meter combination container and break-bulk cargo ship, twin diesels, under the command of Sen Zi-jun – that's last name Sen – fifty-six years old, and has a crew of seven. It left Vyborg, Russia, at 0845 hours fourteen days ago and is presently – I'm estimating now – about three hundred miles off the coast of New York. It's making for the Brooklyn docks."

"How the hell'd you figure that out?" Coe blurted in astonishment. Even Sellitto, used to Rhyme's deductive abilities, barked a laugh.

"Simple. I assumed that they'd be sailing east to west – otherwise he would have left from China itself. I've got a friend on the Moscow police – does crime scene work. I've written some papers with him. Expert in soils by the way, best in the world. I asked him to call the harbor masters in ports in western Russia. He pulled some strings and got all the manifests from Chinese ships that left port in the past three weeks. We spent a few hours going over them. By the way, you're getting a very obese bill for the phone calls. Oh, and I told him to charge you for translation services too. I would. Now, we found that only one ship took on enough fuel for an 8000-mile trip when the manifest reported it was making a 4400-mile one. Eight thousand would get them from Vyborg to New York and back to Southampton, England, for refueling. They weren't going to dock in Brooklyn at all. They were going to drop off the Ghost and the immigrants then scoot back to Europe."

"Maybe fuel's too expensive in New York," Dellray had offered.

Rhyme had shrugged – one of the few dismissive gestures his body allowed him – and said sourly, "Everything's too expensive in New York. But there's more: the Dragon's manifest said she was transporting industrial machinery to America. But you need to report your ship's draft – that's how far the hull sinks into the water, if you're interested – to make sure you don't run aground in shallow ports. The Dragon's draft was listed at three meters. But a fully loaded ship her size should draw at least seven and a half meters. So she was empty. Except for the Ghost and the immigrants. Not offended by calling the ship 'she,' anyone? It is customary. Oh, I say twenty to thirty immigrants because the Dragon took on enough fresh water and food for that many, when – like I said – the crew was only seven."

"Damn," offered the otherwise stiff Harold Peabody with an admiring grin.

Later that day, spy satellites had picked up the Dragon about 280 miles out to sea, just as Rhyme had predicted.

The Coast Guard cutter Evan Brigant, with a boarding party of twenty-five sailors backed up by twin fifties and an 80mm cannon, had gone to ready status but kept its distance, waiting until the Dragon had sailed closer to shore.

Now – just before dawn on Tuesday – the Chinese ship was in U.S. waters and the Evan Brigant was in pursuit. The plan was to take control of the Dragon, arrest the Ghost, his assistant and the ship's crew. The Coast Guard would sail the ship to the harbor at Port Jefferson, Long Island, where the immigrants would be transferred to a federal detention center to await deportation or asylum hearings.

A call was patched through from the radio of the Coast Guard cutter closing in on the Dragon. Thom put it on the speakerphone.

"Agent Dellray? This is Captain Ransom on the Evan Brigant."

"I'm readin' you, Captain."

"We think they've spotted us – they had better radar than we thought. The ship's turned hard for shore. We need some direction on the assault plan. There's some concern that if we board, there'll be a firefight. I mean, considering who this particular individual is. We're worried about casualties. Over."

"Among who?" Coe asked. "The undocumenteds?" The disdain in his voice when he used the word that described the immigrants was clear.

"Right. We were thinking we should just make the ship come about and wait until the Ghost surrenders. Over."

Dellray reached up and squeezed the cigarette he kept behind his ear, a memento from his smoking days. "Negative on that. Follow your original rules of engagement. Stop the ship, board it and arrest the Ghost. The use of deadly force is authorized. You copy that?"

After a moment of hesitation the young man responded, "Five by five, sir. Out."

The line went dead and Thom disconnected the call. Electric tension flowed into the room on the heels of the silence that followed. Sellitto wiped his palms on his forever-wrinkled slacks then adjusted his service pistol on his belt. Dellray paced. Peabody called INS headquarters to tell them he had nothing to tell them.

A moment later Rhyme's private line rang. Thom took the call in the corner of the room. He listened for a moment then looked up. "It's Dr. Weaver, Lincoln. About the surgery." He glanced at the roomful of tense law enforcers. "I'll tell her you'll call her back."

"No," Rhyme answered firmly. "I'll take it."

Chapter Three

The winds were stronger now, the waves arcing high over the sides of the intrepid Fuzhou Dragon.

The Ghost hated water crossings. He was a man used to luxury hotels, to being pampered. Human smuggling voyages were dirty, oily, cold, dangerous. Man has not tamed the sea, he thought, and never will. It is an icy blanket of death.

He scanned the rear of the ship but could not find his bangshou anywhere. Turning toward the bow, he squinted into the wind and could see no land either, just more restless mountains of black water. He climbed to the bridge and pounded on the window of the rear door. Captain Sen looked up and the Ghost gestured for him.

Sen pulled a knit cap on his head and dutifully walked outside into the rain.

"The Coast Guard will be here soon," the Ghost shouted over the raging wind.

"No," Sen replied, "I can get close enough to off-load before they intercept us. I'm sure I can."

But the Ghost turned his still eyes on the captain and said, "You will do this. Leave those men on the bridge and you and the rest of the crew go below with the piglets. Hide with them, get everyone out of sight in the hold."

"But why?"

"Because," the Ghost explained, "you're a good man. Too good to lie.

I'll pretend to be the captain. I can look a man in the eye and he will believe what I tell him. You cannot do that."

The Ghost grabbed Sen's cap. In reaction the man started to reach for it but then lowered his hand. The Ghost put it on. "There," he said humorlessly. "Do I look like a captain? I think I make a good captain."

"This is my ship."

"No," the Ghost shot back. "On this voyage the Dragon is my ship. I'm paying you in one-color cash." U.S. dollars were far more valuable and negotiable than Chinese yuan, the currency many low-level snakeheads paid in.

"You are not going to fight with them are you? The Coast Guard?"

The Ghost gave an impatient laugh. "How could I fight them? They have dozens of sailors, right?" A nod toward the crewmen on the bridge. "Tell your men to follow my orders." When Sen hesitated the Ghost leaned forward with the placid, yet chilling gaze that so unsettled everyone who looked into his eyes. "Is there something you want to say?"

Sen looked away then stepped onto the bridge to give the instructions to the crewmen.

The Ghost turned back to the stern of the ship, looking again for his assistant. He then pulled the captain's cap tighter over his head and strode onto the bridge to take command of the rocking ship.

The ten judges of hell…

The man crawled along the main deck to the stern of the ship, stuck his head over the side of the Fuzhou Dragon and began retching again.

He'd been lying beside a life raft all night long, ever since the storm picked up and he'd fled from the stinking hold to purge his body of the disharmony wrought by the rocking sea.

The ten judges of hell, he thought again. His gut was in agony because of the dry heaving and he was as cold and miserable as he'd ever been in his life. Slumping against the rusty railing, he closed his eyes.

He was called Sonny Li, though the given name ruthlessly bestowed upon him by his father was Kangmei, which meant "Resist America." It was typical of children born under Mao's reign to have such politically correct – and thoroughly shameful – given names. Still, as often happened with youngsters from coastal China – Fujian and Guangdong – he'd taken a Western name too. His was the one that the boys in his gang gave him: Sonny, after the dangerous, bad-tempered son of Don Corleone in the movie The Godfather.

True to the character after whom he was named, Sonny Li had seen – and been the cause of – much violence in his life but nothing had ever brought him to his knees, literally, like this seasickness.

Judges of hell…

Li was ready for the infernal beings to take him. He'd own up to everything bad he'd done in life, all the shame he'd brought to his father, all the foolishness, all the harm. Let the god T'ai'shan assign me a place in hell. Just stop this fucking sickness! Light-headed from nearly two weeks of meager food, dizzy from the vertigo, he fantasized that the sea was in turmoil thanks to a dragon gone mad; he wanted to rip his heavy pistol from his pocket and fire bullet after bullet into the beast.

Li glanced behind him – toward the bridge of the ship – and he thought he saw the Ghost but suddenly his stomach lurched and he had to turn back to the railing. Sonny Li forgot about the snakehead, forgot about his dangerous life back in Fujian Province, forgot about anything except the ten judges of hell gleefully urging demons to prod his dying belly with their spears.

He began heaving once again.

The tall woman leaned against her car, the contrasts stark: her red hair tossed by the fierce wind, the yellow of the old Chevy Camaro, the black nylon utility belt securing a black pistol to her hip.

Amelia Sachs, in jeans and a hooded windbreaker on the back of which were the words nypd crime scene, looked out over the turbulent water of the harbor near Port Jefferson, on the north shore of Long Island. She surveyed the staging area around her. Immigration and Naturalization, the FBI, the Suffolk County Police and her own shop had cordoned off a parking lot that on an average day in August would normally have been packed with families and teenagers here to catch some rays. The tropical storm, however, had kept vacationers far away from the shore.

Parked nearby were two large Department of Corrections prisoner buses the INS had borrowed, a half-dozen ambulances and four vans filled with tactical officers from the various agencies. In theory, by the time the Dragon arrived here, it would be under the control of the crew of the cutter Evan Brigant and the Ghost and his assistant would be in custody. But there would be a certain period of time after the Ghost had spotted the Coast Guard cutter and before the actual boarding by the crew – perhaps as much as forty minutes. That would give the Ghost and his bangshou plenty of time to masquerade as immigrants and hide weapons, a tactic that snakeheads frequently used. The Coast Guard might not be able to effectively search the immigrants and the ship before it arrived at the harbor here and the snakehead and any assistants might try to shoot their way to freedom.

Sachs herself would be in particular danger. Her job was to "walk the grid," to sweep the ship for crime scene evidence that would bolster the various cases against the Ghost and to find leads to his confederates. If the searcher is running a scene where, say, a body is found or a robbery has occurred long after the perp has fled, there is relatively little danger to the CS officer. But if the scene is the actual takedown site, involving an unknown number of perps whose appearance isn't well known, the risks can be great, particularly in the case of human smugglers, who have ready access to good weaponry.

Her cell phone rang and she dropped into the tight seat of the Chevy to answer it.

The caller was Rhyme.

