The Stone Monkey

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

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

Chapter Nine

The life of a tollbooth operator guarding the portals to New York City is not particularly glamorous.

Occasionally there's a little excitement – like the time a thief stuck up a toll taker and netted a clean $312, the only problem being that the robber struck at the entrance to the Triborough Bridge, at the other end of which a dozen bemused cops were waiting for him at the only possible exit he could take.

But the operator sitting in a Queens Midtown Tunnel booth this stormy morning, just after 8 A.M. – a retired NYC transit cop working part-time as a toll taker – hadn't seen any serious trouble in years and he was excited that something had happened to break the monotony: all the tollbooth operators in Manhattan had gotten a priority call from Port Authority headquarters about a ship that'd sunk off the coast of Long Island, one of those illegal immigrant ships. The word was that some of the Chinese on board were now headed into town, as was the smuggler himself. They were in a white van bearing the name of a church and in a red Honda. Some or all of them were reportedly armed.

There were several ways to get into the city from Long Island by surface transportation: bridges or tunnels. Some of these were free – no tolls were charged at the Queensboro or the Brooklyn bridges, for instance – but the most direct route from the end of Long Island was through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The police and FBI had gotten permission to shut down all of the express pass and exact change lanes, so that the perps would have to go through a manned booth.

The ex-cop had never thought that he'd be the one to spot the immigrants.

But it looked like that was the way things were going to fall out. He was now wiping his sweaty palms on his slacks and watching a white van, some writing on the side, driven by a Chinese guy, easing toward his booth.

Ten cars away, nine…

He pulled his old service piece from its holster, a Smith & Wesson.357 with a four-inch barrel and rested the pistol on the far side of the cash register, wondering how to handle the situation. He'd call it in but what if the guys in the van acted funny or evasive? He decided he'd draw down on them and order them out of the van.

But what if one of them reached under the dash or between the seats?

Hell, here he was in an exposed glass booth, no backup, with a vanload of Chinese gangsters heading toward him. They might even be armed with Russia 's crowning contribution to small arms: AK-47 machine guns.

Fuck it, he'd shoot.

The operator ignored a woman complaining about the E-ZPass lanes' being closed and looked at the line of traffic. The van was three cars away.

He reached onto his belt and pulled off his Speedloader, a metal ring holding six bullets, with which he could reload his Smittie in seconds. He rested this next to his pistol and wiped his shooting hand on his slacks once again. He debated for a moment, picked up the gun, cocked it and set it back on the counter. This was against regulations but then he was the one in the fishbowl, not the brass who wrote the regs.

At first Sam Chang had worried that the long line of cars meant a roadblock but then he saw the booths and decided this was some kind of a border crossing.

Passports, papers, visas… They had none of these.

In panic he looked for an exit but there was none – the road was surrounded by high walls.

But William said calmly, "We have to pay."

"Pay why?" Sam Chang asked the boy, their resident expert on American customs.

"It's a toll," he explained as if this were obvious. "I need some U.S. dollars. Three and a half."

In a moneybelt Chang had thousands of yuan – soggy and salty though they were – but hadn't dared change the money into U.S. dollars on the black markets of Fuzhou, which would've tipped off public security that they were about to flee the country. In a well beside the two front seats, though, they'd found a five-dollar bill.

The van crawled slowly forward. Two cars were in front of them.

Chang glanced up at the man in the booth and observed that he seemed very nervous. He kept looking at the van while appearing not to.

One car ahead of them in line now.

The man in the booth now studied them carefully from the corner of his eye. His tongue touched the side of his lip and he rocked from one foot to the other.

"I don't like this," William said. "He suspects something."

"There's nothing we can do," his father told him. "Go forward."

"I'll run it."

"No!" Chang muttered. "He may have a gun. He'll shoot us."

William eased the van to the booth and stopped. Would the boy, in his newfound rebellion, disregard Chang's order and speed through the gate?

The man in the booth swallowed and gripped something next to a large cash register. Was it a signal button of some kind? Chang wondered.

William looked down and pulled the U.S. money from the plastic divider between the front seats.

The officer seemed to flinch. He ducked, moving his arm toward the van.

Then he stared at the bill William was offering him.

What was wrong? Had he offered too much? Too little? Did he expect a bribe?

The man in the booth blinked. He took the bill with an unsteady hand, leaning forward to do so, and glanced at the side of the van, on which were the words:

The Home Store

As the guard counted out change he looked into the back of the van itself. All that the man could see – Chang prayed – were the dozens of saplings and bushes that Chang, William and Wu had dug up in a park on the way here from the beach and packed into the van to make it look like they were delivering plants for a local store. The rest of the families were lying on the floor, hidden beneath the foliage.

The officer gave him the change for the toll. "Good place. The Home Store. I shop there all the time."

"Thank you," William replied.

"Bad day for making deliveries, huh?" he asked Chang, nodding up at the stormy skies.

"Thank you," Chang said.

William eased the van forward. He accelerated and a moment later they plunged into a tunnel.

"Okay, we're safe, we're past the guards," Chang announced and the rest of the passengers sat up, brushing leaves and dirt off their clothing.

Well, his idea had worked.

As they'd sped down the highway from the beach Chang realized that the police here might do what the Chinese PLA and security bureau officers did frequently to search for wanted dissidents – set up roadblocks.

So they'd stopped at a huge shopping center, in the middle of which was The Home Store. It was open twenty-four hours and – with few employees so early in the morning – Chang, Wu and William had no trouble slipping in through the loading dock. From the stockroom they stole some cans of paint, brushes and tools, then slipped outside again. But not before Chang had snuck to the doorway that led to the store itself and looked at the astonishing place. He saw acres of aisles. It was breath-taking – Chang had never seen so many tools and supplies and appliances. Kitchens ready-made, a thousand light fixtures, outdoor furniture and grills, doors, windows, carpets. Whole rows devoted to nuts and bolts and nails. Chang's first reaction was to bring Mei-Mei and his father inside, just to show them the place. Well, there would be time for that later.

Chang told William, "I'm taking these things now because we need to – for our survival. But as soon as I get some one-color I'm going to pay them back. I'll send them the money."

"You're crazy," the boy replied. "They have more than they'll need. They expect things to be stolen. It's built into the price."

"We will pay them back!" Chang snapped. This time the boy didn't even bother to respond. Chang found a colorful newspaper in a large pile on the loading dock. Struggling with the English, he realized that this was a sales flyer and that it had the addresses of a number of Home Stores on it. When he got his first pay envelope or converted some yuan he would send them the money.

They'd returned to the van and found a truck parked nearby. William swapped the number plates and then they drove toward the city until they found a deserted factory. They parked in the loading dock, out of the rain, and Chang and Wu painted over the letters spelling the name of the church. After the white paint dried, Chang, a lifelong calligrapher, expertly drew the words "The Home Store" on the side in a typeface similar to that in the flyer he'd taken.

Yes, the trick had worked and, unstopped by security officers and the guard at the tollbooth, they now sailed out of the tunnel into the streets of Manhattan. William had studied the map carefully as they had waited in line at the toll and knew generally where they should go to get to Chinatown. The one-way streets caused a bit of confusion but soon he oriented himself and found the highway he sought.

Through dense rush-hour traffic, further slowed by the intermittent rain and patches of fog, they drove along a river whose shade perfectly matched the ocean they had just survived.

The gray land, Chang reflected. Not highways of gold and a city of diamonds, as the unfortunate Captain Sen had promised.

As Chang looked around at the streets and buildings he wondered what now awaited them.

In theory he still owed the Ghost a great deal of money. The going rate for smuggling someone from China to the United States was about U.S. $50,000. Since Chang was a dissident and desperate to leave he expected that the Ghost's agent in Fuzhou would charge him a premium. Yet he'd been surprised to find that the Ghost's fee was only $80,000 for his entire family, his father included. Chang had raided his meager savings and had borrowed the rest from friends and relatives to make up the ten percent down payment.

In his contract with the Ghost, Chang had agreed that he, Mei-Mei and William – and Chang's youngest son when he was old enough – would give money to the Ghost's debt collectors monthly until the remainder of the fee was paid off. Many immigrants worked directly for the snakehead who'd smuggled them into the country – the men generally in Chinatown restaurants, the women in garment factories – and lived in safehouses provided by them for a stiff fee. But Chang didn't trust snakeheads, especially the Ghost. There were too many rumors of immigrants being beaten and raped and kept prisoner in rat-infested safehouses. So he had made his own arrangements for a job for him and William and had located an apartment in New York through the brother of a friend back in China.

Sam Chang had always intended to pay his obligation. But now, with the sinking of the Fuzhou Dragon and the Ghost's attempts to murder them, the contract was void and they were out from under the crushing debt – if, of course, they could stay alive long enough for the Ghost and his bangshous to be captured or killed by the police or to flee back to China, and this meant going to ground as soon as possible.

William drove expertly through the traffic. (Where had he learned that? The family didn't even own a car.) Sam Chang looked back at the others in the van. They were disheveled and stank of seawater. Wu's wife, Yong-Ping, was in a bad way. Her eyes were closed and she shivered, sweat covering her face. Her arm was shattered from their collision with the rocks and the wound was still bleeding through an impromptu bandage. Wu's pretty teenage daughter, Chin-Mei, seemed unhurt but was clearly frightened. Her brother, Lang, was the same age as Chang's youngest son, and the two boys, with nearly identical bowl-shaped haircuts, sat close to each other, staring out the window and whispering.

Elderly Chang Jiechi sat motionless in the back of the van with his legs crossed and arms at his sides, thin white hair slicked back, saying nothing but observing all through eyes half covered by drooping lids. The old man's skin seemed more jaundiced than when they'd left Fuzhou over two weeks ago but perhaps that was just Chang's imagination. In any case, he'd decided that the first thing he'd do after they were settled in their apartment was get the man to a doctor.

The van slowed to a stop because of the traffic. William pressed the horn impatiently.

"Quiet," his father snapped. "Don't draw attention to us."

The boy hit the horn once more.

Chang glanced toward his son, the boy's lean face, the long hair, which fell well below his ears. He asked in a harsh whisper, "The van… how did you learn to start it that way?"

"What does it matter?" the boy asked.

"Tell me."

"I heard somebody talking about it at school."

"No, you're lying. You've done it before."

"I only steal from party undersecretaries and commune bosses. That'd be all right with you, wouldn't it?"

"You do what?"

But the boy grinned in a snide way and Chang understood he was joking. The comment, though, was cruelly intended; it was a reference to Changs anticommunist political writings, which had caused the family so much pain in China – and necessitated the flight to America itself.

"Who do you spend time with, thieves?"

"Oh, Father." The boy shook his head, a condescending gesture, and Chang wanted to slap him.

"And what did you have that knife for?" Chang asked.

"A lot of people have knives. Yeye has one." This was the affectionate term for "grandfather," which many Chinese children used.

"That's a penknife for cleaning pipes," Chang said, "not a weapon." He finally lost his temper. "How can you be so disrespectful?" he shouted.

"If I didn't have the knife," the boy answered angrily, "and if I didn't know how to start the engine we'd probably be dead now."

The traffic sped up and William fell into a moody silence.

Chang turned away, feeling as if he'd been physically assaulted by the boy's words, by this very different side of his son. Oh, certainly there'd been problems with William in the past. As he'd neared his late teens he'd grown sullen and angry and withdrawn. His attendance at school dropped. When he'd brought home a letter from his teacher reprimanding him for bad grades Chang had confronted the boy – whose intelligence had been tested and was far higher than average. William had said that it wasn't his fault. He was persecuted at school and treated unfairly because his father was a dissident who'd flouted the one-child rule, spoke favorably about Taiwanese independence and – the worst sacrilege of all – was critical of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, and its hardline views on freedom and human rights. Both he and his younger brother were taunted regularly by "superbrats," youngsters who, as only children in comfortable rich and middle-class Communist families, were spoiled by hordes of doting relatives and tended to bully other students. It didn't help that William was named after the most famous American entrepreneur in recent years, and young Ronald for a U.S. president.

But neither his behavior, nor this explanation for it, had seemed to Chang very serious and he hadn't paid much mind to his son's moods. Besides, it was Mei-Mei's task to rear the children, not his.

Why was the boy suddenly behaving so differently?

But then Chang realized that between working ten hours a day at a print shop and engaging in his dissident activities for most of the night, he'd spent virtually no time with his son – not until the voyage from Russia to Meiguo. Perhaps, he thought with a chill, this is how the boy always behaved.

For a moment he felt another burst of anger – though only partially directed toward William himself. Chang couldn't tell exactly what he was furious at. He stared at the crowded streets for a few moments then said to his son, "You're right. I wouldn't have been able to start the car myself. Thank you."

William didn't acknowledge that his father had even spoken and hunched over the wheel, lost in his own thoughts.

Twenty minutes later they were in Chinatown, driving down a broad road that was named in both Chinese and English, " Canal Street." The rain was letting up and there were many people on the sidewalks, which were lined with hundreds of grocery and souvenir shops, fish markets, jewelry stores, bakeries.

"Where should we go?" William asked.

"Park there," Chang instructed and William pulled the van to a curb. Chang and Wu climbed out. They walked into a store and asked the clerk about the neighborhood associations – tongs. These organizations were usually made up of people from common geographic areas in China. Chang was seeking a Fujianese tong, since the two families were from the province of Fujian. They would not, Chang assumed, be welcomed in a tong with roots in Canton, where most of the early Chinese immigrants had come from. But he was surprised to learn that much of Manhattan 's Chinatown was now heavily populated with people from Fujian and many of the Cantonese had moved away. There was a major Fujianese tong only a few blocks away.

Chang and Wu left the families in the stolen van and walked through the crowded streets until they found the place. Painted red and sporting a classic Chinese bird-wing roof, the dingy three-story building might have been transported here directly from the shabby neighborhood near the North Bus Station in Fuzhou.

The men stepped inside the tong headquarters quickly, with their heads down, as if the people lounging about in the lobby of the building were about to pull out cell phones and call the INS – or the Ghost – to report their arrival.

Jimmy Mah, wearing a gray suit dusted with cigarette ash and about to burst at the seams, greeted them and invited them into his upstairs office.

President of the East Broadway Fujianese Society, Mah was the de facto mayor of this portion of Chinatown.

His office was a large but plain room, containing two desks and a half-dozen mismatched chairs, piles of paper, a fancy computer and a television set. A hundred or so Chinese books sat on a lopsided bookcase. On the wall were faded and fly-blown posters of Chinese landscapes. Chang wasn't fooled by the run-down appearance of the place, however; he suspected that Mah was a millionaire several times over.

"Sit, please," Mah said in Chinese. The broad-faced man with black hair slicked straight back offered them cigarettes. Wu took one. Chang shook his head no. He'd stopped smoking after he lost his teaching job and money grew scarce.

Mah looked over their filthy clothes, their mussed hair. "Ha, you two look like you have a story to tell. Do you have an interesting story? A compelling story? What would it be? I bet I would like very much to hear it."

Chang indeed did have a story. Whether it was interesting or compelling he couldn't have said but one thing he did know: it was fictional. He had decided not to tell any strangers that they'd been on the Fuzhou Dragon and that the Ghost might be searching for them. He said to Mah, "We've just come into the port on a Honduran ship."

"Who was your snakehead?"

"We never learned his name. He called himself Moxige."

"Mexican?" Mah shook his head. "I don't work with Latino snake-heads." Mah's dialect was tainted with an American accent.

"He took our money," Chang said bitterly, "but then he just left us on the dock. He was going to get us papers and transportation. He vanished."

With curiosity Wu watched him spin this tale. Chang had told the man to keep quiet and let him talk to Mah. On the Dragon Wu drank too much and grew impulsive. He'd been careless about what he'd told the immigrants and crew in the hold.

"Don't they do that sometimes?" Mah said jovially. "Why do they cheat people? Isn't it bad for business? Fuck Mexicans. Where are you from?"

" Fuzhou," Wu offered. Chang stirred. He was going to mention a different city in Fujian – to minimize any connection between the immigrants and the Ghost.

Chang continued, feigning anger. "I have two children and a baby. My father too. He's old. And my friend here, his wife is sick. We need help."

"Ah, help. Well, that is an interesting story, isn't it? But what kind of help do you want? I can do some things. Other things I can't do. Am I one of the Eight Immortals? No, of course I'm not. What do you need?"

"Papers. ID papers. For myself, my wife and my oldest son."

"Sure, sure, I can do some of them. Drivers' licenses, Social Security cards, some old company ID cards – bankrupt companies so no one can check on you. Aren't I clever? Only Jimmy Mah thinks of things like this. These cards, they'll make you look like citizens but you won't be able to get a real job with them. The INS bastards make companies check everything nowadays."

"I've got an arrangement for work," Chang said.

"And I don't do passports," Mah added. "Too dangerous. No green cards either."

"What is that?"

"Resident permits."

"We're going to stay underground and wait for an amnesty," Chang explained.

"Are you? May wait a long time."

Chang shrugged. He then said, "My father needs to see a doctor." A nod toward Wu. "His wife too. Can you get us health cards?"

"I don't do health cards. Too easy to trace. You'll have to go to a private doctor."

"Are they expensive?"

"Yes, very expensive. But if you don't have money go to a city hospital. They will take you."

"Is the care good?"

"What do I know if the care is good? Besides, what choice do you have?"

"All right," Chang said. "For the other documents. How much?"

"Fifteen hundred."

"Yuan?"

Mah laughed. "One-color."

Chang showed no emotion but he thought: Fifteen hundred U.S. dollars! That was insane. In the money belt around his waist he had about five thousand dollars' worth of Chinese yuan. It was all the cash that his family had left in the world. Shaking his head. "No, impossible." After a few minutes of animated haggling they settled on $900 for all the documents.

"You too?" Mah asked Wu.

The gaunt man nodded but added, "Only for myself. That will be less, won't it?"

Mah drew heavily on his cigarette. "Five hundred. I won't go lower than that."

Wu tried to bargain too but Mah held firm. Finally the skinny man grudgingly agreed.

Mah said, "You'll have to get me pictures of everybody for the drivers' licenses and employee cards. Go into an amusement arcade. You can have the pictures made there."

Chang remembered poignantly the night he sat with Mei-Mei in such a booth at a large entertainment center in Xiamen years ago, not long after they'd first met. The pictures were presently in a suitcase sitting within the corpse of the Fuzhou Dragon at the bottom of the dark ocean.

"We also need a van. I can't afford to buy one. Can I rent one from you?"

The tong leader scoffed. "Don't I have everything? Of course, of course." After more bargaining, they agreed on a rental. Mah calculated the total that the men owed and then figured the exchange rate for paying in yuan. He told the men the astonishing sum and they reluctantly agreed. "Give me the names and address for the documents." He turned to his computer and, as Chang dictated the information, Mah typed with fast keystrokes.

Chang himself spent a lot of time on his old laptop computer. The Internet had become the main means for dissidents in China to communicate with the outside world, though doing so was very difficult. Chang's modem was woefully slow and the public security bureaus, as well as agents from the People's Liberation Army, were constantly looking for emails and postings by dissidents. Chang had a firewall on his computer that would often give a beep, signaling that the government was trying to break into his system. He'd log off immediately and have to establish a new service provider account. His laptop too, he thought sadly, was sleeping forever inside the Fuzhou Dragon.

As Chang dictated the address, the tong leader looked up from the keyboard. "So you'll be staying in Queens?"

"Yes. A friend arranged a place for us."

"Is it a big place? Is it comfortable for all of you? Don't you think my broker could do better? I'm thinking he could. I have contacts in Queens."

"He is my best friends brother. He's already arranged for the lease."

"Ah, friends brother. Good. Well, we have an affiliated association there. The Flushing Neighborhood and Merchants Association. Very big. Powerful. That's the new Chinatown in the New York area: Flushing. Maybe you won't like your apartment. Maybe the children won't be safe. That's possible, don't you think? Go to the association and mention my name."

"I'll remember that."

Mah nodded toward the computer screen and asked Wu, "You're both at this address?"

Chang started to say that they were but Wu interrupted. "No, no. I want to stay in Manhattan, Chinatown here. Can your broker find us a house?"

"But -" Chang said, frowning.

"You don't mean house, do you?" Mah inquired, amused. "There are no houses." He added, "That you could afford."

"An apartment then?"

Mah said, "Yes, he has temporary rooms. You can get a place today and then stay there until he finds you a permanent home." As Mah typed some more and the hiss of the modem filled the office, Chang put his hand on Wu's arm and whispered, "No, Qichen, you must come with us."

"We're staying in Manhattan."

Leaning closer so that Mah could not hear, Chang whispered, "Don't be a fool. The Ghost will find you."

Wu laughed. "Don't worry about him."

"Don't worry? He just killed a dozen of our friends." Gambling with Wu's own life was one thing but to risk his wife and children was unthinkable.

But Wu was adamant. "No. We are staying here."

Chang fell silent as Mah logged off the computer and then wrote a note, handed it to Wu. "This is the broker. He's only a few blocks from here. You'll pay him a fee." He added, "I won't charge you for this. Am I generous? Everybody says Jimmy Mah is generous. Now, for Mr. Changs car." Mah made a call and began to speak quickly into the phone. He made arrangements for a van to be brought around. He hung up and turned to the two men. "There. That concludes our business. Isn't it a pleasure to work with reasonable men?"

They rose in unison and shook hands.

"Do you want a cigarette to take with you?" he asked Wu, who took three.

When the immigrants were at the door Mah asked, "One thing. This Mexican snakehead? There's no reason for him to come after you, is there? You're even with him?"

"Yes, we're even."

"Good. Don't we have enough reason to look over our shoulders?" Mah asked jovially. "Aren't there enough demons after us in this life?"

Chapter Ten

In the distance, sirens pierced the early morning air.

The sound grew louder and Lincoln Rhyme hoped it would mark the arrival of Amelia Sachs. The evidence she'd gathered at the beach had already arrived, delivered by a young tech who'd sheepishly entered the den of the legendary Lincoln Rhyme without a word and scurried about to deposit the bags and stacks of pictures as the criminalist gruffly directed.

Sachs herself had been diverted on the way back from the beach, however, to run a secondary crime scene. The church van stolen at Easton had been found in Chinatown – abandoned in an alley next to an uptown subway stop forty-five minutes ago. The van had slipped past the roadblocks because not only did it sport stolen plates but one of the immigrants had painted over the name of the church and replaced it with a good facsimile of the logo for a local home improvement store.

"Smart," Rhyme had said, with some dismay; he didn't like smart perps. He'd then called Sachs – who was speeding back to the city on the Long Island Expressway – and ordered her to meet a crime scene bus downtown and process the van.

The INS's Harold Peabody was gone – summoned to juggle press conferences and calls from Washington about the fiasco.

Alan Coe, Lon Sellitto and Fred Dellray remained, as did the trim, hedgehog-haired detective Eddie Deng. An addition as well: Mel Cooper, slim, balding, reserved. He was one of the NYPD's top forensic lab workers and Rhyme often borrowed him. Walking silently on his crepe-soled Hush Puppies, which he wore during the day because they were comfortable and at night because they gave him good traction for ballroom dancing, Cooper was assembling equipment, organizing examination stations and laying out the evidence from the beach.

At Rhyme's direction Thom taped a map of New York City on the wall, next to the map of Long Island and the surrounding waters, which they'd used in following the Fuzhou Dragon's progress. Rhyme stared at the red dot that represented the ship and he once again felt the pain of guilt that his lack of foresight had resulted in the deaths of the immigrants.

