The Stone Monkey

Wednesday, the Hour of the Dragon, 7 A.M.,

to the Hour of the Rooster, 6:30 P.M.

Chapter Thirty

On the morning of the day he was to die, Sam Chang awoke to find his father in the back courtyard of their Brooklyn apartment going through the slow movements of tai-chi.

He watched the elderly man for a few moments and a thought occurred to him: Chang Jiechi's seventieth birthday was in three weeks. In China they'd been so poor and so persecuted the family had not been able to have the man's sixtieth birthday celebration, traditionally a huge party that signified the move into old age, the time for veneration. But his family would do so for the seventieth.

Sam Chang's animate body would not make it to the party but his spirit perhaps would.

He gazed at the old man, who moved like a leisurely dancer in the small backyard.

Tai-chi was beneficial to the body and to the soul but it always saddened Chang to watch the exercise. It reminded him of a humid night in June years ago. Chang and a cluster of students and fellow teachers had been sitting together in Beijing, watching a group of people nearby engaged in the balletic movements. It was after midnight and they were all enjoying the pleasant weather and the exhilaration of being among like-minded friends in the center of what was becoming the greatest nation on earth, the new China, the enlightened China.

Chang had turned to a young student next to him to point out a spry elderly woman lost under the spell of tai-chi, when the boy's chest exploded and he dropped to the ground. The People's Liberation Army soldiers had begun firing on the crowd in Tiananmen Square. The tanks came through a moment later, driving the people in front of them, crushing many beneath the treads (the famous televised image of the student stopping the tank with a flower was the rare exception that terrible night).

Chang could never watch tai-chi without thinking of that moment, which solidified his stance as an outspoken dissident and changed his life – and that of his father and family – forever.

He now looked down at his wife and, next to her, the little girl, who slept with her arm around the white stuffed cat Mei-Mei had sewn for her. He gazed at them for a moment. Then walking into the bathroom, he turned the water on full. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower, resting his head against the tiles that Mei-Mei had somehow found the time to scrub last night.

He showered, shut off the scalding water and dried himself with a towel. He cocked his head, hearing the sounds of clanking metal in the kitchen.

Mei-Mei was still asleep and the boys knew nothing of cooking. Alarmed, he climbed out of bed and pulled the pistol from beneath the mattress and walked cautiously into the main room of the apartment. He laughed. His father was making tea.

"Baba," he said, "I'll wake Mei-Mei. She can do that."

"No, no, let her sleep," the old man said. "When your mother died I learned to make tea. I can cook rice too. And vegetables. Though not very well. Let us take tea together." Chang Jiechi lifted the iron pot, the handle wrapped with a rag, and took cups and hobbled into the living room. They sat and he poured the tea.

Last night, when Chang had returned, he and his father had taken a map and located the Ghost's apartment building, which was not, to their surprise, in Chinatown but farther to the west, near the Hudson River.

"When you get to the Ghost's apartment," his father now asked, "how will you get inside? Won't he recognize you?"

Chang sipped the tea. "I don't think he will, no. He only came to the hold of the ship once. It was dark too."

"How will you get in?"

"If there is a doorman I'll tell him I'm there on business and give the name Tan. I practiced my English all night. Then I'll just take the elevator up to his door and knock on it."

"And if he has bodyguards?" Chang Jiechi said. "They'll search you."

"I'll hide the gun in my sock. They won't search carefully. They won't be expecting me to be armed." Chang tried to picture what would happen. He knew they would have guns too. Even if they shot him as soon as they saw the gun he would still be able to shoot one or two bullets into the Ghost. He realized that his father was gazing at him and he looked down. "I will come back," he said firmly. "I will be here to take care of you, Baba."

"You are a good son. I could not have asked for a better one."

"I have not brought you all the honor I should have."

"Yes, you have," the old man said and poured more tea. "I named you well." Chang's given name, Jingerzi, meant "shrewd son."

They lifted their cups and Chang drained his.

Mei-Mei came to the door, glanced at the teacups. "Have you taken rice yet?" she asked, the expression meaning simply, "Good morning." It wasn't a reference to food.

"Wake William," Chang told Mei-Mei. "There are some things I want to say to him."

But his father waved for her to stop. "No." She did.

"Why not?" Chang asked.

"He will want to come with you."

"I'll tell him no."

Chang Jiechi laughed. "And that will stop him? That impetuous son of yours?"

Chang fell silent for a moment then said, "I can't go off like this without talking to him. It's important."

But his father asked, "What is the only reason that a man would do something like you are about to do – something foolhardy and dangerous?"

Chang replied, "For the sake of his children."

His father smiled. "Yes, son, yes. Keep that in mind, always. You do something like this for the sake of your children." Then he grew stern. How well Sam Chang knew this look of his father's. Imperial, unyielding. He had not seen it for some time – ever since the man had grown sick with the cancer. "I know exactly what you intend to say to your son. I will do it. It's my wish that you don't wake William."

Chang nodded. "As you say, Baba." He looked at his wristwatch. The time was seven-thirty. He had to be at the Ghost's apartment in an hour. His father poured him more tea, which Chang drank down quickly. Then he said to Mei-Mei, "I have to leave soon. But I wish that you come sit by me."

She sat beside her husband, lowering her head to his shoulder.

They said nothing but after five minutes Po-Yee began to cry and Mei-Mei rose to take care of the girl. Sam Chang was content to sit in silence and watch his wife and their new daughter. And then it was time to leave and go to his death.

Rhyme smelled cigarette smoke.

"That's disgusting," he called.

"What?" asked Sonny Li, the only other person in the room. The Chinese cop was groggy and his hair stuck out comically. The hour was 7:30.

"The cigarettes," Rhyme explained.

"You should smoke," Li barked. "Relaxes you. Good for you."

Mel Cooper arrived with Lon Sellitto and Eddie Deng not far behind him. The young Chinese-American cop walked very slowly. Even his hair was wilted, no stylish spikes today.

"How are you, Eddie?" Rhyme asked.

"You should see the bruise," Deng said, referring to his run-in with a lead slug yesterday during the shoot-out on Canal Street. "I wouldn't let my wife see it. Put on my pajamas in the bathroom."

Red-eyed Sellitto carried a handful of pages from the overnight team of officers who'd been canvassing recent contractors that had installed gray Arnold Lustre-Rite carpet in the past six months. The canvassing wasn't even finished and the number of construction locations was discouragingly large: thirty-two separate installations in and around Battery Park City.

"Hell," Rhyme muttered, "thirty-two." And each one could have multiple floors that had been carpeted. Thirty-two? He'd hoped there'd be no more than five or six.

INS agent Alan Coe arrived, walking brightly into the lab. He didn't seem the least contrite and began asking questions about how the investigation was going – as if the shoot-out yesterday had never happened and the Ghost hadn't escaped thanks to him.

More footsteps in the corridor outside.

"Hey," Sachs said in greeting, entering the room. She kissed Rhyme. He started to tell her about the list of recently carpeted buildings but Sellitto interrupted. "Get some rest last night?" he asked her. The detective's voice had a definite edge to it.

"What?" she asked.

"Rest? Sleep? You get plenty of rest?"

"Not exactly," she replied cautiously. "Why?"

"I tried you at home about one. Had some questions for you."

Rhyme wondered what the reason for the interrogation was.

"Well, I got home at two," she answered, a flare in her eyes. "I went to see a friend."

"Did you?"

"Yeah, I did."

"Well, I couldn't get in touch with you."

"You know, Detective," she said, "I can let you have my mother's phone number. She can give you some pointers on checking up on me. Even though she hasn't done it for about fifteen years."

"Ho, boy, that was good," said Sonny Li.

"Watch yourself, patrolman," Sellitto said to Sachs.

"Watch what?" she snapped. "You got a point to make, make it."

The homicide cop backed down. He muttered, "I couldn't get in touch with you, that's all. Your cell phone was off."

"Was it? Well, I had my pager. Did you try to page me?"

"No."

"Then?" she asked.

The argument mystified Rhyme. True, when she was working, Rhyme insisted that she be instantly available. But after hours it was different. Amelia Sachs was independent. She liked to go for fast drives, she had interests and friends other than him.

Whatever drove her to scratch her skin, to mourn her father, to mourn her former lover, a cop busted for being one of the most crooked in recent history, whatever drove her at the crime scenes – the same force drove her off by herself at times.

Just as there were times when he booted her out, sometimes asking nicely, sometimes ordering her away. A crip needs time alone. To gather strength, to let the aide take care of the piss 'n' shit stuff and to consider little questions like Do I want to kill myself today?

Rhyme called the Federal Building and asked for Dellray but he was in Brooklyn checking out leads to the attempted bombing last night. Then he spoke to the assistant special agent in charge and was told that they were meeting that morning about assigning another FBI agent to GHOSTKILL to replace Dellray. Rhyme was angry; he'd assumed the bureau had already picked an SSA for the team.

"What about SPEC-TAC?"

The ASAC replied, "That's on the scroll for the powwow this morning too."

The scroll for the powwow?

"Well, we need people and we need them now," Rhyme snapped.

The slick man said, "We're prioritized."

"Oh, that's fucking reassuring."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Rhyme? I missed that."

"I said, call us as soon as you know something. We need more people."

Just after he disconnected, the phone rang again. Rhyme snapped, "Command, answer phone."

There was a click and a Chinese-accented voice asked, "Mr. Li, please."

Li sat down, absently pulled out a cigarette, which Thom swooped by and lifted from his hand. Li leaned toward the speaker and began to talk rapidly in Chinese. There was an explosive exchange between him and the caller. Rhyme thought they were arguing but Li finally sat back, jotting notes in Chinese. Then he hung up and smiled. "Okay, okay," Li said, "here I got something. That was Cai, from the tong. "He ask around about minorities. There this group of Chinese called Uighurs. They Muslims, Turks. Tough guys. They got take over by China – like Tibet – and don't like it so good. Treated bad. Cai find that Ghost hire people from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens. The guy Hongse shot, he one of them. Here address and phone number. Hey, was I right, Loaban? I say he from minority."

"You sure were, Sonny."

Eddie Deng translated the information into English on a second slip of paper.

"Should we raid it?" Sellitto asked.

"Not yet. Might tip off the Ghost," Rhyme said. "I've got a better idea."

Deng was right with him. "Pen register."

"Yep."

These were phone company records of incoming and outgoing calls for a particular number. Since they didn't record the content of a conversation, it was far easier for law enforcers to access these records than to monitor the actual transmissions under a Title 3 or state wiretap.

"What's that going to do?" Coe asked.

"The Ghost got to town yesterday morning and called the center at some point – presumably to arrange for his muscle. We'll check out all incoming and outgoing calls to the number of the place after, say, 9 A.M. yesterday."

In a half hour the phone company had provided a list of about thirty numbers into and out of the Uighur center in Queens in the past two days. Most of those numbers they could eliminate immediately – like those called before the Ghost arrived, as Rhyme had pointed out – but four were cell phones with local exchanges.

"And they're hot phones, right? The mobiles?"

"Stolen as bad as the Mets' second base," Sellitto said.

Because the phones were stolen, this meant there was no billing address where the Ghost might be. But the cell phone providers were able to give the team information about where the callers were located when each call had been made or received. One phone had been in the Battery Park City area and, as the security chief from the company dictated intersections to delineate the cell zone, Thom drew them on the map. The result was a wedge about a half mile square downtown near the Hudson River.

"Now," Rhyme shouted to Sachs, feeling the excitement of narrowing in on his prey, "did any of the buildings in that area have Arnold Lustre-Rite carpet installed?"

"Crossing my fingers," Eddie Deng said.

Finally Sachs looked up from the list and shouted, "Yes! Got one."

"That's the Ghost's safehouse," Rhyme announced.

She said, "A new building. Eight-oh-five Patrick Henry Street. Not far from the river." She circled it on the map. Then she sighed, looking over the information from the Arnold company. "Hell," she muttered. "They installed carpet on nineteen floors. Lots of apartments to check."

"Then," Rhyme said impatiently, "you better get going."

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

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

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

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

• Vehicle is a BMW X5.

• Driver – Jerry Tang.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

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

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

• No trace of Honda found.

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

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

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

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Jerry Tang Murder

Crime Scene

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

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

• Extensive vandalism.

• Some fingerprints.

• No matches except Tang's.

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

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

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

• Uighurs from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens.

• Cell phone calls lead to 805 Patrick Henry Street, downtown.

Canal Street Shooting

Crime Scene

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

• Stolen Chevrolet Blazer, untraceable.

• No match on prints.

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

• Location of installations determined: 32 near Battery Park City.