"We're all in place," she told him.

"We think they're on to us, Sachs," he said. "The Dragon turned toward land. The cutter'll get there before they make it to shore but we're thinking now that the Ghost is gearing up for a fight."

She thought of the poor people on board.

When Rhyme paused, Sachs asked him, "Did she call?"

A hesitation. Then he said, "Yes. About ten minutes ago. They have a slot open at Manhattan Hospital next week. She's going to call back with the details."

"Ah," Sachs said.

The "she" was Dr. Cheryl Weaver, a renowned neurosurgeon who'd come up to the New York area from North Carolina to teach for a semester at Manhattan Hospital. And the "slot" referred to an opening for some experimental surgery that Rhyme was having – an operation that might improve his quadriplegic condition.

An operation Sachs was not in favor of.

"I'd get some extra ambulances in the area," Rhyme said. His tone was now curt – he didn't like personal subjects intruding in the midst of business.

"I'll take care of it."

"I'll call you back, Sachs."

The phone went silent.

She ran through the downpour to one of the Suffolk County troopers and arranged for more med techs. She then returned to her Chevy and sat down in the front bucket seat, listening to the rattle of the powerful rain on the windshield and cloth roof. The dampness made the interior smell of plastic, motor oil and old carpeting.

Thinking about Rhyme's operation put her in mind of a recent conversation with another doctor, one who had nothing to do with his spinal cord surgery. She didn't want her thoughts to go back to that meeting – but go there they did.

Two weeks ago Amelia Sachs had been standing by the coffee machine in a hospital waiting room, up the hall from Lincoln Rhyme's examining room. She remembered the July sun falling brutally on the green tile floor. The white-jacketed man had approached and then addressed her with a chilling solemnity. "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."

Her heart pounding, she'd said, "You're looking like it's bad news, Doctor."

"Why don't we sit down over there in the corner?" he'd asked, sounding more like a funeral home director than an M.D.

"Here's fine," she'd said firmly. "Tell me. Let me have it straight."

A gust of wind now rocked her and she looked out over the harbor again, at the long pier, where the Fuzhou Dragon would dock.

Bad news…

Tell me. Let me have it straight…

Sachs flicked her Motorola to the Coast Guards secure frequency not only to learn what was happening with the Dragon but to keep her thoughts from returning to that scaldingly bright waiting room.

• • •

"How far from land?" the Ghost asked the two remaining crewmen on the bridge.

"A mile, maybe less." The slim man at the helm glanced quickly at the Ghost. "We'll turn just before the shallows and try for the harbor."

The Ghost gazed forward. From the vantage point of the crest of a wave he could just see the line of light gray land. He said, "Steer straight on course. I'll be back in a moment."

Bracing himself, he stepped outside. The wind and rain lashed his face as the Ghost made his way down to the container deck and then to the one below it. He came to the metal door that opened into the hold. He stepped inside and looked down at the piglets. Their faces turned toward him with fear and distress. The pathetic men, the frumpy women, the filthy children – even some pointless girls. Why had their foolish families bothered to bring them?

"What is it?" Captain Sen asked. "Is the cutter in sight?"

The Ghost didn't answer. He was scanning the piglets for his bangshou. But there was no sign of him. Angry, he turned away.

"Wait," the captain called.

The snakehead stepped outside and closed the door. "Bangshou!" he shouted.

There was no response. The Ghost didn't bother to call a second time. He screwed down the latches so that the door to the hold couldn't be opened from the inside. He hurried back toward his cabin, which was on the bridge deck. As he struggled up the stairs he took from his pocket a battered black plastic box, just like the door opener for the garage of his luxurious house in Xiamen.

He opened the box and pushed one button and then a second. The radio signal zipped through two decks down to the duffel bag he'd placed in the aft hold below the waterline. The signal closed the circuit and sent an electrical charge from a nine-volt battery into a blasting cap embedded in two kilos of Composition 4 explosive.

The detonation was huge, much larger than he'd expected, and it sent a tall spume of water shooting into the air, higher than the highest waves.

The Ghost was thrown off the stairs onto the main deck. He lay on his side, stunned.

Too much! he realized. There'd been too much explosive. Already the ship was starting to list as she took on seawater. He'd thought it would take half an hour for the ship to sink. Instead, she would go down in minutes. He looked toward the bridge deck, where his money and guns sat in the small cabin, then once again scanned the other decks for his bangshou. No sign of him. But there was no time to look further. The Ghost rose and scrabbled across the listing deck to the nearest rubber life raft and began undoing the tie-down ropes.

The Dragon lurched again, rolling farther onto her side.

Chapter Four

The sound had been deafening. A hundred sledgehammers on a piece of iron.

Nearly all of the immigrants had been thrown to the cold, wet floor. Sam Chang climbed to his feet and picked up his youngest boy, who'd fallen into a puddle of greasy water. He then helped up his wife and his elderly father.

"What happened?" he shouted to Captain Sen, who was struggling through the panicked crowd to the door that led up to the deck. "Did we hit the rocks?"

The captain called back, "No, no rocks. The water's a hundred feet deep here. Either the Ghost has blown up the ship or the Coast Guard is firing on us. I don't know."

"What is happening?" asked a panic-stricken man sitting near Chang. He was the father of the family that had camped out in the hold next to the Changs. Wu Qichen was his name. His wife lay listlessly on the cot nearby. She'd been feverish and lethargic throughout the entire voyage and even now seemed hardly aware of the explosion and chaos. "What's going on?" Wu repeated in a high voice.

"We're sinking!" the captain called, and together he and several of his crewmen grabbed the latches of the door and struggled to open them. But they didn't move. "He's jammed them!"

Some of the immigrants, both men and women, began wailing and rocking back and forth; children stood frozen with fear, tears running down their dirty cheeks. Sam Chang and several of the crew joined the captain and tugged on the latches. But the thick metal bars wouldn't give a millimeter.

Chang noticed a suitcase sitting on the floor. Slowly it toppled to its side and hit the floor with a splash; the Dragon was listing sharply. Cold seawater was shooting into the hold from seams in the metal plates. The puddle his son had fallen into was now a half meter deep. Several people slid into the deepening pools, filled with trash, luggage, food, Styrofoam cups, papers. They screamed and flailed about in the water.

Desperate men and women and children, futilely slamming luggage into the walls to break through the metal, hugging one another, sobbing, screaming for help, praying… The scar-faced woman clutched her young daughter the way the child herself clung to a filthy yellow Pokémon toy. Both were sobbing.

A powerful groaning from the dying ship filled the stale air, and the brown, vile water grew deeper.

The men at the hatch were making no headway with the latches. Chang wiped his hair out of his eyes. "This won't work," he said to the captain. "We need another way out."

Captain Sen replied, "There's an access panel on the floor, in the back of the hold. It leads to the engine room. But if that's where the hull was breached we won't be able to open it. Too much pressure -"

"Where?" Chang demanded.

The captain pointed it out, a small door secured by four screws. It was only large enough for one person to pass through at a time. He and Chang pushed toward it, struggling to stay upright against the sharp angle of the floor. Scrawny Wu Qichen helped his sick wife to her feet; the woman shivered with chills. Chang bent down to his own wife and said in a firm voice, "Listen to me. You will keep our family together. Stay close to me by that doorway."

"Yes, husband."

Chang joined the captain at the access door and, using Sen's flick-knife, they managed to undo the screws. Chang pushed hard on the door and it fell into the other room without resistance. Water was filling the engine room too but it wasn't as deep as in the hold. Chang could see steep stairs leading to the main deck.

Screams and shouts as the immigrants saw the open passageway. They pushed forward in panic, crushing some people against the metal walls. Chang struck two of the men with his large fist. He cried, "No! One at a time or we'll all die."

Several others, desperation in their eyes, started for Chang. But the captain turned on them, brandishing his knife, and they backed away. Captain Sen and Chang stood side by side, facing the crowd. "One at a time," the captain repeated. "Through the engine room and up the ladder. There're rafts on the deck." He nodded to the immigrants closest to the doorway and they crawled outside. The first was John Sung, a doctor and a dissident, whom Chang had spent some time talking with on the voyage. Sung stopped outside the doorway and crouched down to help the others out. A young husband and wife climbed out next and scurried to the ladder.

The captain caught Changs eye and he nodded. "Go!"

Chang motioned to Chang Jiechi, his father, and the old man went through the door, John Sung gripping him by his arm. Then Chang's sons: teenage William and eight-year-old Ronald. Next, his wife. Chang went last and pointed his family toward the ladder. He turned back to help Sung get the others out.

The Wu family was next: Qichen, his sick wife, their teenage daughter and young son.

Chang reached into the hold to take the hand of another immigrant but two of the crewmen raced for the doorway. Captain Sen grabbed for them. He raged, "I'm still in charge. The Dragon is my ship. The passengers go first."

"Passengers? You idiot, they're cattle!" one of the crew screamed and, knocking aside the scar-faced mother and her little girl, crawled through the opening. The other followed right behind him, pushing Sung to the floor and running for the stairs. Chang helped the doctor to his feet. "I'm all right," Sung shouted and clutched a charm he wore around his neck, muttering an abbreviated prayer. Chang heard the name Chen-wu, the god of the northern sky and protector against criminals.

The ship lurched hard and tilted faster. The wind of escaping air began to shoot out through the doorway as water flooded in, filling the hold. The screams were heartbreaking and were soon mixed with the sound of choking. She's going down, Chang thought. Another few minutes at the most. He heard a hissing, sparking sound behind him. He glanced up and saw water flowing down the stairwell onto the massive, grimy engines.

One of the diesels stopped running and the lights went out. The second engine then went silent.

John Sung lost his handhold and slid across the floor into the wall. "Get out!" Chang called to him. "We can't do anything more here."

The doctor nodded, scrabbled for the stairs and climbed out. But Chang himself turned back to the doorway to try to rescue one or two more. He shivered, sickened at the sight in front of him: water was pouring out of the doorway, from which four desperate arms extended into the engine room, clawing for help. Chang grabbed one man's arm but the immigrant was so jammed among the others that he couldn't be dislodged. The arm shivered once and then Chang felt the fingers go limp. Through the roiling water now bubbling into the engine room Chang could just see Captain Sen's face. Chang motioned for him to try to climb out but the captain disappeared into the blackness of the hold. A few seconds later, though, the bald man swam back to the doorway and shoved something up through the fountain of seawater toward Chang.