The sirens grew louder then stopped outside his window, which faced Central Park. A moment later the door opened and Amelia Sachs, limping slightly, hurried into the room. Her hair was matted and flecked with bits of seaweed and dirt and her jeans and work shirt were damp and sandy.

Those in the room nodded distracted greetings. Dellray studied her clothes and lifted an eyebrow.

"Had some free time," she said. "Went for a swim. Hi, Mel."

"Amelia," Cooper said, shoving his glasses higher on his nose. He blinked at her appearance.

Rhyme noted with eager anticipation what she carried: a gray milk crate, filled with plastic and paper bags. She handed the evidence to Cooper and started for the stairs, calling, "Back in five."

A moment later Rhyme heard the shower running and, indeed, five minutes after she'd left, she was back, wearing some of the clothes she kept in his bedroom closet: blue jeans and a black T-shirt, running shoes.

Wearing rubber gloves, Cooper was laying the bags out, organizing them according to the scenes – the beach and the van in Chinatown. Rhyme gazed at the evidence and felt – in his temples, not his numb chest – a quickening of his heart, the breathtaking excitement of a hunt that was about to begin. Indifferent toward sports and athletics, Rhyme nonetheless supposed that this edgy exhilaration was what ski racers, for instance, felt when they stood at the top of a run, looking down the mountain. Would they win? Would the course defeat them? Would they make a tactical mistake and lose by a fraction of a second? Would they be injured or die?

"Okay," he said. "Let's get to it." He looked around the room. "Thom? Thom! Where is he? He was here a minute ago. Thom!"

"What, Lincoln?" The harried aide appeared in the doorway, with a pan and dish towel in hand.

"Be our scribe… write our pithy insights down" – a nod at the whiteboard – "in that elegant handwriting of yours."

"Yes, bwana." Thom started back to the kitchen.

"No, no, just leave it," Rhyme groused. "Write!"

Sighing, Thom set down the pan and wiped his hands on the towel. He tucked his purple tie into his shirt to protect it from the marker and walked to the whiteboard. He'd been an unofficial member of several forensic teams here and he knew the drill. He now asked Dellray, "You have a name for the case yet?"

The FBI always named major investigations with acronymlike variations of the key words describing the case – like ABSCAM. Dellray pinched the cigarette that rested behind his ear. He said, "Nup. Nothing yet. But less just do it ourselves and make Washington live with it. How 'bout the name of our boy? GHOSTKILL. That good enough for ever-body? That spooky enough?"

"Plenty spooky," Sellitto agreed though with the tone of someone who was rarely spooked.

Thom wrote this at the top of the whiteboard and turned back to the law enforcers.

Rhyme said, "We've got two scenes: the beach in Easton and the van. The beach first."

As Thom was writing the heading Dellray's phone rang and he took the call. After a brief conversation he hung up and told the team what he'd just learned: "No other survivors so far," he said. "And the Coast Guard hasn't found the ship. But they did recover some bodies out to sea. Two shot, one drowned. ID on one of them had merchant papers. Nothing on the other two. They're sending prints and pictures to us and copies to China."

"He even killed the crew?" Eddie Deng asked in disbelief.

"What do you expect?" Coe responded. "You know him by now. You think he'd leave a single witness alive?" A grim laugh. "Besides, with the crew dead he won't have to pay the balance due for chartering the boat. And back in China he'll probably claim that the Coast Guard fired on them and sank the Dragon."

But Rhyme had no time for anger at the Ghost or for dismay at the cruel potential of the human heart. "Okay, Sachs," he said curtly. "The beach. Tell us what happened."

She leaned against a lab table and consulted her notes. "Fourteen people came ashore in a life raft about a half mile east of Easton, on the road to Orient Point." She walked to the wall and touched a spot on the Long Island map. "Near the Horton Point lighthouse. As they got closer to shore the raft hit some rocks and started to deflate. Four of the immigrants were thrown into the water and were washed down the beach. The other ten stayed together. They stole the church van and got away."

"Photos of the footprints?" Rhyme asked.

"Here you go," Sachs said, handing Thom an envelope. He taped up Polaroids. "I found them under a shelter near the raft. It was too wet to use electrostatic," she explained to the team. "I had to take pictures."

"And fine artwork they are too," Rhyme said, wheeling back and forth in front of them.

"I'm counting nine," Dellray said. "Why you sayin' ten, Amelia?"

"Because," Rhyme said, "there's a baby, right?"

Sachs nodded. "Right. Under the shelter I found some patterns in the sand I couldn't identify, looked like something had been dragged but there were no footprints in front of it – only behind. I figured it was a crawling child."

"Okay," Rhyme said, studying the sizes of the shoes, "looks like we've got seven adults and/or older teens, two young children and one infant. One of the adults could be elderly – he's shuffling. I say 'he' because of the shoe size. And somebody's injured – probably a woman, to judge from the size other shoes. The man next to her is helping her."

Sachs added, "There were bloodstains on the beach and in the van."

"Samples of the blood?" Cooper asked.

"There wasn't much on the raft or the beach – the rain had washed most of it away. I got three samples from the sand. And plenty in the van, still wet." She found a plastic bag containing some vials. Handed it to him.

The tech prepared samples for typing and filled out a form. He called in an expedited request for typing and gendering into the serology lab at the Medical Examiner's office and arranged for a uniformed officer to take the samples downtown.

Sachs continued her scenario. "Now, the Ghost – in a second launch – landed about two hundred yards east of where the immigrants did."

Her fingers disappeared into her abundant red hair and worried the flesh of her scalp. Sachs would often injure herself in minor ways like this. A beautiful woman, a former fashion model, she often had stubby, sometimes bloody fingernails. Rhyme had given up trying to figure out where this painful compulsion came from but, oddly, he envied her. The same cryptic tensions drove him as well. The difference was that he didn't have her safety valve of fidgety motion to bleed off the stress.

He silently sent out a plea to Dr. Weaver, his neurosurgeon: Do something for me. Release me just a little from this terrible confinement. Please… Then he slammed the door on these personal thoughts, angry with himself, and turned his attention back to Sachs.

"Then," she continued with a splinter of emotion in her voice, "then he started tracking down the immigrants and killing them. He found two who'd fallen off the raft and killed them. Shot them in the back. He wounded one. The fourth immigrant's still missing."

"Where's the wounded one?" Coe asked.

"They were taking him to a trauma center then to the INS Manhattan detention facility. He said he doesn't know where the Ghost or the immigrants might've been going once they got here." Sachs again consulted her soggy handwritten notes. "Now there was a vehicle on the road near the beach but it left – fast, spun the wheels and skidded to make a turn. I think the Ghost took a shot at it. So we may have a witness, if we can track down the make and model. I got dimensions of the wheelbase and -"

"Wait," Rhyme interrupted. "What was it near? The car?"

"Near?" she asked. "Nothing. It was just parked by the roadside."

The criminalist frowned. "Why would somebody park there on a stormy day before dawn?"

"Drivin' by and saw the rafts?" Dellray suggested.

"No," Rhyme said. "In that case he would've gone for help or called. And there weren't any nine-one-ones reporting anything. No, I think the driver was there to pick up the Ghost but when it turned out the snake-head wasn't in any hurry to leave, he took off."

"So he got abandoned," Sellitto observed.

Rhyme nodded.

Sachs handed a sheet of paper to Mel Cooper. "Dimensions of the wheelbase. And here are pictures of the tread marks."

The tech scanned the marks into the computer and then sent the image, along with the dimensions, to the NYPD's VI – Vehicle Identifier – database. "Shouldn't be long," Cooper's calm voice reported.

Young detective Eddie Deng asked, "What about the other trucks?"

"What other trucks?" Sachs asked.

Coe filled in. "The terms of a smuggling contract include land transport too. There should've been some trucks to take the immigrants back to the city."

Sachs shook her head. "I didn't see any sign of them. But when he sank the ship the Ghost probably called the driver and had them go back to the city." She looked over the evidence bags again. "I found this…" She held up a bag containing a cell phone.

"Excellent!" Rhyme said. He'd dubbed clues like this "NASDAQ evidence," after the high-tech-heavy stock market. Computers, cell phones, personal electronic organizers. A whole new breed of evidence, these telltale devices could provide huge amounts of information about perps and the people they'd been in contact with. "Fred, let's get your people to look it over."

"Gotcha."

The bureau had recently added a computer and electronics team to the New York office. Dellray made a call and arranged for an agent to pick up the cell phone and take it to the federal forensics lab downtown for analysis.

Rhyme said, musing, "Okay, he's hunting them down, shooting the immigrants, shooting at the driver who abandoned him. He's doing it by himself, right, Sachs? No sign of the mysterious assistant?"

She nodded at the footprint Polaroids. "No, I'm sure the Ghost was the only one in the second raft and the only one shooting."

Rhyme frowned. "I don't like unidentified perps out there someplace when we're running crime scenes. Nothing on who this bangshou is?"

Sellitto muttered, "Nope. Not a clue. The Ghost's got dozens of them around the world."

"And no sign of the fourth immigrant? The other one who fell out of the raft?"

"No."

The criminalist then asked Sachs, "What about ballistics?"

Sachs held up a plastic bag containing shell casings for Rhyme to examine.

"Seven-point-six-two millimeter," he said, "but the brass's an odd length. And it's uneven. Cheap." Though he had a body that couldn't move, his eyes were as sharp as those of the peregrine falcons that lived on the windowsill outside his bedroom upstairs. "Check out the casings online, Mel."

When Rhyme had been head of NYPD forensics he'd spent months putting together databases of evidence standards – samples of substances and materials along with the sources they came from, like motor oil, thread, fibers, dirt and so on – to facilitate tracing evidence found at crime scenes. One of the largest, and most often used, databases was the compilation of bullet shell casings and slugs information. The combined FBI and NYPD collection had samples and digitized images of nearly every projectile that had ever been fired from a weapon in the past hundred years.

Cooper opened the plastic bag and then reached in with chopsticks – appropriately, considering the case they were now working on. This was the tool that Rhyme had found was the least damaging to evidence and he'd ordered all his techs to learn to use the sticks, preferring them to tweezers or forceps, which could too easily crush delicate samples.

"Back to your captivating narrative about the beach, Sachs."

She continued. "Things were heating up by now. The Ghost had been on land for a while. He knew the Coast Guard had a rough idea of his location. He found the third immigrant in the water, John Sung, shot him, then stole the Honda and left." She glanced at Rhyme. "Any word about it?"

An emergency vehicle locator notice had gone out to all nearby law enforcement agencies. As soon as the stolen red Honda was spotted anywhere in the New York metropolitan area, Sellitto or Dellray would get a call. But there'd been no word, the homicide detective told her. Then added, "The Ghost's been to New York before, though, plenty of times. He'd know the transit system. I'd guess he stuck to back roads west until he got close to the city then dumped the car and took the subway into town. He's got to be here by now."

Rhyme noticed a frown of concern on the FBI agent's face. "What is it, Fred?"

"I wish we'da found the prick 'fore he got over the city line."

"Why?"

"Reports my people're feeding me're that he's got a nice, tidy network in town. Tongs and street gangs in Chinatown, course. But it's way beyond that – even got people in the government on his 'roll."

"Government?" Sellitto asked, surprised.

"What I hear," Dellray said.

"I believe it," Deng said cynically. "If he's got dozens of officials in China in his pocket, why not here too?"

So, Rhyme reflected, we've got an unidentified, presumably armed assistant and a homicidal snakehead and now spies within our own ranks. It's never easy but really…

A glance at Sachs, which meant: keep going. "Friction ridges?" he asked. The technical name for finger-, palm- and footprints.

She explained, "The beach was a mess – the rain and wind. I got a few partials from the outboard motor and the rubber sides of the rafts and the cell phone." She held up the cards of the prints she'd lifted. "The quality's pretty bad."

Rhyme called, "Scan 'em and get them into AFIS."

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System was a huge network of digitized federal and state fingerprint files. AFIS reduced the search time for matching prints from months to hours or even minutes in some cases.

"I also found this." She held up a metal pipe in a plastic bag. "One of them used it to break the window of the van. There were no visibles on this one so I thought we better raise the prints here."

"Go to work, Mel."

The thin man took the bag, pulled on cotton gloves and extracted the pipe, holding it only by the ends. "I'll use VMD."

Vacuum metal deposition is considered the Rolls-Royce of fingerprint-raising systems. It involves binding a microscopic coating of metal to the object to be printed and then radiating it. After a few minutes Cooper had a razor-sharp image of several latent prints. He shot pictures of them and ran the photos through the scanner then sent them off to AFIS. He handed the pictures to Thom, who pinned them up.

"That's about it for the beach, Rhyme," Sachs said.

The criminalist glanced at the chart. The evidence told him little yet. But he wasn't discouraged; this was how criminalistics worked. It was like dumping a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces out on the table – incomprehensible at first; only after trial and error and much analysis did patterns begin to appear. He said, "The van next."

Sachs pinned up pictures of the van on the whiteboard.

Recognizing the location in Chinatown from the Polaroid, Coe said, "It's crowded around that subway station. There must've been some witnesses."

"Nobody saw a thing," Sachs said wryly.

"Where've I heard that before," Sellitto added. It was astonishing, Rhyme knew, what kind of amnesia was induced by the mere act of flashing a gold shield in front of your average citizen.

"What about the plate?" Rhyme asked.

"Stolen off a truck in a parking lot in Suffolk County," the burly homicide cop said. "No wits there either."

"What'd you find in the van?" he asked Sachs.

"They'd dug up a bunch of plants and had them in the back."

"Plants?"

"To hide the others, I'm guessing, and make it look like they were a couple of employees making deliveries for that place, The Home Store. But I didn't get much else. Just the fingerprints, some rags and the blood – the spatter was on the window and door so I'm guessing the injury was above the waist. Arm or hand, probably."

Rhyme asked, "No paint cans? Brushes? From when they painted the logo on the side."

"Nope, they ditched it all." She shrugged. "That's it, aside from the friction ridges." She handed Cooper the cards and Polaroids of the fingerprints she'd lifted from the van and he scanned and ran them: digitized them and then fed them into the AFIS.

Rhyme's eyes were glued to the chart. He studied the items for a moment the way a sculptor sizes up a raw piece of stone before he begins carving. Then he turned away and said to Dellray and Sellitto, "How do you want to handle the case?"

Sellitto deferred to the FBI agent, who said, "We gotta split the effort. Don't see a single other way to handle it. One, we'll be going after the Ghost. Two, we gotta find those families 'fore he does." He glanced at Rhyme. "We'll do the command post thing from here, if that's okay?"

Rhyme nodded. He no longer cared about the intrusion, no longer cared about his town house's conversion to Grand Central Station. Whatever it took, the criminalist was going to find the man who'd ruthlessly taken so many innocent lives.

"Now here's what I'm thinkin'," Dellray said, pacing on his long legs. "We're not fuckin' around with this guy. I'm gettin' a dozen more agents assigned to the case here in the Southern and Eastern Districts and I'll get us a SPEC-TAC team up from Quantico."

SPEC-TAC was short for Special Tactics, though it was pronounced as in "spectacular." This little-known outfit within the FBI was the best tactical unit in the country. It regularly engaged in practice operations with Delta Force and the Navy Seals – and usually won. Rhyme was glad to hear that Dellray was beefing up their side. From what they now knew about the Ghost, their present resources were inadequate. Dellray, for instance, was the only FBI agent assigned full-time to the Ghost case and Peabody was only mid-level INS.

"Gonna be tough to get ever-body on board down at the Federal Building," the agent said, "but I'll make sure it happens."

Coe's phone rang. He listened for a few moments, nodding his head. After he hung up he said, "That was INS Detention in Midtown – about that undocumented, John Sung. He was just released on bond by one of our hearing officers." Coe raised an eyebrow. "Everybody who's caught coming ashore tries for asylum – it's standard procedure. But it looks like Sung may just get it. He's a pretty well-known dissident in China."

"Where is he now?" Sachs asked.

"With the lawyer he was assigned from the Human Rights Law Center downtown. He's going to set Sung up at some apartment off Canal Street. I've got the address. He'll be there in a half hour. I'll go interview him."

"I'd rather go," Sachs said quickly.

"You?" Coe said. "You're Crime Scene."

"He trusts me."

"Trusts you? Why?"

"I saved his life. More or less."

"This is still an INS case," the young agent said adamantly.

"Exactly," Sachs pointed out. "How much do you think he's going to open up with a federal agent."

Dellray intervened. "Let Aye-melia do it."

Coe reluctantly handed her the address. She showed it to Sellitto. "We should have an RMP baby-sit outside his place." Meaning a Remote Mobile Patrol – coptalk for squad car. "If the Ghost finds out Sung's still alive he'll be a target too."

The detective jotted the address down. "Sure. I'll do it now."

"Okay, everybody, what's the theme of the investigation?" Rhyme called out.

"Search well but watch your backs," Sachs responded with a laugh.

"Keep that in mind. We don't know where the Ghost is, we don't know where – or who – his bangshou is."

Then his attention faded. He was vaguely aware of Sachs's grabbing her purse and starting to the door, just as he was aware of Coe's disgruntled sigh at his limited jurisdiction, Dellrays pacing and fashionable Eddie Deng's amusement at their running the case from this oddball command post. But these impressions were fading from his thoughts as his quick eyes made the circuit of the evidence culled from the crime scenes. He gazed at these items intently, as if imploring the inanimate evidence assembled before him to come to life, give up whatever secrets it might hold and guide them to the killer and the unfortunate prey that the snake-head was hunting.

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung. One missing.

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

Chapter Eleven

The Ghost waited for the three men in decadent surroundings.

Showered and dressed in clean, unobtrusive clothes, he sat on the leather couch and looked over New York Harbor from the vantage point of his eighteenth-floor apartment that was his main safehouse in New York. It was in a fancy high-rise near Battery Park City, in the southwest corner of Manhattan, not far from Chinatown but away from its crowded streets, the smells of seafood, the stink of rancid oil from the tourist restaurants. He reflected now on how elegance and comfort like this, which he'd fought hard to achieve, had long been targets of the Communist Party.

Why do you pursue the path of decadence?

You are part of the old! Do you repent your ways?

You must rid yourself of old culture, old customs, old habits, old ideas! You must reject your decadent values.

You are infected with wrong thought and wrong desires!

Wrong desires? he considered, smiling cynically to himself. Desires? Feeling the familiar crawling sensation in his groin. An urge he'd been very familiar with – and often ruled by – all his life.

Now that he'd survived the sinking of the ship and had escaped from the beach, his thoughts were returning to his normal priorities: he needed a woman badly.

He'd had none for over two weeks – a Russian prostitute in St. Petersburg, a woman with a broad mouth and breasts that lolled alarmingly toward her armpits when she lay on her back. The event was satisfying – but only barely.

And on the Fuzhou Dragon? None. Usually it was a snakehead's prerogative to ask one of the prettier women piglets to his stateroom, promising to reduce her transit fee in exchange for a night in his bed. Or, if she was traveling alone or with a weak man, simply to drag her to his cabin and rape her. What was she going to do, after all? Call the police when they arrived in the Beautiful Country?

But his bangshou, hiding out in the hold as his spy, had reported that the women piglets on the Dragon weren't particularly attractive or young and the men were defiant and smart, perfectly capable of causing trouble. So it had been a long, celibate voyage.

He now resumed fantasizing about the woman he called Yindao, the Chinese word for female genitals. The nickname was contemptuous, of course, but not particularly so in her case – for the Ghost thought of all women, except for a few businesswomen and female snakeheads he respected, solely in terms of their bodies. A number of images came to mind about the liaison he had planned with Yindao: her lying beneath him, the distinctive sound of her voice in his ear, her arching back, his hands gripping her long hair… such beautiful silken hair… He found himself painfully aroused. For a moment he thought about forgetting the Changs and the Wus. He could meet Yindao – she was here in New York – and make the fantasies real. But, of course, it wasn't in his nature to do that. First, the piglet families would die. Then he would be able to spend long hours with her.

Naixin.

All in good time.

A glance at his watch. It was nearly 11 a.m. Where were the three Turks? he wondered.

When the Ghost had arrived at the safehouse not long ago he'd used one of the stolen cell phones he kept there to call a community center in Queens with which he'd done business several times in the past. He'd hired three men to help him find and kill the piglets. Ever paranoid and wishing to keep his connections between himself and his crimes as distant as possible, the Ghost hadn't gone to any of the traditional tongs in Chinatown; he'd hired Uighurs.

Racially the vast majority of mainland China is Han, tracing their ancestry back to the dynasty of that name, which established itself about 200 B.C. The other eight or so percent of the population is made up of minority groups like the Tibetans, Mongolians and Manchus. The Uighurs (pronounced "wee-gurs"), whose people are from western China, were one such minority. Predominantly Islamic, their native region is considered central Asia and before being annexed by China was called East Turkestan. Hence, the Ghost's name for them: "Turks."

Like the other minorities in China the Uighurs were often persecuted and under great pressure from Beijing to assimilate into Chinese culture. Separatists were often brutalized and killed and Uighurs were very vocal in their demands for independence; most of the terrorist acts in China could be traced to Uighur freedom fighters.

The Uighur community in New York was quiet, devout and peaceful. But this particular group of men from the Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens was as ruthless as any triad the Ghost had ever dealt with. And since this assignment involved killing families who were Han Chinese they were the perfect choice to help him; they were motivated by both years of oppression and the generous amounts of cash the Ghost would pay them, part of which would ultimately go to the western Chinese province of Xinjiang to help fund the foundering Uighur independence movement.

Ten minutes later they arrived. Hands were shaken and they gave their names: Hajip, Yusuf, Kashgari. They were dark, quiet, thin – of smaller stature than he, and the Ghost was not particularly big. They wore black suits, gold bracelets or necklaces and fancy cell phones on their hips like badges.

Uighurs spoke Turkic, a language the Ghost didn't understand, and they weren't comfortable with any of the Chinese dialects. They settled on English. The Ghost explained what was needed and asked if they'd have any trouble killing people who were unarmed – women and children too.

Yusuf, a man in his late twenties with eyebrows that met above his nose, was the spokesman; his English was better than the others'. Without consulting them he said, "No problem. We do that. We do what you want." As if he killed women and children regularly.

And perhaps, the Ghost reflected, he did.

The Ghost gave them each $10,000 from a cashbox he kept in the safe-house and then called the head of the Turkestan community center and handed the phone to Yusuf, who told his boss in English how much money the Ghost had distributed, so there would be no dispute about underpayment and where the money had gone. They hung up.

The Ghost now said, "I'm going out for a while. I need to get some information."

"We will wait. May we have coffee?"

The Ghost nodded them into the kitchen. Then he walked to a small shrine. He lit a joss stick of incense, muttered a prayer to Yi, the divine bowman in Chinese mythology, whom the Ghost had adopted as his personal deity. He then put his pistol into an ankle holster and left his decadent apartment.

Sonny Li sat on a Long Island Commuter Services bus, which was nudging its way through the rain-spattered early morning traffic, as the skyline of Manhattan slowly grew larger.

Cynical and hard by nature, Li nonetheless was in awe of what he was examining. Not the massive size of the city they were approaching – Li's world was the southeast China coast, which was the most populous metropolitan sprawl on earth. Shanghai was twice the size of New York and 50 million people lived in the Pearl Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

No, what fascinated him was the bus in which he rode.