• Fresh gardening mulch found.

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

• Details on immigrants:

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

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

Chapter Thirty-one

You are part of the old. Do you repent?

The Ghost stood at the window of his high-rise apartment on Patrick Henry Street in Lower Manhattan and watched the boats sailing through the harbor, fifty meters below him, a mile away.

Some streaking fast, some bobbing awkwardly.

Some pristine, some rusty like the Fuzhou Dragon.

…part of the old. Your decadent way of life is disgusting…

He greatly enjoyed watching the panorama below him. He rarely had such views in China; once away from Beijing and the big cities in Fujian and Guangdong there were few towering buildings. Because there were few elevators.

Which was a condition that the Ghost's father came close to rectifying in the 1960s.

His father was a man blessed with the rare combination of careening ambition backed up by sensible schemes. The stocky businessman had his hands in many ventures: selling military products to the Vietnamese, who were gearing up to defeat the Americans in their appendix of a country to the south, operating junkyards, lending money, building private housing and importing Russian machinery – the most lucrative of which were Lemarov elevators, which were cheap, functional and rarely killed anyone.

Under the auspices of a Fuzhou collective, Kwan Baba – the given nickname meaning "father" – had signed contracts to buy thousands of these elevators, sell them to the building collectives and bring in Russian technicians to install them. He had every reason to believe that his efforts would change the skylines of China and make him even wealthier than he was.

And why wouldn't he succeed? He wore conformist unisex suits, he attended every CCP rally he possibly could, he had guanxi throughout the southeast and his cooperative was one of the most successful in the province of Fujian, sending a cascade of yuan to Beijing.

But his career was doomed. And the reason for this was simple: a solid, humorless soldier-turned-politician named Mao Zedong, whose capricious 1966 Cultural Revolution incited students across the country to rise up and destroy the four olds: old culture, customs, ideas and habits.

The house of the Ghost's father in an elegant part of Fuzhou was one of the first targets of the rampaging young men who took to the streets, practically shivering with idealism, on the orders of the Great Helmsman.

"You are part of the old," the leader raged. "Do you repent? Do you confess to clinging to the old values?"

Kwan Baba had met them in his living room, which had shrunk to the size of a prison cell due to the number of shouting youths surrounding the family, and had gazed at them not only in fear but in bewilderment too; he honestly hadn't been able to see the evil in what he'd done.

"Confess and seek reeducation and we will spare you!" another cried.

"You are guilty of old thought, old values, old culture…"

"You have built a lackey's empire on the backs of the people!"

In fact, the students had no idea what Kwan Baba did for a living or whether the cooperative he headed was based on the purest principles of J. P. Morgan capitalism or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communism. They knew only that his house was nicer than theirs and that he could afford to buy art from an abhorred "old" era – art that did nothing to inform the people's struggle against the oppressive forces of the West.

Kwan and his wife, along with the twelve-year-old Ang and his older brother, stood speechless before the seething crowd.

"You are part of the old…"

Much of that night was a terrible, confused blur to young Ang.

But one part was permanently branded into his memory and he thought of it now, standing in his luxurious high-rise overlooking the harbor, awaiting the Changs' betrayer.

The tall student leader of the cadre stood in the middle of the living room, wearing black-rimmed glasses, lenses slightly askew because they'd been made at one of the local collectives. Spittle flying from his mouth, he engaged in a furious dialectic with young Kwan Ang, who hovered meekly beside the kidney-shaped coffee table on which his father had taught him to use the abacus years before.

"You are part of the old," the student raged into the boy's face. "Do you repent?" For emphasis, with every line he spoke he swung the thick baton – heavy as a cricket bat – to the floor between them; it landed with a loud thud.

"Yes, I repent," the boy said calmly. "I ask the people to forgive me."

"You will reform your decadent ways."

Thud.

"Yes, I will reform my ways," he said, though he didn't know what "decadent" meant. "The old ways are a threat to the collective good of the people."

"You will die if you retain your old beliefs!"

Thud.

"Then I will reject them."

Thud, thud, thud…

So it continued for endless minutes – until the blows the student rained down finally stole the life from what the student had been striking with the iron-tipped baton: the Ghost's parents, who lay bound and gagged on the floor at their feet.

The boy gave not a single glance at the bloody forms as he recited the catechism the students thirstily sought to hear. "I repent my ways. I reject the old. I regret that I have been seduced by unbeneficial and decadent thought."

He was spared, but not his older brother, who fled to the gardener's shed and returned with a rake – the only weapon the foolish boy could find. Within minutes the students reduced him to a third bloody pile on the carpet, as lifeless as his parents.

The fervent youngsters took loyal Kwan Ang with them, welcoming the young boy into the heart of the Glorious Red Banner Fuzhou Youth Brigade, as they spent the rest of the night ferreting out more of the pernicious old.

None of the students noticed that the next morning Ang slipped away from their impromptu headquarters. It seemed that with so much reform to perpetrate none of them even remembered him.

He, however, remembered them. His short time as an old-despising Maoist revolutionary – no more than a few hours – had been spent quite productively: memorizing the names of the youths in the cadre and planning their deaths.

Still, he bided his time.

Naixin…

The boy's sense of survival was strong and he escaped into one of his father's junkyards near Fuzhou. He lived there for months. He would prowl through the huge place, hunting rats and dogs for food, tracking them through the skeletons of machinery and mounds of trash with a homemade spear and a club – a rusty shock absorber from a wrecked Russian truck.

When he grew more confident and learned that the cadres were not searching for him he began making forays into town to steal food from trash bins behind Fuzhounese restaurants.

Because of their seafaring history and extensive contact with the rest of the world the Fuzhounese have always been among the most independent of Chinese. Teenage Kwan Ang found that the Communist Party and the Maoist cadres steered clear of the waterfront and docks, where snakeheads and smugglers didn't give a shit about downtrodden masses, and spouting ideology was a sure way to get yourself killed. The boy was informally adopted by several of these men and began running errands for them, earning their trust, eventually being allowed to head up some of their smaller schemes, like thefts from the docks and extorting protection money from businesses in town.

He killed his first man at thirteen – a Vietnamese drug dealer who had robbed the snakehead Ang was working for. And at fourteen he finally tracked down, tortured and killed the students who'd robbed him of his family.

Young Ang was not a fool; he looked around him and realized that the thugs he worked with tended to rise only so far – largely because of their poor education. He knew that he needed to master business, accounting and English – the coming language of international crime. He would sneak into the state schools in Fuzhou, which were so crowded that the teachers never knew that one of the students was not officially enrolled.

The boy worked hard amassing money, learning which crimes to avoid (stealing from the state and importing drugs, each of which would assure that you were the headline act at the well-attended Tuesday morning executions in the local football stadium) and which crimes were acceptable: stealing from the foreign businesses that were stumbling obliviously into the Chinese market, dealing in guns and human smuggling.

His experience on the waterfronts had given him an expertise in smuggling, extortion and money laundering, and these were the areas in which he made his money, first in Fuzhou then in Hong Kong and expanding throughout China and the Far East. He made a fetish of staying out of the limelight, of never being photographed, of going to desperate lengths never to be spotted, much less arrested. He was thrilled when he learned that some local public security bureau officer had dubbed him Gui, the Ghost. He immediately adopted the nickname.

He was successful because the money itself was not what excited him. Rather it was the challenge itself. To lose was to be shamed. To win was glorious. The driving force in his life was the hunt. In gambling dens, for instance, he would play only games of skill. He was contemptuous of the fools who would pay money for a chance at a wheel of fortune or a lottery.

Challenges…

Like finding the Wus and the Changs.

He wasn't displeased with how the hunt was going. The Ghost had learned from his sources that the Wus were in a special safehouse – not an INS one but a facility run by the NYPD – which he never would have expected. Yusuf had talked to a colleague who would check out the place, see what the security was like and perhaps even kill the Wus if he had an opportunity.

As for the Changs – they'd be dead by nightfall, betrayed by their own friend, this Tan fellow, whom the Ghost would, of course, kill after the man revealed the family's address.

He was also pleased to hear from his source that the police weren't having much success tracking him down. The FBI side of the case was stalling and most of the case had fallen to the city police department. His luck was changing.

These meditations were interrupted by a knock on the door.

The betrayer had arrived.

The Ghost nodded toward a Uighur, who pulled his gun out of his waistband. He opened the door slowly, pointing his pistol toward the visitor.

The man in the hallway said, "I am Tan. I am here to see the man who is called the Ghost. Kwan is his real name. We have a business matter. It's about the Changs."

"Come in," the Ghost said, stepping forward. "Do you want some tea?"

"No," the old man replied, hobbling inside, looking around. "I won't be here long."

Chapter Thirty-two

With his still eyes, beneath drooping lids, Chang Jiechi surveyed the men in the room: the Ghost himself, then two men from some Chinese minority – Uighurs or Kazahks. Like many older Han Chinese, Chang Jiechi thought of them by the word "barbarians."

The old man continued farther into the room, thinking: What a journey it had been to come here to this place that would be the site of his death. Thinking too about his son, Sam Chang, who, he hoped, was still unconscious from the tea Chang Jiechi had given him, generously laced with some of the old man's morphine.

"What is the only reason that a man would do something like you are about to do – something foolhardy and dangerous?"

"For the sake of his children."

No father, of course, would willingly let a son go to his death. Chang Jiechi had decided as soon as Sam had returned from Chinatown last night that he himself would drug his son and come here in his stead. Sam had half a life span ahead of him here in the Beautiful Country. He had his sons to raise and now – miraculously – the daughter that Mei-Mei had always wanted. Here was freedom, here was peace, here was a chance for success. He would not let his son miss out on these things.

As the drugged tea had taken effect and his son's lids fell heavily and the cup dropped from his hand Mei-Mei had risen, alarmed. But Chang Jiechi had told her about the morphine and what he intended to do. She tried to stop him but she was a woman and she was his daughter-in-law; she acquiesced to his wishes. Chang Jiechi had taken the gun and some money and, embracing Mei-Mei and touching his son's forehead one last time, left the apartment, with instructions not to wake William under any circumstances. He'd found a taxi and used the church van map to show the driver where he wished to go.

Now he walked stiffly into the Ghost's elegant apartment. The barbarian with the gun hovered close and Chang Jiechi understood that he would have to put the men at ease before he would have a chance to pull out his own pistol and put a bullet into the heart of the snakehead.

"Do I know you?" the Ghost asked, eyeing him curiously.

"Perhaps," Chang Jiechi replied, making up something he believed was reasonable and would make the Ghost less suspicious. "I'm involved in the tongs here in Chinatown."

"Ah." The Ghost sipped his tea.

The barbarian remained nearby, looking suspiciously at the old man. The other young man, dark and brooding, sat down in the back of the apartment.

As soon as the thug that was closest turned his attention away, Chang Jiechi would shoot the Ghost.

"Sit down, old man," the Ghost said.

"Thank you. My feet aren't well. Dampness and heat in my bones."

"And you know where the Changs are?"

"Yes."

"How do I know I can trust you?"

Chang Jiechi laughed. "Regarding trust, I think I have more to worry about than you do."

Please, he prayed to the spirit of his own father, a man gone from this earth for forty-six years and the primary god in Chang Jiechi's pantheon, higher even than the Buddha: Father, make that man put his gun away and give me five seconds. Let me save my family. Give me the chance for one bullet – that's all I ask. I'm only three meters away, I cannot miss.

"How do you know the Changs?" the Ghost asked.

"Through a relative in Fuzhou."

"You know I wish them harm. What reason do you have to betray them?"

"I need the money for my son. He is not well. He needs doctors."

The Ghost shrugged and said to the barbarian, "Search him. Let me see any papers he has on him."

No! thought Chang Jiechi in alarm.

The barbarian stepped forward, blocking his view – and aim – of the Ghost.

Chang Jiechi held up a hand and stopped the barbarian. "Please. I am an old man. I deserve your respect. Don't touch me. I will give you my papers myself."

The barbarian glanced back at the Ghost with a raised eyebrow. And when he did, Chang Jiechi drew the pistol from his pocket and, without hesitation, shot the barbarian in the side of the head. He dropped hard and lay motionless, sprawled on a footstool.

But the Ghost reacted immediately and leapt behind a heavy couch as Chang Jiechi fired again. The bullet snapped through the leather but he had no idea whether or not he'd hit the snakehead. He turned toward the second barbarian in the back of the apartment but the man had already raised his gun and was aiming it. Chang Jiechi heard a shot and felt a huge fist strike his thigh as the heavy bullet spun him around and he landed on his back on the floor. The barbarian hurried toward him. The old man might have fired at the man and possibly hit him. Instead, he turned to the couch and repeatedly fired his gun toward where the Ghost was hiding.