What was it?

Gripping a pipe to keep from sliding away, Chang reached into the frothy water to take what the captain offered. He closed his muscular hand around cloth and pulled hard. It was a young child, the daughter of the scarred woman. She rose from the doorway through the stalks of lifeless arms. The toddler was choking but conscious. Chang held her to his chest firmly then let go of the pipe. He slid through the water to the wall then swam to the stairwell, where he climbed through the icy cascade to the deck above.

He gasped at what he saw – the stern of the ship was barely above water, and gray, turbulent waves were already covering half the deck. Wu Qichen and Changs father and sons were struggling to untie a large orange inflatable launch on the stern of the boat. It was already floating but would soon be underwater. Chang stumbled forward, handed the baby to his wife and began to help the others undo the rope. But soon the knot securing the raft was beneath the waves. Chang dove under the surface and tugged futilely on the hemp knot, his muscles quivering from the effort. Then a hand appeared near his. His son William was holding a long, sharp knife that he must've found on the deck. Chang took it and sawed on the rope until it gave way.

Chang and his son surfaced and, gasping, helped his family, the Wus, John Sung and the other couple into the raft, which was quickly drawn away from the ship by the massive waves.

He turned to the outboard motor. He pulled the cord to start the engine but it wouldn't engage. They needed to get it going immediately; without the control of a motor, they'd be overturned by the sea in seconds. He began yanking furiously and finally the motor buzzed to life.

Chang braced himself in the back of the raft and quickly turned their small craft into the waves. It bucked furiously but didn't capsize. He accelerated and then steered carefully in a circle, heading back through the fog and rain toward the dying ship.

"Where are you going?" Wu asked.

"The others," Chang shouted. "We have to find the others. Some might have -"

That was when the bullet snapped through the air no more than a meter from them.

The Ghost was furious.

He stood at the bow of the sinking Fuzhou Dragon, his hand on the lanyard of the forward life raft, and looked back fifty meters to sea where he'd just spotted some of the fucking piglets who'd escaped.

He fired his pistol once more. Another miss. The pitching seas made accurate shooting from this distance impossible. He scowled in fury as his targets maneuvered behind the Dragon, out of his sight. The Ghost surveyed the distance to the bridge deck, on which his cabin was located, where he had his machine gun and his money: more than a hundred thousand in one-color cash. He wondered momentarily if he could make it back to the cabin in time.

As if in answer, a huge spume of venting air broke through the hull of the Dragon and she began to sink even more quickly, rolling farther on her side.

Well, the loss hurt but it wasn't worth his life. The Ghost climbed into the raft and pushed away from the ship with an oar. He scanned the nearby water, struggling to see through the fog and rain. Two heads bobbed up and down, their arms waving frantically, fingers splayed in panic.

"Here, here!" the Ghost shouted. "I'll save you!" The men turned to him, kicking hard to rise from the water so he could see them better. They were two of the crew members, the ones who'd been on the bridge. He lifted his Chinese military Model 51 automatic pistol again. He killed the two crewmen with one shot each.

Then the Ghost got the outboard motor going and, riding the waves, looked once more for his bangshou. But there was no sign of him. The assistant was a ruthless killer and fearless in shoot-outs but he was a fool when he was out of his element. He'd probably fallen into the water and drowned because he wouldn't throw away his heavy gun and ammunition. Well, the Ghost had other matters to attend to. He turned the raft toward where he'd last seen the piglets and twisted the outboards throttle up high.

There'd been no time to find a life vest.

No time for anything.

Just after the explosion shattered the Dragon's rusty hull, knocking Sonny Li to his belly, the ship began to list, the water rushing over him and tugging him relentlessly toward the ocean. Suddenly he found himself off the side of the ship, alone and helpless in the frantic hills of water.

Ten fuck judges of hell, he thought bitterly in English.

The water was cold, heavy, breathtakingly salty. The waves slammed him onto his back then lifted him high and dunked him. Li managed to kick to the surface and looked around for the Ghost but, in the cloudy air and stinging rain, couldn't see anyone. Li swallowed a mouthful of the sickening water and began gasping and coughing. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and drank liters of Tsingtao beer and mao-tai; soon he was winded and the little-used muscles in his legs started to cramp painfully.

Reluctantly he reached into his belt and withdrew his automatic pistol. He released it and the gun sank quickly from his fingers. He did the same with the three clips of ammunition in his back pocket. This helped his buoyancy some but it wasn't enough. He needed a vest, anything that floated, anything to share the agonizing burden of staying on the surface.

He thought he heard the sound of an outboard motor and he twisted around as best he could. Thirty meters away was an orange raft. He raised his hand but a wave caught him in the face as he was inhaling and his lungs filled with stinging water.

Searing pain in his chest.

Air… I need air.

Another wave slammed into him. He sank below the surface, tugged down by the great muscles of gray water. He glanced at his hands. Why weren't they moving?

Paddle, kick! Don't let the sea suck you down!

He struggled once more to the surface.

Don't let…

He inhaled more water.

Don't let it…

His vision began to crinkle to black.

Ten judges of hell…

Well, Sonny Li thought, it seemed that he was about to meet them.

Chapter Five

They lay at his feet, a dozen or so, in the cold soup at the bottom of the raft, caught between the mountains of water beneath them and the lacerating rain from above. Their hands desperately gripped the rope that circled the orange raft.

Sam Chang, reluctant captain of the fragile craft, looked over his passengers. The two families – his own and the Wus – huddled in the back of the raft around him. In the front were Dr. John Sung and the two others who'd escaped from the hold, whom Chang knew only by their first names, Chao-hua and his wife, Rose.

A wave crashed over them, soaking the hapless occupants even more. Chang's wife, Mei-Mei, pulled off her sweater and wrapped it around the tiny daughter of the scar-faced woman. The girl, Chang recalled with a pang, was named Po-Yee, which meant Treasured Child; she'd been the good-luck mascot of their voyage.

"Go!" Wu cried. "Go for shore."

"We have to look for the others."

"He's shooting at us!"

Chang looked at the boiling sea. But the Ghost was nowhere to be seen. "We'll go soon. But we have to rescue anyone who can be saved. Look for them!"

Seventeen-year-old William struggled to his knees and squinted through the sharp spray. Wu's teenage daughter did the same.

Wu shouted something but his head was turned away and Chang couldn't hear the words.

Chang entwined his arm around the rope and pushed his feet hard against an oar clamp to brace his body as he struggled to nurse the raft in a circle around the Fuzhou Dragon, twenty meters away. The ship slipped farther into the water, a blast of foamy water occasionally shooting high as air escaped from a rent in the side of a porthole or hatch. The groaning, like that of an animal in pain, rose and fell.

"There!" William cried. "I think I see somebody."

"No," Wu Qichen called. "We have to leave! What are you waiting for?"

William was pointing. "Yes, Father. There!"

Chang could see a dark lump next to a much smaller white lump, ten meters from them. A head and a hand perhaps.

"Leave them," Wu called. "The Ghost will see us! He'll shoot us!"

Ignoring him, Chang steered closer to the lumps, which indeed turned out to be a man. He was pale and choking, thrashing the air, a look of terror on his face. Sonny Li was his name, Chang recalled. While most of the immigrants had spent time talking and reading to one another, several of the men traveling without families had kept to themselves. Li was among these. There'd been something ominous about him. He'd sat alone for the entire voyage, sullen, occasionally glaring at the children who were noisy around him and often sneaking up on deck, which was strictly forbidden by the Ghost. When he'd talk at all, Li would ask too many questions about what the families planned to do when they got to New York and where they would live – subjects that wise illegal immigrants didn't discuss.

Still, Li was a human being in need and Chang would try to save him.

The man was swallowed up by a wave.

"Leave him!" Wu whispered angrily. "He's gone."

From the front of the raft the young wife, Rose, called, "Please, let's go!"

Chang turned the raft into a large wave to keep from tipping over. By the time they were stable again Chang saw a flash of orange about fifty meters away, rising and falling. It was the Ghost's raft. The snakehead started toward them. A wave rose between the two crafts and they lost sight of each other momentarily.

Chang gunned the throttle and turned toward the drowning man. "Down, everybody down!"

He reversed the motor quickly just as they reached Li, leaned over the thick rubber and grabbed the immigrant by the shoulder, pulling him into the raft, where he collapsed on the floor, coughing fiercely. Another gunshot. A burst of water flew up near them as Chang sped the raft around the Dragon, putting the sinking ship between them and the Ghost once more.

The snakehead's attention turned away from them for a moment when he saw several other people in the water – crew members, bobbing on the surface in orange life vests, about twenty or thirty meters away from the killer. The Ghost sped toward the two, his motor running full.

Understanding now that the man was going to kill them, they waved their arms desperately toward Chang and kicked furiously away from the approaching raft. Chang gauged the distance to the crewmen, wondering if he could reach them before the snakehead was close enough to have a clear shot. The mist and rain – and the rolling waves – would make it hard for the Ghost to shoot accurately. Yes, he thought he could do it. He started to apply the power.

Suddenly a voice was in his ear. "No. It's time to leave."

It was his father, Chang Jiechi, who'd spoken; the old man had pulled himself to his knees and was leaning close to his son. "Take your family to safety."

Chang nodded. "Yes, Baba," using the affectionate Chinese term for "father." He aimed the raft toward shore and turned the motor up full.

A minute later came the crack of a gun firing, then another, as the snakehead murdered the two crew members. Sam Chang's soul cried in dismay at the sounds. Forgive me, he thought to the sailors. Forgive me.

Glancing back, he saw an orange shape through the fog; the Ghost's raft coming after them. He felt the despair in his bones. As a dissident in China, Sam Chang was used to fear. But in the People's Republic fear was an insidious unease that you learned to live with; it was nothing like this, the terror of seeing a mad killer hunting down your beloved family and companions.

"Stay down! Everyone stay down." He concentrated on keeping the raft upright and making as much speed as possible.