In China the main means of public transit is buses. They're cramped, filthy vehicles, often broken down, stifling in the warm months, freezing in the fall and winter, windows greasy from smoke residue and hair oil and soot. The bus stations too were old, decrepit places. Li had shot a man behind the infamous North Bus Station in Fuzhou and had himself been knifed not far from the same spot.

So Li had never seen any vehicle like this behemoth – it was huge and luxurious, with thick padded seats, clean floors and spotless windows. Even on this oppressive, dank day in August the air-conditioning worked perfectly. He'd spent two weeks being violently sick every day, was virtually broke, had no idea where the Ghost was. He had no gun, not even a pack of cigarettes. But at least the bus was a blessing from heaven.

After he'd fled from the beach where the survivors of the Fuzhou Dragon had landed, Li had begged a ride from a trucker at a rest stop on the highway several kilometers away. The man had looked over his wet, disheveled clothes and let him ride in the back of the truck. After a half hour or so the trucker dropped him at a sleek bus station in a massive parking lot. Here, the driver explained, Sonny Li could take a commuter bus to where he wanted to go – Manhattan.

Li wasn't sure what was required to buy a ticket but apparently no passports or documents were necessary. He'd handed one of the twenty-dollar bills he'd stolen from redheaded Hongse's car to the clerk and said, " New York City please." He enunciated in his best accent, mimicking the actor Nicolas Cage. Speaking so clearly, in fact, that the clerk, perhaps expecting unintelligible words, blinked in surprise and handed him a computer-printed chit along with six dollars in change. He counted the money twice and decided that either the clerk had robbed him or, as he muttered under his breath in English, he was now in "one fuck expensive country."

He'd gone to a newsstand connected to the station and bought a razor and comb. In the men's room, he'd shaved and washed the salt water out of his hair and dried it with paper towels. Then he combed the thinning strands back and brushed as much sand off himself as he could. He joined the well-dressed commuters on the platform.

Now, approaching the city, the bus slowed for a tollbooth and then continued through a long tunnel. Finally it emerged into the city itself. Ten minutes later the vehicle parked on a busy commercial street.

Li climbed out like everyone else and stood on the sidewalk.

His first thought: Where're all the bicycles and motorbikes? They were the main means of private transport in China and Li couldn't imagine a city this big without millions of Seagull bicycles coursing through the streets.

His second thought: Where can I buy some cigarettes?

He found a kiosk selling newspapers and bought a pack.

When he looked at his change this time he thought: Ten judges of hell! Nearly three dollars for a single pack! He smoked at least two packs a day, three when he was doing something dangerous and needed to calm his nerves. He'd go broke in a month living here, he estimated. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as he walked through the crowds. He asked a pretty Asian woman how to get to Chinatown and was directed to the subway.

Jostling his way through the mass of commuters, Li bought a token from the clerk. This too was expensive but he'd given up comparing costs between the two countries. He dropped the token in the turnstile, walked through the device and waited on the platform. He had a bad moment when a man began shouting at him. Li thought the man might be deranged, even though he was wearing an expensive suit. In a moment he realized what the man was saying. Apparently, it was illegal to smoke on the subway.

Li thought this was madness. He couldn't believe it. But he didn't want to make a scene so he stubbed out his cigarette and put it in his pocket, muttering under his breath another assessment: "One crazy fuck country."

A few minutes later the train roared into the station and Sonny Li got on board as if he'd been doing it all his life, looking around attentively – though not for security officers but simply to see if anyone else was smoking so that he could light up again. To his dismay, no one was.

At Canal Street Li stepped out of the car and climbed up the stairs into the bustling, early morning city. The rain had stopped and he lit the snuffed cigarette then slipped into the crowd. Many of the people around him were speaking Cantonese, the dialect of the south, but aside from the language, this neighborhood was just like portions of his town, Liu Guoyuan – or any small city in China: movie theaters showing Chinese action and love films, the young men with long slicked-back hair or pompadours and challenging sneers, the young girls walking with their arms around their mothers or grandmothers, businessmen in suits buttoned snugly, the ice-filled boxes of fresh fish, the bakeries selling tea buns and rice pastries, the smoked ducks hanging by their necks in the greasy windows of restaurants, herbalists and acupuncturists, Chinese doctors, shop windows filled with ginseng roots twisted like deformed human bodies.

And somewhere near here, he was hoping, would be something else he was very familiar with.

It took Li ten minutes to find what he sought. He noticed the telltale sign – the guard, a young man with a cell phone, smoking and examining passersby as he lounged in front of a basement apartment whose windows were painted black. It was a twenty-four-hour gambling hall.

He walked up and asked in English, "What they play here? Fan tai? Poker? Maybe thirteen points?"

The man looked at Li's clothes and ignored him.

"I want play," Li said.

"Fuck off," the young man spat out.

"I have money," Li shouted angrily. "Let me inside!"

"You Fujianese. I hear your accent. You not welcome here. Get outta here or you get hurt."

Li raged, "My dollar good as fuck Cantonese dollar. You boss, he want you turn away customers?"

"Get outta here, little man. I'm not going to tell you again."

And he pulled aside his nice black jacket, revealing the butt of an automatic pistol.

Excellent! This is what Li had been hoping for.

Appearing frightened, he started to turn away then spun back with his arm outstretched. He caught the young man in the chest with his fist, knocking the wind out of him. The boy staggered back and Li struck him in the nose with his open palm. He cried out and fell hard to the pavement. The guard lay there, gasping frantically for breath, blood pouring from his nose, while Li delivered a kick to his side.

Taking the gun, an extra clip of ammunition and the man's cigarettes, Li looked up and down the street. Two young women, walking arm in arm, pretended that they hadn't seen. Aside from them the street was empty. He bent down to the miserable man again and took his wristwatch too and about three hundred dollars in cash.

"If you tell anyone I did this," Li said to the guard, speaking in Putonghua, "I'll find you and kill you."

The man nodded and sopped up the blood with his sleeve.

Li started to walk away then he glanced back and returned. The man cringed. "Take your shoes off," Li snapped.

"Shoes. Take them off."

He undid the black lace-up Kenneth Coles and pushed them toward Li.

"Socks too."

The expensive black silk socks joined the shoes.

Li took off his own shoes and socks, gritty with sand and still wet, and flung them away. He put on the new ones.

Heaven, he thought happily.

Li hurried back to one of the crowded commercial streets. There he found a cheap clothing store and bought a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a thin Nike windbreaker. He changed in the back of the store, paid for his purchases and tossed his old clothes into a trash bin. Li then went into a Chinese restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of noodles. As he ate he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his wallet, the sheet that he'd stolen from Hongse's car at the beach.

August 8

From: Harold C. Peabody, Assistant Director of Enforcement,

U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service To: Det. Capt. Lincoln Rhyme (Ret.) Re: Joint INS/FBI/NYPD Task Force in the matter of Kwan Ang,

AKA Gui, AKA The Ghost

This confirms our meeting at ten a.m. tomorrow to discuss the plans for the apprehension of the above-referenced suspect. Please see attached material for background.

Stapled to the memo was a business card, which read:

Lincoln Rhyme

345 Central Park West

New York , NY 10022

He flagged down the waitress and asked her a question.

Something about Li seemed to scare her and warn that she shouldn't help this man. But a second glance at his face must've told her that it would be worse to say no to him. She nodded and, eyes down, gave him what Li thought were excellent directions to the street known as Central Park West.

Chapter Twelve

"You look better," Amelia Sachs said. "How are you feeling?"

John Sung motioned her into the apartment. "Very sore," he said, and closing the door, joined her in the living room. He walked slowly and winced occasionally. An understandable consequence of having been shot, she supposed.

The apartment that his immigration lawyer had arranged for him to stay in was a dingy place on the Bowery, two dark rooms, containing mismatched, damaged furniture. Directly below, on the first floor, was a Chinese restaurant. The smell of sour oil and garlic permeated the place.

A compact man, with a few stray gray hairs, Sung walked hunched over from the wound. Watching his unsteady gait, she felt a poignant sympathy for him. In his life in China, as a doctor, presumably he would have enjoyed some respect from his patients and – even though he was a dissident – may have had some prestige. But here Sung had nothing. She wondered what he was going to do for a living – drive a taxi, work in a restaurant?

"I'll make tea," he said.

"No, that's all right," she said. "I can't stay long."

"I'm making some for myself anyway." There was no separate kitchen but a stove, a half-size refrigerator and a rust-stained sink lined one wall of the living room. He put a cheap kettle on the sputtering flame and took a box of Lipton from the cabinet over the sink. He smelled it and gave a curious smile.

"Not what you're used to?" she asked.

"I'll go shopping later," he said ruefully.

Sachs asked, "The INS let you out on bond?"

Sung nodded. "I've formally petitioned for asylum. My lawyer tells me that most people try for it but don't qualify. But I spent two years in a reeducation camp. And I've published articles attacking Beijing for human rights violations. We downloaded some as evidence. The examining officer wouldn't guarantee anything but he said there's a good case for asylum."

"When's the hearing?" she asked.

"Next month."

Sachs watched his hands as he took two cups from the cupboard and carefully washed, dried and arranged them on a tray. There was something ceremonial about the way he did this. He tore open the bags of tea and put them in a ceramic pot and poured the hot water over them then whisked the brew with a spoon.

All for a cup of mass-market Lipton…

He carried the pot and cups into the living room, sat stiffly. He poured two cups and offered one to her. She rose to help him. She took the cup from his hands, which she found to be soft but very strong.

"Is there any word on the others?" he asked.

"They're in Manhattan somewhere, we think. We found a truck they stole abandoned not far from here. I'd like to ask you about them."

"Of course. What can I tell you?"

"Anything that you know. Names, descriptions… anything."

Sung brought the tea to his lips and took a very small sip. "There were two families – the Changs and the Wus – and a few other people who escaped. I don't remember their names. Some crewmen got off the ship too. Chang tried to save them – he was steering our raft – but the Ghost shot them."

Sachs tried her tea. It seemed to taste very different from the grocery-store beverage she was used to. My imagination, she told herself.

Sung continued. "The crew was decent to us. Before we left I heard bad rumors about the crews on the smuggling ships. But on the Dragon they treated us okay, gave us fresh water and food."

"Have you remembered anything about where the Changs or the Wus might've gone?"

"Nothing other than what I told you on the beach. All we heard was that we were going to be dropped at a beach on Long Island. And then trucks were going to take us to someplace in New York."

"And the Ghost? Can you tell me anything that might help us find him?"

He shook his head. "The little snakeheads in China – they were the Ghost's representatives – said that once we landed, we'd never see him again. And they warned us not to try to contact him."

"We think he had an assistant on board, pretending to be one of the immigrants," Sachs said. "The Ghost generally does that. Do you know who that might've been?"

"No," Sung replied. "There were several men in the hold who stayed by themselves. They didn't say much to anyone. It might've been one of them. But I never paid any attention. I don't know their names."

"Did the crew say anything about what the Ghost would do when he got to the country?"

Sung grew grave and seemed to be considering something. He said, "Nothing specific – they were afraid of him too, I think. But one thing… I don't know if it will help you but it's something I heard. The captain of the ship was talking about the Ghost and used the expression 'Pofu chen zhou' about him. It translates literally as 'break the cauldrons and sink the boats.' You'd say, I suppose, There is no turning back.' It refers to a warrior from the Qin dynasty. After his troops had crossed a river to attack some enemy, that's what he ordered his men to do – break the cauldrons and sink the boats. So there'd be no possibility of either encamping or retreating. If they wanted to survive, they had to push forward and destroy the other side. The Ghost is that kind of enemy."

So he won't stop until he finds and kills the families, Sachs reflected uneasily.

Silence fell between them, interrupted by the grating sounds of traffic on Canal Street. On impulse Sachs asked, "Your wife is in China?"

Sung looked into her eyes and said evenly, "She died last year."

"I'm sorry."

"In a re-education camp. The officials said that she got sick. But they never told me what her illness was. And there was no autopsy. I hope that she did get sick, though. Rather that, than to think she was tortured to death."

Sachs felt a chill surge through her at these words. "She was a dissident too?"

He nodded. "That's how we met. At a protest in Beijing ten years ago. On the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Over the years she became more outspoken than me. Before she was arrested we were going to come here together, with the children…" Sung's voice faded and he let the ellipses following his words explain the essential sorrow of his present life.

Finally he said, "I decided I couldn't stay in the country any longer. Politically it was dangerous, of course. But more than that, there were too many associations with my wife. I decided to come here, apply for asylum and then send for my children." A faint smile. "After my mourning is over I'll find a woman here to be the mother to my children." He shrugged and sipped tea. "But that will be in the future."

His hand went to the amulet he wore. Her eyes followed it. He noticed and took it off his neck and handed it to her.

"My good-luck charm. Maybe it works," he laughed. "It brought you to me when I was drowning."

"What is it?" she asked, holding the carving close.

"It's a carving from Qingtian, south of Fuzhou. The soapstone there is very famous. It was a present from my wife."

"It's broken," she observed, rubbing the fracture with her nail. Some of the soft stone flaked off.

"It got chipped on the rock I was holding on to when you saved me."

The design was of a monkey, sitting on his haunches. The creature seemed humanlike. Wily and shrewd. Sung explained, "He is a famous character in Chinese mythology. The Monkey King."

She handed the amulet back to him. He replaced it and the charm dropped back against his muscular, hairless chest. The bandages from the Ghost's gunshot wound were just visible under the blue work shirt. Suddenly she was keenly aware of Sung's presence, inches away from her. She could smell disinfectant soap and harsh laundry detergent from his clothes. She felt an inexplicable comfort coming from him – this man who was virtually a stranger.

She told him, "We're leaving a patrol car outside your apartment."

"To protect me?"

"Yes."

This amused Sung. "The public security bureau officers in China wouldn't do that – they'd only park outside your door to spy or intimidate you."

"You're not in Kansas anymore, John."

" Kansas?"

"An expression. I have to get back to Lincoln."

"To -?"

"The man I work with. Lincoln Rhyme."

She rose, felt a stab of pain in her knee.

"Wait," Sung said. He took her hand. She felt a serene power radiating from his touch. He said, "Open your mouth."

"What?" She laughed.

"Lean forward. Open your mouth."

"Why?"

"I'm a doctor. I want to look at your tongue."

Amused, she did and he examined her mouth quickly. "You have arthritis," he said, releasing her hand and sitting back.

"Chronic," she said. "How did you know that?"

"As I said, I'm a doctor. Come back and I will treat you."

She laughed. "I've been to dozens of doctors."

"Western medicine, Western doctors, they have their place. Chinese medicine is best for curing chronic pains and discomfort – problems that seem to arise for no apparent reason. There always is a reason, though. There are things I can do that will help. I'm indebted to you. You saved my life. I would be shamed if I didn't repay that."

"That was two big guys in black rubber suits."

"No, no, if not for you I would have drowned. I know that. So, please, you will come back and let me help you?"

She hesitated for a moment.

But then, as if prodding her to act, a bolt of pain shot through her knee. She gave no outward reaction to the twinge but kept a placid face as she took out her pen and gave Sung her cell phone number.

Standing on Central Park West, Sonny Li was confused.

What was with the public security bureau here? Hongse drove that fast yellow car, bang, bang, like a TV cop, and now, it seemed, the officers were hunting the Ghost from a building as luxurious as this? No PSB officer in China could afford such an apartment, even the most corrupt (and there were some pretty damn corrupt public security officers).

Li tossed his cigarette away, spat on the grass and then, with his head down, walked quickly across the street into the alley that led to the back of the building. Even the alley was spotless! In Li's home of Liu Guoyuan – which was richer than most towns in China – an alley like this would have been piled high with trash and discarded appliances. He paused, looked around the corner and found the back door of the building open. A young man, with perfectly trimmed blond hair, wearing dark slacks, a light shirt and a flowery tie, stepped out. He carted two green plastic trash bags with him, which he carried to a large blue metal container and tossed inside. The man glanced around the alley, picked up a few stray pieces of paper and threw those out too. He brushed his hands together then returned inside, pulling the door closed. It didn't, however, latch.

Thank you, sir.

Sonny Li slipped into the basement, smelling the powerful musty scent of the place, listening for sounds. The young man's footsteps ascended the stairs. Li waited behind a stack of large cartons for him to return but the man had apparently gone on to other chores. There were creaks from upstairs and the sound of running water. Li glanced into cardboard boxes on the floor. Some were filled with clothes, others seemed to be memorabilia. Plaques, awards, degrees from schools. University of Illy-noise, Li pronounced the English to himself. The American Institute of Forensic Science Achievement Award, a Federal Bureau of Investigation Letter of Commendation signed by the director himself. Dozens of others.

The recipient of all of these commendations was Lincoln Rhyme.

The blond man was apparently not bringing any more trash downstairs and Li left his hiding place. Up a flight of stairs, walking slowly. The wood was old and he stepped carefully to avoid creaks. He paused behind the door at the top and pushed it open slightly.

Then loud footsteps came toward him, several people, it seemed like. Li pressed himself back against the wall, beside some mops and brooms.

Voices calling: "We'll be back in a couple of hours, Linc. We'll have forensics call…" Some other things that Li couldn't understand.

The footsteps stopped and Li heard another man ask, "Hey, Lincoln, you want one of us to stay?"

Another voice, irritated, responded. "Stay? Why would I want somebody to stay? I want to get some work done. And I don't want any interruptions!"

"I'm just saying it might be better to have somebody with a weapon. The Ghost's fucking vanished. His assistant too. You said yourself to watch our backs."

"But how's he going to find me? How's he going to know where on God's green earth I live? I don't need anyone to baby-sit me. I need you to get me that goddamn information I wanted."

"Okay, okay."

From above: the sounds of people walking, a door opening and closing. Then silence. Sonny Li listened for a moment. He pushed the door open fully and glanced out. In front of him was a long corridor that led to the front door, the one through which the men – presumably other security bureau officers – had just left.

To Li's right was an entryway to what must have been a living room. Staying close to the baseboards to keep his footsteps quiet, Li moved through this hallway. He paused outside the living room then looked in quickly. An odd sight: the room was filled with scientific equipment, computers, tables, charts and books of all kinds. Which was the last thing one would expect to find in this fine old building.

But what was more curious was the dark-haired man sitting in a complicated red wheelchair in the middle of the room, leaning forward, looking at a computer screen, talking to himself, it seemed. Then Li realized that, no, the man was talking into a microphone near his mouth. The mike must have been sending signals to the computer, telling it what to do. The screen responded to his commands.

So, was this creature Lincoln Rhyme?

Well, it hardly mattered who he was and, besides, Li had no time to speculate. He didn't know when the other officers would return.

Lifting the gun, Sonny Li stepped into the room.

Chapter Thirteen

One meter forward. Another. Sonny Li was a slight man and he moved silently.

Sneaking closer to the back of the wheelchair, looking on the tabletops for any evidence or information about the Ghost. He would -

Li had no idea where the men came from.

One of them – far taller than Li – was black as coal and wearing a suit and bright yellow shirt. He'd been hiding against the wall inside the room. In a seamless motion he swept the gun from Li's hand and pressed a pistol against his temple.

Another man, short and fat, flung Li to the ground and knelt on his back, pushing the air from his lungs as sharp pain coursed through his belly and sides. Handcuffs were ratcheted on fast as an eel.

"English?" the black man asked.

Li was too shocked to answer.

"I'ma ask you once more, skel. Do. You. Speak. English?"

A Chinese man, who'd also been hiding in the room, stepped forward. He wore a stylish dark suit and had a badge dangling from a chain around his neck. He asked the same question in Chinese. It was the Cantonese dialect but Li was able to understand.

"Yes," Li responded breathlessly. "I talk English."

The man in the wheelchair spun around. "Let's see what we've caught."

The black man hauled him to his feet, nearly off the ground, ignoring Li's moans and gasps of pain. Holding him with one hand he began patting his pockets with the other. "Listen here, you little skel, I find any needles in your pockets? I find anything that's gonna poke me unpleasantly?"

"Answer the question now and tell the truth. 'Cause if I get poked, you gonna get poked too." He shook Li by the collar and shouted, "Needles?"

"You saying drug stuff? No, no."

The man pulled the cash out of his pockets, his cigarettes, ammunition, the sheet of paper he'd stolen from the beach. "Ah, looks like this boy here borrowed something he shouldn'ta from Aye-melia. An' while she was busy savin' lives, no less. Shame on him."

"That's how he found us," Lincoln Rhyme said, eyeing the sheet of paper with his card attached. "I was wondering."

The trim blond man appeared in the doorway. "So you got him," he said without surprise. And Li understood then that this young man had spotted him in the alley when he'd taken out the bags, and had left the door open on purpose. To draw him upstairs. And the other men had made a noisy show of departing, pretending to leave Lincoln alone.

So you got him…

The man in the wheelchair noticed the disgust in Li's eyes. He said, "That's right – my observant Thom here spotted you when he took the trash out. And then…" He nodded at the computer screen and said, "Command, security. Back door."

On the computer screen a video image of the back door of the building and the alley popped up.

Li suddenly understood how the Coast Guard had located the Fuzhou Dragon floating in the endless ocean: this man. Lincoln Rhyme.

"Judges of hell," he muttered.

The fat officer laughed. "Don'tcha just hate days like this?"

Then the black man pulled Li's wallet out of his pocket. He squeezed the damp leather. "Our li'l skel here been swimming, I de-duce." He opened the wallet and handed it to the Chinese officer.

The fat man pulled out a radio and spoke into it. "Mel, Alan, come on back in. We got him."

Two men, probably the ones Li had heard leaving a few moments ago, returned. A balding, slight man ignored Li and walked to a computer, began to type frantically on it. The other was a man in a suit with striking red hair. He blinked in surprise and said, "Wait, that's not the Ghost."

"His missing assistant then," Rhyme said. "His bangshou."

"No," the red-haired man said. "I know him. I've seen him before."

Li realized that there was something familiar about this man too.

"Seen him?" the black officer asked.

"Some of us from INS were at a meeting last year in the Fuzhou public security bureau – about human smuggling. He was there. He was one of them."

"One of who?" the fat officer grumbled.

The Chinese officer gave a laugh and held up an ID card from Li's wallet, comparing Li's picture with his face. "One of us," he said. "He's a cop."

Rhyme too examined the card and the driver's license, both of which had pictures of the man. They gave his name as Li Kangmei, a detective with the Liu Guoyuan Public Security Bureau.

The criminalist said to Dellray, "See if any of our people in China can confirm it." A tiny cell phone appeared in the agent's large hand. And he started punching keys.

Looking over the diminutive man, Rhyme asked, "'Li' is your first or last name?"

"Last. And I not like 'Kangmei,'" he explained. "I use Sonny. Western name."

"What're you doing here?" Rhyme asked.

"Ghost, he kill three people in my town last year. He had meeting, I'm saying. Had meeting with little snakehead in restaurant. You know what is little snakehead?"

Rhyme nodded. "Go on."

"The little snakehead cheating him. Big fight. Ghost kill him but woman and her daughter also killed and old man sitting on bench. Got in way and Ghost just kill them to escape, I'm saying."

"Bystanders?"

Li nodded. "We try to arrest him but he has very powerful…" He sought for a word. Finally he turned to Eddie Deng and said, "Guanxi."