Then he realized that the weapon had stopped firing.

He was out of bullets.

Had he hit the Ghost?

Oh, please, Guan Yin, goddess of mercy… Please!

But a shadow grew on the wall. The Ghost rose from behind the couch, unhurt, his own pistol in his hand. Breathing heavily, he pointed the black muzzle toward Chang Jiechi and walked around the furniture. A glance at the dead barbarian.

"You're Chang's father."

"Yes, and you're the devil who's on his way back to hell."

"But not," the Ghost said, "on your ticket."

The other barbarian, moaning and whispering hysterically in a language that Chang Jiechi did not understand, hovered over the body of his countryman. He then rose and started toward the old man, pointing the gun at him.

"No, Yusuf," the Ghost said impatiently, waving him back. "He'll tell us where the rest of them are."

"Never" was the defiant response.

The Ghost said to his confederate, "We don't have much time. Somebody will have heard the shots. We'll have to leave. Use the stairs. Not the elevator. Have the van waiting by the back door."

The agitated man continued to stare at Chang Jiechi with wide eyes, hands shaking in rage.

"Did you hear me?" the Ghost raged.

"Yes."

"Then go. I'll join you in a minute. Go!"

Chang Jiechi began to crawl desperately toward the closest doorway, which led to a dim bedroom. He glanced back. The Ghost was in the kitchen, taking a long filleting knife from a drawer.

Just ahead of Amelia Sachs, driving her bee-yellow Camaro at seventy miles an hour, was the building that contained the Ghost's safehouse apartment. The structure was huge, though, many stories tall and wide. Finding which apartment was the Ghost's would be a chore.

A sharp crackle in her Motorola speaker.

"Be advised, all RMP units in the vicinity of Battery Park City, we have a ten-thirty-four, reports of shots fired. Standby… All units, further to that ten-thirty-four. Have a location. Eight-oh-five Patrick Henry Street. All units in area respond."

The very building she was now bearing down on. The Ghost's. Was it a coincidence? She doubted it, though. What had happened? Did he have the Changs inside the building? Had he lured them there? The families, the children… She pushed the accelerator farther down and depressed the button of her mike, pinned to her windbreaker. "Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Central. Approaching scene of that ten-thirty-four. Anything further, K?"

"Nothing further, Five Eight Eight Five."

"No apartment number, K?"

"Negative."

"K."

A few seconds later, Sachs's Camaro was up on the curb, leaving room for the ambulances and other emergency vehicles, which would soon be converging on the building.

As she ran inside, minding the slick, rosy marble floors, she noted that the flower beds near the front door overflowed with mulch, which was scattered on the sidewalks – undoubtedly the source of the trace that they'd found at the earlier scene.

There was no security guard or doorman station in the building but several people were standing in the lobby, looking uneasily at the elevators.

Sachs asked a middle-aged man, wearing workout clothing, "Did you report the shots?"

"I heard something. I don't know where from, though."

"Anybody?" Sachs asked, glancing at the other tenants.

"I think it was west," an elderly woman said. "High up, but I'm not sure where."

Two other responding RMPs pulled up out front and the uniformed officers ran inside. Sellitto, Li and Alan Coe were behind them. An ambulance appeared and then two Emergency Services Unit trucks.

"We heard the ten-thirty-four," Sellitto said. "This's his building, right? The Ghost's?"

"Yep," Sachs confirmed.

"Jesus," the homicide detective muttered. "There've gotta be three hundred units here."

"Two hundred seventy-four," the elderly woman said.

Sellitto and Sachs conferred. The name on the apartment directory would be fake, of course. The only way to find the Ghost would be a dangerous, door-to-door search.

Crewcut Bo Haumann strode into the lobby with more ESU officers. "We've sealed all the exits," he said.

Sachs nodded. "What floor?" she asked the elderly woman.

"I was on nineteen. West wing. They seemed awfully close."

A young man in a business suit had joined them. "No, no, no," he said. "I'm sure they were from fifteen. South. Not west."

"You sure?" Haumann asked.

"Absolutely."

"I don't think so," the woman offered in gentle disagreement. "They were higher. And it was definitely the west wing of the building."

"Great," Haumann muttered. "Well, we've gotta move. We could have injureds. We'll search everywhere."

Sachs's Motorola clattered again. "Central to Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five."

"Go ahead, Central."

"Landline patch."

"Go ahead, K."

"Sachs, are you there?" Lincoln Rhymes voice said.

"Yeah, go ahead. I'm here with Lon and Bo and ESU."

"Listen," the criminalist said, "I've been talking to dispatch and correlating the reports from the people in the building who called nine-one-one. It looks like the shots came from either the eighteenth or nineteenth floors, somewhere in the middle of the west side of the building."

The speaker was a squawk box, not a headset; anyone nearby could hear the transmission. "Okay, you all hear that?" Haumann asked his officers.

They nodded.

"We're going to sweep, Rhyme," she said. "I'll call you back."

Haumann divided his officers into three teams, one for each floor – eighteen and nineteen – and one to divide up further and sweep the stairwells.

Sachs noticed Coe nearby. He was checking his own pistol – the large Glock with which he was a proven bad shot – and had sidled over to one of the ESU teams. She whispered to Haumann, "Keep him off the entry. He's trouble in a tac situation."

Sachs had some credibility with the head of ESU – he'd seen her under fire – and Haumann agreed. He walked over to Coe and spoke with him. Sachs didn't hear the exchange but since this was an NYPD operation, Haumann must've pulled jurisdictional rank and ordered the agent to stand down. After a moment of heated discussion, the INS agent's face was nearly as red as his hair. But Haumann had never lost the will – and demeanor – of the drill sergeant he had once been and Coe soon gave up his futile protests. He turned away and stormed out the front door, pulling out his cell phone, undoubtedly to lodge a protest with Peabody or somebody at the Federal Building.

The ESU head left a small team to guard the lobby then he, Sachs and a group of officers stepped into one of the elevators and started up to the eighteenth floor.

They crowded away from the door when it opened and one officer looked out with a metal mirror attached to a wand. "Clear."

Out they stepped, moving cautiously along the carpet, trying to remain quiet though their equipment rang like mountain climbers'.

Haumann gave the hand signals that meant to spread out. Two officers, armed with MP5 machine guns, joined Sachs and together they deployed to start the search. Bracketed by the two large cops, machine guns ready, Sachs picked a door and knocked.

There was an odd sound from inside, a faint clunk, as if something heavy was being set down next to the door. She glanced at the ESU officers, who leveled their weapons at the doorway. With a satisfying zip of Velcro, Sachs drew her pistol from her holster and stood back slightly.

Another clunk from inside, a scraping of metal.

What the hell was that noise?

A chain rattled.

Sachs put a few pounds of nervous pressure on the trigger guard of her weapon, though not on the trigger itself, and tensed as the door opened.

A tiny, gray-haired woman looked up at them. "You're the police," she said. "You're here about those firecrackers I complained about." She stared at the large machine guns the ESU officers carried. "Oh. Well. Look at this."

"That's right, ma'am," Sachs said, noticing that the clunking sound had been a stool, which the woman had apparently set on the floor to be able to look out through the security peephole.

She grew wary. "But you wouldn't have those guns if they were just firecrackers, right?"

"We're not sure what they were, ma'am. We're trying to find out where the sounds came from."

"I think it's 18K, up the hall. That's why I thought they were firecrackers – because an Oriental man lives there. Or Asian, or whatever you're supposed to say nowadays. They use firecrackers in their religion. They're supposed to scare away dragons. Or maybe it's ghosts. I don't know."

"Are there any other Asians on this floor?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"Okay, ma'am, thank you. Could you go back inside and lock your door. Whatever you hear, don't open it."

"Oh, dear." She looked at the men with the guns again and nodded uncertainly. "Could you tell me -"

"Now, please," Sachs said, smiling, but in a firm voice. She pulled the woman's door shut herself. She called in a whisper to Haumann, "Think it's 18K."

Haumann gave hand signals to his team, directing them to the apartment.

He knocked hard on the door. "Police, open the door!"

No response.

Again.

Nothing.

Haumann nodded to the officer who'd lugged the team's large battering ram with him. He and another cop took hold of the handles on the sides of the thick metal tube and looked at Haumann, who nodded.

The officers eased the ram back and then swung it forward hard into the door near the knob. The lock gave way immediately and the door slammed inward. They dropped the ram, chipping the marble floor. A half-dozen officers, guns to their shoulders, raced into the room.

Amelia Sachs moved in fast too, though behind the others, who sported full body armor, Nomex hoods, helmets and visors. Weapon in hand, she paused in the entryway and looked over the luxurious apartment, painted in subtle grays and pinks.

The ESU entry team fanned out and checked every room and any possible hiding places a human being might fit into. Their gruff voices began reverberating through the place. "Clear here… clear… Clear in the kitchen. No back entrance. Clear…"

The Ghost was gone.

But, just like at Easton Beach yesterday, he'd left death in his stead.

In the living room was the body of a man who bore a resemblance to the one she'd shot outside the Wus' apartment last night. Another Uighur, she assumed. He'd been shot at close range. He lay near a leather couch that had been riddled with bullets. A street gun – a cheap chrome automatic with the serial number etched out – lay on the floor in front of the couch.

The other body was in the bedroom.

He was an elderly Chinese man, lying on his back, his eyes glazed. There was a bullet wound in his leg but the slug had missed the major arteries and veins; it hadn't bled much. Sachs could see no other wounds, even though a long kitchen knife lay near his side. She pulled on rubber gloves and felt his jugular. No pulse.

Emergency Medical Services technicians arrived and checked the man over, verifying that he was dead.

"What's the COD?" one of the techs mused.

Sachs studied him. Then leaned forward. "Ah, got it," she said, nodding at the man's hand, in which was clutched a brown bottle. Sachs worked it out of his fingers. The characters on the label were in both Chinese and English. "Morphine," she said. "Suicide."

This might have been one of the immigrants on the Fuzhou Dragon – perhaps Sam Chang's father, who'd come here to kill the Ghost. She speculated about what had happened: The father had shot the Uighur but the Ghost had jumped for cover behind the couch and the old man had run out of ammunition. The Ghost took the knife and was going to torture him to learn where the rest of the family was but the immigrant had killed himself.

Haumann listened into his headset and reported that the rest of the building was clear; the Ghost had escaped.

"Oh, no," she muttered.

Crime Scene arrived – two techs carrying large metal suitcases into the hallway outside the apartment. Sachs knew them and nodded a greeting. She opened the cases, donned the Tyvek suit and then announced to the ESU team, "I need to process the room. Could I have everybody out of here please?"

For a half hour she worked the scene and though she collected some evidence none of it gave an obvious indication of where the Ghost might have gone to.

As she finished the search Sachs was aware of cigarette smoke. She looked up to see Sonny Li standing in the doorway, surveying the room. "I know him from boat," Li said, shaking his head with a sadness in his eyes. "That Sam Changs father."

"I figured. Why'd he try it? One old man against the Ghost and the others?"

"For family," Li said quietly. "For family."

"I suppose you want to run the scene too?" she asked without any irony. Li's correct prediction about Jerry Tang and his surprise appearance at the Wus' apartment yesterday had bolstered his credibility as a detective.

"What you think I doing now, Hongse? I walking grid."

She laughed.

"Loaban and me talk last night. He tell me about walking grid. Only I walk grid in my mind now."

Sort of like Rhyme does, Sachs reflected. "You finding anything good?"

"Oh, plenty, I'm saying."

She turned back to the more tangible evidence and wrote out the chain of custody cards and packaged the evidence for transport.

In the corner of the room she noticed a small altar and several statues of Chinese gods. The words from the woman up the hall echoed in her mind.

They use firecrackers in their religion. They're supposed to scare away dragons.

Or maybe it's ghosts.

Chapter Thirty-three

Dozens of flashing lights surrounded the high-rise. The Ghost turned and looked back at them. Yusuf, the silent Turk, drove along Church Street away from the place. He was grim and badly shaken from the loss of yet another comrade but he drove calmly and was careful not to draw attention to the stolen Windstar van.

After the old man had killed himself, without revealing anything (he had nothing in his pockets either), the Ghost had fled down the stairs and sprinted into the parking lot just as he'd heard sirens in front of the building. He was now still struggling to catch his breath and to calm his heart.