Another shot. The bullet struck the water nearby. If the Ghost hit the rubber they'd sink in minutes.

A huge, unearthly groan filled the air. The Fuzhou Dragon turned completely on her side and vanished under the surface. The massive wave created by the sinking ship rolled outward like the shock ring from a bomb blast. The immigrants' raft was too far away to be affected but the Ghost's was much closer to the ship. The snakehead looked back and saw the tall wave heading toward him. He veered away and, after a moment, was lost to sight.

Though he was a professor, an artist, a political activist, Sam Chang was also, like many Chinese, more accepting of spirituality and portents than a Western intellectual might be. He thought for a moment that Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, might have interceded on their behalf and sent the Ghost to a watery death.

But only a moment later John Sung, who was facing backward, shouted, "He's still there. He's coming. The Ghost is coming after us."

So, Guan Yin is busy elsewhere today, Sam Chang thought bitterly. If we're going to survive we'll have to do it on our own. He adjusted their course toward land. And sped away from the limp corpses and the flotsam that were like floating tombstones marking the graves of Captain Sen and his crew and the many people who'd become Chang's friends over the past weeks.

"He scuttled the ship."

Lon Sellitto's voice was a whisper. "Christ." The phone dropped away from his ear.

"What?" Harold Peabody said, shocked. A fat hand rose to his cumbersome glasses and removed them. "He sank it?"

The detective nodded a grim confirmation.

"Lord, no," Dellray said.

Lincoln Rhyme's head, one of the few parts of his physique that was still mobile, turned toward the heavyset cop. Shocked at this news, he felt a wave of heat pass through his entire body – solely an emotional sensation, of course, when it sped below his neck.

Dellray stopped pacing and Peabody and Coe stared at each other. Sellitto looked down at the yellow parquet as he listened once more into the phone and then looked up. "Jesus, Linc, the ship's gone. With everybody on board."

Oh, no…

"The Coast Guard doesn't know exactly what happened but they picked up an underwater explosion and ten minutes later the Dragon vanished from the radar."

"Casualties?" Dellray asked.

"No idea. The cutters still a few miles away. And they don't know the location – nobody on board the Dragon hit any emergency distress signals. They send out the exact coordinates."

Rhyme stared at the map of Long Island, its eastern end split like a fishtail. His eye was on a red sticker that marked the Dragon's approximate location. "How far offshore?"

"About a mile."

Rhyme's sweeping mind had run through a half-dozen logical scenarios of what might happen when the Coast Guard interdicted the Fuzhou Dragon, some optimistic, others involving some injury and the loss of life. Criminal apprehension was a trade-off and you could minimize the risks but never completely eliminate them. But drowning everyone on board? All those families and children? No, that thought had never occurred to him.

Christ, he'd lain in his luxurious $3000 bed and listened to the INS's little problem of the Ghost's whereabouts as if it were a diverting game at a cocktail party. Then he'd drawn his conclusions and snappily given them the solution.

And he'd let it go at that – never thinking one step further, never thinking that the immigrants might be at such terrible risk.

Illegals're called "the vanished" – if they try to cheat a snakehead, they're killed. If they complain, they're killed. They just disappear. Forever.

Lincoln Rhyme was furious with himself. He knew how dangerous the Ghost was; he should have anticipated this deadly turn. He closed his eyes momentarily and adjusted the burden somewhere in his soul. Give up the dead, he often told himself – and the CS techs who'd worked for him – and he reiterated this command silently now. But he couldn't quite give them up, not these poor people. The sinking of the Dragon was different. These dead weren't corpses at a crime scene, whose glassy eyes and rictus grin you learned to ignore in order to do your job. Here were whole families dead because of him.

After they'd interdicted the ship, arrested the Ghost and run the crime scene, his involvement in the case would end, Rhyme had thought, and he'd get back to preparing for his surgery. But now he knew he couldn't abandon the case. The hunter within him had to find this man and bring him to justice.

Dellray's phone rang and he answered. After a brief conversation he snapped off the call with a long finger.

"Here'sa deal. The Coast Guard thinks a coupla motorized rafts're heading toward shore." He stalked to the map and pointed. "Prob'ly around here. Easton – little town on the road to Orient Point. They can't get a chopper in the air with the storm being's nasty as it is but they got some cutters on the way to look for survivors and we're going to get our people at Port Jefferson out to where the rafts're headed."

Alan Coe brushed his red hair, only slightly darker than Sachs's, and said to Peabody, "I want to go out there."

The INS supervisor replied pointedly, "I'm not making personnel decisions around here." A none-too-subtle comment about the fact that Dellray and the FBI were running the show, one of many such barbs that had been exchanged between the two agents over the past few days.

"How 'bout it, Fred?" Coe asked.

"Nup," the preoccupied agent said.

"But I -"

Dellray shook his head emphatically. "There's nothin' you can do, Coe. If they collar him you can go question him in detention. Jabber at him all you want. But this's a tactical apprehension op now and that ain't your specialty."

The young agent had provided good intelligence about the Ghost but Rhyme thought he was difficult to work with. He was still angry and resentful that he hadn't been allowed to actually be on board the cutter interdicting the ship – another battle Dellray had had to fight.

"Well, that's bullshit." Coe dropped moodily into an office chair.

Without a response, Dellray sniffed his unlit cigarette, tucked it behind his ear and took another call. After he hung up he said to the team, "We're trying to set up roadblocks on the smaller highways out of the area – Routes 25, 48 and 84. But it's rush hour and nobody's got the balls to close the Long Island Expressway or Sunrise Highway."

Sellitto said, "We can call the toll takers at the tunnel and the bridges."

Dellray shrugged. "That's somethin', but it's not enough. Hell, Chinatown 's that boy's turf. Once he's there it'll be hell to find him. We gotta get him on the beach if there's anyway."

"And when," Rhyme asked, "are the life rafts going to land?"

"They're guessin' twenty, twenty-five minutes. And our folk're fifty miles away from Easton."

Peabody asked, "Isn't there any way to get somebody out there sooner?"

Rhyme debated for a moment then said into the microphone attached to his wheelchair, "Command, telephone."

The 1969 Indianapolis 500 pace car was a General Motors Camaro Super Sport convertible.

For this honor, GM picked the strongest of their muscle car line – the SS fitted with a 396-cubic-inch Turbojet V-8 engine, which could churn 375 horsepower. And if you were inclined to tinker with the vehicle – by removing sound deadeners, undercoating, sway bars and interior wheel wells and playing around with the pulleys and cylinder heads, for instance – you could goose the effective hp up to 450.

Which made it a boss machine for drag racing.

But a bitch to drive at 130 miles per hour through a gale.

Squeezing the leather-clad wheel, feeling the pain in her arthritic fingers, Amelia Sachs piloted the car eastbound on the Long Island Expressway. She had a blue flasher on the dash – a suction cup doesn't stick well to convertible roofs – and wove perilously in and out of the commuter traffic.

As she and Rhyme had decided when he'd called five minutes before and told her to get the hell out to Easton, Sachs was one-half of the advance team, which, if they were lucky, might get to the beach at the same time the Ghost and any surviving immigrants did. The other half of the impromptu team was the young officer from the NYPD Emergency Services Unit sitting next to her. The ESU was the tactical branch of the police department, the SWAT team, and Sachs – well, Rhyme actually – had decided that she should have some backup with firepower of the sort that now sat in the man's lap: a Heckler Koch MP5 machine gun.

Miles behind them now were the ESU, the crime scene bus, a half-dozen Suffolk County troopers, ambulances and assorted INS and FBI vehicles, making their way through the vicious storm as best they could.

"Okay," said the ESU officer. "Well. Now."

He offered this in response to a brief bit of hydroplaning.

Sachs calmly brought the Camaro back under control, recalling that she'd also removed the steel plates behind the backseat, put in a fuel cell in lieu of the heavy gas tank and replaced the spare with Fix-A-Flat and a plug kit. The SS was about 500 pounds lighter than when her father had bought it in the seventies. Could use a little of that ballast now, she thought, and snipped another skid short.

"Okay, we're okay now," the ESU cop said, apparently far more comfortable in a shoot-out than driving down the wide expanse of the Long Island Expressway.

Her phone rang. She juggled the unit and answered it.

"Say, miss," the ESU cop asked, "you gonna use one of those hands-free things? I'm just thinking it might be better." And this from a man dressed like Robocop.

She laughed, plugged the earpiece in and upshifted.

"How's the progress, Sachs?" Rhyme asked.

"Doing the best I can. But we turn off onto surface roads in a few miles. I may have to slow up for some of the red lights."

"'May'?" the ESU cop muttered.

"Any survivors, Rhyme?" Sachs asked.

"Nothing further," he answered. "The Coast Guard can only confirm two rafts. Looks like most people didn't get off."

Sachs said to the criminalist, "I hear that tone, Rhyme. It's not your fault."

"Appreciate the sentiment, Sachs. That's not an issue. Now, you driving carefully?"

"Oh, yeah," she said, calmly steering into the spin that took the car forty degrees off center, her heart rate rising not a single digit. The Camaro straightened as if it were on guy wires and continued down the expressway, its speed goosed up to 140. The ESU cop closed his eyes.

"It's going to be close, Sachs. Keep your weapon handy."

"It always is." Another brief skid.

"We're getting calls from the Coast Guard cutter, Sachs. I've got to go." He paused for a moment. Then said, "Search well but watch your back."

She laughed. "I like that. We need to print it up on T-shirts for the Crime Scene Unit."

They hung up.

The expressway ended and she skidded off onto a smaller highway. Twenty-five miles to Easton, where the lifeboats would land. She'd never been there; city-girl Sachs wondered what the topography was like. Would it be a beach? Rocky cliffs? Would she have to climb? Her arthritis had been bad lately and this thick humidity doubled the pain and stiffness.

Wondering too: If the Ghost was still at the beach, were there plenty of hiding places for him to snipe from?

She glanced down at the speedometer.

Ease back?

But the treads on her wheels were true and the only moisture on her palms was from the rain that had drenched her back at Port Jefferson. She kept her foot near the floor.

As the launch smashed through the water, closer to the shore, the rocks grew more distinct.

And more jagged.