"That means connections," Deng explained. "You pay off the right people and you get good guanxi."

Li nodded. "No one willing testify against him. Then evidence in shooting disappear from headquarters office. My boss lose interest. Case got collectivized."

"Collectivized?" Sellitto asked.

Li smiled grimly. "When something ruined, we say it got collectivized. In old days, Mao's day, when government turn business or farm into commune or collective, it fail pretty fuck fast."

"But," Rhyme offered, "the case wasn't collectivized to you."

"No," Li said, his eyes hard ebony disks. "He kill people in my town. I want make sure he come to trial."

Dellray asked, "How'dja get on the ship?"

"I have lots informants in Fuzhou. Last month I find out Ghost kill two people in Taiwan, big guys, important guys, and was leaving from China for month until Taiwan NSB stop looking for him. He going to south of France then taking immigrants from Vyborg in Russia to New York on Fuzhou Dragon."

Rhyme laughed. This small, scruffy man's information had been better than the FBI's and Interpol's combined.

"So," Li continued, "I go undercover. Become piglet – immigrant."

Sellitto asked, "You find out anything about the Ghost? Where he stays here? Associates of his?"

"No, nobody talk to me much. Got on deck when crew not looking – mostly for puking." He shook his head, apparently at the unpleasant memory of the voyage. "But not get close to Ghost."

Coe said, "But what were you going to do? We wouldn't extradite him to China."

Perplexed, Li said, "Why I want him extradited? You not listen. Guanxi, I'm saying. In China they let him go. I going to arrest him when we land. Then give him your public security bureau."

Coe laughed. "You're serious, aren't you."

"Yes. I was going to do."

"He had his bangshou with him, the crew of the ship. Little snake-heads to meet and greet here. They would've killed you."

"Risky, you saying? Sure, sure. But that our job, right? Always risk." He reached for the cigarettes Dellray had relieved him of.

Thom said, "No smoking here."

"What you mean?"

"No smoking."

"Why not?"

"Because you can't," the aide said firmly.

"That craziest thing. You not make joke?"

"No."

"Subway stupid enough. But this is house, I'm saying."

"Yes, a house where you can't smoke."

"Very fuck," Li said. He grudgingly put the pack away.

A faint beeping from across the room. Mel Cooper turned to his computer. He read for a moment and then spun the screen around so that everybody could look. The FBI's Singapore office had sent an email confirmation that Li Kangmei was indeed a detective in the Liu Guoyuan Public Security Bureau of the People's Republic of China. He was presently listed as being on undercover assignment but his office would say no more about it. A picture of Li in a navy-blue uniform accompanied the message. It was clearly the man in the room before them.

Li then explained how the Ghost had scuttled the Dragon. Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, along with Dr. Sung, several other immigrants and the baby of a woman on board the ship got away in a life raft. Everyone else drowned. "Sam Chang – he become leader on raft. Good man, smart. Save my life. Pick me up when Ghost shooting people. Wu was father of second family. Wu smart too but not balanced. Liver-spleen disharmony."

Deng saw Rhyme's frown and said, "Chinese medicine. Hard to explain."

Li continued, "Wu too emotion, I'm saying. Does impulse things."

Even the FBI's crack behavioral profiling was out of Rhyme's comfort zone, being the physical scientist that he was; he had no time whatsoever for disharmonious spleens. "Let's stick with facts," he said.

Li then told them how the raft hit the rocks and he, Sung and the others were washed overboard. They were swept down the shoreline. By the time Li made it back to where the raft had beached, the Ghost had killed two of the immigrants. "I hurry to arrest him but by time I get there, he gone. I hide in bushes on other side of road. I saw woman with red hair rescue one man."

"John Sung," Rhyme said.

"Dr. Sung." Li nodded. "Sat next to me on raft. He okay?"

"The Ghost shot him but he'll be all right. Amelia – the woman you saw – is interviewing him now."

"Hongse, I call her. Hey, pretty girl. Sexy, I'm saying."

Sellitto and Rhyme shared a humorous glance. Rhyme was picturing the consequences if Li had said that to Sachs's face.

Li pointed around the town house. "I get address from her car and come here, thinking maybe I get stuff that lead me to Ghost. Information, I'm saying. Evidence."

"Steal it?" Coe asked.

"Yes, sure," he said unabashedly.

"Why'd you do that, you little skel?" Dellray asked menacingly, using a popular cop word, short for "skeleton," meaning basically: worthless little snitch.

"Have to get it for myself. Because, hey, you not let me help you, right? You just send me back. And I going to arrest him. 'Collar,' right? You say 'collar.'"

Coe said, "Well, you're right – you're not helping us. You may be a cop in China. But here you're just one more fucking undocumented. You are going back."

Eyes flashing angrily, Sonny Li stepped close to Coe, who towered over the small man.

Sellitto sighed and tugged Li back by the shirt. "Naw, none of that shit."

Amused at the man's bravado, Coe reached for his cuffs. "Li, you're under arrest for entering the United States -"

But Lincoln Rhyme said, "No, I want him."

"What?" the agent asked in shock.

"He'll be a consultant. Like me."

"Impossible."

"Anybody who goes to this much trouble to nail a perp – I want him working on our side."

"You bet I help, Loaban. Do lots, I'm saying."

"What'd you call me?"

Li explained to Rhyme, "'Loaban.' It mean 'boss.' You got keep me. I can help. I know how Ghost think. We from same world, him and me. I in gang when I boy, like him. And spent lots time as undercover officer, working docks in Fuzhou."

"No way," Coe blurted. "For Christ's sake, he's an undocumented. As soon as we turn our back he'll just run off, get drunk and go to a gambling parlor."

Rhyme wondered if a kung fu match was about to break out. But this time Li ignored Coe and spoke in a reasonable voice. "In my country we got four classes people. Not like rich and poor, stuff like you got here. In China what you do more important than money you got. And know what highest honor is? Working for country, working for people. That what I do and I one fuck good cop, I'm saying."

"They're all on the take over there," Coe muttered.

"I not on take, okay?" Li then grinned. "Not on important case like this."

Coe said, "And how do we know he's not really on the Ghost's payroll."

Li laughed. "Hey, how we know you not working for him?"

"Fuck you," Coe said. He was furious.

The young INS agent's problem, Rhyme assessed, was that he was too emotional to be an effective law enforcer. The criminalist often heard contempt in his voice when he spoke about the "undocumenteds." He seemed affronted that they would break federal law to sneak into this country and had suggested several times that immigrants were motivated essentially by greed to come here, not by a love of freedom or democracy.

Apart from his derisive attitude toward the aliens, however, he had a troubling personal stake in collaring the Ghost. Several years ago Coe had been stationed in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, running undercover agents in mainland China, trying to identify major snakeheads. During an investigation of the Ghost, one of his informants, a woman, had disappeared and presumably been killed. Later it was learned that the woman had two young children but had so desperately needed money that she was willing to snitch on the Ghost – the INS never would have used her as an informant if they'd known that she had children. Coe was reprimanded – suspended for six months. He'd become obsessed with collaring the Ghost.

But to be a good cop you've got to tuck those personal feelings away. Detachment is absolutely necessary. This was a variation on Rhyme's rule about giving up the dead.

Dellray said, "Listen up. Ain't in the mood t'put you kiddies in a timeout corner so juss settle down. Li stays with us for's long as Lincoln wants him. Make it happen, Coe. Call somebody at the State Department and get him a temporary visa. We all together on that?"

Coe muttered, "No, I'm not all together on that. You can't have one of them on a task force."

"'Them'?" Dellray asked, pivoting on a very long foot. "Who exactly might 'them' be?"

"Undocumenteds."

The tall agent clicked his tongue. "Now, you know, Coe, that word's kinda like marbles in a blender to me. Doesn't sound respectful. Doesn't sound nice. Specially the way you say it."

"Well, as you folks from the bureau've made clear all along, this isn't really an INS case. Keep him if you want. But I'm not taking any heat for it."

"You make good decision," Sonny Li said to Rhyme. "I help lots, Loaban." Li walked over to the table and picked up the gun he'd been carrying.

"Nup, nup, nup," Dellray said. "Get your hands offa that."

"Hey, I a cop. Like you."

"No, you ain't a cop like me or any-single-solitary soul else here. No guns."

"Okay, okay. Keep gun for now, Heise."

"What's that?" Dellray snapped. "Heise?"

"Means black. Hey, hey, don't get offense. Nothing bad, nothing bad."

"Well, can it."

"Sure, I can it. Sure."

"Welcome on board, Sonny," Rhyme said. Then glanced at the clock. It was just noon. Six hours had passed since the Ghost began his relentless pursuit of the immigrants. He could be closing in on the poor families even now. "Okay, let's start on the evidence."

"Sure, sure," Li said, suddenly distracted. "But I need cigarette first. Come on, Loaban. You let me?"

"All right," Rhyme snapped. "But outside. And for Christ's sake, somebody go with him."

Chapter Fourteen

Wu Qichen wiped the sweat off his wife's forehead.

Shivering, burning with fever, soaking with sweat, she lay on a mattress in the bedroom of their tiny apartment.

The basement rooms were down an alley off Canal Street in the heart of Chinatown. They'd been provided by the broker that Jimmy Mah had sent them to – a robber, Wu had thought angrily. The rent was ridiculous, as was the fee the slimy man had demanded. The apartment stank, the place was virtually unfurnished and roaches roamed the floor boldly – even now, in the diffuse noon light bleeding in through the greasy windows.

He studied his wife with concern. The raging headache Yong-Ping had suffered on board the Dragon, the lethargy, the chills and sweats, which he'd believed were seasickness, had persisted even after they'd landed. She was afflicted with something else.

His wife opened her fever-glazed eyes. "If I die…" she whispered.

"You won't die," her husband said.

But Wu wasn't sure that he believed his own words. He remembered Dr. John Sung in the hold of the Dragon and wished he'd asked the man's opinion on his wife's condition; the doctor had treated several of the immigrants for various maladies but Wu had been afraid that he'd charge him money to examine Yong-Ping.

"Sleep," Wu said sternly. "You need rest. You'll be fine if you rest. Why won't you do that?"

"If I die you must find a woman. Someone to take care of the children."

"You won't die."

"Where is my son?" Yong-Ping asked.

"Lang is in the living room."

He glanced through the doorway and saw the boy on the couch and teenage Chin-Mei hanging laundry on a line strung through the room. After they'd arrived the family had taken turns showering then dressing in the clean clothes that Wu had bought at a discount store on Canal Street. After some food – which Yong-Ping had not taken a single bite of – Chin-Mei had directed her brother to the TV set and washed their saltwater-encrusted clothing in the kitchen sink. This is what she was now hanging up to dry.

Wu's wife looked around the room, squinting, as if trying to remember where she was. She gave up and rested her head on the pillow. "Where… where are we?"

"We're in Chinatown, in Manhattan of New York."

"But…" She frowned as his words belatedly registered in her feverish brain. "The Ghost, husband. We can't stay here. It's not safe. Sam Chang said we should not stay."

"Ah, the Ghost…" He gestured dismissively. "He has gone back to China."

"No," Yong-Ping said, "I don't think so. I'm scared for our children. We have to leave. We have to get as far away from here as we can."

Wu pointed out: "No snakehead would risk being captured or shot just to find a few immigrants who'd escaped. Are you foolish enough to think that?"

"Please, husband. Sam Chang said -"

"Forget Chang. He's a coward." He snapped, "We're staying." His anger at her disobedience was tempered by the sight of the poor woman and the pain she must be suffering. He added softly, "I'm going out. I'm going to get you some medicine."

She didn't respond and he rose and walked into the living room.

He glanced at the children, who looked uneasily toward the room where their mother lay.

"Is she all right?" the teenage girl asked.

"Yes. She'll be fine. I'll be back in a half hour," he said. "I'll get some medicine."

"Wait, Father," Chin-Mei said uncertainly, looking down.

"What?"

"May I come with you?" the girl asked.

"No, you will stay with your mother and brother."

"But…"

"What?"

"There is something I need."

A fashion magazine? he thought cynically. Makeup? Hair spray? She wants me to spend our survival money on her pretty face. "What?"

"Please let me come with you. I'll buy it myself." She was blushing fiercely.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"I need some things for…" she whispered, head down.

"For what?" he asked harshly. "Answer me."

She swallowed. "For my time. You know. Pads."

With a shock Wu suddenly understood. He looked away from the girl and gestured angrily toward the bathroom. "Use something in there."

"I can't. It's uncomfortable."

Wu was furious. It was his wife's job to take care of matters like this. No man he ever knew bought those… things. "All right!" he snapped. "All right. I'll buy you what you need." He refused to ask her what kind she wanted. He'd get the first box of whatever was in the closest store. She'd have to use that. He stepped outside and locked the door behind him.

Wu Qichen walked down the busy streets of Chinatown, hearing a cacophony of languages – Minnanhua, Cantonese, Putonghua, Vietnamese and Korean. English too, laced with more accents and dialects than he'd ever known existed.

He gazed at the stores and shops, the piles of merchandise, the huge high-rises ringing the city. New York seemed ten times bigger than Hong Kong and a hundred times the size of Fuzhou.

I'm scared for our children. We have to leave. We have to get as far away from here as we can…

But Wu Qichen had no intention of leaving Manhattan. The forty-year-old man had nurtured a dream all his life and he wouldn't let his wife's sickness or the faint threat from a bully of a snakehead deter him from it. Wu Qichen was going to become a wealthy man, the richest ever in his family.

In his twenties he'd been a bellboy then a junior assistant manager at the Paradise Hotel on Hundong Road, near Hot Springs Park, in the heart of Fuzhou, waiting on rich Chinese and Europeans. Wu had decided then that he would be a successful businessman. He worked hard at the hotel and, even though he gave his parents a quarter of his income, he managed to save enough to buy a sundries and souvenir shop near the famous statue of Mao Zedong on Gutian Road with his two brothers. With the money they made from that store they bought one grocery then two more. They intended to run the businesses for several years and save as much money as they could then buy a building and make their fortune at real estate.

But Wu Qichen made one mistake.

The economic face of China was changing drastically. Economic free zones were prospering and even the top politicos had been speaking favorably of private business – the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping himself had said, "To be wealthy is glorious." But Wu neglected to remember the first rule of Chinese life: that the CCP – the Chinese Communist Party-runs the show. Wu was bluntly vocal in his call for closer economic ties with Taiwan, ending the iron rice bowl system of guaranteed employment regardless of productivity, and cracking down on party and government officials' taking bribes and levying arbitrary taxes on businesses. Ironically Wu didn't even care about what he advocated; his point was merely to attract the attention of Western trading partners – in Europe and America – who, he dreamed, would come to him with money to invest because he was the voice of the new Chinese economy.

But it wasn't the West who listened to the skinny man; it was the cadres and secretaries of the Communist Party. Suddenly governmental inspectors began appearing at the Wus' stores, finding dozens of violations of health and safety codes – many of which they simply made up on the spot. Unable to pay the crushing fines, the brothers were soon broke.

As shamed as he was by his lowered station, though, Wu refused to give up on his goal of becoming rich. And so, seduced by the fat opportunities in the Beautiful Country, Wu Qichen had bundled up his family and risked immigrating illegally. He would become a landlord in Chinatown. He would ride to work in a limousine and – when, finally, he was able to travel back to China – he would walk into the Paradise Hotel and stay in the grandest suite, the penthouse, the very room to which as a young man he had carried hundreds of bags.

No, his dreams had been delayed too long; the Ghost would not drive him from the city of money.

Wu now found a Chinese medicine store. He stepped inside and talked to the herbalist about his wife's condition. The doctor listened carefully and diagnosed deficient qi – the life spirit – and obstructed blood, both of which were aggravated by excessive cold. He put together a bundle of herbs for Wu, who reluctantly paid the huge bill of eighteen dollars, furious once again that he'd been taken advantage of.

Leaving the herbalist, he continued down the street to a Chinese grocery store. He stepped inside quickly, before his courage broke, found a basket and grabbed some groceries he didn't need. He swooped past the drug section, picking up a box of women's pads for his daughter. He walked quickly to the counter and kept his eyes on a glass container of ginseng root throughout the entire transaction. The gray-haired woman rang up the purchase and, though she didn't smile or call attention to his purchase, Wu knew she was laughing at him. He left the store with his head down and his face as red as the Chinese flag.

Wu turned in the direction of his apartment but after five minutes of fast walking he slowed and began meandering through the side streets. He was concerned about his wife, of course, and about leaving his children but, gods of heaven, this day had been a nightmare. He'd nearly been killed in a shipwreck, he'd lost all his possessions, had been cheated by Jimmy Mah and the real estate broker. And, worst of all, he'd endured the shame and humiliation of buying what was in the bag in his hand right now. He decided that he needed some diversion, some male companionship.

It took only a few minutes to find what he'd sought: A Fujianese gambling den. After showing his money to the guard in front he was admitted.

He sat silently for a time, playing thirteen points, smoking and drinking some baijiu. He won a little money and began to feel better. Another cup of the powerful, clear spirits, then another and finally he relaxed – making sure, though, that the grocery bag was completely hidden beneath his chair.

Eventually he struck up a conversation with the men around him and from the thirty dollars he won – a huge sum to him – he bought them drinks. Drunk and in good humor, he told a joke and a number of the men laughed hard. With the conspiratorial tone of men alone they all shared stories of disobedient wives and disrespectful children, the places they now lived and what jobs they had – or were seeking.

Wu lifted his cup. "Here is to Zai Chen," he announced drunkenly. This was the god of wealth and one of the most revered throughout China. Wu believed that he had a special connection with this folk deity.

The men all tossed back their drinks.

"You're new here," an old man said. "When did you come over?"

Pleased that he had the spotlight among his equals, Wu bragged in a whisper, "Just this morning. On the ship that sank."

"The Fuzhou Dragon?" one man asked, his eyebrow raised. "It was on the news. They said the seas were terrible."

"Ah," Wu said, "the waves were fifteen meters high! The snakehead tried to kill us all but I got a dozen people out of the hold. And then I had to swim underwater to cut a life raft off the deck. I nearly drowned. But I managed to get us to shore."

"You did that yourself?"

He looked down sadly. "I couldn't save them all. But I tried."

Another asked him, "Is your family all right?"

"Yes," Wu answered drunkenly.

"Are you in the neighborhood?"

"Up the street."

"What is the Ghost like?" one man asked.

"He's all bluff. And a coward. He's never without a gun. If he'd put it aside and fought like a man – with a knife – I could have killed him easily."

Then Wu fell silent as Sam Chang's words began to echo in his mind. He realized he probably should not be saying these things. He changed the subject. "Can someone tell me? There's a statue I want to see. Maybe you can tell me where it is."

The man nearest Wu asked, "Statue? Which one? There are statues everywhere here."

"It's very famous. It's of a woman and she's holding her accounts."

"Accounts?" another man asked.

"Yes," Wu explained. "You see her in movies about the Beautiful Country. She's on an island somewhere, holding a lantern in one hand and a book of her business accounts in the other. She's holding the torch so she can read her register at any time of the night or day and see how much money she has. Is that here in New York?"

"Yes, she's here," one man said but he began laughing. Several of the others did too. Wu joined in though he had no idea what was so funny.

"You go down to a place called Battery Park and take a boat out to see the statue."

"I will do that."

Another man laughed. "To the lady of accounts." They all emptied their glasses and resumed the game.

Chapter Fifteen

Amelia Sachs returned from the witness's apartment in Chinatown and Rhyme was amused to see the harsh look with which she studied Sonny Li when he announced with consummate pride that he was a "detective with public security bureau in People's Republic of China."

"You don't say," she responded coolly.

Sellitto explained to her about the Chinese cop's presence.

"You check him out?" she asked, closely studying the man, who was nearly a foot shorter than she.

Li spoke before the detective could. "They checked me out good, Hongse. I'm clean."

"Hoankseh? What the hell's that?" she barked.

He held up his hands defensively. "Means 'red.' Only that. Nothing bad. Your hair, I'm saying. I saw you on beach, saw your hair." Rhyme believed that there was the dabbling of a flirt in his crooked-tooth smile.

Eddie Deng confirmed that the word meant only the color; there was no secondary, derogatory meaning to it.

"He's okay, Amelia," Dellray confirmed.

"Though he oughta be in a holding cell," Coe muttered.

Sachs shrugged and turned to the Chinese cop. "What'd you mean about the beach? You were spying on me?"

"Not say anything then. Afraid you send me back. Wanted chance to get Ghost too."

Sachs rolled her eyes.

"Wait, Hongse, here." He held out some crumpled dollars.

She frowned. "What's that?"

"On beach, your bag, I'm saying. I need money. I borrow it."

Sachs looked into her purse, snapped it shut loudly. "Jesus Christ." A glance at Sellitto. "Can I collar him now?"

"No, no, I am paying back. Not thief. Here. Look, all there. Ten dollar extra even."

"Ten extra?"

"Interest, I'm saying."

"Where'd you get it?" she asked cynically. "I mean, who'd you steal this from?"

"No, no, it okay."

"Well, there's a defense for you. 'It's okay.'" Sachs sighed, took the money and handed back the questionable ten.

She then told the team what the witness – John Sung – had said. Rhyme relaxed a bit more about his decision to keep Sonny Li when he heard that Sung confirmed the information Li had given them, bolstering the Chinese cop's credibility. He was troubled, though, when Sachs mentioned John Sung's story about the captain's assessment of the Ghost.

"'Break the cauldrons and sink the boats,'" she said, explaining the meaning of the expression.

"To fu chen zhou,'" Li said, nodding grimly. "That describe Ghost good. Never relax or retreat until you win."

Sachs then began to help Mel Cooper log in the evidence from the van, cataloging it and carefully filling out chain of custody cards to show at trial that the evidence was accounted for and hadn't been tampered with. She was bagging the bloody rag she'd found in the van when Cooper looked at the sheet of newsprint on the table underneath the bag she was holding. He frowned. The tech pulled on latex gloves and extracted the bloody rag from the plastic. Using a magnifying glass, he looked it over carefully.

"This's odd, Lincoln," Cooper said.

"'Odd'? What does odd mean? Give me details, give me anomalies. Give me specifics!"

"I missed these fragments. Look." He held the cloth over a large sheet of newsprint and caressed it carefully with a brush.

Rhyme couldn't see anything.

"Some kind of porous stone," Cooper said, leaning over the sheet with a magnifying glass. "How could I miss it?" The tech seemed disheartened.

Where had the fragments come from? Had they been embedded in a fold? What were they?

"Oh, hell," Sachs muttered, looking at her hands.

"What?" Rhyme asked.

Blushing, she held up her fingers. "That was from me. I picked it up without gloves."

"Without gloves?" Rhyme asked, an edge in his voice. This was a serious error by a crime scene tech. Apart from the fact that the rag contained blood, which might be tainted with HIV or hepatitis, she'd contaminated the evidence. As head of the forensic unit at the NYPD, Lincoln Rhyme had fired people for this type of lapse.

"I'm sorry," Sachs said. "I know what it's from. John… Dr. Sung was showing me this amulet he wore. It was chipped and I guess I picked at it with my nail."

"Are you sure that's it?" Rhyme demanded.

Li nodded and said, "I remember… Sung let children on Fuzhou Dragon play with it. Qingtian soapstone. Worth some money, I'm saying. Good luck." He added, "It was of Monkey. Very famous in China."