The police had arrived too quickly to be responding to the sound of the gunshots; they'd known that he was there. How? Gazing absently at the people on the morning streets, he considered this. The safehouse had absolutely no connection to him. Finally he decided that they had probably tracked the place down through phone calls to and from the Uighur center in Queens. That had given the police his cell phone number and they'd traced the location of the safehouse. Probably there was other evidence too; his intelligence about this Lincoln Rhyme suggested that he was fully capable of making a deduction like that – but he was troubled that he'd gotten no advance warning that the police were on their way there. He'd thought his guanxi was better than this.

Yusuf said something in his native Turkic and the Ghost said in English, "Repeat."

"Where you go?"

The Ghost had several other safehouses in the city but only one nearby. He gave him directions. Then the Ghost handed the man another five thousand in one-color. "Go find somebody else to help us. You'll do that?"

Yusuf hesitated.

"I'm sorry about your friends," the Ghost said, masking the contempt in his voice with as much faux sympathy as he could add. "But they were careless. You're not careless. I need you to help me. There'll be another ten thousand for you. Cash to you alone. You don't have to split it."

He nodded.

"Okay, go find someone else. But not at the Uighur center. Don't go back there. The police will be watching it. And get another cell phone. Call me on mine and give me your new number." He recited the number of his new mobile phone – another one he'd kept in the high-rise and had taken with him, along with the money, when he'd escaped a few minutes before.

"Drop me on the corner, up there."

The Turk rolled to a stop at Canal Street, not far from where they had nearly killed the Wus yesterday. The Ghost climbed out then leaned down and had the Turk reiterate his instructions in English, made sure that he remembered the number of the Ghost's new cell phone.

The van sped off.

The Ghost stretched, his eyes following a Chinese teenager in a tight knit blouse, short skirt and implausibly high heels, which gave her a stuttering gait.

He watched her disappear in the crowd. He wasn't the only man watching her though the Ghost suspected that only he wanted to hurt her very badly before he fucked her.

Turning the opposite way, he started down disheveled Canal Street. He still had a long walk to get to his other safehouse – it was nearly a kilometer east. As he walked he considered what he needed to do: Foremost was a new gun – something big, a SIG or a Glock. It seemed this was going to be a neck-and-neck race to see who got to the Changs first, he or the police, and if it came to a shoot-out he wanted good firepower. He also needed some new clothes. A few other things as well.

The battle was growing more and more challenging. He thought of the days of his youth when he'd hide from Mao's cadres in the junkyard, patiently stalking rats and vicious dogs for food. He thought too of the search for his fathers killers in the youth brigade. Those times had taught him a lot about the art of hunting and one lesson he learned was this: The stronger adversary expects you to seek out and exploit his weakness and he prepares his defense accordingly. But the only effective way to prevail against such an enemy is to use his strength against him. And this is what the Ghost now intended to do.

Naixin? he asked himself.

No. The time for patience was over.

Chang Mei-Mei set a cup of tea in front of her groggy husband.

He blinked at the pale green cup but his attention, as was that of his wife and sons, was wholly on the television set.

The news story, they learned with the translation assistance of William, was about two men found dead in Lower Manhattan.

One of the men was a Chinese-Turkestan immigrant from Queens.

The other was a sixty-nine-year-old Chinese national, believed to have been a passenger on the Fuzhou Dragon.

Sam Chang had wakened from his heavy sleep, cotton-mouthed and disoriented, a half hour ago. He'd tried to stand but fell, crashing to the floor, bringing the children and his wife running. As soon as he noticed the gun was gone he'd understood what his father had done and stumbled toward the door.

But Mei-Mei had stopped him. "It's too late," she'd said.

"No!" he'd cried, falling back onto the couch.

He'd turned to her. His loss and sorrow tipped him into fury and he raged at her, "You helped him, didn't you? You knew what he was going to do!"

The woman, holding Po-Yee's toy kitten, looked down at it. She said nothing.

Chang had made a fist and drawn back to strike her. Mei-Mei had squinted and turned away, anticipating the blow. William shifted from one foot to the other; Ronald cried. But then Chang had lowered his hand. Thinking: I've taught her and my children to respect their elders, my father most of all. Chang Jiechi would have ordered her to help him and she would have obeyed.

As the pernicious effects of the powerful medicine had worn off, Chang had then sat for a time, racked by worry, hoping for the best.

But the television report confirmed that the worst had come to be.

The Turkestan had been shot to death, the reporter explained, by the elderly man, who had then died of an overdose of morphine, apparently a suicide. The apartment was believed to have been a hideout for Kwan Ang, the human smuggler wanted in connection with the sinking of the Fuzhou Dragon early yesterday. Kwan had escaped before the police arrived and was still at large.

Ronald continued to cry and looked back and forth from the TV to his mother then his father. "Yeye," he said. "Yeye…"

Sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth anxiously, William bitterly spat out the translation of the pretty newscaster's words. By coincidence the reporter was Chinese-American.

The story concluded and, as if the televised confirmation of Chang Jiechi's death signaled the moment, Mei-Mei rose and went into the bedroom. She returned with a sheet of paper. She handed it to her husband then hefted Po-Yee onto her hip and wiped the girl's face and hands.

Numb, Sam Chang took the folded piece of paper and opened it. The letter had been written in pencil, not a brush charged with rich ink, but the characters were beautifully drawn; a true artist, the old man had taught his son, can excel in any medium, no matter how base.

My son:

My life has been full beyond my hopes. I am old and I am sick. Seeking a year or two more of life on earth gives me no comfort. Rather, I find solace in my duty to return to the soul of Nature at the hour inscribed for me in The Register of the Living and the Dead.

And that moment is now.

I could say many things to you, summarize for you all the lessons of my life, all that I have learned from my father and from your mother and from you, son, as well. But I choose not to do so. Truth is unwavering but the path to truth is often a maze that we each must struggle to find on our own. I have planted healthy bamboo and it has grown well. Continue your journey away from the earth and toward the light and nurture your own young crops. Be vigilant, as any farmer, but give them space. I have seen the stock of the plant; they will grow straight.

– Your father

Sam Chang was seized with bottomless anger. He rose fast from the couch and, groggy from the drug, struggled to stay upright. He flung the teacup against the wall and it shattered. Ronald shied away from his enraged father.

"I am going to kill him!" he screamed. "The Ghost is going to die!"

His tirade started the baby crying. Mei-Mei whispered something to her sons. William hesitated but then nodded toward Ronald, who hefted Po-Yee. Together they walked into the bedroom. The door closed.

Chang said to her, "I found him once and I'm going to find him again. This time -"

"No," Mei-Mei said firmly.

He turned to face his wife. "What?"

She swallowed and looked down. "You will not."

"Don't speak to me like that. You're my wife."

"Yes," she said to him, her voice quavering, "I am your wife. And I'm the mother of your children. And what will happen to us if you die? Have you thought about that? We'd live on the street, we'd be deported. Do you know what life in China would be like for us when we returned? A widow of a dissident with no property, no money? Is that what you want for us?"

"My father is dead!" Chang raged. "The man responsible for that has to die."

"No, he doesn't," she replied breathlessly, working up her courage once again. "Your father was an old man. He was sick. He was not the center of our universe and we must move on."

"How can you say that?" Chang raged, shocked at her impudence. "He's the reason I exist."

"He lived a full life and now he's gone. You live in the past, Jingerzi. Our parents deserve our respect, yes, but nothing more than that."

He realized that she'd used his Chinese given name. He didn't think she'd done so in years – not since they'd been married. When she addressed him, she always used the respectful zhangfu, "husband."

In a steadier voice now Mei-Mei said, "You won't avenge his death. You'll stay here with us, in hiding, until the Ghost is captured or killed. Then you and William will go to work at Joseph Tan's printing company. And I'll stay here and teach Ronald and Po-Yee. We'll all study English, we'll make money… And, when there's another amnesty, we'll become citizens." She paused for a moment and wiped her face, from which tears streamed. "I loved him too, you know. It's my loss as well as yours." She resumed cleaning up.

Chang fell onto the couch and sat for a long time in silence, staring at the shabby red and black carpet on the floor. Then he walked to the bedroom. William, holding Po-Yee, stared out the window. Chang began to speak to him but changed his mind and silently motioned his younger son out. The boy warily stepped into the living room and followed his father to the couch. They both sat. After a moment Chang composed himself. He asked Ronald, "Son, do you know the warriors of Qin Shi Huang?"

"Yes, Baba."

These were thousands of full-size terra-cotta statues of soldiers, charioteers and horses built near Xi'an by Chinas first emperor in the third century B.C. and placed in his tomb. The army was to accompany him to the afterlife.

"We're going to do the same for Yeye." He nearly choked on his sorrow. "We're going to send some things to heaven so your grandfather will have them with him."

"What?" Ronald asked.

"Things that were important to him when he was alive. We lost everything on the ship so we'll draw pictures of them."

"Will that work?" the boy asked, frowning.

"Yes. But I need you to help me."

Ronald nodded.

"Take some paper there and that pencil." He nodded toward the table. "Why don't you draw a picture of his favorite brushes – the wolf-hair and the goat. And his ink stick and well. You remember what they looked like?"

Ronald took the pencil in his small hand. He bent over the paper, began his task.

"And a bottle of the rice wine he liked," Mei-Mei suggested.

"And a pig?" the boy asked.

"Pig?" Chang asked.

"He liked pork rice, remember?"

Then Chang was aware of someone behind him. And he turned to see William looking down at his brother's drawing. Somber-faced, the teenager said, "When Grandmother died, we burned money."

It was a tradition at Chinese funerals to burn slips of paper printed to look like million-yuan notes, issued by the "Bank of Hell" so that the deceased would have money to spend in the afterworld.

"Maybe I can draw some yuan," William said.

Chang was swept with emotion at his words but he didn't embrace the boy, as he wanted desperately to do. He said simply, "Thank you, son."

The lean boy crouched down beside his brother and began to draw the bills.

When the children had finished their drawings Chang led his family outside into the backyard of their new home and, as if this were Chang Jiechi's actual funeral, he set two burning incense sticks in the ground to mark the spot where the body would have lain and then, setting afire the pictures the sons had drawn, they watched the smoke disappear into the gray sky and the ash melt into black curls.

Chapter Thirty-four

"Somebody made another move on the Wus," Sellitto said, glancing up at Rhyme from his cell phone.

"What?" Sachs asked, astonished. "In our Murray Hill safehouse?" Rhyme wheeled around to face the detective, who said, "Dark-complected man, slight build, wearing gloves, was spotted on one of the security cameras in the alleyway. He was checking out one of the rear windows. Coincidence, you think?"

Sonny Li laughed bitterly. "With Ghost, there not coincidences." With a concurring nod, Rhyme asked, "What happened?"

"Two of our people went after him but he got away." The criminalist then asked, "How the hell did the Ghost find out where they were?"

"Who'd know?" Sellitto asked.

Sachs considered this. "After the shoot-out on Canal Street, one of his bangshous could've followed me to the clinic then followed the Wus to the safehouse. Hard to do but possible." She walked to the whiteboard and tapped an entry. "Or how 'bout this?"

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

"A spy, you thinking?" Sellitto asked.

She said, "Nobody at the bureau knew we sent them to Murray Hill.

Dellray had left by the time I thought of it. That leaves somebody at the INS or NYPD."

"Well," Sellitto said, "we damn well can't keep the Wus there anymore. I'll call the U.S. Marshals and have them taken to a witness protection facility upstate." He looked at the team around him. "And that information doesn't leave this room." He placed the call and arranged to have the Wus transported in a bulletproof van.

Rhyme was growing impatient. "Somebody check with the bureau. Where the hell is Dellray's replacement? Eddie, make the call."

Deng got in touch with the bureau's ASAC. It turned out that there'd been some delay with the magical "powwow" that was supposed to result in additional agents to work GHOSTKILL.

"They said everything'll be in place this afternoon."

"What's 'everything'?" Rhyme asked caustically. "And what fucking place does it have to be in before we get the agents? Don't they know there's a killer out there?"

"You want to call them back?"

He snapped, "No. I want to look at the evidence."

Sachs's search of the crime scene at the Ghost's safehouse on Patrick Henry Street had mixed results. One discouraging fact was that the cell phone that had been instrumental in tracking down the Ghost had been abandoned in the high-rise. Had he still been using it, they might have been able to trace him. Moreover, the fact he'd left it meant that he'd probably figured out that this was how they'd found him and would now be far more careful when calling on mobiles.

Unlike the shooter killed on Canal Street, the Uighur in the safehouse did have some identification on him, a driver's license and a card with the address of the Turkestan cultural center in Queens. But Bedding and Saul and a team of tactical agents were at the center now and the head of the organization had said only that he'd heard that some unidentified Chinese man had hired a few people in the neighborhood to move furniture. He didn't know anything else. They would continue to lean on him, the twins assured, but their assessment was that he'd rather go to jail than dime out the Ghost.