Sam Chang squinted through the rain and spray. There were some short stretches of beach ahead, covered with pebbles and dirty sand, but much of the shoreline was dark rock and bluffs well over their heads. And to reach a portion of beach where they could land he'd have to maneuver through an obstacle course of jutting stone.

"He's still there, behind us," Wu shouted.

Chang looked back and could see the tiny orange dot of the Ghost's raft. It was heading directly for them but was making slower progress than theirs. The Ghost was hampered by the way he handled the raft. He aimed right toward the shore and fought the waves, which slowed his progress. But Chang, true to his Taoist leanings, piloted his craft differently; he sought the natural flow of the water, not fighting it but steering around the stronger crests in a serpentine pattern and using the shore-bound waves to speed them forward more quickly. The distance between them and the snakehead was increasing.

Before the Ghost landed, there should be enough time to find the trucks that were waiting to take them to Chinatown, Chang estimated. The truck drivers wouldn't know about the sinking but Chang would tell them that the Coast Guard was after them and order the men to leave immediately. If they insisted on waiting, Chang and Wu and the others would overpower them and drive the trucks themselves.

He studied the shoreline and beyond – past the beach were trees and grass. It was hard to see in the windblown rain and mist but he detected what looked like a road. Some lights too, not far away. A cluster of them: a small village, it seemed.

Wiping the stinging seawater from his eyes, Chang watched the people at his feet, falling silent as they gazed at the shore ahead of them, the turbulent currents here, riptides and whirlpools, the approaching rocks, sharp as knives, dark as dried blood.

Then, just ahead of them, under the surface of the water, appeared a bank of rock. Chang throttled back fast and turned hard to the side, just missing the stone shelf. The raft was now sideways, buffeted by the ragged waves, which flooded the vessel. They nearly capsized once, then again. Chang tried to steer through a gap in the bank but the motor suddenly cut out. He grabbed the lanyard and tugged hard. A chug, then silence. Again, a dozen times. But nothing happened. The motor didn't even turn over. His older son scrabbled forward and tipped the gasoline can. "Empty!" William shouted.

Desperate, weak with fear for his family's safety, he looked behind them. The fog was thicker now and obscured them – but it also hid the Ghost. How close was he?

The raft rose on a high wave then dropped into a gully of water with a jarring crash.

"Down, everybody down!" Chang shouted. "Stay low." He dropped to his knees in the dark water sloshing on the floor of the raft. He grabbed the oar and tried to use it as a rudder. But the waves and current were too powerful, the raft too heavy. A fist of water struck him and ripped the oar from his hands. Chang fell backward. He glanced in the direction they were headed and he saw a line of rocks just ahead, a few meters away.

The water caught the launch like a surfboard and sped it forward. They struck the rocks with stunning force, bow first. The rubber shell ripped open with a gasping hiss and began to deflate. Sonny Li, John Sung and the young couple in the front – Chao-hua and Rose – were pitched out into the turbulent water just past the rocks and swept away in the surf.

The two families – the Wus and the Changs – were in the rear of the raft, which remained partially inflated and they managed to hold on. The raft struck the rocks again. Wus wife was thrown hard into a ledge of stone but she didn't go overboard; screaming, she fell back into the raft, blood covering her arm, and lay stunned on the floor. No one else was injured by the impact.

Then the raft was past the rocks and headed toward shore, deflating quickly.

Chang heard a distant cry for help – from one of the four who'd vanished when they struck the rock but he couldn't tell where the shout had come from.

The raft slid over another rock, low in the water, fifteen meters from shore. They were trapped in the surf now, battered and being dragged toward the pebbly beach. Wu Qichen and his daughter struggled to keep his injured and half-conscious wife above the surface – her arm torn open and bleeding badly. In Mei-Mei's arms Po-Yee, the baby, had stopped crying and was staring listlessly around her.

But the motor of the raft was hung up on a rock ledge, trapping them eight or nine meters from shore. The water wasn't deep here – two meters – but the waves were still pounding them hard.

"The shore," he shouted, coughing water. "Now!"

The swim took forever. Even Chang, the strongest among them, was gasping for breath and racked by cramps before he reached land. Finally, under his feet, he felt stones, slippery with kelp and slime, and stumbled forward out of the water. He fell once, hard, but quickly regained his foothold and helped his father out of the water.

Exhausted, they all stumbled to a nearby shelter on the beach, open on the sides but with a corrugated roof that protected them from the slashing rain. The families collapsed on the dark sand underneath it, coughing water, crying, gasping, praying. Sam Chang finally managed to stand. He gazed out to sea but saw no sign of the Ghost's raft or the immigrants who'd been swept overboard.

Then he sank down to his knees and lay his forehead on the sand. Their companions and friends were dead, and they themselves injured, tired beyond words and pursued by a killer… Still, Sam Chang reflected, they were alive and were on firm land. He and his family had at last finished the endless journey that had taken them halfway around the world to their new home, America, the Beautiful Country.

Chapter Six

Half a kilometer out to sea the Ghost hunched over his cell phone, trying to protect it from the rain and waves as his raft plowed through the water toward the piglets.

The reception was bad – the signal was bouncing via satellite through Fuzhou and Singapore after it left his phone – but he managed to get through to Jerry Tang, a bangshou he sometimes used in New York's Chinatown and who was now waiting somewhere on the shore nearby to pick him up.

Breathless from the rough ride, the Ghost managed to describe to the driver more or less where he'd be landing – about three or four hundred meters east from what seemed to be a strip of stores and houses.

"What weapons do you have?" the Ghost shouted.

"What?" Tang shouted.

He had to repeat the question several times. "Weapons!"

But Tang was a debt collector – more of a businessman than an enforcer – and it turned out that he had with him only a pistol.

"Gan," the Ghost spat out. Fuck. Armed only with his old Model 51 handgun, he'd hoped for an automatic weapon of some kind.

"The Coast Guard," Tang told him, the transmission lost in static and the sound of the wind, "they're on… here. I'm listening… scanner… have to get away. Where…"

The Ghost shouted, "If you see any of the piglets, kill them. Did you hear me? They're on the shore nearby you. Find them! Kill them!"

"Kill them? You want -"

But a wave washed over the side of the raft and drenched him. The phone went silent and the Ghost glanced at the screen. It was dead, shorted out. Disgusted, he flung it to the floor.

A wall of rock loomed and the Ghost steered around it, making for a broad beach far to the left of the small town. It would take some time to get back to where the piglets had landed but he didn't want to risk injuring himself on the outcroppings of stone. Still, beaching the raft proved to be harrowing. As he closed in on the sand the small craft rose on the crest of a wave and nearly tipped over but the Ghost throttled back fast and the raft settled onto the water. A wave, though, caught him in the back and knocked him to the floor of the boat, drenching him and spinning the raft sideways. It slammed into the shore in an explosion of surf and tossed its occupant hard onto the beach. The propeller tipped out of the water and the motor screamed as it raced. The Ghost, afraid the sound would give him away, crawled frantically back to the engine and managed to shut it off.

He saw Jerry Tang, in a silver four-by-four BMW, on a sandy asphalt road about twenty meters from the shore. He rose and jogged toward the vehicle. Fat, unshaven Tang caught sight of him and drove forward. The Ghost leaned down to the window on the driver's side. "Did you see the others?"

The nervous man said, "We have to go!" He nodded at a police scanner. "The Coast Guard knows we're here. They're sending the police to search."

"The others?" the Ghost snapped. "The piglets?"

"I didn't see anybody else. But -"

"I can't find my bangshou either. I don't know if he got off the ship." The Ghost scanned the shoreline.

"I haven't seen anyone," Tang said, his voice high. "But we can't stay here."

From the corner of his eye the Ghost saw motion near the surf: a man in gray cloth was crawling on the rocks away from the water, like an injured animal. The Ghost stepped away from the truck and pulled his gun from his belt. "Wait here."

"What are you doing?" Tang asked desperately. "We can't stay here anymore! They're coming. They'll be here in ten minutes. Don't you understand me?"

But the Ghost was paying no attention to the thug as he walked back across the road. The piglet looked up and saw the Ghost approaching but the man had apparently broken his leg in the landing and couldn't even stand, much less flee. He began to crawl desperately back to the water. The Ghost was curious why he was even bothering.

Sonny Li opened his eyes and thanked the ten judges of hell – not for surviving the sinking but because for the first time in two weeks, the slippery twist of nausea within his gut was virtually gone.

When the raft had hit the rocks he and John Sung and the young couple had been thrown into the water and swept away by the strong current. Li had immediately lost sight of the other three and had been dragged down the beach for what seemed like a kilometer until he'd been able to kick his way onto the sand. Then, crawling as far away as he could from the ocean, Li collapsed.

He'd lain motionless under the pounding rain as the seasickness dissipated and the throbbing in his head lessened. Now, struggling to his feet, Li started slowly toward the road, his skin irritated from the cloth of his jeans and sweatshirt, which were filled with sand and saturated with the pungent residue of salt water. He could see nothing in either direction. He remembered, though, the lights of a small village to his right and it was in that direction that he now began to walk along the sand-swept road.

Where was the Ghost? Li wondered.

Then, as if in answer, came a brief pop, which Li recognized immediately as a pistol shot. It reverberated through the dark, wet dawn.

But was it the Ghost? Or some local resident? (Everyone knew that all Americans carried guns.) Maybe it was a U.S. public security officer.

Better to be safe. He was eager to find the Ghost quickly but he knew he had to be careful. He stepped off the road into some brush, where he was less visible, and started forward as fast as his cramped and exhausted legs could carry him.

At the sound the families paused. "It was -" Wu Qichen began. "Yes," Sam Chang muttered. "A gunshot."

"He's killing us. He's tracking us down and killing us."

"I know," Chang snapped back. His heart cried for them – for Dr. Sung, for Sonny Li, for the couple – whoever among them had just died. But what could he do?

Chang looked at his father and observed that Chang Jiechi was breathing hard but, despite the battering in the raft and the swim to shore, the old man didn't seem to be in great pain. He nodded to his son, meaning it was all right to continue. The cluster of people started walking once again through the rain and wind.