Eddie Deng nodded. "Sure, the Monkey King… He was a mythological figure. My father'd read me stories about him."

But Rhyme wasn't interested in any myths. He was trying to catch a killer and save some lives.

And trying to figure out why Sachs had made a mistake of this magnitude.

A rookie's mistake.

The mistake of someone who's distracted. And what exactly is on her mind? he wondered.

"Throw out the -" he began.

"I'm sorry," she repeated.

"Throw out that top sheet of newsprint," Rhyme said evenly. "Let's move on."

As the tech tore off the sheet of paper his computer beeped. "Incoming." He read the screen. "Okay, we've got the blood types back. All samples're from the same person – presumably from the injured woman. It's type AB negative and the Barr Body test confirms that it's a woman's blood."

"Up on the wall, Thom," Rhyme called. And the aide wrote.

Before he was finished Mel Cooper's computer summoned them again. "It's the AFIS search results."

They were discouraged to find that the search of the fingerprints Sachs had collected came back negative. But as he examined the prints, which were digitized and sitting on the screen in front of them, Rhyme observed something unusual about the clearest prints they'd lifted – from the pipe used to break into the van. They knew these were the prints of Sam Chang because they matched a few lifted from the outboard motor and Li had confirmed that Chang had piloted the raft to shore. "Look at those lines," he said.

"Whatcha see, Lincoln?" Dellray asked.

Rhyme said nothing to the agent but, wheeling close to the screen, ordered, "Command, cursor down… stop. Cursor left… stop." The arrow of the cursor on the screen stopped on a line – an indentation on the pad of the index finger of Chang's right hand. There were similar ones on his middle finger and his thumb – as if Chang had been tightly gripping a thin cord.

"What is that?" Rhyme wondered aloud.

"Callus? A scar?" Eddie Deng offered.

Mel Cooper offered, "Never seen that before."

"Maybe it's a cut or wound of some kind."

"Maybe a rope burn," Sachs suggested.

"No, that'd be a blister. It must be a wound of some kind. Did you see any scars on Chang's hands?" Rhyme asked Li.

"No. I not see."

Indentations, calluses and scars on fingers and palms can be revealing about the professions or hobbies of the people who leave the prints – or on the actual fingers themselves in the case of suspects or victims. These are less useful nowadays where the only physical skill required by so many professions is keyboarding or jotting notes. Still, people who are in the manual trades, for instance, or who play certain sports frequently develop distinctive markings on their hands.

Rhyme had no idea what this pattern meant but some additional information might reveal that. He instructed Thom to write the observation down on the board. He then took a call from Special Agent Tobe Geller, one of the FBI's computer and electronics gurus, presently assigned to the Manhattan office. He'd completed his analysis of the Ghost's cell phone, which Sachs had found in the second raft at Easton Beach. The criminalist transferred the call to the speakerphone and a moment later Geller's animated voice said, "Now, let me tell you, this is an excessively interesting phone."

Rhyme didn't know the young man well but he remembered curly hair, an easy disposition and a consuming passion for anything containing microchips.

"Howsat?" Dellray asked.

"First of all, don't get your hopes up. It's virtually untraceable. We call 'em 'hot phones.' The memory chip's been deactivated so that the phone doesn't record the last call dialed or incoming calls – the log features are out completely. And it's a satellite phone – you can call anywhere in the world and you don't need to go through local service providers. The signals are relayed through a government network in Fuzhou. The Ghost or somebody working for him hacked into the system to activate it."

Dellray snapped, "Well, let's juss call somebody in the People's fuckin' Republic and tell 'em this bad guy's using their system."

"We tried that. But the Chinese position is that nobody can hack their phone system so we must be mistaken. Thank you for your interest."

"Even if it means helpin' collar the Ghost?"

Geller said, "I mentioned Kwan Ang by name. They still weren't interested. Meaning they were probably paid off."

Guanxi…

Rhyme thanked the young agent and they hung up. Score one for the Ghost, the criminalist thought angrily.

They were somewhat more successful with the firearms database. Mel Cooper found that the shell casings matched one of two weapons, both of them dating back nearly fifty years: a Russian Tokarev 7.62mm automatic was one type. "But," Cooper continued, "I'm betting he was using the Model 51, a Chinese version of the Tokarev. Virtually the same gun."

"Yeah, yeah," Sonny Li said. "Gotta be 51, I'm saying. I had Tokarev but lost it in ocean. More peoples in China got 51s."

"Ammunition?" Rhyme asked. "He might need to replenish it here somewhere." He was thinking that if the ammo was rare they might stake out the most likely places the Ghost would go to purchase more.

But Cooper shook his head. "You can buy the shells in any good-sized gun shop."

Damn.

A messenger arrived with an envelope. Sellitto took it and tore the end off. He extracted a handful of photographs. He glanced at Rhyme with a raised eyebrow. "The three bodies the Coast Guard recovered from the water. About a mile offshore. Two shot. One drowned."

The photos were facial shots of the dead men, eyes partially open but glazed. One had a hole in his temple. The other two showed no sign of visible injuries. There were fingerprint cards too.

"Those two," Li said, "they crew members. Other guy, one of immigrants. Down in hold with us. Don't know name."

"Pin them up," Rhyme said, "and run the prints through AFIS."

Sellitto taped them to the board under the GHOSTKILL heading and Rhyme realized that the room had gone silent as the members of the team stared at the macabre additions to the evidence charts. He supposed that Coe and Deng had little experience with corpses. That was one thing about crime scene detail, he recalled: how fast one becomes immune to the countenance of death.

Sonny Li continued to gaze at the photos silently for a moment. He muttered something in Chinese.

"What was that?" Rhyme asked.

He glanced at the criminalist. "I said, 'judges of hell.' Just expression. We have myth in China – ten judges of hell decide where your name go in Register of Living and Dead. Judges decide when you born and when you die. Everybody in world, name is in register."

Rhyme thought momentarily of recent doctors' appointments and of his upcoming operation. He wondered exactly where his own name was entered in The Register of the Living and the Dead.…

The silence was then broken by another beep from the computer. Mel Cooper glanced at the screen. "Got the make of the driver's car at the beach. BMW X5. It's one of those fancy four-by-fours." He added, "I myself drive a ten-year-old Dodge. Good mileage, though."

"Put it on the chart."

As Thom wrote, Li looked at the board and asked, "Whose car that?"

Sellitto said, "We think somebody was at the beach to pick up the Ghost. That's what he was driving." A nod at the board.

"What happen him?"

"Looks like he panicked and took off," Deng said. "The Ghost shot at him but he got away."

"He leave Ghost behind?" Li asked, frowning.

"Yep," Dellray confirmed.

Rhyme ordered, "Run the make through Motor Vehicles. New York, Jersey and Connecticut too. Can you break the search down to, let's say, a hundred fifty miles outside of Manhattan?"

"Yup." Cooper logged online, heading for the secure DMV sites. "Remember when this took weeks?" he mused. With a faint hum Rhyme's wheelchair drove up to the screen in front of the tech. Only a moment later he could see the screen fill with the names and addresses of all the registered owners of X5's.

"Shit," Dellray muttered, walking close. "How many we got?"

"More popular car than I'd hoped," Cooper said. "Hundreds."

"What're the names?" Sellitto asked. "Any Chinese?"

Cooper scrolled through the list. "Sounds like two. Ling and Zhao." He looked at Eddie Deng, who nodded his confirmation. "Yep, they're Chinese."

Cooper continued, "But neither of them're close to downtown. One's in White Plains and the other's in New Jersey, Paramus."

"Have New York and Jersey troopers check 'em out," Dellray ordered.

The tech continued to scroll through the list. "Here's a possibility – there're about forty X5's registered to corporations and another fifty or so registered to leasing agents."

"Any of the corporations sound Chinese?" Rhyme asked, wishing he himself could pound on the keys and scroll quickly through the list.

"Nope," Cooper replied. "But they're all pretty generic – holding companies. You know, it'd be a bear but we could contact all of them. And the leasing companies too. Find out who's actually driving the cars."

"Too much of a long shot," Rhyme said. "Waste of resources. It'll take days. Have a couple of officers from downtown check the ones closest to Chinatown but -"

"No, no, Loaban," Sonny Li interrupted. "You got to find that car. Number one thing you do. Fast."

Rhyme lifted a querying eyebrow.

The Chinese cop continued, "Find it now. Beemer, right? You call them Beemers. Put lots people on it. All your cops, I'm saying. Whole bunch."

"It'll take too much time," Rhyme muttered, irritated at the distraction. "We don't have the manpower. We'd have to find somebody in the corporation who was in charge of buying cars and, if it was leased, talk to the dealer's leasing agent, get the records and half of them wouldn't do it without a court order. I want to concentrate on finding the Changs and the Wus."

"No, Loaban," Li insisted. "The Ghost, he going to kill that driver. That what he doing now, looking for him."

"Nup, I'ma thinking you're wrong," Dellray said. "His pri-ority's killing the wits from the boat."

"What you mean 'wit'?"

"Witnesses," Sellitto explained.

Sachs agreed. "My take is that, sure, he's pissed about the driver leaving him and maybe he'll go after him if he has time later. But not now."

"No, no," Li said, shaking his head emphatically. "Important, I'm saying. Find man in Beemer."

"Why?" Sachs asked.

"Very clear. Very obvious. Get that driver. He lead you to snakehead. Maybe use him as bait to find Ghost."

"And what, Sonny," a testy Lincoln Rhyme muttered darkly, "is your basis for that conclusion. Where're the data to support it?"

"Lots data, I'm saying."

"What?"

The small man shrugged. "When I on bus coming to city this morning I saw sign."

"A road sign?" Rhyme asked. "What do you mean?"

"No, no, what you say it? I don't know…" He spoke in Chinese to Eddie Deng.

The young detective said, "He means an omen."

"An omen?" Rhyme barked, as if he were tasting spoiled fish.

Li reached absently for his cigarettes then left them untouched when he saw Thom's sharp glance. He continued, "I am coming into town on bus, I'm saying. I saw crow on road picking at food. Another crow tried steal it and first crow not just scare other away – he chase and try to peck eyes out. Not leave thief alone." Li raised his palms. This was, apparently, his entire argument.

"And?"

"Not clear, Loaban? What I say?"

"No, what you're saying isn't the least fucking bit clear."

"Okay, okay. I remember that crow now and I start thinking about Ghost and who he is and thinking about driver – man in fancy Beemer – and who he is. Well, he is enemy to Ghost. Like crow stealing food. The families – the Wus, the Changs – they not do anything bad to him personal, I'm saying. The driver…" Li frowned, looked frustrated and spoke again to Deng, who offered, "'Betray'?"

"Yes, betray him. He now Ghost's enemy."

Lincoln Rhyme tried not to laugh. "Noted, Sonny." He turned back to Dellray and Sellitto. "Now -"

"I see your face, Loaban," Li said. "I not saying gods come down and give me sign of crows. But remembering birds make me think different way, open up my mind. Get wind flowing through it. That good, you not think?"

"No, I think it's superstitious," Rhyme said. "It's woo woo and we don't have any time for – What the hell are you laughing at?"

"Woo woo. You say woo woo. You speaking Chinese. 'Woo' mean fog. So you say something woo woo, it foggy, unclear."

"Well, to us it means supernatural bullshit."

Even facing Rhyme's considerable bluster, Li wouldn't back down. "No, this not bullshit. Find that driver. You got to, Loaban."

Sachs's eyes were studying the small, persistent man. "I don't know, Rhyme."

"No way."

"Fuck good idea, I'm saying," Li assured the criminalist.

There was thick silence for a moment.

Sellitto intervened. "How 'bout if we put Bedding and Saul on it, give 'em a half-dozen guys from Patrol, Linc? They can check corporate and lease X5 registrations in Manhattan and Queens, only those – Chinatown here and the one in Flushing. And if there're any other breaks and we need bodies, we'll pull 'em off."

"All right, all right," Rhyme said angrily. "Just get moving on it."

"Half-dozen just six, right?" Li complained. "Need more than that." But Rhyme's glare silenced him. "Okay, okay, Loaban."

Pecking crows, stone monkeys and The Register of the Living and the Dead… Rhyme sighed then looked over the team. "Now, if it's not too much to ask, can we get back to some real police work?"

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative.

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

• Vehicle is a BMW X5. Checking registered owners.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

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

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

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

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

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Chapter Sixteen

The family name Chang means archer.

His father, wife and children sitting around him, Sam Chang, with a calligrapher's magic touch, drew the Chinese characters for this name on a slat of broken wood he'd found in the backyard of their new apartment. The silk case holding his prized wolf-, goat- and rabbit-hair brushes, ink stick and stone well, had gone down with the Fuzhou Dragon and he was forced to use a dreadful American plastic pen.

Still, Chang had learned calligraphy from his father when he was young and had practiced the art all his life, so, although the line width of the ink didn't vary, the strokes were perfectly formed – they were, he decided, like the studies by sixteenth-century artist Wan Li, who would do a simple rendering to record a scene he would later paint on ceramic – the sketch was half-formed but beautiful in its own right. Chang took the piece of wood representing the family name and rested it on the impromptu cardboard altar sitting on the fireplace mantel in the living room.

China is a theological shopping mall, a country in which the Buddha is the most recognized traditional deity but where the philosophers Confucius and Lao-tzu stand as demigods, where Christianity and Islam have large pockets of devotees and where the vast majority of people hedge their bets by regularly praying and sacrificing to folk gods so numerous no one knows exactly how many there are.

But highest in the pantheon of gods for most Chinese are their ancestors.

And it was to the Chang progenitors that this red altar was devoted, decorated with the only ancestral likenesses that had survived the sinking of the ship: seawater-stained snapshots from Changs wallet of his parents and grandparents.

"There," he announced. "Our home."

Chang Jiechi shook his son's hand and then gestured for tea, which Mei-Mei poured for him. The old man cupped the hot brew and looked around the dark rooms. "Better than some."

Despite the man's words, though, Sam Chang felt another wave of shame, like a hot fever, that he was subjecting his father to such a mean place as this. The strongest duty after that owed to the ruler of the government, according to Confucius, is that which a son owes to his father. Ever since Chang had planned their escape from China he'd worried about how the trip would affect the elderly man. Ever quiet and unemotional, Chang Jiechi had taken the news of their impending flight silently, leaving Chang to wonder if he was doing the right thing in the old man's eyes.

And now, after the sinking of the Dragon, their life wasn't going to get better any time soon. This apartment would have to be their prison until the Ghost was captured or went back to China, which might be months from now.

He thought again about that place they'd stopped at to steal the paint and brushes – The Home Store. The rows of glistening bathtubs and mirrors and lights and marble slabs. He wished he could have moved his father and family into a home outfitted with the wonderful things he'd seen there. This was squalor. This was -

A firm knock on the door.

For a moment no one in the family moved. Then Chang looked out through the curtain and relaxed. He opened the door and broke into a smile at the sight of the middle-aged man wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Joseph Tan walked inside and the men shook hands. Chang glanced outside into the quiet residential street and saw no one who looked like enforcers for the snakehead. In the humid, overcast air was a foul smell; the apartment, it turned out, was not far from a sewage treatment plant. He stepped inside, locked the door.

Tan, the brother of a good friend of Chang's in Fujian, had come over here some years ago. He was a U.S. citizen and, since he had no history of dissident activity, traveled freely between China and New York. Chang had spent several evenings with him and his brother in Fuzhou last spring and had finally grown comfortable enough to share with Tan the news that he intended to bring his family to the Beautiful Country. Tan had volunteered to help. He had arranged for this apartment and for Chang and his oldest son to work in one of Tan's businesses – a quick printing shop not far from the apartment.

The easygoing man now paid respects to elderly Chang Jiechi and then to Mei-Mei and they sat down to tea. Tan offered cigarettes. Sam Chang declined but his father took one and the two men smoked.

"We heard about the ship on the news," Tan said. "I thanked Guan Yin you were safe."

"Many died. It was terrible. We nearly drowned, all of us."

"The TV said the snakehead was the Ghost."

Chang replied that it was and that he'd tried to kill them even after they came ashore.

"Then we will have to be very careful. I will not mention your name to anyone. But I have people around the shop who will be curious about you. I had thought you should start work right away but now, with the Ghost… It would be better to wait. Maybe next week. Or the week after. I'll train you then. Do you know about American printing equipment?"

Chang shook his head no. In China he'd been a professor of art and culture – until his dissident status had gotten him fired. Just like the displaced, and despised, artists who'd lost their jobs during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Chang had been forced to do "right-thinking" work – labor. And like many of the calligraphers and artists from that earlier era he'd gotten a job as a printer. But he'd operated only outdated Chinese or Russian presses.

They spoke for a time about life in China and life here. Then Tan wrote out directions to the shop and the hours Chang and his son would be working. He asked to meet William.

Chang opened the door to the boy's bedroom. He stared – first in surprise, then in dismay – at the empty room. William was not there.

He turned to Mei-Mei. "Where is our son?"

"He was in the bedroom. I didn't see him leave."

Chang strode to the back door and found it was unlocked. William had left it unlatched when he'd snuck out.

No!

The backyard was empty. The alleyway behind it too. He returned to the living room. He asked Tan, "Where would a teenage boy go around here?"

"He speaks English?"

"Better than we do."

"At the corner there's a Starbucks, do you know them?"

"Yes, the coffee place."

"A lot of Chinese teenagers go there. He won't say anything about the Dragon, will he?"

Chang said, "No, I'm sure. He knows the danger."

Tan, who had children himself, said, "He'll be your biggest problem. He'll watch that" – gesturing at the television set – "and want everything he sees on it. Video games and cars and clothes. And he'll want them without working for them. Because in the television you see people have things, you don't see them earning them. You came all this way, you survived the Atlantic Ocean, you survived the Ghost. Don't get deported because the police arrest your son for shoplifting and turn him over to the INS."

Chang understood what the man was saying but was panicking at the moment, not able to concentrate on the advice. The Ghost might have bangshous all over the streets here. Or men who would sell their whereabouts to him. "I must go find my boy now."

He and Tan walked outside to the sidewalk. Tan pointed him toward the corner, where the coffee shop was located. "I'll leave you now. Be strong with your son. Now that he's here it will be far more difficult. But you must control him."

Chang kept his head down as he walked past the cheap apartments, Laundromats, delicatessens, restaurants and stores. This neighborhood was less congested than Manhattan 's Chinatown, sidewalks wider, fewer people on the streets. More than half the people here were Asian but the population was mixed: Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. There were many Hispanics too and a number of Indians and Pakistanis. Hardly any whites.

He glanced into the shops as he walked past and didn't see his son in any of them.

He prayed to Chen-wu that the boy had merely gone for a walk by himself and that he hadn't met someone and told them how they'd come here – perhaps trying to impress a girl.

A small park – no sign of him.

A restaurant. Nothing.

He walked into the Starbucks coffee shop and a number of cautious teenagers and complacent old men glanced at the immigrant's troubled face. William was not here. Chang ducked out quickly.

Then, happening to glance down a dim alley, he saw his son. The boy was talking with two young Chinese men, both wearing black leather jackets. Their hair was long and high, swept back with spray or oil. William handed one of them something Chang couldn't see. The man nodded to his friend and slipped a small bag into William's hand. Then the two turned quickly and walked back down the alley. William looked into the bag, examining what he'd just received, then stuffed it into his pocket. No! Chang thought in shock. What was this? Drugs. His son was buying drugs?

Chang ducked back out of the alley and, when his son stepped out, grabbed the shocked boy by his arm and pressed him against the wall.

"How could you do this?" Chang demanded.

"Leave me alone."

"Answer me!"

William glanced at the nearby coffee shop, where three or four people sat outside, enjoying the momentary absence of rain. They'd heard Chang's raised voice and glanced toward the boy and his father. Chang noticed them and released his son, nodding with his head for the boy to follow.

"Don't you know that the Ghost is looking for us? He wants to kill us!"

"I wanted to go outside. It's like a prison here! That fucking little room, with my brother."

Chang grabbed his son's arm again. "Don't use that language with me. You can't disobey me like this."

"It's a shitty little place. I want a room of my own," the boy replied, pulling away.

"Later. We all have to make sacrifices."

"It was your choice to come here. You can make the sacrifices."

"Don't speak to me that way!" Chang said. "I'm your father."

"I want a room. I want some privacy."

"You should be grateful we have someplace to stay at all. None of us have rooms of our own. Your grandfather sleeps with your mother and me."

The boy said nothing.

He'd learned many things about his son today. That he was insolent, that he was a car thief, that the iron cables of obligation to family that had so absolutely guided Sam Chang's life meant little to the boy. Chang wondered superstitiously if he had made a mistake in giving the boy his Western name when he started school, calling him after the American computer genius Gates. Perhaps this had somehow caused the boy to veer onto a path of rebellion.

As they approached the apartment Chang asked, "Who were they?"

"Who?" the boy answered evasively.

"Those men you were with."

"Nobody."

"What did they sell you? Was it drugs?"

Irritated silence was the response.

They were at the front door to the apartment. William started to walk past his father but Chang stopped him. He reached into the boy's pocket. William's arms rose hostilely and for a shocked moment Chang thought his son would shove him away or even hit him. But after an interminable moment he lowered his hands.

Chang pulled out the bag and looked inside, stunned at the sight of the small silver pistol.

"What are you doing with this?" he whispered viciously. "So you can rob people?"

Silence.

"Tell me, son." His strong calligrapher's hand closed firmly on the boy's arm. "Tell me!"

"I got it so I can protect us!" the boy shouted.

"I will protect us. And not with this."

"You?" William laughed with a sneer. "You wrote your articles about Taiwan and democracy and made our life miserable. You decided to come here and the fucking snakehead tries to kill us all. You call that taking care of us?"

"What did you pay for this with?" He held up the bag containing the pistol. "Where did you get the money? You have no job."

The boy ignored the question. "The Ghost killed the others. What if he tries to kill us? What will we do?"

"We'll hide from him until the police find him."

"And if they don't?"

"Why do you dishonor me like this?" Chang asked angrily.

Pushing inside the apartment, William shook his head, a look of exasperation on his face, and walked brusquely into the bedroom. He slammed the door.

Chang took the tea his wife offered him.

Chang Jiechi asked, "Where did he go?"

"Up the street. He got this." He showed him the gun and the elder Chang took it in his gnarled hands.

Chang asked, "Is it loaded?"

His father had been a soldier, resisting Mao Zedong on the Long March that swept Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists into the sea, and was familiar with weapons. He examined it closely. "Yes. Be careful. Keep the safety lever in this position." He handed the gun back to his son.

"Why does he disrespect me?" Chang asked angrily. He hid the weapon on the top shelf of the front closet and led the old man to the musty couch.

His father said nothing for a moment. The pause was so long that Chang looked at the old man expectantly. Finally, with a wry look in his eyes, his father responded, "Where did you learn all your wisdom, son? What formed your mind, your heart?"

"My professors, books, colleagues. You mostly, Baba."

"Ah, me? You learned from your father?" Chang Jiechi asked in mock surprise.

"Yes, of course." Chang frowned, unsure what the man was getting at.

The old man said nothing but a faint smile crossed his gray face.

A moment passed. Then Chang said, "And you are saying that William learned from me? I've never been insolent to you, Baba."

"Not to me. But you certainly have been to the Communists. To Beijing. To the Fujianese government. Son, you're a dissident. Your whole life has been rebellion."