The name on the lease of the Ghost's apartment didn't help either: Harry Lee. His Social Security number and references were fake and the certified rental check came from a bank in the Caribbean. "Lee" was the equivalent of "Smith" in English, Deng reported.

The body of the old man found dead from the morphine overdose, though, did reveal some clues. He'd carried in his wallet an ID card, very blurred from the seawater, that identified him as Chang Jiechi. They also found a very old scrap of paper hidden behind the ID. Deng smiled sadly. "Look at that. It's an autograph from Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader. The inscription thanked Chang Jiechi for his efforts to resist the communists and keep the Chinese people free from dictatorship."

Rhyme's gaze then slipped to the row of pictures below the ones of the old man's corpse. They were close-ups of his hands. The criminalist moved his own finger slightly and eased the Storm Arrow up to the board.

"Look at that," he said. "His hands."

"I shot them because of the blotches," Sachs said.

Chang Jiechi's fingers and palms were covered with blue-black stains. Paint or ink. Clearly not the purple shade of postmortem lividity – which in any case wouldn't've occurred so soon after death.

"The fingers!" Rhyme called. "Look at the fingers."

She squinted and walked close. "Indentations!" She pulled the printout of Sam Chang's fingerprints off the wall and held it close to that of the fathers hand. The palms and digits were different sizes – and the old man's were far more wrinkled – but the indentations Rhyme had spotted on Sam Chang's fingers and thumb were similar to the lines clearly evident on his fathers.

They'd assumed that the marks on Sam Chang's fingers were from an injury of some kind. But clearly that wasn't the case.

"What's it mean?" Mel Cooper asked. "Genetic?"

"No, can't be," Rhyme said, his eyes scanning the picture of the old man's hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and let his mind fly – like one of the peregrine falcons lifting off from its bedroom window perch. Ink on his hands, indentations… Then his head jerked back in the chair and he looked at Sachs. "They're painters! Father and son're both artists. Remember the logo of The Home Store on the van? One of them painted it."

"No," Li said, looking at the photo. "Not painters. Calligraphers. Calligraphy in China lots important. Hold brush like this." He grabbed a pen and held it perfectly vertical, gripped firmly in a triangle formed by the thumb and his first two fingers. When he released it and held his hand up, the red indentations in his fingers and thumb were identical to those in the hands of Chang and his father. Li continued, "Calligraphy considered art in China. But during Proletarian Revolution, artists persecuted bad. Lots calligraphers got jobs printing and sign painting. Doing useful things. Good for society. On boat Chang tell us he dissident and got fired from teaching job. Nobody hire him at schools. Make sense for him do printing, sign painting."

"And at the clinic Wu said that Chang had a job here lined up already," Sachs reminded.

"We know the Changs're in Queens," Rhyme said. "Let's get as many Chinese-speaking officers from the Fifth Precinct as we can to start calling quick-print, printing or sign-painting companies that've just hired somebody illegal."

Alan Coe laughed – apparently at Rhyme's naiveté. "They're not going to cooperate. No guanxi."

"Here's some fucking guanxi," Rhyme snapped. "Tell them if they lie about it and we find out, the INS is going to raid their shop and – if the Changs are killed – we'll book them for accessory to murder."

"Now you think like Chinese cop," Sonny Li said with a laugh. "Using Historically Unprecedented People's Ox Prod."

Deng pulled out his cell phone and made a call to his headquarters.

Mel Cooper had run some of the trace from the safehouse on Patrick Henry Street through the gas chromatograph. He studied the results. "Something interesting here." He glanced at the bag that Sachs had marked with a felt-tip pen.

"It was on Chang's father's shoes. Nitrates, potassium, carbon, sodium… Biosolids. In significant amounts too."

This caught Rhyme's attention. "Biosolid" was a term undoubtedly invented by some public relations expert who was clever enough to know that the marketing potential of the product would be severely limited if the stuff was sold under its real name: processed human shit.

The fourteen waste treatment plants in New York City produced more than a thousand tons of biosolids a day and sold it throughout the country as fertilizer. For there to be significant amounts on the victims shoes meant that the Changs were probably living quite close to one of the plants.

"Can we search house by house near the treatment plants?" Sellitto asked.

Rhyme shook his head. There were a number of treatment plants in Queens and given the fickle winds in the New York City area, the Changs could be living in a several block radius around any of them. Without narrowing the search down further – by finding the print shop where Sam Chang would be working, say – a door-to-door search would take forever.

The rest of the evidence didn't help much. The morphine that the man had killed himself with had come from a clinic in China and therefore was of no use to them forensically.

"Morphine can kill you?" Sellitto asked.

"The rumor is that's how the writer Jack London killed himself," pointed out Lincoln Rhyme, whose knowledge of suicide techniques was as extensive as his command of historical criminal trivia. "Besides, in the right dosage, anything can kill you."

Sachs then added that the old man had no subway transfers or other receipts on him to suggest where he might've come from.

But, Rhyme was soon reminded, Amelia Sachs was not the only cop to have run the crime scene in the Ghost's high-rise.

Sonny Li said, "Hey, Loaban, I found things too when I search Ghost's place. You want to hear?"

"Go ahead."

"Got some good stuff, I'm saying. Okay, there a statue of the Buddha across from door, facing it. No stereos or red color in his bedroom. Hallway painted white. Bookcases had doors on them. Had statue of eight horses. All mirrors very tall so they not cut off part of head when you look in them. Had brass bells with wooden handles – he keep them in western part of room." He nodded at the apparent significance of this. "Figure it out, Loaban?"

"No," Rhyme snapped. "Keep going."

Li patted his shirt for his cigarettes then let his arms fall to his side. "Over my desk at security bureau office in Liu Guoyuan I got sign."

"Another expression?"

"Ju yi fan san. It mean: Learning three things from one example. From Confucius saying: 'If I show man corner of object and he not able to figure out what other three corners look like, then I not bother to teach him again.'"

Not a bad motto for a forensic detective, Rhyme reflected. "And you deduced something helpful, something we can use from a statue of eight horses and brass bells?"

"Feng shui, I'm saying."

"Arranging furniture and things for good luck," Thom said. When Rhyme glanced at him he added, "It was on a show on the Home and Garden Channel. Don't worry – I watched it on my own time."

Impatient Rhyme said, "So he lives in a good-luck apartment, Li. What's the evidentiary point?"

"Hey, congratulations, Sonny," Thom said. "You got the last-name treatment. He saves that for his really good friends. Note that I'm only 'Thom.'"

"Speaking of which, Thom, I believe you're here merely to write. Not to editorialize."

"The point, Loaban? Pretty clear to me," Li continued. "The Ghost hire somebody to arrange his room and guy he hire do fuck good job. Know his stuff. Maybe know other places the Ghost has apartments."

"Okay," Rhyme said. "That's useful."

"I go check feng shui men in Chinatown. What you think?"

Rhyme caught Sachs's eye and they laughed. "I need to write a new criminalistics textbook. This time I'll add a woo-woo chapter."

"Hey, know what our leader Deng Xiaoping say. He say it not matter if cat black or white, so long as it catches mouse."

"Well, go catch yourself a mouse, Li. Then come on back here. I need some more baijiu. Oh, and Sonny?"

The Chinese cop glanced at him.

"Zaijian." Rhyme carefully pronounced the word he'd learned on a Chinese language translation website.

Li nodded. "'Goodbye.' Yes, yes. You even pronounce good, Loaban. Zaijian."

The Chinese cop left and they returned to the evidence. But the team made no headway and an hour went by without any word from the officers who were canvassing the quick-print shops in Queens.

Rhyme stretched his head back into the pillow. He and Sachs gazed at the charts, Rhyme feeling a too-familiar sensation: the desperate hope that evidence long picked over would yield just one more nugget even though you knew there was nothing else for it to reveal.

"Should I talk to the Wus again, or John Sung?" she asked.

"We don't need more witnesses," Rhyme murmured. "We need more evidence. I need something concrete."

More goddamn evidence… They needed -

Then his head swiveled fast toward the map – the original one: of Long Island. He looked at the tiny red dot about a mile off the coast of Orient Point.

"What?" Sachs asked, seeing him squint.

"Goddamn," he whispered.

"What?"

"We have another crime scene. And I forgot all about it."

"What?"

"The ship. The Fuzhou Dragon."

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back, • One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

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

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

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

• Vehicle is a BMW X5.

• Driver – Jerry Tang.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

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

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

• No trace of Honda found.

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

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

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

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Jerry Tang Murder

Crime Scene

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

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

• Extensive vandalism.

• Some fingerprints.

• No matches except Tang's.

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

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

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

• Uighurs from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens.

• Cell phone calls lead to 805 Patrick Henry Street, downtown.

Canal Street Shooting

Crime Scene

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

• Stolen Chevrolet Blazer, untraceable.

• No match on prints.

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

• Location of installations determined: 32 near Battery Park City.

• Fresh gardening mulch found.

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

• Details on immigrants:

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

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

Safehouse Shooting

Crime Scene

• Fingerprints and photos of Chang Jiechi's hands reveal father – and son Sam – are calligraphers. Sam Chang might be doing printing or sign painting. Calling stores and companies in Queens.

• Biosolids on deceased's shoes suggest they live in neighborhood near sewage treatment plant.

• Ghost uses feng shui practitioner to arrange his living space.

Chapter Thirty-five

Lon Sellitto said, "But the evidence on the ship'd be messed up, wouldn't it, Linc? Because of the water."

Sachs said, " 'Although submersion in water may destroy or degrade certain types of evidence, such as water-soluble chemicals, other forms of physical evidence, even trace, may be preserved and readily discovered, depending on the currents and the depth and temperature of the water. Indeed, some may be better preserved than had the scene been on dry land.' How'd I do, Rhyme?"

"Good, Sachs. I'm impressed." The passage was from Rhyme's textbook on criminalistics.

"Somebody call the Coast Guard, patch me through to whoever's in charge of the rescue out there."

Sellitto finally got through and put the call on speakerphone.

"This is Fred Ransom speaking. I'm captain of the Evan Brigant." The man was shouting; the wind whistled loudly over the mouthpiece of his radio mike.

"This is Detective Sellitto, NYPD. I talked to you before?"

"Right, sir. I recall."

"I'm here with Lincoln Rhyme. Where are you now?"

"Just above the Dragon. We're still looking for survivors but haven't had any luck."

Rhyme asked, "What's the status of the ship, Captain."

"She's on her starboard side about eighty, ninety feet down."

"What's the weather like now?"

" Lot better'n it was. Ten-foot seas, wind about thirty knots. Light rain. Visibility, probably two hundred yards."

"You have divers available who can check out the interior?" Rhyme asked.

"Yessir."

"Can they dive in that weather?"

"Conditions aren't the best but they're acceptable. You know, sir, we've already scanned for survivors. Negative on that."

"No, I'm talking about searching for evidence."

"I see. We could send some folks down. The thing is, though, that my divers've never done that. They're S and R."

Search and Rescue, Rhyme recalled.

The captain asked, "Could somebody walk them through what to do?"

"Sure," Rhyme said, though he was discouraged at the idea of explaining a lifetime of crime scene investigation to a novice.

Then Amelia Sachs's voice interrupted. "I'll search it."

Rhyme said, "I'm talking about the ship itself, Sachs."

"I understand that."

"It's ninety feet underwater."

She bent down and said into the speakerphone, "Captain, I can be down in Battery Park in thirty minutes. Can you have a chopper get me out to your location?"

"Well, we can fly in this weather. But -"

"I'm open-water certified – PADI." Meaning she had been trained in scuba diving by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Rhyme knew that she and her former boyfriend Nick had taken the course together and gone on a number of dives. Not surprisingly, though, speed-lover Sachs had found cigarette boats and Jet Skiing more to her liking.

"But you haven't been diving for years, Sachs," he pointed out.

"Like riding a bike."

"Miss…"

"That'd be Officer Sachs, Captain," she said.

"Officer, there's a big difference between recreational dives and what it's like down there today. My people've been diving for years and I wouldn't feel real comfortable sending them into an unstable wreck under these conditions."

"Sachs," Rhyme said, "you can't. You're not trained for that."

"There're a million things they'd miss. You know that. They'd be the same as civilians. All respect, Captain."

"Understood, Officer. But my vote is it's too risky."

Sachs paused and then said, "Captain, you have children?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You have a family?"

"Well," he said, "yes, I do."