Their concerns about begging or coercing the drivers to take them to Chinatown were unfounded; there'd been no trucks waiting for them. Chang supposed that the vehicles were at a different location altogether, or perhaps as soon as the Ghost decided to scuttle the ship he'd called and had them return. He and Wu had spent several minutes calling for Sung and Li and the others who'd been washed overboard. But then Chang had seen the orange raft of the snakehead approaching and he'd led the two families off the road into the grass and bushes, where they'd be out of sight, and they made their way toward the lights, where he hoped to find a truck.

The beacons that drew them turned out to be a line of restaurants, a petrol station, several stores selling souvenirs like on the waterfront at Xiamen, ten or twelve houses, a church.

The hour was just around dawn – perhaps 5:30 or 6 – but there were signs of life: a dozen cars were parked in front of the two restaurants, including a driverless one with the motor running. But it was a small sedan and Chang needed a vehicle with room for ten. And he needed one whose theft wouldn't be noticed for at least two or three hours – the length of time he'd been told it would take them to get to Chinatown in New York City.

He told the others to wait behind a tall hedge of bushes and motioned his son William and Wu to follow him. Crouching, they moved behind the buildings. There were two large trucks behind the petrol station but they were both well in view of a young attendant in the garage. Rain pelted the glass, making visibility poor, but he would have noticed immediately if they'd started to drive a truck away.

Twenty meters farther on was a darkened house and behind it was a pickup truck. But Chang didn't want to expose his father or the children to the rain and weather. Also, ten shipwrecked Chinese would be easily spotted in a rickety old vehicle of this sort, driving toward New York City like a band of the "floating population" – itinerant laborers who travel from town to town in China looking for work.

"Stay out of the mud," Chang ordered his son and Wu. "Walk only on the grass or branches or stones. I don't want to leave footprints." Caution was instinctive for Chang; with both public security bureau and People's Liberation Army agents constantly following them, dissidents in China learn quickly to obscure their movements.

They moved on, through brush and trees whipped by the ferocious wind, past more houses, some dark, some showing signs of families waking: televisions flickering, breakfasts being prepared. Seeing this poignant evidence of normal life, Chang was stabbed by the hopelessness of their plight. But, as he'd learned to do in China, where the government had taken so much away from him, he pushed these sentimental feelings aside and urged his son and Wu to move more quickly. Finally they came to the last building on this strip of habitation: a small church, dark and apparently unoccupied.

Behind the weathered building they found an old white van. From his hours on the Internet and watching TV, Chang knew a little English but these words he didn't understand. At his urging, though, both of his sons had studied the language, and American culture, for years. William glanced at the van and explained, "It says 'Pentecostal Baptist Church of Easton.'"

Another soft crack in the distance. Chang froze at the sound. The Ghost had killed another one of them.

"Let's go!" an anxious Wu said. "Hurry. See if it's open."

But the van's door was locked.

As Chang looked around for something they could use to break the window William surveyed the lock closely. He called over the noisy wind, "Do you have my knife?"

"Your knife?"

"The one I gave you on the ship – to cut the rope holding the raft."

"That was yours?" What on earth had his son been doing with a weapon like that? It was a switchblade.

"Do you have it?" the boy repeated.

"No, I dropped it getting into the raft."

The boy grimaced but Chang ignored the expression – why, it was almost impertinent – and scanned the rain-pelted ground. He found a piece of metal pipe and swung it hard into the window of the van. The glass shattered into a hundred tiny pieces of ice. He climbed into the passenger seat and looked through the map box for keys. He couldn't find any and stepped out onto the muddy ground. Glancing at the building, he wondered if there would be a set inside the church? And if so, where? An office? There might be a caretaker inside; what if the man heard and confronted them? Chang believed that he couldn't hurt anyone innocent even if -

He heard a loud snap and spun around in alarm. His son was crouched in the driver's seat and had shattered the plastic housing of the ignition lock with a kick from his boot. As Chang watched, astonished and dismayed, the boy pulled out wires and began brushing them against each other. Suddenly the radio came on with a blare: "He will always love you, let Our Savior into your heart…"

William touched a button on the dash and the volume lowered. He touched other wires together. A spark… The engine fired up.

Chang stared in disbelief. "How did you know how to do that?"

The boy shrugged.

"Tell me -"

Wu clutched Chang's arm. "Let's go! We have to get our families and leave. The Ghost is looking for us."

The father pierced his son with a look of shock. He expected the boy to lower his eyes in shame. But William stared back coldly in a way that Chang himself never would have done with his own father, at any age.

"Please," Wu begged. "Let's go back for the rest."

"No," Chang said after a moment. "Have them come here. Follow our path – and make sure they don't leave any footprints."

Wu hurried off to get them.

In the van William found a booklet of maps of the area and studied them carefully. He nodded, as if memorizing directions.

Resisting his desire to interrogate his son about hot-wiring the ignition, Chang asked him, "Do you know where to go?"

"I can figure it out." The boy looked up. "Do you want me to drive?" Then he added bluntly, "You're not very good at it." Like most urban Chinese, Sam Chang's main means of transportation was a bicycle.

Chang blinked at these words of his son's – spoken once again in a tone that approached insolence. Then Wu appeared with the rest of the immigrants and Chang ran forward to help his wife and father into the van, calling back to his son, "Yes, you drive."

Chapter Seven

He'd killed two of the piglets on the beach – the injured man and a woman.

But there'd been about a dozen people in the raft. Where were the rest?

A horn blared. The Ghost whirled around. It was Jerry Tang, drawing his attention. He held up the police scanner, his gestures frantic. "The police will be here any minute! We have to go!"

The Ghost turned away and scanned the beach once more, the road. Where had they gotten to? Maybe they'd -

With a squeal of tires Tang's four-by-four pulled into the road, accelerating fast.

"No! Stop!"

Seized by fury, the Ghost aimed his pistol and fired once. The slug hit the rear door but the vehicle continued, not slowing, to an intersection and then skidded through the turn and disappeared. The Ghost stood frozen, the pistol at his side, staring through the mist at the road where his means of escape had just vanished. He was eighty miles from his safe-houses in Manhattan, his assistant was missing and probably dead, he had no money and no cell phone. Dozens of policemen and troopers were on their way. And Tang had just abandoned him. He could -

He tensed. Not far away a white van suddenly appeared out of a field on the other side of a church and turned onto the road. It was the piglets!

The Ghost lifted his pistol again but the vehicle disappeared into the fog. Lowering the gun, the Ghost took several deep breaths. After a moment he grew serene. He was plagued by troubles at the moment, yes, but he'd experienced much adversity in his life, far worse than this.

You are part of the old.

You will reform your ways.

You will die for your old beliefs…

A reversal, he'd come to learn, was merely a temporary unbalance and even the most horrific events in his life had ultimately been harmonized by good fortune. His abiding philosophy was found in one word: naixin. This translated as "patience" in Chinese but meant something more in the Ghost's mind. The English equivalent would be "All in good time." He had survived these forty-some years because he'd outlasted trouble and danger and sorrow.

For the moment the piglets had gotten away. Their deaths would have to wait. Now there was nothing to do but escape from the police and the INS.

He put his old pistol into his pocket and trudged through the rain and wind along the beach toward the lights of the small town. The closest building was a restaurant, in front of which was a car with its engine running.

So, some good fortune already!

And then, glancing out to sea, he saw something that actually made him laugh. Yet more good luck: not far offshore he saw another piglet, a man struggling to stay afloat. At least he could kill one more of them before he escaped to the city.

The Ghost pulled his gun from his pocket and started back toward the shoreline.

The wind was wearing him down.

Making his way toward the small town, Sonny Li slogged through the sand. He was a slight man and in the hard, dangerous world in which he made his way he relied on bluff and surprise and wits (weapons too, of course), not on physical strength. He was now at his limits, exhausted from this morning's ordeal.

The wind… Twice it actually knocked him to his knees.

No more, he thought. Despite the risk of being seen, struggling through the soft sand was simply too much for him and he stumbled back onto the rain-swept asphalt road and continued toward the lights of the small village. He pushed forward as best he could, afraid that the snake-head would leave before Li found him.

But a moment later he received the reassurance that the man was still here: several more gunshots.

Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.

Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he'd swallowed he was desperately thirsty.

Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost's. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.

He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man's footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.

INS? Security bureau officers?

Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.

Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman's body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.

"He's killing them, Rhyme," Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. "He's shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They're dead."

"Shot them?" The criminalist's voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.

The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. "No sign of him," the man shouted over the wind. "People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago." The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.

"Lon'll put it on the wire," he said. "Was he alone?"

"Think so. Because of the rain there're no footprints in the sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then."

"So we'll assume his bangshou's still unaccounted for. He could've gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might've been in the wrecked one."

Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.

Then she said, "We're going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme."

She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed all the evidence. But he said simply, "Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid." The line went dead.

Search well but watch your back…

The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs's instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants – and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might've gone to ground.

They found neither.

Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who'd been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.

The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene – so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn't vanish, either accidentally or at the hands of souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew – there were plenty of other people to do that now – and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.

As the CS techs roped off the beach with yellow tape, Sachs pulled the latest in forensic couture over her soaked jeans and T-shirt. The NYPD's new crime scene overalls, a hooded full-body suit made of white Tyvek, prevented the searcher from sloughing off his or her own trace evidence – hair, skin or sweat, for instance – and contaminating the scene.

Lincoln Rhyme approved of the suit – he'd lobbied for something similar when he'd been running the Investigation and Resources Division, which oversaw Crime Scene. Sachs wasn't so pleased, however. The fact that the overalls made her look like an alien from a bad space movie wasn't the problem; what troubled her was that it was brilliant white – easily spotted by any perps who, for whatever reason, might wish to hang around the crime scene and try out their marksmanship on cops picking up evidence. Hence, Sachs's pet name for the garb: "the bull's-eye suit."

A brief canvass of the patrons in the restaurant, employees of the gas station and residents living in the few houses on the beach yielded nothing except facts they'd already learned about the Honda in which the Ghost had escaped. No other vehicles had been stolen and no one had seen anybody swimming to shore or hiding out on land or even heard the gunshots over the wind and rain.

So it fell exclusively to Amelia Sachs – and Lincoln Rhyme – to wring from the crime scene whatever information about the Ghost, the crew and the immigrants might reside here.