"But…"

"If Beijing said to you, 'Why does Sam Chang dishonor us?' what would your response be?"

"I'd say, 'What have you done to earn my respect?'"

"William might say the same to you." Chang Jiechi lifted his hands, his argument complete.

"But my enemies have been oppression, violence, corruption." Sam Chang loved China with his complete heart. He loved the people. The culture. The history. His life for the past twelve years had been a consuming, passionate struggle to help his country step into a more enlightened era.

Chang Jiechi said, "But all William sees is you hunched over your computer at night, attacking authority and being unconcerned about the consequences."

Words of protest formed in Chang's mind but he fell silent. Then he realized with a shock that his father perhaps was right. He laughed faintly. He thought about going to speak to his son but something was holding him back. Anger, confusion – maybe even fear of what his son might say to him. No, he'd speak to the boy later. When -

Suddenly the old man winced in pain.

"Baba!" Chang said, alarmed.

One of their few possessions that had survived the sinking of the Dragon was the nearly full bottle of Chang Jiechi's morphine. Chang had given his father a tablet just before the ship sank and he'd had the bottle in his pocket. It was tightly sealed and no seawater had gotten inside.

He now gave his father two more pills and placed a blanket over him. The man lay back on the couch and closed his eyes.

Sam Chang sat heavily in a musty chair.

Their possessions gone, his father desperately needing treatment, a ruthless killer their enemy, his own son a renegade and criminal…

So much difficulty around them.

He wanted to blame someone: Mao, the Chinese Communist Party, the People's Liberation Army soldiers…

But the reason for their present hardship and danger seemed to lie in only one place, where William had assigned it: at Chang's own feet.

Regret would serve no purpose, though. All he could now do was pray that the stories about life here were true, and not myths – that the Beautiful Country was indeed a land of miracles, where evil was brought to light and purged, where the most pernicious flaws within our bodies could quickly be made right, and where generous liberty fulfilled its promise that troubled hearts would be troubled no more.

Chapter Seventeen

At 1:30 that afternoon the Ghost was walking quickly through Chinatown, head down, worried as always about being recognized.

To most Westerners, of course, he was invisible, his features blending together into one generic Asian man. White Americans could rarely tell the difference between a Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean. Among the Chinese, though, his features would be distinct and he was determined to remain anonymous. He'd once bribed a traffic magistrate in Hong Kong $10,000 one-color cash to avoid being arrested in a minor brawl some years ago so there would be no picture of him in criminal records. Even Interpol's Automated Search and Archives section and the Analytical Criminal Intelligence Unit didn't have any reliable surveillance photos of him (he knew this because he'd used a hacker in Fuzhou to break into Interpol's database through its supposedly secure X400 email system).

So he now strode quickly, keeping his head down – most of the time.

But not always.

He would lift his eyes to study women, the pretty and young ones, the voluptuous ones, the svelte ones, the coy and flirtatious and the timid. The clerks, the teenage girls, the wives, the businesswomen, the tourists. Eastern or Western made no difference to him. He wanted a body lying beneath him, whimpering – in pleasure or pain (that made no difference either), as he pulsed up and down on top of her, gripping her head tightly between his palms.

A woman with light brown hair passed by, a Western woman. He slowed and let himself be touched by the veil of her perfume. He hungered – though he realized too that his lust wasn't for her but for his Yindao.

He had no time for his fantasies, though; he'd come to the merchants association, where the Turks awaited him. He spat on the sidewalk, found the back entrance, which they'd left open, and stepped inside. He made his way up to the top floor. It was time to conduct some important business.

Inside the large office, he found Yusuf and the two other Turks. It hadn't taken much – a few phone calls, a threat and a bribe – to find the name of the man who was sitting, nervous to the point of tears, in a chair in front of his own desk.

Jimmy Mah's eyes fell to the floor when the Ghost walked into the room. The snakehead pulled up a chair and sat beside him. The Ghost took Mah's hand casually – a gesture not unusual among Chinese men – and he felt the trembling of muscles and the pulsing of a frightened heart.

"I didn't know they came in on the Dragon. They didn't tell me! I swear that. They lied to me. When they were here I hadn't even heard about the ship. I didn't watch the news this morning."

The Ghost continued to hold the man's hand, adding slight pressure to his grip but saying nothing.

"Are you going to kill me?" Mah asked the question in such a whisper that he repeated it though the Ghost had heard perfectly.

"The Changs and the Wus. Where are they?" The Ghost squeezed the man's hand slightly harder and received a pleasant whimper for his effort. "Where are they?"

Mah's eyes glanced at the Turks. He'd be wondering what kind of terrible weapons they'd have on them, knives or garrotes or guns.

But in the end it was simply the faint pressure of the Ghost's palm against poor Jimmy Mah's that loosened his tongue.

"Two different places, sir. Wu Qichen is in an apartment in Chinatown. A broker I use set him up with a place."

"The address?"

"I don't know. I swear! But the broker knows. He'll tell you."

"Where is this broker?"

Mah quickly recited the name and address. The Ghost memorized it.

"And the others?"

"Sam Chang took his family to Queens."

" Queens?" the Ghost asked. "Where?" A particularly delicate squeeze of the hand. He imagined momentarily that he was touching Yindao's breast.

Mah nodded toward the desk. "There! It's on that piece of paper."

The Ghost picked it up, glanced at the address and then pocketed the note. He released the tong leader's hand and slowly rubbed his thumb in the sweat that had poured from Mah's palm. "You won't tell anyone I asked about this," the Ghost murmured.

"No, no, of course not."

The Ghost smiled. "You did me a favor, for which I am thankful. I am indebted to you. Now, I will do you a favor in return."

Mah fell silent. Then cautiously he asked in a shaky voice, "A favor?"

"What other business arrangements do you have, Mr. Mah? What other activities are you involved in? You help piglets, you help snake-heads. But do you run massage parlors?"

"Some." The man was looking calmer. He wiped his hand on his slacks. "Mostly gambling."

"Ah gambling, sure. Much gambling here in Chinatown. I like to gamble. Do you?"

Mah swallowed and wiped his face with a white handkerchief. "Don't we all love to gamble? Yes, yes."

"Tell me then: Who interferes with your gambling operation? Another tong? A triad? Some Meiguo gang? The police? I can talk to people. I have connections throughout the government. My connections go very high. I can make sure nobody bothers your gambling parlors."

"Yes, sir, yes. Aren't there always problems? It's not the Chinese, though, or the police. It's the Italians. Why do they cause us such trouble? I don't know. The young men, they firebomb us, beat up our customers, rob the gambling halls."

"The Italians," the Ghost mused. "What are they called? There's a derogatory term… I can't think of it."

"Wops," Mah said in English.

"Wops."

Mah smiled. "It's a reference to those in your line of work."

"Mine?"

"Immigration. Wop means 'without passport.' When Italian immigrants came here years ago without documentation they were labeled WOP. It's very insulting."

The Ghost looked around the room, frowning.

"Is there something you need, sir?" Mah asked.

"Do you have a thick marker? Some paint perhaps?"

"Paint?" Mah's eyes followed the Ghost's. "No. But I can call my assistant downstairs. I can have her get some. Whatever you like, I can get. Anything."

"Wait," the Ghost said, "that won't be necessary. I have another thought."

Lon Sellitto looked up from his Nokia and announced to the GHOST-KILL team, "We've got a body in Chinatown. Detective from the Fifth Precinct's on the line." He turned back to his phone.

Alarmed, Rhyme looked up at him. Had the Ghost tracked down and killed another of the immigrants? Who? he wondered. Chang, Wu? The baby?

But Sellitto hung up and said, "Doesn't look related to the Ghost. Vic's name's Jimmy Mah."

"Know him," Eddie Deng said. "Heads a tong."

Coe nodded. "I've heard of him too. Smuggling's not his specialty but he does a little meeting and greeting."

"What's that mean?" Rhyme asked acerbically when Coe explained no further.

The agent answered, "When undocumenteds get to Chinatown there's an official who helps them out – gets them into a safehouse, gives them a little money. Called 'meeting and greeting' the illegals. Most of the meeters work for snakeheads but some do it freelance. Like Mah. It's just that there's not a lot of profit there. If you're corrupt and you want big bucks you'll go with drugs or gambling or massage parlors. That's what Mah's into. Well, was, apparently."

Rhyme asked, "Why don't you think it's related?"

Sellitto said, "There was a message painted on the wall behind his desk, where they found the body. It said 'You call us wops, you take our homes.' It was written in Mah's blood, by the way."

Nodding, Deng said, "Major rivalry between the third-generation Mafiosi – you know, the Sopranos crowd – and the tongs. Chinese gambling and massage parlors – some drugs too – they've just about kicked the Italians out of Manhattan O.C."

The demographics of organized crime, Rhyme knew, were as fluid as those of the city itself.

"Anyway," Coe said, "those people off the Dragon, they're going to dig underground as fast as they can. They'd avoid somebody public like Mah. I would."

"Unless they were desperate," Sachs said. "Which they are." She looked at Rhyme. "Maybe the Ghost killed Mah and made it look like an O.C. hit. Should I run the scene?"

Rhyme debated for a moment. Yes, the families were desperate but Rhyme had already seen the immigrants' resourcefulness, presumably the work of Sam Chang. It would leave too many trails to go to somebody like Mah for help, he assessed. "No, I need you here. But send a special team from Crime Scene and tell them to copy us on the crime scene report stat."

To Eddie Deng, Rhyme said, "Call Dellray and Peabody at the Federal Building. Let them know about the killing."

"Yessir," Deng said.

Dellray had gone downtown to arrange for the extra agents from the two relevant federal jurisdictions in New York – the Southern and Eastern, which covered Manhattan and Long Island. He was also wielding his influence to get the SPEC-TAC team on site, which Washington was reluctant to do; the special unit was generally reserved for major hostage standoffs and embassy takeovers, not for manhunts. Still, Rhyme knew, Dellray was a tough man to say no to and if anybody could get the much-needed tactical force up here it'd be the lanky agent.

Rhyme maneuvered the chair back to the evidence and the whiteboards.

Nothing, nothing, nothing…

What else can we do? he wondered. What haven't we exhausted? Scanning the board… Finally he said, "Let's look at the blood some more." He looked over the samples that Sachs had found: that from the injured immigrant, the woman with the broken or gashed arm, hand or shoulder.

Lincoln Rhyme loved blood as a forensic tool. It was easy to spot, it stuck like glue to all kinds of surfaces, it retained its important forensic information for years.

The history of blood in criminal investigation, in fact, largely reflects the history of forensic science itself.

The earliest effort – in the mid-1800s – to use blood as evidence focused simply on classifying it, that is, determining if an unknown substance was indeed blood and not, say, dried brown paint. Fifty years later the focus was on identifying blood as human, as opposed to animal. Not long after that detectives began looking for a way to differentiate blood – break it down into a limited number of categories – and scientists responded by creating the process of blood typing (the A, B, O system as well as the MN and the Rh systems), which narrows down the number of sources. In the sixties and seventies forensic scientists sought to go one step further – to individuate the blood, that is, trace it back to a single individual, like a fingerprint. Early efforts at doing this biochemically – identifying enzymes and proteins – could eliminate many individuals as the source, but not all. It wasn't until DNA typing that true individuation was achieved.

Classification, identification, differentiation, individuation… that's criminalistics in a nutshell.

But there was more to blood than linking it to an individual. The way it fell on surfaces at crime scenes – spatter, it was called – provided great information about the nature of the attack. And Lincoln Rhyme often examined the content of blood to determine what it could tell about the individual who'd shed it.

"Let's see if our injured woman's got a drug habit or's taking some rare medicine. Call the M.E.'s office and have them do a complete workup. I want to know everything that's in her bloodstream."

As Cooper was talking to the office Sellitto's phone rang and he took the call.

Rhyme could see in the detective's face that he was receiving some bad news.

"Oh, Jesus… oh, no…"

The criminalist sensed an odd fibrillation in the core of his body – an area where he could by rights feel nothing at all. People who are paralyzed often feel phantom pain from limbs and parts of their body that cannot have any sensation. Rhyme not only had experienced this feeling but he'd felt shock and adrenaline rushes too, when his logical mind knew that this was impossible.

"What, Lon?" Sachs asked.

"Fifth Precinct again. Chinatown," he said, wincing. "Another killing. This time it's definitely the Ghost." He glanced at Rhyme and shook his head. "Man, it's not good."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, they're saying it's fucking unpleasant, Linc."

Unpleasant was not a word that one heard often from an NYPD homicide detective, especially Lon Sellitto, as hardened a cop as you'd ever find.

He wrote down some information then hung up the phone and glanced at Sachs. "Suit up, Officer, you've got a scene to run."

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

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

• Vehicle is a BMW X5. Checking registered owners.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

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

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

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

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

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Chapter Eighteen

Amelia Sachs had left the Camaro on the street near Rhyme's town house and was driving a crime scene bus downtown on the FDR Drive.

The vehicle was functional city property – a Ford station wagon – but she drove it pretty much the same as if she'd been behind the wheel of her gaudy yellow sports car. The time was 2:45 P.M., before rush hour, but the roads were still crowded and maneuvering through traffic took all her skill.

"Hey, Hongse," Sonny Li began nervously as she skidded around a taxi at 70 m.p.h. But he apparently preferred she keep her attention on the road and fell silent.

In the backseat were Eddie Deng, who wasn't concerned about her driving, and agent Alan Coe, who, like the Chinese cop, clearly was. He gripped the chest strap of his seat belt as if he were holding the rip cord of a parachute during a skydive.

"Did you see that?" Sachs asked casually as a cab ignored the siren and light on the CS bus and pulled out directly in front of her to make the exit at Houston Street.

"We moving real fast," Li said then seemed to remember that he didn't want to distract her and he stopped talking again.

"Which way, Eddie?" Sachs asked.

"The Bowery, turn left, two more blocks then a right."

She pulled off onto a rain-slick Canal Street at fifty, controlled the skid before they went into a garbage truck and accelerated into Chinatown, the tires, goosed by the big cop engine, steaming up the wheel wells.

Li muttered something in Chinese.

"What?"

"Ten judges of hell," he translated his own words.

Sachs recalled – the ten judges of hell, who kept the book called The Register of the Living and the Dead, containing the name of everybody in the world. The balance sheet of life and death.

My father, Herman, she thought, is already inscribed on the dead side.

Where does my name fall in the register? she wondered.

And the names of people I'm now close to? The people yet to be?

Thinking of life and death…

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

"Hello, Doctor."

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

"Yes?"

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

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

"Uhm, Officer," Deng interrupted her thoughts. "I think that's a red light ahead of us."

"Got it," she said and slowed to thirty to sweep through the intersection.

"Gan," Li whispered. Then offered what Sachs had guessed was the translation: "Fuck."

Three minutes later the crime scene bus skidded to a stop in front of an alley surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers, kept back by a spider strand of yellow police tape and a half-dozen uniformed officers from the Patrol division. The front door to what seemed to be a small warehouse was open. Sachs climbed out, followed by Deng, who called, "Hey, Detective," to a blond man in a suit. He nodded and Deng introduced her to a homicide detective from the Fifth Precinct.

"You're running the scene?" he asked.

Sachs nodded. "What is this place?"

"Warehouse. Owner's clean, looks like. We've contacted him and he doesn't know anything except that the victim – name was Jerry Tang – worked here. Eight arrests, two convictions. Mostly he boosts wheels and drives getaway. Does – did – some muscle work."

He nodded at the silver BMW four-by-four in the alley. An X5. This was the SUV that Tang had driven out to Long Island to pick up the Ghost this morning. There was a bullet hole in the back door from the Ghost's gunshot as Tang had fled, abandoning him.

A patrol officer responding to some screams had noticed a late-model BMW four-by-four next to the building where the commotion had come from. Then he'd seen the bullet hole in the back and, with his partner, they'd entered the warehouse.

And found what was left of Jerry Tang. He'd been tortured with a knife or razor – skin was missing, including his eyelids – then killed.

Rhyme, she knew, hated to be one-upped by other law enforcers almost as much as he hated being one-upped by perpetrators and when it turned out that Sonny Li, the crow detective, had been right – that the Ghost's first mission was to kill the man who'd abandoned him – the criminalist's mood darkened even more. It hadn't helped, of course, that Li'd said, "Hey, should have listen to me, Loaban. Should have listen."

The detective from the Fifth now continued, "We've got two canvassers from downtown, checking out wits. Oh, there they are now."

Sachs nodded to two detectives she'd worked with before. Bedding and Saul were no longer needed to track down registered owners of BMW X5's and were back at their usual assignment: post-crime canvassing, "spadework," as it was called. They were known for their consummate skill in double-teaming witnesses. Despite their different heights, builds and complexions (one had freckles), their identical sandy hair and their demeanor resulted in their nickname: the Twins. They were also known as the Hardy Boys.

"Got here twenty minutes after the first sighting," said either Bedding or Saul. The tall one.

"Was a teenage girl on her way home from drama club at school. Heard a scream in the building. But didn't report it till she got home. She was -"

"- afraid, you know. Can't blame her, considering what the respondings found at the scene inside. I'd be too."

"Afraid, he means. Blood everywhere. And body parts."

Sachs winced, but not from the gore; it was only because she was lifting her knees to pull on the white Tyvek crime scene suit and her arthritic joints protested painfully.

"We've talked to about eight people in the building -" Bedding or Saul said.

"- and around it. This is even more a case of the deaf and dumbs than usual."

"Yeah, most people here got the blinds too."

"We think they heard it was the Ghost who worked on Tang and that scared everybody off. Nobody'll help. The most anybody'll tell us is that two or -"

"- three or four -"

"- people, presumably men, kicked in the door to the warehouse there."

"And there was major screaming for ten minutes. Then two gunshots. Then it got quiet."

"The girl's mother called nine-one-one."

"But everybody was gone by the time Patrol got here."

Sachs looked up and down the alleyway and the street in front of the warehouse. As she'd feared, the rain had destroyed any hope of finding tread marks of whatever kind of car the Ghost and his assistants had been driving.

"Who's been inside?" she asked the blond detective from the Fifth Precinct.

"Only one uniform – to see if the vic was alive. We heard from upstairs you wanted it virgin so we didn't even let the tour doc from the Medical Examiner's office go in."

"Good," she said. "I want the patrol officer who was inside."

"I'll track 'em down."

A moment later he returned with a uniformed patrolwoman. "I was first officer. You wanted to see me?"

"Just your shoe."

"Well, okay." The woman slipped it off and handed it to Sachs, who shot a picture of the tread and noted the size of the sole so that she could differentiate it from the prints of the Ghost and his accomplices.

She then put rubber bands around her own shoes to distinguish her footprints. Looking up, she noticed Sonny Li standing in the doorway of the warehouse. "Excuse me," she said testily, "you mind standing back?"

"Sure, sure, Hongse. That big room. Man, lot to look at. But you know Confucius, right?"

"Not really," she said, concentrating on the scene.

"He write, 'Longest journey must begin with first step.' I think he write that. Maybe somebody else. I read Mickey Spillane more than Confucius."

"Could you wait over there, Officer Li?"

"Call me Sonny, I'm saying."

He stepped aside and Sachs walked into the warehouse. The headset went on and she clicked the Motorola handy-talkie to life.

"Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Central. Need a patch to a landline, K?"

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. What's the number, K?"

She gave them Lincoln Rhyrne's phone number and a moment later she heard his voice. "Sachs, where are you? At the scene yet? We've got to move on this."

As always – and inexplicably – his feisty impatience reassured her. She scanned the carnage. "Jesus, Rhyme, this's a mess."

"Tell me," he said. "Give me the blueprint first."

"Warehouse and office combined. Thirty by fifty feet, more or less, office area about ten by twenty. A few desks and -"

"Few? Two or eighteen?"

Rhyme was hell on anyone guilty of sloppy observation.

"Sorry," she said. "Four metal desks, eight chairs, no, nine – one's overturned."

The one that Tang had been tied to when the Ghost had tortured and killed him.

"Rows of metal shelves, stacked with cardboard boxes, food inside. Canned goods and cellophane packages. Restaurant supplies."

"Okay, Thom's ready to start writing. You are ready, aren't you, Thom? Write big, so I can see it. Those words over there, I can't make them out. Redo them… All right, all right… Please redo them." He then said, "Start on the grid, Sachs."

She began to search the scene, thinking: A first step… the longest journey.

But twenty minutes of one-step-at-a-time searching revealed virtually nothing useful. She found two shell casings, which appeared to be the same as those from the Ghost's gun at the beach. But there was nothing that would lead them directly to where he might be hiding out in New York. No cigarettes, no matchbooks, no fingerprints – the assailants had worn leather gloves.

She studied the ceiling and smelled the scene – two of Rhyme's important directives to crime scene searchers – but detected nothing that would help. Sachs jumped when Rhyme's voice popped into her ear. "Talk to me, Sachs. I don't like it when you're quiet."

"The place is a mess," she repeated.

"You said that. A. Mess. That doesn't really tell us very much, now, does it? Give me details."

"It's been ransacked, drawers opened, posters torn off the walls, desks swept clean; statues, figurines, fishbowl, cups and glasses smashed."

"In a struggle?"

"I don't think so."

"Theft of anything in particular?"

"Maybe but it's mostly vandalism, I'd say."

"What're their shoe treads like?" Rhyme asked.

"All smooth."

"Stylish bastards," he muttered.

He was, she knew, hoping for some dirt or fibers that might lead them to the Ghost's safehouse but, while the gullies in deep-tread-soled shoes can retain such evidence for months, smooth-soled shoes lose trace far more quickly.

"Okay, Sachs, keep going. What do the footprints tell you?"

"I'm thinking that -"

"Don't think, Sachs. That's not the way to understand a crime scene. You know that. You have to feel it."

His seductive, low voice was hypnotizing and with each word he spoke she felt herself uneasily being transported back to the crime itself, as if she were a participant. Her palms began to sweat copiously in the latex gloves.

"He's there. Jerry Tang is at his desk and they -"

"'We,'" Rhyme corrected sternly. "You're the Ghost, remember."

"- we kick the door in. He gets up and runs toward the back door but we get him and drag him back to his chair."

"Let's narrow it down, Sachs. You're the snakehead. You've found the man who's betrayed you. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to kill him."

I saw crow on road picking at food. Another crow tried steal it and first crow not just scare other away – he chase and try to peck eyes out.

Suddenly she was filled with a burst of unfocused anger. It nearly took her breath away. "No, wait, Rhyme. It's like his death is secondary. What I really want is to hurt him. I've been betrayed and I want to hurt him bad."

"What do you do? Exactly."

She hesitated, sweating hard in the hot suit. Several places on her body itched at once. She felt like ripping a hole in the suit to scratch her skin.

"I can't -"

"'I', Sachs. Who's 'I'? You're the Ghost, remember?"

Solidly in her own persona, though, she said, "I'm having trouble with this one, Rhyme. There's something about him, about the Ghost. He's way on the other side." She hesitated. "It feels really bad there."

A place where families die, where children are trapped in the holds of sinking ships, where men and women are shot in the back scrabbling for the only sanctuary they can find: a heartless, cold ocean. A place where they die for no reason other than that they are irritations and stumbling blocks.

Sachs stared at the ever-open eyes of Jerry Tang.

"Go there, Sachs," Rhyme murmured. "Go on. I'll get you back. Don't worry."