"This perp we're after is the man who sank that ship and killed most of the people inside. And right now he's trying to kill some immigrants who escaped – a family with two children and a baby. I'm not going to let that happen. There may be some evidence inside that ship that could tell us where he is. My expertise is finding clues – under all conditions."

Sellitto said, "Use our divers." Both the NYPD and the city's fire department had experienced scuba divers.

"They're not Crime Scene," Sachs argued. "They're just S and R too." She looked at Rhyme, who hesitated for a long moment. But then nodded, indicating that, yes, he'd back her up.

"Will you help us out here, Captain?" Rhyme asked. "She needs to be the one who goes down."

Through the wind the captain said, "Okay, Officer. But tell you what, we'll set the chopper down at the Hudson River helipad. That'll save some time. It's closer than Battery Park. You know it?"

"Sure," she said. Then added, "One thing, though, Captain?"

"Yes'm?"

"On a lot of those dives I did in the Caribbean?"

"Right."

"Afterward, when we were sailing home, the crew made rum punch for everybody – it was included in the cost of the dive. You have anything like that on Coast Guard cutters?"

"You know, Officer, I think we may be able to rustle something up for you."

"I'll be at the pad in fifteen minutes."

They hung up and Sachs glanced at Rhyme. "I'll call you with what I find."

There was so much he wanted to say to her and yet so little he was able to. He settled for "Search well -"

"- but watch my back."

She stroked his right hand – the one whose fingers couldn't feel any sensation whatsoever. Not yet, at any rate. Maybe after the surgery.

He glanced at the ceiling, toward his bedroom, where the god of detectives, Guan Di, presently sat with his evaporating cup of sweet wine. But Lincoln Rhyme, of course, restrained himself from sending a prayer to a folk deity wishing Sachs a safe journey and sent that message directly – though tacitly – to her.

Learning three things from one example…

Confucius, hm? I like that, thought Lincoln Rhyme. He said to his aide, "I need something from the basement."

"What?"

"A copy of my book."

"I'm not sure where they are," Thom replied.

"Then you better start looking, don't you think?"

With a loud sigh, the aide vanished.

Rhyme was referring to a hardcover book that he'd written several years ago, The Scenes of the Crime. In it, he'd examined fifty-one old crime scenes in New York City, some solved, some not. The book included a cross section of the more notorious crimes in the city, ranging from mayhem in the Five Points section of town, considered in the mid-1800s one of the most dangerous places on earth, to architect Stanford White's love triangle murder in the original Madison Square Garden, to Joey Gallo's unfortunate last meal at a Little Italy clam house, to John Lennon's death. The illustrated book had been popular – though not popular enough to keep it from being remaindered; the surplus copies had been sloughed off to "bargain books" shelves in bookstores around the country for discounted sales.

Still, Rhyme was secretly proud of the book; it was his first tentative venture back into the real world after his accident, an emblem that, despite what had happened to him, he was capable of doing something beyond lying on his ass and bitching about his state.

Thom returned ten minutes later, his shirt streaked with dirt and his handsome face dotted with sweat and dust. "They were in the farthest corner. Under a dozen cartons. I'm a mess."

"Well, I'd think if things were better organized down there, it might've taken less work," Rhyme muttered, eyes on the book.

"Maybe if you hadn't said to pack them away, you never wanted to see them again, you hated the quote fucking things, it might not have taken so much work either."

"Say, is the cover torn?"

"No, the cover's fine."

"Let me see," Rhyme ordered. "Hold it up."

The weary aide brushed some dirt off his slacks and then offered the book for inspection.

"It'll do," the criminalist said. He looked around the room uneasily. His temples were pounding, which meant his heart, which he couldn't feel, was pumping blood hard.

"What, Lincoln?"

"That touchpad. Do we still have it?"

A few months ago, Rhyme had ordered a touchpad attachment for the computer, like a mouse, thinking that he could use his extant finger – his left ring finger – to control the computer. He hadn't shared with Thom or Sachs how important it had been for him to make the pad work. But he hadn't been able to. The range of motion for the digit was too limited to move the cursor in any helpful way, unlike the touchpad controller that operated his Storm Arrow, which was specifically made for people in his condition.

The failure had, for some reason, devastated him.

Thom left the room for a moment and returned with the small gray unit. He hooked up the system and placed it under Rhyme's ring finger. "What are you going to do with it?" Thom asked.

Rhyme grumbled, "Just hold it still."

"All right."

"Command, cursor down. Command, cursor stop. Command, double click." A drawing program popped up on the screen. "Command, line draw."

Surprised, Thom asked, "When did you learn that?"

"Quiet. I need to concentrate." Rhyme took a deep breath and then he started to move his finger on the pad. A shaky line appeared on the screen. Sweat popped out on his forehead from the tension.

Breathing hard, riddled with anxiety, as if he were dismantling a bomb, Rhyme said through clenched teeth, "Move the pad to the left, Thom. Carefully."

The aide did and Rhyme continued giving him directions.

Ten minutes of agony, ten minutes of exhausting effort… He gazed at the screen, finally satisfied with the result. He rested his head on the back of the chair. "Command, print."

Thom walked to the printer. "You want to see your handiwork?"

"Of course I want to see it," Rhyme barked.

Thom picked up the sheet and held it in front of Rhyme.

To my friend, Sonny Li -

From Lincoln

"I think that's the first thing you've written since the accident. In your actual handwriting."

"It's a goddamn schoolchild's scrawl," Rhyme muttered, feeling exhilarated at the accomplishment. "Hardly legible."

"You want me to paste that in the book?" Thom asked.

"If you would, yes. Thank you," Rhyme said. "Then set it aside and we'll give it to Li when he gets back."

"I'll wrap it up," the aide said.

"I don't think we need to go that far," Rhyme snapped. "Now, let's get back to the evidence."

Chapter Thirty-six

Okay, I can do this.

Amelia Sachs stood on the rippled metal floor of the Coast Guard's Sikorsky HH-60J helicopter fifty feet above the whipping antenna of the cutter Evan Brigant and let the crewman fit the harness around her.

It had never occurred to her when she'd requested the helicopter ride out to the ship that the only way to get onto the ship would be by winching down to a bobbing deck.

Well, what did she expect, she now reflected, an escalator?

The chopper pitched in the fierce wind and beneath them, through the mist, she could see the gray water breaking around the cutter in ragged white ridges.

Encased in an orange vest and battered helmet, Sachs gripped the handhold near the open doorway and thought again, Okay, I can do this.

The crewman shouted something she didn't hear and she shouted back for him to repeat it – a request he apparently didn't hear, for he took her words to be an acknowledgment. Then a hook was attached to the harness and the rig double-checked. The crewman shouted something else. Sachs pointed to herself, then out the door and received a thumbs-up.

Okay…

I can do this.

Her essential fear was claustrophobia, not heights, but still…

Then out she went, holding the cable, even though she thought she'd been told not to. She swung wildly from the momentum of stepping out the door. In a moment the motion slowed and she started down, buffeted by the wind and the powerful downdraft from the rotor blades.

Down, down…

A shroud of fog suddenly enveloped her and she was disoriented. She found herself hanging in space, not able to see either the chopper above or the ship below. Rain spattered her face and she was blinded. Vertigo consumed her and she couldn't tell if she was swinging like an out-of-control pendulum or dropping toward the ship at a hundred miles an hour.

Oh, Rhyme…

But then the cutter grew visible beneath her.

The Evan Brigant bobbed up and down and rocked but whoever was at the helm held the vessel perfectly in position despite waves that were so huge that they seemed fake – something created by a special-effects team for a movie. Her feet touched the deck but just as she hit the quick-release button on the harness the ship dropped to the bottom of a wave and she fell four feet to the deck, hitting hard, her arthritic legs screaming in pain. As two seamen ran to help her up she reflected that this was probably what the crewman on the chopper had been warning her about.

Boating is not a sport for arthritics, Sachs recalled; she had to flex her knees continually for stability as she made her way to the bridge. She had an imaginary conversation with Dr. John Sung, reporting to him that Chinese medicine had yet to score serious points over Percoset and anti-inflammatories.

On the bridge the improbably young-looking captain, Fred Ransom, greeted her with a smile and a handshake. He welcomed her to the ship and led her to the chart table. "Now, here's a picture of the vessel and where she's lying."

Sachs concentrated on the image of the ship. Ransom told her where the bridge was and where the cabins were located – on the same deck but down a lengthy corridor toward the stern.

"Now, one thing, Officer, just to warn you," he said delicately. "We understand there are about fifteen bodies inside and there'll be some sea-life activity regarding them. It could be pretty grim. Some of my crew have sort of a tough time…"

But his voice faded as he looked into her eyes.

Sachs said, "Appreciate the warning, Captain. But I do run crime scenes for a living."

"Sure, Officer, understood. All right, let's get you into your gear."

Another trek outside into the rain and wind. They made their way to the stern of the ship. In a small shed, open to the rear, she was introduced to two other officers, a man and a woman, both wearing yellow and black wet suits and boots. They were the chief dive officer on board the ship and his second in command.

"Understand you did PADI?" the man asked. "How many dives?"

"I'd guess twenty-five or so."

This relieved them somewhat.

"And the last time was?"

"Make it a few years."

This response had the opposite effect.

"Well, we're going to walk you through all the steps again," the male officer said, "like you're a novice."

"I was hoping you would."

"Your deepest?" the woman dive officer asked.

"Eighty feet."

"That's about the same as here. The only difference is that it'll be murkier. The currents're stirring up the bottom."

The water wasn't that cold, they explained, still retaining much of the summer's heat, but to be under for any length of time would deplete her body heat quickly and so she needed to wear a wetsuit, which insulated her not only with the rubber but, as the name suggested, a thin layer of water between her skin and the shell of the suit.

Behind a screen she stripped and then struggled to put the suit on.

"Are you sure this isn't a child's size?" she called, gasping from the effort of pulling the tight rubber over her hips and shoulders.

"We hear that a lot," the woman dive officer responded.

Then they suited her up with the rest of the equipment: weights, mask and the air tank attached to the BCD – buoyancy control device, a vest that you inflated or deflated with a control near your left hand, which made you rise or sink in the water.

Also attached to the air tank was a primary regulator – the one that she'd breathe through – and then a secondary one, nicknamed the octopus, that could be used by a fellow diver to breathe off her tank if the buddy's air supply was cut off. They also fitted a head-mounted spotlight to her hood.

They ran through the basic hand signals for communicating with dive partners.

A lot of information, important information, and she struggled to keep it in her mind.

"How 'bout a knife?" she asked.

"You've got one," the dive chief said, pointing to her BCD. She drew the weapon only to find that it didn't have a point.

"You're not going to be stabbing anything," the woman said, seeing Sachs's concern. "Only cutting. You know, wire or something that entangles you."

"Thinking more about sharks, actually," she said.

"Rarely see sharks in these waters."

"Hardly ever," the other officer echoed. "Not big ones anyway."

"I'll take your word for it," Sachs said, replacing the knife. Wasn't the movie Jaws set here?

The dive chief handed Sachs a large mesh bag for stowing any evidence she found. Into these she placed what she'd brought for evidence collection – plastic bags. Then he and his assistant donned their equipment and, carrying their flippers, all three walked unsteadily to the very stern of the heaving ship.

Shouting over the noise of the wind the dive chief said, "Too choppy to go off the deck. We'll get into the raft, put our flippers on and then fall backward into the water. Hold your mask and regulator to your face. Other hand on your weight-belt release."

She tapped the top of her head – the hand signal for okay.

He did the same.

They climbed into the yellow raft, which was already in the water and reared up and down like a bucking horse. They sat on the side and checked their equipment.

Twenty feet away was an orange buoy. The dive chief pointed to it and said, "There's a line from there that goes straight down to the vessel. We'll swim over to that and follow the line down. What's your plan for the search?"

She called back, "I want to get samples of the explosion residue from the hull and then search the bridge and cabins."

The other divers nodded.

"I do the inside alone."

This was a breach of the fundamental scuba rule that you be able to swim to your buddy on one breath. The dive chief frowned.

"You're sure?"

"Have to."

"Okay," he said uneasily. Then he continued, "Now, sounds don't work well underwater – hard to tell where they're coming from – but if you're in trouble bang on your tank with the knife and we'll search for you." He held up her SPG – submersible pressure gauge – which showed how much air was in her tank. "You've got three thousand pounds of air. You'll burn it fast because you're going to be pumped up on adrenaline. We leave the bottom with five hundred. No less than that. That's an iron-clad rule. No exceptions. We come up slow – no faster than the bubbles from our regulator and we pause for three minutes fifteen feet down."

Otherwise, Sachs knew, there was a risk of decompression sickness – the bends.