And what a crime scene it was, one of the biggest they'd ever run: a mile of beach, a road and, on the other side of the asphalt strip, a maze of scruffy brush. Millions of places to search. And possibly still populated by an armed perp.

"It's a bad scene, Rhyme. The rain's let up a little but it's still coming down hard and the wind's twenty miles an hour."

"I know. We've got the Weather Channel on." His voice was different now, calmer. The sound spooked her a bit. It reminded her of the eerily placid quality of his voice when he talked about endings, about killing himself, about finality. "All the more reason," he prodded, "to get on with the search, wouldn't you say?"

She looked up and down the beach. "It's just… Everything's too big. There's too much here."

"How can it be too big, Sachs? We work every scene one foot at a time. Doesn't matter if it's a square mile or three feet. It just takes longer. Besides, we love big scenes. There're so many wonderful places to find clues."

Wonderful, she thought wryly.

And, starting closest to the large deflated raft, she began walking the grid. The phrase described one technique for physically searching a crime scene for clues, in which the CS officer covers the floor or ground in one direction, back and forth, like mowing a lawn, then turns perpendicular and covers the same ground again. The theory behind this method of searching is that you see things from one angle that you might miss when looking at them from a different angle. Although there were dozens of other methods of searching crime scenes, all of them faster, the grid – the most tedious type of search – was also the most likely to yield gold. It was the one that Rhyme insisted that Sachs use – just as he'd done with the officers and techs who worked for him at NYPD forensics. Thanks to Lincoln Rhyme, "walking the grid" had become synonymous with searching a crime scene among cops in the metropolitan area.

Soon she was out of sight of the village of Easton and the only sign that she wasn't alone was the diffuse flashing of the emergency vehicle lights, like blood pulsing through pale skin, unsettling and eerie.

But soon the lights too vanished in the fog. The solitude – and a creepy sense of vulnerability – curled snug around her. Oh, man, I don't like this. The fog was worse here and the sounds of the rain tapping loudly on the hood of her suit, the waves and the wind would mask an attacker's approach.

She slapped the grip of her black Glock pistol for reassurance and kept on the grid.

"I'm going to go quiet for a while, Rhyme. I've got this feeling there's somebody still here. Somebody watching me."

"Call me when you're through," he said. His hesitant tone suggested there was something more he wished to say but after a moment the line clicked off.

Watch your back…

For the next hour, through the wind and rain, she searched the beach and road and the foliage beyond, like a child hunting for seashells. She examined the intact raft, in which she found a cell phone, and the deflated one, which two ESU officers had muscled up onto the beach. Finally she assembled her collection of evidence, shell casings, blood samples, fingerprints and Polaroids of footprints.

Then she paused and looked around. Then she clicked on the radio and was patched through to a cozy town house light-years away. "Something's funny, Rhyme."

"That's not helpful, Sachs. 'Funny'? What does that mean?"

"The immigrants… ten or so of them, they just vanish. I don't understand it. They leave a shelter on the beach then cross the road and hide in the bushes. I see the prints in the mud on the other side of the road. Then they just disappear. I guess they've gone inland to hide but I can't find any tracks. And nobody's going to give a ride to hitchhikers like them around here and none of the people in town saw any trucks waiting to pick them up. There aren't any tire treads here anyway."

"All right, Sachs, you've just walked in the Ghost's footsteps. You've seen what he's done, you know who he is, you've been where he's been. What's going through your mind?"

"I -"

"You're the Ghost now," Rhyme reminded in a lulling voice. "You're Kwan Ang, nicknamed Gui, the Ghost. You're a multimillionaire, a human trafficker – a snakehead. A killer. You've just sunk a ship and killed over a dozen people. What's in your mind?"

"Finding the rest of them," she answered immediately. "Finding them and killing them. I don't want to leave. Not yet. I'm not sure why but I have to find them." For an instant an image jolted her mind. She did see herself as the snakehead, filled with a salivating lust to find the immigrants and kill them. The sensation was harrowing. "Nothing," she whispered, "is going to stop me."

"Good, Sachs," Rhyme replied softly, as if he was afraid of breaking the thin wire that was connecting a portion of her soul to the snakehead's. "Now, think about the immigrants. They're being pursued by someone like that. What would they do?"

It took her a moment to transform herself from a heartless murderer and snakehead into one of the poor people on that ship, appalled that the man she'd paid her life's savings to had betrayed her in this way, had killed people she'd grown close to, perhaps family members too. And was now compelled to kill her.

"I'm not going to hide," she said firmly. "I'm getting the hell out of here as fast as I can. Any way I can, as far away as possible. We can't go back into the ocean. We can't walk. We need a ride."

"And how would you get one?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, feeling the frustration of being close to an answer yet having it evade her.

"Any houses inland?" he asked.

"No."

"Any trucks at the gas station?"

"Yes, but the troopers asked the attendants. None of 'em're missing."

"Anything else?"

Sachs scanned the street. "Nothing."

"There can't be nothing, Sachs," he scolded. "These people're running for their lives. They escaped somehow. The answer's there. What else do you see?"

She sighed and began reciting, "I see a stack of discarded tires, I see a sailboat upside down, I see a carton of empties – Sam Adams beer. In front of the church there's a wheelbarrow -"

"Church?" Rhyme pounced. "You didn't mention a church before."

"It's Tuesday morning, Rhyme. The place is closed and ESU cleared it."

"Get over there, Sachs. Now!"

Stiffly she began to walk toward the place but had no clue what she might find that would be helpful.

Rhyme explained, "Didn't you do vacation Bible school, Sachs? Ritz crackers, Hawaiian Punch and Jesus on summer afternoons? No potluck picnics? No youth group conventions?"

"Once or twice. But I spent most of my Sundays rebuilding carburetors."

"How do you think churches get the younguns to and from their little theological diversions? Minivans, Sachs. Minivans – with room for a dozen people."

"Could be," she added skeptically.

"And maybe not," Rhyme conceded. "But the immigrants didn't sprout wings and fly, did they? So let's check out the more likely possibilities."

And, as so often happened, he was right.

She walked around to the back of the church and examined the muddy ground: footprints, tiny cubes of broken safety glass, the pipe used to shatter the window, the tread marks of a van.

"Got it, Rhyme. A bunch of fresh prints. Damn, that's smart… They walked on rocks, grass and weeds. To avoid the mud so they wouldn't leave prints. And it looks like they got into the van and it drove away through a field before it turned onto the road. So nobody'd see it on the main street."

Rhyme ordered, "Get the scoop on the van from the minister."

Sachs asked a trooper to call the minister of the church. A few minutes later the details came back – it was a white Dodge, five years old, with the name of the church on the side. She took down the tag number then relayed this to Rhyme, who said he would in turn put out another vehicle locator request, in addition to the one on the Honda, and tell the Port Authority police to pass the word to the toll takers at the bridges and tunnels, on the assumption that the immigrants were headed for Chinatown in Manhattan.

She walked the grid carefully behind the church but found nothing else. "I don't think there's much more we can do here, Rhyme. I'm going to log the evidence in and get back." She disconnected the call.

Returning to the crime scene bus, she packed away the Tyvek suit then logged in what she'd found and attached the chain of custody cards that must accompany every item collected at a crime scene. She told the techs to get everything to Rhyme's town house ASAP. Though it seemed hopeless she wanted to make another sweep for survivors. Her knees were on fire – the chronic arthritis inherited from her grandfather. The disease often bothered her but now, alone, she allowed herself the luxury of moving slowly; whenever she was among fellow officers she tried hard not to show the pain. She was afraid that if the brass got wind of her condition they'd desk her for disability.

After fifteen minutes, though, of not finding any sign of more immigrants, she started toward her Camaro, which was the only vehicle left on this portion of the beach. She was alone; the ESU officer who'd accompanied her here had opted for a safer ride back to the city.

The fog was lighter now. A half mile away, on the other side of the town, Sachs could just make out two Suffolk County rescue trucks and an unmarked Ford sedan parked nearby. She believed it was an INS vehicle.

Sachs dropped stiffly into the front seat of her Camaro, found a piece of paper and began to write out notes of what she'd observed at the scene to present to Rhyme and the team back at his town house. The wind buffeted the light car and the rain pelted the steel bodywork furiously. Sachs happened to glance up in time to see a dramatic spume of seawater flying ten feet into the air as it hit a jutting black rock.

She squinted hard and wiped the steam off the inside of the windshield with her sleeve.

What is that? An animal? Some wreckage from the Fuzhou Dragon?

No, she realized with a start; it was a man. He clung desperately to the rock.

Sachs grabbed her Motorola, clicked to the local ops frequency and radioed, "This is NYPD Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Suffolk County Rescue at Easton Beach. You copy?"

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Go ahead."

"I'm a half click east of the town. I've got a vic in the water. I need some help."

"K," came the reply, "we're on our way. Out."

Sachs stepped out of the car and started down to the shore. She saw a large wave lift the man off the rock and pitch him into the water. He tried to swim but he was injured – there was blood on his shirt – and the best he could do was keep his head above water, but just barely. He went down once and struggled to the surface.

"Oh, brother," Sachs muttered, glancing back at the road. The yellow rescue truck was just then moving forward off the sand.

The immigrant gave a choked cry and slipped under the waves. No time to wait for the pros.

From the police academy she knew the basic lifesaving rule: "Reach, throw, row then go." Meaning, try to rescue a drowning victim from the shore or a boat before you yourself swim out to save him. Well, the first three weren't options at all.

So, she thought: Go.

Ignoring the searing pain in her knees, she ran toward the ocean, stripping off her gun and ammo belt. At the shoreline she unlaced her standard-issue shoes, kicked them off and, eyes focused on the struggling swimmer, waded into the cold, turbulent water.

Chapter Eight

Crawling from the bushes, Sonny Li got a better look at the woman with the red hair as she pulled off her shoes and plowed into the rough water then kicked away from the shore toward somebody struggling in the waves.

Li couldn't make out who it was – either John Sung or the husband of the couple who'd sat next to him in the raft – but, in any case, his attention was drawn back immediately to the woman, whom he'd been studying from his hiding spot in the bush since she'd arrived at the beach over an hour ago.