She wished she could believe him.

The criminalist continued, "You've found your betrayer. You're furious with him. What do you do?"

"The other three men with me tie Tang to a chair and we use knives or razors on him. He's terrified, screaming… We're taking our time. All around me – there're bits of flesh. What looks like part of an ear, strips of skin. We cut his eyelids off…" She hesitated. "But I don't see any clues, Rhyme. Nothing that'll help us."

"But there are clues there, Sachs. You know there are. Remember Locard."

Edmond Locard was an early French criminalist who stated that at every crime scene there's an evidence exchange between the victim and the perpetrator, or between the scene itself and the perp. It might be difficult to identify the evidence that's been exchanged and harder yet to trace it to its source but, as Rhyme had said dozens of times, a criminalist must ignore the apparent impossibilities of the job.

"Keep going – further, further… You're the Ghost. You're holding your knife or razor."

Then, suddenly, the phantom anger she felt vanished, replaced by an eerie serenity. This shocking, yet oddly magnetic, sensation filled her. Breathing hard, sweating, she stared at Jerry Tang and was possessed fully by the foul spirit of Kwan Ang, Gui, the Ghost. She did feel what he had experienced – a visceral satisfaction at the sight of his betrayer's pain and slow death.

Gasping, she realized she felt a deep lust to see more, to hear Tang's screams, watch his blood spiral down his shaking limbs…

And with that thought came another: "I'm…"

"What, Sachs?"

"I'm not the one torturing Tang."

"You're not?"

"No. I want the others to do it. So that I can watch. It's more satisfying that way. It's like a porno tape. I want to see everything, hear everything. I don't want to miss a single detail. And I have them cut his eyelids off first so Tang has to watch me watch him." She whispered, "I want it to keep going on and on."

A whisper. "Ah, good, Sachs. And that means there's a place you're watching from?"

"Yes. There's a chair here, facing Tang, about ten feet away from the body." Her voice cracked. "I'm watching," she whispered. "I'm enjoying it." She swallowed and felt sweat pouring from her scalp. "The screams lasted for five, ten minutes. I'm sitting in front of him all that time, enjoying every scream, every drop of blood, every slice." Her breathing was fast now.

"How you doing, Sachs?"

"Okay," she said.

But she wasn't okay at all. She was trapped – in that very place where she didn't want to be. Suddenly everything good in her life was negated and she slipped further into the core of the Ghost's world.

You're looking like it's bad news…

Her hands shook. She was desperate and alone.

You're looking like it's bad -

Stop it! she told herself.

"Sachs?" Rhyme asked.

"I'm fine."

Stop thinking about it, stop thinking about the bits of curled flesh, the smears of blood… Stop thinking about how much you're enjoying his pain.

Then she realized that the criminalist wasn't saying anything.

"Rhyme?"

No answer.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Not really," he finally answered.

"What is it?"

"I don't know… What good does knowing where he sat do us? He was wearing those fucking smooth-soled shoes. It's the only place we know the Ghost himself spent any time but what kind of evidence is there?'

Still feeling nauseous, tainted by the Ghost's spirit within her, she glanced at the chair. But she looked away, unable to concentrate.

Discouraged, angry, he continued, "I can't think."

"I…"

"There's got to be something," he continued. She heard frustration in his voice and she supposed he was wishing he could come down and walk the grid himself.

"I don't know," she said, her voice weak.

She stared at the chair but she saw in her mind the knife working its way up and down Jerry Tang's flesh.

"Hell," Rhyme said, "I don't know either. Is the chair upright?"

"The one the Ghost sat in to watch from? Yes."

"But what do we do with that fact?" His voice was frustrated.

Well, this wasn't like him. Lincoln Rhyme had opinions about everything. And why was he sounding as if he'd failed? His tone alarmed her. Was he still brooding over his role in the deaths of the immigrants and crew on the Fuzhou Dragon?

Sachs focused again on the chair, which was covered with debris from the vandalism. She studied it carefully. "I've got an idea. Hold on." She walked closer to the chair and looked beneath it. Her heart thudded with excitement. "There're scuff marks here, Rhyme. The Ghost sat down and leaned forward – to see better. He crossed his feet under the chair."

"And?" Rhyme asked.

"That means that any trace in the seam between the uppers and his soles might've fallen out. I'll vacuum underneath it. If we're lucky we might find something that'll lead us to his front door."

"Excellent, Sachs," Rhyme said. "Get the Dustbuster."

Excited at this find she started for the CS kit near the door to retrieve the vacuum. But then she stopped. She gave a faint laugh. "You got me, Rhyme."

"I did what?"

"Don't sound so innocent." She realized now that he'd known there was trace beneath the chair from the moment she'd deduced that the Ghost had sat watching the carnage. But he'd recognized that she was still lost in the Ghost's terrible world and that he needed to get her to a better place – the haven of the job they did together. He'd pretended to be frustrated to draw her attention back to him and ease her out of the darkness.

A misrepresentation, she supposed, but it is in such feints as this that love is found.

"Thanks."

"I promised I'd get you back. Now, go do some vacuuming."

Sachs swept the floor under and around the chair and then removed the filter from the portable vacuum and placed it in a plastic evidence bag.

"What happens next?" Rhyme asked.

She judged the angle of the blood spatter from the bullets that killed Tang. "Looks like when Tang finally passed out from the pain the Ghost stood up and shot him. Then he leaves and the assistants trash the place."

"How do you know things happened in that order?"

"Because there was debris covering one of the shell casings. And there was broken glass and some torn poster paper on the chair the Ghost'd been sitting in."

"Good."

Sachs said, "I'm going to do electrostatic prints of the shoes."

"Don't tell me, Sachs," Rhyme muttered, being Rhyme once again. "Just do it."

She stepped outside and returned with the equipment. In this process, a plastic sheet is placed over a shoeprint and an electric charge is sent through the sheet. The result is an image, like a plastic Xerox copy, of a footor shoeprint.

It was as she was crouching down, her back to the dark warehouse, that she smelled the cigarette smoke. Oh, Jesus, she thought suddenly – one of the killers was back, maybe aiming his weapon on the radiant white suit.

Maybe the Ghost himself…

No, she realized, it was the missing bangshou!

Sachs dropped the electrostatic equipment with a crash and spun around, falling hard to the floor on her back, her Glock.40 in her hand. The notch and blade sight rested squarely on the intruder's chest.

"What the fuck're you doing here?" she raged, in agony from the jarring fall.

Sonny Li, smoking a cigarette, was wandering through the office, looking around.

"What I doing? I investigate too."

"What's going on, Sachs!" Rhyme asked.

"Li's in the perimeter. He's smoking."

"What? Get him the hell out."

"I'm trying to." She rose painfully and stormed up to the Chinese cop. "You're contaminating the scene."

"A little smoke. You Americans are worry too much -"

"And the trace on your shoes, on your clothes, your footprints… You're ruining the scene!"

"No, no, I investigate."

"Get him out of there, Sachs!" Rhyme called.

She took him by the arm and walked him to the door. She called to Deng and Coe. "Keep him out."

"Sorry, Officer," Eddie Deng said. "He said he was going to help you run the scene."

"I am doing," Li said, perplexed. "What is problem?"

"Keep him here. Cuff him if you have to."

"Hey, Hongse, you got temper. You know that?"

She stormed back to the scene and finished the printing.

Rhyme said, "Is Eddie Deng there?"

"He's outside," Sachs replied.

"I know the company's supposedly clean but have him go through the files anyway – I assume they're in Chinese. See if he can find anything about the Ghost or smuggling, other snakeheads. Anything helpful."

Outside, she waved to Eddie Deng. He plucked a telephone earbud out of his ear and joined her. She relayed Rhyme's request and, as the Photo and Identification Units took over for Sachs, Deng dug through the desks and file cabinets. After a half hour of diligent work he told her, "Nothing helpful. It's all about restaurant supplies."

She told this to Rhyme and added, "I've got everything here. I'll be back in twenty minutes."

They disconnected the radio.

Massaging her sore spine, she reflected, And what about the Ghost's bangshou? Was he in the city? Was he really a threat to them?

Watch your backs…

She was just at the doorway when her cell phone rang. She answered it and was surprised, and pleased, to hear John Sung identify himself.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Fine. The wound itches some." He then added, "I wanted to tell you – I got some herbs for your arthritis. There's a restaurant downstairs in my building. Could you meet me there?"

Sachs looked at her watch. What could it hurt? She wouldn't be long. Handing off the evidence to Deng and Coe, she told them she had a stop to make and would be at Rhyme's in a half hour. They and Sonny Li got a ride back to Rhyme's from another officer. Li looked relieved he wouldn't be riding with her.

Sachs slipped out of the Tyvek suit and packed it away in the CS bus.

As she dropped into the driver's seat she glanced into the warehouse in which she could clearly see the body of Jerry Tang, his ever-open eyes staring at the ceiling.

Another corpse at the hand of the Ghost. Another name transferred from one balance sheet column to the other in The Register of the Living and the Dead.

No more, she thought to the ten judges of hell. Please no more.

Chapter Nineteen

Amelia Sachs, nursing the crime scene bus through the narrow streets of Chinatown, pulled into an alley near John Sung's apartment.

Climbing out, she glanced at a hand-painted sign in the florist shop on the ground floor of his building, next to the restaurant: NEED LUCK IN YOUR LIFE – BUY OUR LUCKY BAMBOO!

She then noticed Sung through the window of the restaurant. He waved, smiling.

Inside, he winced as he rose to greet her.

"No, no," Sachs said. "Don't get up."

She sat opposite him in a large booth.

"Would you like some food?"

"No. I can't stay long."

"Tea, then." He poured it and pushed the small cup toward her.

The restaurant was dark but clean. Several men sat hunched together in various booths, speaking in Chinese.

Sung asked, "Have you found him yet? The Ghost?"

Disinclined to talk about an investigation, she demurred and said only that they had some leads.

"I don't like this uncertainty," Sung said. "I hear footsteps in the hall and I freeze. It's like being in Fuzhou. Someone slows down outside your home and you don't know if they're neighbors or security officers the local party boss sent to your house to arrest you."

An image of what had happened to Jerry Tang came to her and she glanced out the window for a reassuring look at the squad car parked across the street in front of his building, guarding him.

"After all the press about the Fuzhou Dragon," she said, "you'd think the Ghost'd go back to China. Doesn't he know how many people're looking for him?"

Sung reminded, "'Break the cauldrons -'"

"'- and sink the boats.'" She nodded. Then she added, "Well, he's not the only one who's got that motto."

Sung assessed her for a moment. "You're a strong woman. Have you always been a security officer?"

"We call them police. Or cops. Security officers are private."

"Oh."

"Naw, I went to the police academy after I'd been working for a few years." She told him about her stint as a model for a Madison Avenue agency.

"You were a fashion model?" His eyes were amused.

"I was young. Interesting to try for a while. Was mostly my mother's idea. I remember once I was working on a car with my dad. He was a cop too but his hobby was cars. We were rebuilding an engine in this old Thunderbird. A Ford? A sports car. You know it?"

"No."

"And I was, I don't know, nineteen or something, I'd been doing freelance work for a modeling agency in the city. I was under the car and he dropped a crescent wrench. Caught me on the cheek."

"Ouch."

A nod. "But the big ouch was when my mother saw the cut. I don't know who she was madder at – me, my father or Ford Motor Company."

Sung asked, "And your mother? Is she who watches your children when you work?"

A sip of tea, a steady gaze. "I don't have any."

He frowned. "You… I'm sorry." Sympathy flooded his voice.

"It's not the end of the world," she said stoically.

Sung shook his head. "Of course not. I reacted badly… East and West have different ideas about families."

Not necessarily, she thought, but wouldn't let her mind go any further than that.

Sung continued. "In China children are very important to us. Sure, we have the overpopulation problem but one of the most hated parts of the central government is the one-child rule. That only applies to the Han – the majority race in China – so we actually have people in borderline areas claiming to be racial minorities to have more than one child. I will have more someday. I will bring my children over here and then, when I meet someone, have two or three more."

He watched her when he said this and she felt that comfort radiating from his eyes again. From his smile too. She knew nothing of his competence as a practitioner of Chinese medicine but his face alone would go a long way in calming a patient and helping the healing process.

"You know our language is based on pictograms. The Chinese character for the word 'love' is brushstrokes that represent a mother holding a child."

She felt an urge to tell him more, to tell him that, yes, she wanted children very badly. But suddenly she felt like crying. Then controlled it fast. None of that. No bawling when you're wearing one of Austria 's finest pistols on one hip and a can of pepper spray on the other. She realized that they'd been gazing at each other silently for a moment. She looked down, sipped more tea.

"Are you married?" Sung asked.

"No. I have someone in my life, though."

"That's good," he said, continuing to study her. "I sense he's in the same line of work. Is he by any chance that man you were telling me about? Lincoln…"

"Rhyme." She laughed. "You're pretty observant."

"In China, doctors are detectives of the soul." Then Sung leaned forward and said, "Hold your arm out."

"What?"

"Your arm. Please."

She did and he rested two fingers on her wrist.

"What?"

"Shhh. I'm taking your pulse."

After a moment he sat back. "My diagnosis is correct."

"About the arthritis, you mean?"

"Arthritis is merely a symptom. We think it's misguided to merely cure symptoms. The goal of medicine should be to rebalance harmonies."

"So what's unbalanced?"

"In China we like our numbers. The five blessings, the five beasts for sacrifice."

"The ten judges of hell," she said.

He laughed. "Exactly. Well, in medicine we have liu-yin: the six pernicious influences. They are dampness, wind, fire, cold, dryness and summer heat. They affect the organs of the body and the qi – the spirit – as well as the blood and essence. When they are excessive or lacking they create disharmony and that causes problems. Too much dampness must be dried out. Too much cold must be warmed."

The six pernicious influences, she reflected. Try putting that on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield form.

"I see from your tongue and pulse that you have excessive dampness on the spleen. That results in arthritis, among other problems."

"Spleen?"

"It is not just your actual spleen, according to Western medicine," he said, noting her skepticism. "Spleen is more of an organ system."

"So what does my spleen need?" Sachs asked.

"To be less damp," Sung answered as if it were obvious. "I got you these." He pushed a bag toward her. She opened it and found herbs and dried plants inside. "Make them into tea and drink it slowly over the course of two days." Then he handed her a small box as well. "These are Qi Ye Lien tablets. Herbal aspirin. There're instructions in English on the box." Sung added, "Acupuncture will also help a great deal. I'm not licensed for acupuncture here and I don't want to risk any trouble before my INS hearing."

"I wouldn't want you to."

"But I can do massage. I think you call it acupressure. It's very effective. I'll show you. Lean toward me. Put your hands in your lap."

Sung leaned forward over the table, the stone monkey swinging away from his strong chest. Beneath his shirt she could see the fresh bandages over the wound from the Ghost's gunshot. His hands found spots on her shoulders and pressed into her skin hard for five seconds or so, then found new places and did the same.

After a minute of this he sat back.

"Now lift your arms."

She did and, though there was still some pain in her joints, she believed it much less than she'd been feeling lately. She said a surprised, "It worked."

"It's only temporary. Acupuncture lasts much longer."

"I'll think about it. Thank you." She glanced at her watch. "I should be getting back."

"Wait," Sung said, an urgency in his voice. "I'm not through with my diagnosis." He took her hand, examining the torn nails and worried skin. Normally she was very self-conscious about these bad habits of hers. But she didn't feel the least embarrassed by this man's perusal.

"In China doctors look and touch and talk to determine what is ailing a patient. It's vital to know their frame of mind – happy, sad, worried, ambitious, frustrated." He looked carefully into her eyes. "There's more disharmony within you. You want something you can't have. Or you think you can't have it. It's creating these problems." He nodded at her nails.

"What harmony do I want?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps a family. Love. Your parents are dead, I sense."

"My father."

"And that was difficult for you."

"Yes."

"And lovers? You've had trouble with lovers."

"I scared 'em off in school – I could drive faster than most of them." This was meant as a joke, though it was true, but Sung didn't laugh.

"Go on," he encouraged.

"When I was a model the worthwhile men were too scared to ask me out."

"Why would a man be scared of a woman?" Sung asked, genuinely bewildered. "It's like yin being scared by yang. Night and day. They should not compete; they should complement and fulfill each other."

"Then the ones who had the guts to ask me out wanted pretty much only one thing."

"Ah, that."

"Yeah, that."

"Sexual energy," Sung said, "is very important, one of the most important parts of qi, spiritual power. But it's only healthy when it comes out of a harmonized relationship."

She laughed to herself. Now there's a phrase to try out on the first date: You interested in a harmonized relationship?

After a sip of tea she continued, "Then I lived with a man for a while. On the force."

"The what?" Sung asked.

"He was a cop too, I mean. It was good. Intense, challenging, I guess I'd say. We'd have dates at the small-arms range and try to outshoot each other. Only he got arrested. Taking kickbacks. You know what I mean?"

Sung laughed. "I've lived in China all my life – of course I know what kickbacks are. And now," he added, "you're with that man you work with."

"Yes."

"Maybe this is the source of the problem," Sung said quietly, studying her even more closely.

"Why d'you say that?" she asked uneasily.

"I would say you are yang – that word means the side of a mountain with the sun on it. Yang is brightness, movement, increase, arousal, beginnings, soft, spring and summer, birth. This is clearly you. But you seem to inhabit the world of the yin. That means the shadowy side of the mountain. It is inwardness, darkness, introspection, hardness and death. It is the end of things, autumn and winter." He paused. "I think perhaps the disharmony is that you aren't being true to your yang nature. You have let the yin too far into your life. Could that be the trouble?"

"I… I'm not sure."

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

"Yes?"

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

Her cell phone rang and Sachs jumped at the sound. As she reached for the phone she realized that Sung's hand was still resting on her arm.

Sung eased back into the booth bench and she answered, "Hello?"

"Officer, where the hell are you?" It was Lon Sellitto.

She was reluctant to say but she glanced at the patrol car across the street and had a feeling that they might have told the detective where she was. She said, "With that witness, John Sung."

"Why?"

"Just needed to follow up on a few things."

Not a lie, she thought. Not exactly.

"Well, finish following up," the man said gruffly. "We need you here, at Rhyme's. There's evidence to look at."

Jesus, she thought. What's eating him?

"I'll be right there."

"Make sure you are," the detective snapped.

Perplexed at his attitude, she disconnected the line and said to Sung, "I have to go."

A hopeful expression on his face, the doctor asked, "Have you found Sam Chang and the others from the ship?"

"Not yet."

As she rose he startled her by asking quickly, "I'd be honored if you would come back to see me. I could continue my treatment." Sung pushed the bag of herbs and pills toward her.

She hesitated only a moment before saying, "Sure. I'd like that."

Chapter Twenty

"Hope we didn't interrupt anything important, Officer," Lon Sellitto said gruffly when she walked into Rhyme's living room.

She began to ask the detective what he meant but the criminalist himself began sniffing the air. Sachs responded with a querying glance.

"Recall my book, Sachs? 'Perfumes should not be worn by crime scene personnel because -'"

"'- odors not native to the scene may help identify individuals who have been present there.'"

"Good."

"But it's not perfume, Rhyme."

"Incense maybe?" he suggested.

"I met John Sung at a restaurant in his building. There was some incense burning."

"It stinks," Rhyme concluded.

"No, no," Sonny Li said. "Peaceful. Very peaceful."

No, it stank, petulant Rhyme thought. He glanced at the bag she carried and wrinkled his nose. "And what is that?"

"Medicine. For my arthritis."

"That stinks even more than the incense. What do you do with it?"

"Make it into tea."

"Probably tastes so vile that you forget about the pain in your joints.

Hope you enjoy it. I'll stick to scotch." He examined her closely for a moment. "Enjoy your visit with Dr. Sung, Sachs?"

"I -" she began uneasily, troubled by his edgy tone.

"How's he doing?" Rhyme asked blithely.

"Better," she answered.

"Talk much about his home in China? Where he travels? Whom he spends time with?"

"What're you getting at?" she asked cautiously.

"I'm just curious if what occurred to me occurred to you?"

"And that would be?"

"That Sung was the Ghost's bangshou. His assistant. His co-conspirator."

"What?" she gasped.

"Apparently it didn't," Rhyme observed.

"But there's no way. I've spent some time talking to him. He can't have any connection with the Ghost. I mean -"

"As a matter of fact," Rhyme interrupted, "he doesn't. We just got a report from the FBI office in Singapore. The Ghost's bangshou on the Dragon was Victor Au. The prints and picture match one of the three bodies the Coast Guard found this morning at the site of the sinking." He nodded toward the computer.

Sachs looked at the picture on Rhyme's screen and then glanced at the whiteboard on which were taped the Coast Guard's pictures of the bodies. Au was the one who'd drowned, not been shot.

Rhyme said sternly, "Sung's clean. But we didn't know that until ten minutes ago. I told you to be careful, Sachs. And you just dropped by Sung's to socialize. Don't go getting careless on me." His voice rose, saying, "And that goes for everybody!"

Search well but watch your back…

"Sorry," she muttered.

What was distracting her? Rhyme wondered again. But he said only, "Back to work, boys and girls." Then nodded at the electrostatic shoe-prints from the Tang crime scene that Thom had mounted on the evidence board. There was not much they could tell except that the Ghost's shoeprints, though an average size shoe, about an 8 in America, were larger than the three prints of his accomplices.

"Now, what about the trace that was in the Ghost's shoes, Mel?"

"Okay, Lincoln," the tech said slowly, looking over the screen of the chromatograph. "We've got something here. Very old oxidized iron flakes, old wood fibers and ash and silicon – looks like glass dust. And then the main act is a dark, low-luster mineral in large concentrations – montmorillonite. Alkaline oxide too."

Okay, Rhyme mused. Where the hell did it come from? He nodded slowly then closed his eyes and began, figuratively, to pace.

When he'd been head of IRD – the Investigation and Resources Division of the NYPD, the forensic unit – Rhyme had walked everywhere in New York City. He carried small bags and jars in his pockets for the samples of soil and concrete and dust and vegetation he'd collect to add to his knowledge of the city. A criminalist must know his territory in a thousand different ways: as sociologist, cartographer, geologist, engineer, botanist, zoologist, historian.

He realized that there was something familiar about the trace that Cooper was describing. But what?

Wait, there's a thought. Hold on to it.

Damn, it slipped away.

"Hey, Loaban?" a voice called, but from a distance. Rhyme ignored Li and continued to walk intently through, then fly over, the various neighborhoods of the city.

"Is he -?"

"Shhhhh," Sachs said firmly.

Freeing him to continue on his journey.

He sailed over the Columbia University tower, over Central Park with its loam and limestone and wildlife excrement, through the streets of Midtown coated with the residue of the tons of soot that fall upon them daily, the boat basins with their peculiar mix of gasoline, propane and diesel fuel, the decaying parts of the Bronx with their lead paint and old plaster mixed with sawdust as filler…

Soaring, soaring…

Until he came to one place.

His eyes opened.

"Downtown," he said. "The Ghost's downtown."

"Sure." Alan Coe shrugged. " Chinatown."

"No, not Chinatown," Rhyme replied. "Battery Park City or one of the developments around there."

"How'd you figure that out?" Sellitto asked.

"That montmorillonite? It's bentonite. That's a clay used as slurry to keep groundwater out of foundations when construction crews dig deep foundations. When they built the World Trade Center they sunk the foundation sixty-five feet down to the bedrock. The builder used millions of tons of bentonite. It's all over the place down there."