"Oh, and what's the most important rule in scuba?"

Sachs remembered it from her course years ago. "Don't ever hold your breath underwater."

"Good. Why?"

"Otherwise your lungs could explode."

Then they started her air and she pulled on her fins then mask, gripped the regulator fiercely in her teeth. The dive chief gave the other "okay" sign – middle finger and thumb in a circle – and she responded the same way. She pumped some air into her BCD to allow her to float on the surface. They gestured for her to roll backward.

She gripped the mask and regulator so they wouldn't be torn off by the entry and she held her weight-belt release so that if her buoyancy device failed and she dropped toward the bottom she could dump the weights and swim to the surface.

Okay, Rhyme, here's one for Guinness: the record for searching the most submerged crime scene.

One, two, three…

Backward into the churning water.

By the time she righted herself the others were in the water beside her and gesturing toward the buoy. In a few minutes they'd swum to it. Okay signs all around. Then a thumbs-down, which meant descend. Then they took their BCD control in their left hand and deflated the vests.

Immediately, noise became silence, motion became stillness, heavy became weightless and they drifted downward placidly along the thick rope toward the bottom.

For a moment Sachs was struck by the absolute peace of life underwater. Then the serenity was broken as she looked below her and saw the dim outline of the Fuzhou Dragon.

The image was more unsettling than she'd expected. The ship on her side, a black gash in the hull from the explosion, the rust, the peeling paint, the encrusting barnacles on the plates. Dark and jagged and foreboding – and containing the bodies of so many innocent people.

A coffin, she thought, with a clenched heart. It's a huge, metal coffin.

Sharp pain in her ears; she pinched her nose through the soft plastic portion of the mask and blew to equalize the pressure. They continued downward. As they got closer to the ship she began to hear the noises – grating and moaning as the ship's thick metal plates scraped on the rocks.

Hate that noise. Hate it, hate it. It sounded like a huge creature dying.

Her escorts were diligent. They'd stop the descent occasionally and check on her. Okay signs were exchanged and they continued downward.

At the bottom she looked up and found that the surface didn't seem as far away as she'd expected, though she recalled that water has the effect of acting like a lens and magnifying everything. A glance at her depth gauge. Ninety feet. A nine-story building. Then a glance at her pressure gauge. Jesus, she'd already used 150 pounds of air on the effortless descent.

Amelia Sachs pumped air into the BCD to neutralize her buoyancy – so that she floated level. She first pointed toward the gash in the hull and together the threesome swam toward it. Despite the pitching surface above them the currents here were gentle and they could move easily.

At the site of the explosion Sachs used her blunt knife to scrape residue from the outwardly curled metal. She placed some of the black ashy material into a plastic bag, sealed it and put that in the mesh collection bag.

She looked at the dark windows of the bridge forty feet away. Okay, Rhyme, here we go. They swam toward it.

And the pressure gauge gave her its emotionless message: 2350 pounds.

At 500 they left the bottom. No exceptions.

Because the ship was on its side the bridge door now opened upward, toward the surface. It was metal and very heavy. The two Coast Guard officers struggled to lift it and Sachs swam through the opening and down into the bridge. They lowered the door into the closed position. It clanked shut with a chilling boom and Sachs realized that she was now trapped inside the ship. Without her companions she probably couldn't open the door herself.

Forget it, she told herself, reached up to the light mounted on her wetsuit hood and clicked it on. The beam offered her faint comfort. She turned and swam away from the bridge down a dark corridor that led to the cabins.

Faint motion too from the dimness. Coming from what? Fish, eels, squid?

I don't like this, Rhyme.

But then she thought about the Ghost searching for the Changs, about the baby, Po-Yee, the Treasured Child.

Think about that, not about the darkness or confinement. Do this for her, for Po-Yee.

Amelia Sachs swam forward.

She was in hell.

No other word described it.

The black hallway was filled with sooty debris and refuse, scraps of cloth, paper, food, fish with piercing yellow eyes. And overhead, a shimmering, like ice: the thin layer of air trapped above her. The sounds were harrowing: the scraping and groaning, moans. Squeals like human voices in agony, pings and snaps. The clank of metal on metal.

A fish, gray and sleek, darted past. She gasped involuntarily at the motion and turned her head to follow it.

She found herself looking at two dull human eyes in a white lifeless face.

Sachs screamed through her regulator and jerked back. The body of a man, barefoot, his arms above his head, like a perp surrendering, floated nearby. His legs were frozen in the position of a runner's and, as the fish sped past, the small wake turned him slowly away from her.

Clank, clank.

No, she thought. I can't do this.

Already the walls were closing in on her. Plagued all her life by claustrophobia, Sachs couldn't stop thinking of what would happen if she got caught in one of these tiny passages. She'd go mad.

Two deep breaths of dry air through the regulator.

She thought of the Chang family. She thought of the toddler.

And she swam on.

The gauge: 2300 pounds of pressure.

We're doing fine. Keep going.

Clank.

That damn noise – like doors closing, sealing her shut.

Well, ignore it, she told herself. Nobody's closing any doors.

The rooms above her – on the side of the Dragon facing the surface – were not, she deduced, the Ghost's: two didn't appear to have been occupied on the voyage and one was the captain's; in this one she found seafaring memorabilia and pictures of the bald, mustachioed man she recognized as Captain Sen from the pictures tacked up on Lincoln Rhyme's wall.

Clank, clank, clank…

She swam downward to check out the rooms on the other side of the narrow corridor – facing the bottom.

As she did, her tank caught on a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall and she froze in position. Trapped in the narrow corridor she was seized with a flash of panic.

It's okay, Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme's voice said to her in that deep, lulling voice he always fell into when speaking to her through her headset at crime scenes. It's okay.

She controlled the panic and backed up, freeing herself.

The gauge told her: 2100 pounds.

Three of the cabins below her hadn't been occupied. That left only one more – it had to be the Ghost's.

A huge groan.

More clanks.

Then a moaning so loud she actually felt it in her chest. What was happening? The whole ship was buckling! The doors would be jammed. She'd be trapped here forever. Suffocating slowly… Dying alone… Oh, Rhyme…

But then the moaning stopped, replaced by more clanking.

She paused at the entrance to the Ghost's cabin, below her feet.

The door was closed. It opened inward – well, downward. She gripped the knob and twisted. The latch released and the heavy wooden door eased downward. Looking beneath her into the darkness. Things were swimming around inside the room. Jesus… She shivered and remained where she was, hovering in the narrow corridor.

But Lincoln Rhyme's voice, as clear as if he'd been speaking through her headphones, sounded in her thoughts. "It's a crime scene, Sachs. That's all it is. And searching crime scenes is what we do, remember? You grid it, you search it, you observe it, you collect evidence."

Okay, Rhyme. But I could live without eels.

She let some air out of the BCD and dropped slowly into the room.

Two sights made her gasp.

In front of her a man floated in the black space, eyes closed, his jaw down as far as it could go, arms outstretched, his coat billowing out behind him. His face was white as paper.

The second thing she saw was less macabre but far stranger: what must have been a thousand hundred-dollar bills floated in the water, filling the room, like flakes in a plastic souvenir snow globe.

The bills explained the man's death. His pockets were filled with money and she deduced that as the ship started to go down he'd run to the cabin to get as much of the Ghost's cash as he could but he'd been trapped here.

She eased farther into the room, the bills swirling in her wake.

The money soon proved to be a major pain in the ass. It stuck to her, it obscured the scene like smoke. (Add this to your book, Rhyme: excessive money at the crime scene can make searches extremely difficult.) She couldn't see more than a few feet past the cloud of bills. She grabbed several handfuls of the money for evidence and put them in her collection bag. Kicking her way to what was now the top of the room – originally the side – she noticed an open attaché case floating in the thin air pocket. She found more currency inside – Chinese, it seemed. A handful of these bills went into the collection bag.

Clank, clank.

Jesus, this is spooky. Darkness around her, unseen things caressing the wetsuit. She could see only a few feet in front of her – the tunnel of dim illumination cast by the tiny spotlight on her head.

She then located two weapons: an Uzi machine pistol and a Beretta 9mm. She examined them closely and found that the Uzi's serial number had been etched out. She let this weapon drop to the bottom. There was a number on the Beretta, though, which meant it might yield some traceable connection to the Ghost. She slipped it into her evidence bag. A glance at her pressure gauge: 1800 pounds of air. God, she was going through it fast. Breathe slowly.

"Come on, Sachs, concentrate."

Right, sorry, Rhyme.

Clank, clank, clank.

I hate that fucking sound!

She searched the body of the corpse. No wallet or ID.

Another shiver. Why was this scene so horrible, so eerie? She'd processed dozens of bodies. But then she realized: the corpses at those scenes had always lain like broken toys on the ground, pulled, inanimate, to the concrete or grass or carpet by gravity. They weren't real. But this man wasn't still at all. As cold as the heartless water around him, white as snow, he moved like an elegant dancer in slow motion.

The stateroom was very small and the body would interfere with her search. So, with a respect that she wouldn't have felt anywhere outside of this horrible mausoleum, she eased the body upward into the corridor and pushed him away. Then she returned to the Ghost's cabin.

Clank, clank… clank.

Ignoring the spooky moans and the clanking, she looked around her. In a tiny room like this, where would one hide things?

All the furniture was attached to the walls and floors. And there was only one small dresser. Inside were Chinese-brand toiletries, nothing that yielded any obvious evidence.

She looked for anything hidden in the closet but found only clothes.

Clank, clank…

What do we think, Rhyme?

"I think you've got, let's see, about fourteen hundred pounds of air left. I'd say if you don't find something soon, get the hell out."

I'm not going anywhere yet, she thought. Hovering, she looked slowly around the room. Where would he hide things? He left his guns, he left the money… That means the explosion took him by surprise too. There has to be something here. She glanced again at the closet. The clothes? Maybe. She kicked toward it.

She began to go through them. Nothing in any of the pockets. But she kept searching and – in one of his Armani jackets – found a slit he'd made in the lining. She reached in and extracted an envelope containing a document. She trained the light on it. Don't know if it's helpful or not, Rhyme. They're in Chinese.

"That's for us to find out back home. You find it, Eddie'll translate it, I'll analyze it."

Into the bag.

Twelve hundred pounds of pressure. But don't ever, ever, ever hold your breath.

Why was that again?

Right. Your lungs'll explode.

Clank.

Okay, I'm outta here.

She made her way out of the small stateroom and into the corridor, the treasures of evidence stashed in the bag tied to her belt.

Clank clank clank… clank… clank… clank.

She turned back down the endless corridor – the route by which she could escape from this terrible place. The bridge seemed miles away down the black corridor.

The longest journey, the first step…

But then she stopped, gripping the doorway. Jesus, Lord, she thought.

Clank clank clank…

Amelia Sachs realized something about the eerie banging she'd been hearing since she'd entered the ship. Three fast bangs, three slow.

It was Morse code for S-O-S. And it was coming from somewhere deep within the ship.

Chapter Thirty-seven

S -O-S.

The universal distress call.

S-O…

Somebody was alive! The Coast Guard had missed a survivor. Should she go find the other divers? Sachs wondered.

But that would take too long; Sachs imagined from the uneven pounding that the trapped air the survivor was breathing was nearly gone. Besides, the sound seemed to be coming from nearby. It should take only minutes to find the person.

But where were they exactly?

Well, obviously it hadn't come from the direction of the bridge, through which she'd entered the ship. It wasn't coming from the cabins here either. It had to be one of the holds or the engine room – in the lower part of the ship. Now, with the Dragon on its side, those areas were level with her, on her left.

Yes, no?

For this she couldn't ask Lincoln Rhyme's advice.

There was no one to help her here.

Oh, Jesus, I'm really going to do this, aren't I?

Less than 1200 pounds of air left.

So you better get your butt going, girl.

Sachs glanced at the faint illumination where the bridge was, then she turned away from it toward the darkness – and the claustrophobia – and kicked hard. Following the clanking.

S-O-S.

But when she came to the end of the black corridor, from which she thought she heard the code, Sachs found no way to get into the interior of the ship. The corridor just ended. She pressed her head against the wood, though, and could distinctly hear the clanging.

O-S.

Training the light on the wall she discovered a small door. She opened it and gasped as a green eel swam leisurely past her. She let her heart calm and gazed inside, looking to her left, into the bowels of the ship. The shaft was a dumbwaiter, presumably to cart supplies up to the cabin deck and the bridge from the lower decks. It measured about two feet by two feet.

Confronting the thought of swimming into the narrow space, she now thought about going back for help. But she'd already wasted too much time finding the doorway.