Now, she wasn't his type of girl. He didn't care for Western women, at least the ones he'd seen around Fuzhou. They were either on the arms of rich businessmen (tall and beautiful, casting disdainful glances at the Chinese men who'd stare at them) or tourists with their husbands and children (badly dressed, casting disdainful glances at men spitting on the sidewalks and the bicyclists who never let them cross the street).

This woman, though, intrigued him. At first he hadn't been able to figure out what she was doing here; she'd arrived in her bright yellow car, accompanied by a soldier with a machine gun. Then she'd turned her back and he'd glimpsed nypd on her windbreaker. So, she was a public security bureau officer. Safely hidden across the road, he'd watched her search for survivors and clues.

Sexy, he'd thought, despite his vast preference for quiet, elegant Chinese women.

And that hair! What a color! It inspired him to give her a nickname, "Hongse," pronounced hoankseh, Chinese for "red."

Looking up the road, Li saw a yellow emergency truck speeding toward them. As soon as it turned into a shallow parking lot and stopped he crawled to the edge of the road. There was a chance he'd be spotted, of course, but he had to act now, before she returned. He waited until the rescue workers' attention was on Hongse and then scrabbled across the road and up to the yellow car. It was an old one, the sort you saw in American TV shows like Kojak and Hill Street Blues. He wasn't interested in stealing the car itself (most of the security bureau officers and soldiers had left but there were still enough nearby to pursue and capture him – especially behind the wheel of a car as bright as an egg yolk). No, at the moment he just wanted a gun and some money.

Opening the passenger door of the yellow car, he eased inside and began going through the map box. No weapons. He angrily thought of his Tokarev pistol sitting at the bottom of the ocean. No cigarettes either. Fuck her… He then went through her purse and found about fifty dollars in one-color money. Li pocketed the cash and looked over a paper she'd been writing on. His spoken English was good – thanks to American movies and the Follow Me program on Radio Beijing – but his reading skills were terrible (which hardly seemed fair considering that English only had 25 or so letters while the Chinese language had 40,000). After some stumbling, he recognized the Ghost's real name, Kwan Ang, in English, and made out some other writing. He folded this up and slipped it into his pocket then scattered the rest of the sheets on the ground outside the open driver's side door, so it would look as if the wind had blown them away.

Another car was approaching – a black sedan that smelled to Li like a government vehicle. Crouching, he made his way back to the road. Hidden once more in the bushes, he glanced out into the turbulent sea, observing now that Hongse seemed to be struggling in the choppy ocean just as much as the drowning man. He felt a pang that such a beautiful woman was in danger. But that wasn't really his concern; finding the Ghost and simply staying alive were his priorities now.

The effort of swimming against the battering surf to reach the drowning immigrant had nearly exhausted Amelia Sachs and she found she had to kick furiously to keep them both above water. Her knee and hip joints protested in pain. The immigrant himself wasn't any help at all. He was of medium build and trim – without much fat for buoyancy. He kicked his feet lethargically and his left arm was useless – thanks to a gunshot wound in his chest.

Gasping, spitting out the vile salt water that kept spilling into her mouth and nose, she fought her way toward shore. The water stung her eyes and blurred her vision but she could see on the sand near the breaking surf two medics with a stretcher and a large green oxygen tank, motioning broadly for her to swim toward them.

Thanks, boys… I'm trying.

She steered toward them as best she could but the undertow was fierce. She glanced back at the rock the immigrant had been clinging to and saw that, despite her massive efforts, they'd swum only about ten feet.

Kick harder. Harder!

Reciting to herself one of her personal mantras: When you move they can't getcha…

Another eight or nine feet. But Sachs finally had to stop and catch her breath, watching in dismay as the undertow tugged them back out to sea.

Come on, get out of here…

The listless immigrant, now nearly unconscious, kept pulling her down. Sachs kicked harder. A cramp seized her calf and she cried out and sank fast. The murky gray water, filled with seaweed and sand, swallowed her up. One hand holding the immigrant's shirt, the other pounding on her own calf to break the cramp, she struggled to hold her breath for as long as she could.

Oh, Lincoln! she thought. Going down… Farther into the gray linen water.

Then: Jesus! What's this?

A barracuda, a shark, a black eel… shot out of the foggy water and grabbed her around the chest. She instinctively reached for the switchblade she kept in her back pocket but her arm was pinned to her body by the terrible fish. It tugged her upward and a few seconds later she was on the surface, sucking sweet air into her stinging lungs.

She looked down. The fish turned out to be a man's arm encased in a black wetsuit.

The Suffolk County Rescue diver spit a regulator from a pony bottle of compressed air out of his mouth and said, "It's okay, miss, I got you. It's okay."

A second diver was gripping the immigrant, keeping his lolling head out of the water.

"Cramp," Sachs gasped. "Can't move my leg. Hurts."

He reached underwater with one hand, straightened her leg and then pressed her toes toward her body, stretching out the muscles of her calf. After a moment the pain went away. She nodded.

"Don't kick. Just relax. I'll take you in." He began to tow her and she leaned her head back, concentrated on breathing. His powerful legs, aided by the flippers, moved them rapidly toward shore. He said, "That was gutsy, going out. Most people would've just watched him die."

They swam through the chill water for what seemed like forever. Finally Sachs felt pebbles under her feet. She staggered onto the shore and took the blanket one of the medics offered her. After catching her breath she walked over to the immigrant, who was lying on the stretcher, an oxygen mask over his face. His eyes were dazed but he was conscious. His shirt was open and the medic was cleaning a bloody wound with disinfectant and bandages.

Sachs brushed as much sand off her feet and legs as she could then replaced her shoes and hooked her gunbelt around her once more. "How is he?"

"Wound's not bad. The shooter hit him in the chest but from an angle. But we'll have to watch the hypothermia and exhaustion."

"Can I ask him a few questions?"

"Just the minimum for now," the first paramedic said. "He needs oxygen and rest."

"What's your name?" Sachs asked the immigrant.

He lifted away the oxygen mask. "John Sung."

"I'm Amelia Sachs, with the New York City police department." She showed him her shield and ID, as procedure dictated. She asked, "What happened?"

The man lifted away the oxygen mask again. "I was thrown out of our raft. The snakehead on the ship – we call him the Ghost – he saw me and came down to the shore. He shot at me and missed. I swam underwater but I had to come back for air. He was waiting. He shot again and hit me. I pretended to be dead and when I looked again I saw him get into a red car and drive off. I tried to swim to the beach but I couldn't. I just held on to those rocks and waited."

Sachs studied the man. He was handsome and appeared to be in good shape. She'd recently seen a TV special on China and had learned that unlike Americans – who exercise temporarily, usually out of vanity – many Chinese work out all their lives.

The man asked, "How are…" He coughed again. The spasms turned violent. The medic let him cough out the water for a few moments and, when Sung stopped, knelt down and placed the oxygen mask on his face. "Sorry, Officer, but he really needs to suck air now."

But Sung lifted the mask off. "How are the others? Are they safe?"

It wasn't NYPD procedure to share information with witnesses but she saw the concern in his eyes and she said, "I'm sorry. Two are dead."

He closed his eyes and with his right hand clutched a stone amulet he wore on a leather strap around his neck.

"How many were on the raft?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. "Fourteen altogether." Then he asked, "Did he get away? The Ghost?"

"We're doing everything we can to find him."

Again Sung's face filled with dismay and he again squeezed the amulet.

The medic handed her the immigrant's wallet. She flipped through it. Most of it was turning to mush from the seawater and nearly all of the contents were in Chinese. But one card that was still legible was in English. It identified him as Dr. Sung Kai.

"Kai? Is that your first name?"

He nodded. "But I use John mostly."

"You're a doctor?"

"Yes."

"Medical doctor?"

He nodded again.

Sachs was looking at a picture of two young children, a boy and a girl. She felt a jolt of horror, thinking that they'd been on the ship.

"And your…" Her voice faded.

Sung understood. "My children? They're at home in Fujian. They're living with my parents."

The medic was standing near his patient, unhappy that he kept lifting off the mask. But Sachs had her job to do too. "Dr. Sung, do you have any idea where the Ghost might be going? Does he have a house or apartment here in this country? A company? Any friends?"

"No. He never talked to us. He never had anything to do with us. He treated us like animals."

"How about the other immigrants? Do you know where they might've gone?"

Sung shook his head. "No, I'm sorry. We were going to houses somewhere in New York but they never told us where." His eyes strayed back to the water. "We thought maybe the Coast Guard shot us with a cannon. But then we realized he sank the ship himself." His voice was astonished. "He locked the door in our hold and blew the boat up. With everyone on board."

A man in a suit – an INS agent Sachs remembered meeting in Port Jefferson – stepped out of the black car, which had just joined the rescue vehicle on the sand. He pulled on a windbreaker and crunched through the sand toward them. Sachs handed him Sung's wallet. He read through it and crouched down. "Dr. Sung, I'm with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Do you have a valid passport and entry visa?"

Sachs thought the question was absurd, if not provocative, but she supposed this was one of the formalities that needed to be performed.

"No, sir," Sung replied.

"Then I'm afraid we're going to have to detain you for illegally entering United States territory."

"I'm seeking political asylum."

"That's fine," the agent said wearily. "But we're still going to have to detain you until the bond hearing."

"I understand," Sung said.

The agent asked the medic, "How is he?"

"He'll be all right. But we need to get him to a trauma center. Where's he being processed?"

Sachs interrupted to ask the INS agent, "Can he go to your Manhattan detention center? He's a witness in the case and we've got a task force working there."

The INS agent shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me. I'll do the paperwork."

Sachs rocked from one leg to the other and winced as the pain shot through her knee and hip. Still absently clutching the amulet around his neck, Sung studied her and said in a low, heartfelt voice, "Thank you, miss."

"For what?"

"You saved my life."

She nodded, holding his dark eyes for a moment. Then the medic replaced the oxygen mask.

A flash of white from nearby caught her eye and Amelia Sachs looked up to see that she'd left the door of the Camaro open and that the wind was blowing her notes on the crime scene out to sea. Wincing, she trotted back to her car.