"But they use bentonite in a lot of places," Cooper pointed out.

"Sure, but the other trace materials Sachs found are from there too. That whole area is landfill and it's full of rusted metal and glass trace. And the ash? To clear the old piers down there the builders burned them."

"And it's only twenty minutes from Chinatown," Deng pointed out.

Thom wrote this on the evidence chart.

Still, it was a huge area and contained many high-density buildings: hotels, apartments and office buildings. They would need more information in order to narrow down exactly where the Ghost might be staying.

Sonny Li was pacing, walking in front of the board.

"Hey, Loaban, I got some ideas too."

"About what?" Rhyme grumbled. The man reeked of cigarette smoke. Rhyme had never smoked but he felt a huge burst of crip envy – that this man could partake in his vices all by himself, without having to track down a conspirator to help him.

Fucking surgery better do something, he thought.

"Hey, Loaban, you listening?"

"Go ahead, Sonny," Rhyme said, distracted.

"I was at crime scene too."

"Yeah," Sachs said, giving him an exasperated look. "Walking around, smoking."

"See," Rhyme explained, trying against his nature to be patient, "anything that comes into the crime scene after the perpetrator can contaminate it. That makes it harder to find the evidence that would lead to the suspect."

"Hey, Loaban, you think I don't know that? Sure, sure, you pick up dust and dirt and put in gas chromatograph and then spectrometer and use scanning electron microscope." The complicated English words fell awkwardly from his tongue. "Match against databases."

"You know about forensic equipment?" Rhyme asked, blinking in surprise.

"Know about it? Sure, we use that stuff. Hey, I study at Beijing Institute of Forensics. Got nice medal. Second in class. I know all that, I'm saying." He added testily, "We not back in Ming dynasty, Loaban. I got own computer – Windows XP. All kinds databases too. And cell phone and pager."

"Okay, Sonny, got the point. What'd you see at the scene?"

"Disharmony. That what I saw."

"Explain," Rhyme said.

"Harmony very important in China. Even crime has harmony. At that place back there, that warehouse, no harmony at all."

"What's a harmonious killing?" Coe asked wryly.

"The Ghost find man who betray him. He torture him, kill him and leave. But, hey, Hongse, remember? Place all destroyed. Posters of China torn up, statues of Buddha and dragons broken… Han Chinese not do that."

"That's the racial majority in China – the Han," Eddie Deng explained. "But the Ghost's Han, isn't he?"

"Sure, but he not do it. Office got messed up after Tang killed. I hear her say that."

Sachs confirmed this.

"Probably Ghost left and then those men work for him, they vandal the office. I'm thinking he hire ethnic minority for his ba-tu."

"Muscle, thugs," Deng translated.

"Yeah, yeah, thugs. Hire them from minorities. Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Uighurs."

"That's crazy, Sonny," Rhyme said. "Harmony?"

"Crazy?" Li replied, shrugging broadly. "Sure, you right, Loaban. I crazy. Like when I say you find Jerry Tang first, I crazy. But, hey, you listen me then, we maybe found Tang when he alive, strap him down and use ox prod till he tell us where is Ghost." The entire team turned to him in shock. Li hesitated a moment then laughed. "Hey, Loaban, joke."

Though Rhyme wasn't completely sure he was kidding.

Li continued, pointing at the board, "You want evidence? Okay, here evidence. Shoeprints. Smaller than Ghost's. Han – Chinese – not big people. Like me. Not big like you. But people from west and north minorities, lot of them even smaller than us. There, you like that forensic stuff, Loaban? Thought you would. So go find some minorities. You get lead to Ghost, I'm saying."

Rhyme glanced at Sachs and he could tell she was thinking the same thing. What can it hurt? Rhyme asked Eddie Deng, "What about it? You know these minorities?"

"I don't have a clue," he replied. "Most of the people we deal with in the Fifth Precinct are Han – Fujianese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese…"

Coe agreed, adding, "The minorities would keep to themselves."

Impatient now that there was a lead to be pursued, Rhyme snapped, "Well, who would know? I want to follow up on it. How?"

"Tongs," Li said. "Tongs know everything. Han, non-Han, everything."

"And what exactly is a tong?" Rhyme asked, having only a vague memory from some bad movie he'd watched when recovering from his accident.

Eddie Deng explained that tongs were societies of Chinese who had common interests: people who came from a particular area in China or who practiced the same trade or profession. They were shrouded in secrecy and, in the old days, met only in private – "tong" means "chamber." In the United States they arose for protection from whites and for self-governance; traditionally Chinese resolved disputes among themselves, and the head of one's tong had more power over his members than did the president of the United States.

Though they had a long tradition in crime and violence, he continued, in recent years tongs had cleaned themselves up. The word "tong" was out and they began calling themselves "public associations," "benevolent societies," or "merchant guilds." Many were still just as involved in gambling, massage parlors, extortion and money laundering as ever but they distanced themselves from violence. They hired young men with no connection to the tongs to act as enforcers.

"Outsourcing," Deng joked.

"Were you in one, Eddie?" Rhyme asked.

The detective polished his stylish glasses as he responded defensively, "For a while. It was a kid thing."

"Is there anybody at one we can talk to?" Sachs asked.

Deng thought for a moment. "I'd give Tony Cai a call. He helps us some – up to a point – and he's one of the best connected loabans in the area. Lot of guanxi. He runs the Eastern Chinese Public Association. They're on the Bowery."

"Call him," Rhyme ordered.

Coe shook his head. "Won't talk on the phone."

"Bugged?"

Deng said, "No, no, it's a cultural thing. For some matters you have to meet face-to-face. But there's a catch – Cai won't want to be seen around police, not with the Ghost involved."

A thought occurred to Rhyme. "Get a limo and bring him here."

"What?" Sellitto asked.

"The heads of tongs… they have egos, right?"

"You bet," Coe said.

"Tell him we need his help and that the mayor's sending a limo to pick him up."

While Sellitto called about the car Eddie Deng rang up Cai's community association. The conversation was in the clipped and singsongy cadence of rapidly spoken Chinese. Eddie put his hand over the mouthpiece. "Let me get this straight – I'm telling him this is at the mayor's request."

"No," Rhyme said. "Tell him it's the governor's office."

"We oughta be a little careful here, Linc," Sellitto said delicately.

"We'll be careful after we collar the Ghost."

Deng nodded, returned to the phone and they spoke some more. He hung up. "Okay. He'll do it."

Sonny Li was patting the pockets of his trousers absently, looking for cigarettes undoubtedly. He seemed uneasy.

"Hey, Loaban, I ask you something. Maybe you do me favor?"

"What?"

"I make phone call? Back to China. Cost some money I not have. But I pay you back."

"That's all right," Rhyme said.

"Who're you calling?" Coe asked bluntly.

"Private. My business."

"No. You don't have a private life around here, Li. Tell us, or no call."

The cop offered a cold glance at the INS agent and said, "Call is to my father."

Coe muttered, "I know Chinese – Putonghua and Minnanhua. I understand hao. I'll be listening."

Rhyme nodded at Thom, who got an international operator on the line and placed the call to the town of Liu Guoyuan in Fujian. He handed the receiver to Li, who took it uncertainly. He glanced at the plastic hand piece for a moment then turned away from Rhyme and the others and slowly brought it to his ear.

Rhyme suddenly saw a different Sonny Li. One of the first words he heard was "Kangmei" – Sonny's formal name. The man was obsequious, slumped, nervous, nodding like a young student as he spoke. Finally he hung the phone up and stood looking down at the floor for a moment.

Sachs asked, "Something wrong?"

The Chinese cop was suddenly aware that someone had spoken to him. He shook his head in reply to the question and turned back to Rhyme. "Okay, Loaban, what we going do now?"

"We're going to look at some harmonious evidence," Rhyme responded.

Chapter Twenty-one

A half hour later the doorbell sounded and Thom vanished into the hall. He returned with a heavyset Chinese man in a gray, fully buttoned suit, white shirt and striped tie. His face revealed no surprise or shock at seeing Rhyme in the Storm Arrow chair or at the collection of forensic equipment in the quaint Victorian town house. The only bit of emotion was when he glanced at Sachs and saw her sipping tea, redolent of herbs the man seemed to recognize by smell.

"I am Mr. Cai."

Rhyme introduced himself. "You're comfortable with English?"

"Yes."

"We have a problem, Mr. Cai, and I hope you can help us."

"You work for governor?"

"That's right."

In a distant sort of way we do, Rhyme thought, raising an ironic eyebrow toward the still-uneasy Lon Sellitto.

As Cai sat down, Rhyme explained about the Fuzhou Dragon and the immigrants hiding in town. Another flash of emotion when the name the Ghost was mentioned but then the face went blank again. Rhyme nodded to Deng, who told him about the killers and their suspicion that the men were from a Chinese ethnic minority group.

Cai nodded, considering this. Beneath large, wire-rimmed bifocals, his eyes were quick. "The Ghost, we know about him. He does much harm to all of us here. I will help you… Ethnic minorities? In Chinatown there are none but I'll make some inquiries into other areas around the city. I have many connections."

"It's very important," Sachs said to him. "Those ten people, the witnesses… the Ghost is going to kill them if we don't find them first."

"Of course," Cai said sympathetically. "I'll do whatever I can. If your driver can take me back now I'll begin."

"Thank you," Sachs said. Sellitto and Rhyme nodded their gratitude too.

Cai rose and shook hands though unlike most visitors there was not even a vestigial gesture of his arm toward Rhyme but merely a nod, which told the criminalist that he was very much in control of himself and far more perceptive and intelligent than his distracted demeanor suggested.

He was glad this man would be helping them.

But as Cai walked toward the door Sonny Li said abruptly, "Ting!"

"He said 'Wait,'" Eddie Deng explained to Rhyme in a whisper.

Cai turned around, a frown on his face. Li strode up to him and, gesturing broadly, began speaking harshly. The tong leader leaned closer to Li and the two began an explosive conversation.

Rhyme thought they were going to come to blows.

"Hey!" Sellitto said to Li. "What the hell're you doing?"

Li ignored him and, red-faced, continued to pummel Cai with words. The tong leader finally grew quiet. His head finally dipped and his eyes scanned the floor.

Rhyme looked at Deng, who shrugged. "Too fast for me. I couldn't follow it."

As Li continued to speak, more calmly now, Cai began to nod and respond. Finally Li asked a question and the tong leader extended his hand and they shook.

Cai gave another brief nod to Rhyme, his face completely emotionless, and then left.

"What on earth was that?" Sachs asked.

"Why you just let him leave before?" Li said gruffly to Rhyme. "He not going to help you."

"Yes, he was."

"No, no, no. Not matter what he said. Dangerous for him help us. He has family, not want them hurt. He not getting nothing from you. Limo not fool him." He waved around the room. "He know governor not involved."

"But he said he'd help us," Sellitto said.

"Chinese not like say no," Li explained. "Easier for us to find excuse or just say yes and then forget it. Cai was going back to office and forget you, I'm saying. He say he help but he was really saying 'Mei-you.' You know what is mei-you? Means, I not help you; go away."

"What'd you say? What were you fighting about?"

"No, no, not fight. We negotiation. You know, business. Now he going to look for your minorities. He really do it."

"Why?" Rhyme asked.

"You pay him money."

"What?" Sellitto asked.

"Not so much. Only cost you ten thousand. Dollar, not yuan."

"No way," Alan Coe said.

"Jesus Christ," Sellitto said. "We haven't got that in the budget."

Rhyme and Sachs looked at each other and laughed.

Li scoffed, "You a big city, you rich. You got strong dollar, Wall Street, you run World Trade Organization. Hey, Cai want lot more at first."

"We can't pay -" Sellitto began.

"Come on, Lon," Rhyme said, "you've got your snitch fund. Anyway, technically this's a federal operation. The INS'll cough up half of it."

"I don't know about that," Coe said uneasily, running his hand over his red hair.

"It's okay – I'll sign the chit myself," Rhyme said and the agent blinked, not sure whether it was appropriate to laugh at this. "Call Peabody. And we'll get Dellray to contribute too." He glanced at Li. "What're the terms?"

"I did good bargain. He give us names first and then he get paid. Course, he wants pay in cash."

"Of course."

"Okay, I need a cigarette. I take break for while, Loaban? I need good cigarettes. You got fuck worst ones in this country. Not taste like nothing. Get some food too."

"Go ahead, Sonny. You earned it."

As the Chinese cop left the room Thom asked, "What do I put down on the chart?" Nodding at the evidence whiteboard. "About Cai and the tongs."

"I don't know," Sachs said. "I think I'd say 'Checking out the woo-woo evidence.'"

Lincoln Rhyme, however, opted for something somewhat more helpful. "How 'bout: 'Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority,'" he dictated. "'Presently pursuing whereabouts.'"

The Ghost, accompanied by the three Turks, was driving a stolen Chevrolet Blazer into Queens en route to the Changs' apartment.

As he drove through the streets, carefully as always so that he wouldn't get stopped, he reflected on Jerry Tang's death. He hadn't for a moment considered letting the man go unpunished for his betrayal. Nor had he considered delaying the retribution. Disloyalty to your superiors was the worst crime in Confucian philosophy. Tang had abandoned him on Long Island – a situation from which he'd escaped only because of the luck of finding that car with the engine running at the restaurant on the beach. So the man'd had to die and to die painfully. The Ghost thought of the Shang emperor Zhou Xin. Once, sensing disloyalty from one of his vassals, the emperor butchered the man's son and had him cooked and served to the unsuspecting traitor for dinner, after which he cheerfully revealed the primary ingredient of the main course. The Ghost thought such justice was perfectly reasonable, not to mention satisfying.

A block from the Changs' apartment he pulled the Blazer to the curb.

"Masks," he ordered.

Yusuf dug into a bag and handed out ski masks.

The Ghost considered how best to attack the family. Sam Chang had a wife and an elderly father or mother with him, he'd been told. The main risk, though, would be any older children, like teenage boys. Life was for them just a video game and when the Ghost and the others broke in, a teenager might charge them with a knife.

"Kill any sons first," he instructed them. "Then their father and the old people." Then he had a thought. "Don't kill the wife yet. Bring her with us."

The Turks apparently understood the reason for this and nodded.

The Ghost surveyed the quiet street, across which were two long warehouses. Halfway along the block was an alley between the buildings. According to the map, the Changs' address was just on the other side of the warehouses. It was possible that Chang and his sons or father would be watching the front of the house so the Ghost would speed down the alley to the rear and they would rush in through the back door, while one of the Turks ran to the front door in case the family tried to escape that way.

He said in English, "Wear the masks on top of your heads like hats until we're at the house."

They nodded and did so. With their dark complexions and the stocking caps they looked like black gangstas in a bizarre rap video.

The Ghost donned his own mask.

He felt a moment's fear, as he often did at times like this, just before going into battle. There was always a chance that Chang had a gun or that the police had found the family first, had taken them to detention and were themselves waiting for the Ghost at the apartment.

But he reminded himself that fear was part of humility and it was the humble who succeeded in this world. He thought of one of his favorite passages from the Tao.

Yield and you need not break.

Bent, you can straighten.

Emptied, you can hold.

Torn, you can mend.

The Ghost now added his own line: Afraid, you can be brave.

He glanced at Yusuf, sitting next to him in the passenger seat. The Uighur nodded firmly in reply. And with the skill of seasoned craftsmen they began checking their weapons.

Chapter Twenty-two

Sonny Li had found some very good cigarettes indeed.

Camels, without filters on the end, which tasted pretty close to the brand he regularly bought in China. He inhaled deeply and said, "Bet five." Li pushed the chips forward and watched the other poker players consider how to respond as the bet went around the cheap fiberboard table, stained from years of sweaty hands and spilled liquor.

The gambling parlor was on Mott Street, in the heart of Chinatown, the neighborhood to which he'd come to buy his cigarettes. Such a long trip probably wasn't what Loaban had in mind when he gave Li permission to buy some smokes. But no matter. He'd return soon enough. There was no hurry.

The parlor was a large one, populated mostly with Fujianese (he wanted to avoid running into the Cantonese guard he'd mugged that morning), and featured a full bar and three cigarette machines. The room was dark, except for dim lights over the tables, but with his sharp security bureau officer's eye he had spotted five armed guards.

This was not a problem, though. No stealing guns now or beating up pretty boys. He was here only to gamble, drink and chat.

He won the hand and laughed then poured mao-tai into the glasses of everyone at the table, except the dealer, who was not allowed to drink. The men lifted the glasses and quickly tossed back the clear, potent liquor. Mao-tai was Chinas version of moonshine and you didn't sip it; you poured it into your gullet as fast as you could.

Li struck up conversations with the men hunched over the table around him. A bottle of liquor and a dozen Camels later Sonny Li estimated his net loss to be merely seven dollars.

He decided against another glass and rose to go.

Several of the men asked him to stay. They were enjoying his company.

But Li told them that his mistress awaited and the men nodded enthusiastically.

"She fuck you every way," an old, drunk man said. It wasn't clear to Li if this was a question or a statement.

Sonny Li walked to the door, giving them a smile that confirmed the high quality of his love life. The truth, however, was that this particular gambling parlor had turned out to have little for him and he wanted to try another.

The Blazer, speeding down the alleyway that led to the rear of the Changs' apartment.

The Ghost, gripping his Model 51 pistol in one hand, the leather-clad steering wheel in the other.

The Turks, poised to leap from the SUV.

They burst from the alley into a large parking lot – and found a huge semi truck bearing down on them, head-on.

With a deep groan of brakes the truck began to skid.

The Ghost shoved his foot down on the brake pedal – instinctively striking the floor with his left foot as well, hitting the spot where the clutch in his BMW sports car was. The Blazer swerved and skidded to a stop door-to-door with the truck. He gasped and felt his heart stutter from the near-miss.

"What the fuck're you doing?" the truck driver shouted. He leaned down toward the Blazer's driver's-side window. "It's one-way, you fucking Jap! You come to this country, learn the fucking rules."

The Ghost was too shaken to answer.

The driver put the truck in gear and pulled past the Chevy.

The Ghost thanked his god, Yi the archer, for saving him from death. Ten seconds later and they would have collided head-on with the truck.

Starting forward slowly, the Ghost glanced at the Turks, who were looking around with frowns. They were confused, troubled.

"Where it is?" asked Yusuf, who was gazing at the large parking lot in which they found themselves. "The Changs' apartment? I cannot see it."

There were no residences anywhere around here.

The Ghost checked the address. The number was correct; this was the place. Except… except that it was a large retail shopping center. The alleyway that the Ghost had turned into was one of the exits from the parking lot.

"Gan," the Ghost spat out.

"What happened?" one of the Turks in the back asked him.

What had happened was that Chang hadn't trusted Jimmy Mah, the Ghost realized. He'd given the tong leader a fake address. He'd probably seen an advertisement for this place. He glanced up at the big sign over their heads.

The Home Store

Your source for every house and lawn need

The Ghost considered what to do. The other immigrant, Wu, probably hadn't been so clever. He had used Mah's broker to get an apartment. The Ghost had the name of the broker and they could find out the location of that family quickly.

"We'll get the Wus now," the Ghost said. "Then we'll find the Changs."

Naixin.

All in good time.

Sam Chang hung up the phone.

Numb, he stood for a moment, staring at a TV show, which depicted a living room very different from the one he was now in and a content and silly family very different from his own. He glanced at Mei-Mei, who was looking at him with a querying glance. He shook his head and she dutifully returned to Po-Yee, the baby. Chang then crouched down beside his father and whispered to him, "Mah is dead."

"Mah?"

"The loaban in Chinatown, the one who helped us. I called to ask about our papers. His girl said that he was dead."

"The Ghost? That was who killed him?"

"Who else?"

His father asked, "Did Mah know where we are?"

"No." Chang hadn't trusted Mah. So he'd given the address of one of the Home Stores in the flyer he'd found at the shopping center where they'd stolen the paint and brushes.

The Changs were, in fact, not in Queens at all but in Brooklyn, a neighborhood called Owls Head, near the harbor. That this had been their destination was a secret he'd kept from everyone except his father.

The old man nodded and winced as some pain shot through him.

"Morphine?"

His father shook his head and breathed deeply for a moment. "This news about Mah – it confirms that the Ghost is looking for us."

"Yes." Then Chang had a troubling thought. "The Wus! The Ghost can find them. They got their apartment through Mah's broker. I have to warn him." He stepped toward the door.

"No," his father said. "You can't save a man from his own foolishness."

"He has a family too. Children, his wife. We can't let them die."

Chang Jiechi thought for some moments. Finally the old man said, "All right but don't go yourself. Use the phone. Call that woman back. Tell her to get a message to Wu, warn him."

Chang picked up the phone and dialed. He spoke to the woman from Mah's office again and asked her to get a message to Wu. "Tell him he must move at once. He and his family are in great danger. You will tell him that?"

"Yes, yes," she said but she was clearly distraught and Chang had no idea if she actually would do as he'd asked.

His father closed his eyes and lay back on the couch. Chang wrapped the blanket around his feet. The old man would need to see a doctor very soon.

So many things to do, precautions to take. For a moment he was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of it all. He thought of the amulet that Dr. John Sung wore – the Monkey King. In the hold of the ship he'd let young Ronald play with the charm and had told him stories about Monkey. One of them was how the gods punished Monkey for his effrontery by burying him under a huge mountain. This is how Sam Chang now felt – covered by a million kilos of fear and uncertainty.

But his eyes then fell on his family and the burden lessened somewhat.

William laughed at something on the television; Chang believed this was the first time that his oldest son had been free from the anger and sour spirit that he'd radiated all day. He was laughing in genuine good spirits at the frivolous show. Ronald too.

Chang then looked at his wife, completely absorbed in the child, Po-Yee. How comfortable she is with children. Chang himself didn't have this easiness with them. He was forever weighing what he said – should he be stern about this matter, lenient about that?

Mei-Mei perched the baby on her own knees and made the child giggle as she rocked her.

In China families pray for a son to carry on the family name (traditionally, not bearing a male heir was grounds for divorce). Chang of course had been delighted when William had been born, and Ronald after him, proud that he could assure his own father that the Chang line would continue. But Mei-Mei's sadness at not having a daughter had been a source of sorrow for him too. And so Chang had found himself in a curious position for a Chinese man of a certain age – hoping for a girl, should Mei-Mei have gotten pregnant again. As a persecuted dissident and flouter of the one-child rule, the party could not have punished him more for having yet another child so he was fully prepared to try to give his wife a daughter.

But she had been very ill during her pregnancy with Ronald and it had taken her months to recover from the delivery. She was a slight woman, no longer young, and the doctors urged, for her health, that she not have any more children. She had accepted this stoically, as she had accepted Chang's decision to come to the Beautiful Country – which virtually precluded the chance that they could adopt a daughter, because of their illegal status.

Out of this terrible plight, though, had apparently come some good to balance the hardship. The gods or fate or the spirit of some ancestor had bestowed Po-Yee on them, the daughter that they could never have, and restored the harmony within his wife.

Yin-yang, light and dark, male and female, sorrow and joy.

Deprivation and gift…

Chang rose and walked to his sons and sat down to watch the television with them. He moved very slowly, very quietly, as if any abrupt motion would shatter this fragile familial peace like a rock dropping into a still morning pond.