Oh, man…

One thousand pounds of air.

Clank, clank…

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

Can't do it. No way.

S-O-S.

Amelia Sachs, calm as tea when she hit 130 miles per hour in her Camaro SS, would wake up sobbing after dreams of herself imprisoned in chambers and tunnels and mine shafts.

Can't do it! she thought again.

Then sighed through her regulator and pulled herself into the narrow space, turned left as best she could and kicked her way deeper into hell.

God, I hate this.

Nine hundred pounds of pressure on her gauge.

She eased forward, moving along the shaft that was just wide enough to accommodate her and her tank. Ten feet. Her tank suddenly caught on something above her. She fought down the shiver of panic, clamping her teeth furiously on the mouthpiece of her regulator. Rotating slowly, she found the wire that had snagged her and she freed herself. She turned back and found another blue-white face protruding through another doorway of the dumbwaiter shaft.

Oh, my Lord…

The man's eyes, opaque as jelly, stared in her direction, glowing in the bright light. His hair rose outward from his head like the coat of a porcupine.

Sachs eased forward and kicked slowly past the man, struggling to ignore the chilling sensation of the crown of his head brushing her body as she swam past.

S…

The sound, though still feeble, was louder here.

O…

She continued down the shaft to the very bottom of the dumbwaiter and, pushing aside the panic as she neared the exit, she forced herself to move calmly through the doorway into what was the galley of the Dragon.

S…

The black water here was filled with trash and flecks of food – and several bodies.

Clank.

Whoever was signaling couldn't even make an entire letter now.

Above, she saw the shimmering surface of a large air pocket and a man's legs in the water, dangling downward. The feet, in socks, moved slightly, almost a twitch. She swam quickly toward them and burst to the surface. A bald man with a mustache was clinging to a rack of shelves that were bolted to the wall – now the ceiling of the kitchen – turned away with a cry of shock and undoubtedly from the pain of the blinding light shooting into his eyes.

Sachs squinted. She recognized him – why? Then realized that she'd seen his picture on the evidence board in Rhyme's town house – and the one she'd seen in the cabin just a few minutes before. This was Captain Sen of the Fuzhou Dragon.

He was muttering incoherently and shivering. He was so blue he looked cyanotic – the color of an asphyxia victim. She spit the regulator out of her mouth to breathe the air that was trapped in the pocket and save her own store of oxygen but the atmosphere was so foul and depleted that she felt faint. She grabbed the mouthpiece again and began to suck the air from her own supply.

Pulling the secondary regulator off her vest, she stuck it into Sen's mouth. He breathed deeply and began to revive somewhat. Sachs pointed downward into the water. He nodded.

A fast glance at the pressure gauge: 700 pounds. And two of them were using her supply now.

She released air from the BCD and, with her arm around the limp man, they sank to the bottom of the galley, pushing aside the bodies and cartons of food that floated in their way. At first she wasn't able to locate the doorway to the dumbwaiter shaft. She felt weak with panic for a moment, afraid that the moaning she'd heard meant the ship was settling and buckling and the doorway was now sealed off. But then she saw that the body of a young woman had floated in front of it. She gently pulled the corpse aside and opened the dumbwaiter doorway wide.

They couldn't both fit into the shaft side by side so she eased the captain in before her, feet first. Eyes squeezed shut, still shivering violently, he gripped the black hose of his regulator desperately with both hands. Sachs followed him, imagining all too clearly what might happen if he panicked and ripped the regulator from her mouth or tore her mask or the light off: trapped in this horrible narrow place, thrashing in panic as she breathed the foul water into her lungs…

No, no, stop thinking about it! Keep going. She kicked hard, moving as quickly as she could. Twice the captain, floating backward, became jammed and she had to free him.

A glance at the gauge: 400 pounds of pressure.

We leave the bottom with five hundred. No less than that. That's an iron-clad rule. No exceptions.

Finally they got to the top deck – where the cabins were located and the corridor that led to the bridge and, beyond that, precious Outside, with its orange rope that would take them to the surface and a boundless supply of sweet air. But the captain was still dazed and it took a long minute to maneuver him through the opening while making certain that he kept the regulator in his mouth.

Then they were out of the dumbwaiter and floating into the main corridor. She swam beside the captain and grabbed him by his leather belt. But as she started to kick forward she braked suddenly to a stop. The knob on her air tank was snared. She reached back and found it was caught by the jacket on the body that'd been in the Ghost's stateroom.

The gauge: 300 pounds of pressure.

Goddamn, she thought, pulling fiercely at the snag, kicking. But the body was jammed in a doorway and the tail of his jacket had wound tightly around the tank knob. The harder she pulled the more snugly she was held.

The needle of the pressure gauge was now below the redline: 200 pounds remained.

She couldn't reach the snag behind her.

Okay, nothing to do…

She ripped open the Velcro of the BCD vest and slipped out of it. But as she turned to focus on the tangle the captain went into seizure. He kicked out hard, struck her in the face with his foot. The spotlight went out and the regulator popped from her mouth. The blow pushed her backward.

Darkness, no air…

No, no…

Rhyme…

She made a grab for the regulator but it floated somewhere behind her, out of reach.

Don't hold your breath.

Well, I fucking have to…

Blackness all around her, spinning in circles, groping desperately for her regulator.

Where were the Coast Guard baby-sitters?

Outside. Because I told them I wanted to search alone. How could she let them know she was in trouble?

Fast, girl, fast…

She patted the evidence bag and reached in desperately. Pulled out the Beretta 9mm. She pulled the slide to chamber a round and pressed the muzzle close to the wooden wall, where she knew she wouldn't hit Sen, and pulled the trigger. A flash and loud explosion. The blowback and recoil nearly broke her wrist and she dropped the weapon through the cloud of debris and gunpowder residue.

Please, she thought… Please…

No air…

No…

Then lights burst on silently as the dive chief and his assistant kicked fast into the corridor. Another regulator mouthpiece was thrust between her lips and Sachs began to breathe again. The dive chief got his secondary regulator into the captain's mouth. The stream of bubbles was faint but at least he was breathing.

Okay signs were exchanged.

Then the foursome made its way out of the bridge and to the orange rope. Thumbs-up. Calmer now that the risk of confinement was gone, Sachs concentrated on ascending leisurely, no faster than her bubbles, and breathing, deep in, deep out, as they left behind the ship of corpses.

Sachs lay in the cutter's sickbay, breathing deeply; she'd opted for nature's air, turning down the green oxygen mask the corpsman offered her – it would, she was afraid, only increase her sense of confinement, having something else pressed close against her body.

As soon as she'd climbed onto the bobbing deck she'd stripped off the wetsuit – the tight outfit itself had become another carrier of the pernicious claustrophobia – and wrapped the thick government-issue blanket around her. Two sailors escorted her to the sickbay to check out her wrist, which turned out not to be badly injured at all.

Finally, she felt well enough to venture up top. She popped two Dramamine and climbed the stairs to the bridge, observing that the helicopter was back, hovering over the cutter.

This ride wasn't for Sachs, however, but to evacuate unconscious Captain Sen to a Long Island medical center.

Ransom explained how they'd probably missed the captain during their search for victims. "Our divers did a long search, banging on the hull, and didn't get any response. We did a sound scan later and that came back negative too. Sen must've wedged himself in the air pocket, passed out, then come to later."

"Where's he going?" she asked.

"Marine station in Huntington, part of the hospital. They have a hyperbaric chamber there."

"Is he going to make it?"

Ransom said, "Doesn't look good. But if he survived twenty-four hours under these conditions then I guess anything's possible."

Slowly the chill subsided. She dried off and dressed once more in her jeans, T-shirt and sweatshirt and then hurried to the bridge to call Rhyme. Neglecting to share some of her underwater adventures, she told him that she'd found some evidence. "And maybe a wit."

"A witness?"

"Found somebody still alive in the ship. The captain. Looks like he got some of the people trapped in the hold into the galley after the ship went down. But he was the only one who survived. If we're lucky he'll be able to give us some leads to the Ghost's operation in New York."

"Did he say anything?"

"He's unconscious. They're not even sure he's going to make it – hypothermia and decompression sickness. The hospital'll call as soon as they know something. Better have Lon send baby-sitters for him too. The Ghost'll come after him if he finds out he's still alive."

"Hurry back, Sachs. We miss you."

The royal we, she knew, coming from Lincoln Rhyme, really meant "I."

She assembled the evidence she'd found underwater, drying the letter she'd found in the Ghost's jacket with paper towels from the cutter's galley. This would contaminate it some but she was worried that more exposure to seawater would deteriorate the paper so much it couldn't be read. Crime scene work, Rhyme had often told her, was always a compromise.

Captain Ransom walked onto the bridge. "There's another chopper on the way here for you, Officer." He carried two large Styrofoam coffee cups, covered with lids. He handed her one.

"Thanks."

They peeled the lids off. His contained steaming black coffee.

She laughed. In her cup was fruit juice that was mixed, she could smell, with a generous slug of rum.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Feng shui, which literally means wind and water, is the art of trapping good energy and luck and repelling bad.

It's widely practiced around the world but because of the astonishing number of rules and the rarity of the ability to assess the dynamics of good and evil there are very few truly talented feng shui practitioners. It entails far more than just arranging furniture, as Loaban's assistant had suggested, and the Ghost's apartment had clearly been done by a master. Sonny Li knew plenty of feng shui practitioners in China but he had no idea who here in New York could have prepared the Ghost's apartment so expertly.

But rather than race around like Hongse in her yellow car to track down someone who could help him, Li remained true to his Taoist way.

The way to use life is to do nothing through acting, the way to use life is to do everything through being.…

And so Detective Sonny Li went into the fanciest bubble tea shop he could find in Chinatown, sat down at a table and slouched back in the chair. He ordered a cup of the odd beverage: tea sweetened with sugar and lightened with milk. In the bottom of the tall cup were large chewy black pearls of tapioca that you sucked up through a wide straw and ate. Like the famous (and equally expensive) foaming iced tea popular in Fuzhou, this was a Taiwanese creation.

Sonny didn't much care for the tea but he kept it in front of him to buy the right to sit here for what might be a long time. He studied the chic room, which had been planned by some too-clever designer. The chairs were metal and purple leather, the lighting was subdued and the wallpaper fake Zen. Tourists would breeze into the place, drink down their tea and then hurry off to see more Chinatown sights, leaving behind huge tips, which Sonny Li at first thought was their forgotten change; tipping is rare in China.

Sitting, sipping… Thirty minutes passed. Forty-five.

Do everything through being…

His patience was finally rewarded. An attractive Chinese woman in her early forties walked into the tea shop, found a seat near him and ordered a tea.

The woman wore a beautiful red dress and high, narrow heels. She read the New York Times through stylish reading glasses with narrow rectangular lenses and blue frames no thicker than a pencil line. Most of the Chinese women shopping here in Chinatown carried cheap plastic bags wrinkled from many uses. But this woman carried one made of flawless white paper. Inside was a box tied with a gold cord. He deciphered the name on the side of the bag: SAKS FIFTH AVENUE.

She was exactly the sort of woman Sonny Li wanted yet knew he would forever be denied. Sleek, stylish, beautiful, hair shiny and dense as a crow's black pelt, a lean face with some Vietnamese features beautifully sharpening the Han Chinese, keen eyes, bright red lips and Dowager Empress nails to match.

He looked over her dress again, her jewelry, her sprayed hair and decided, Yes, she's the one. Li picked up his tea, walked to her table and introduced himself. Li sat, though the chair he chose was near but not actually at her table, so that she wouldn't be threatened by his presence. He casually struck up a conversation with her and they talked about the Beautiful Country, about New York, about bubble tea and about Taiwan, where she'd been born. He said casually, "The reason I troubled you – forgive me – but perhaps you can help. The man I work for? He has bad luck. I believe it is because of how his apartment is arranged. You obviously have a good feng shui man."

He nodded at the emblems that had told him that she indeed followed feng shui diligently: an ostentatious bracelet of nine Chinese coins, a pin in the likeness of the homely goddess Guan Yin and a scarf with black fish on it. This was why he had selected her – on this evidence, and because she was obviously rich, which meant that she would go to only the best practitioners of the art, men of the sort that the Ghost too would hire.

He continued, "If I could give my boss the name of someone good to arrange his home and office he might think more of me. It might help me keep my job and raise myself in his view." With these words Li lowered his head but kept his eyes on her face and was pierced by what he saw: pity generated by his shame. What was so wrenching to him about that look, though, was that the phony shame emanating from Sonny Li the undercover cop was virtually identical to the true shame that Sonny Li the man felt daily from his father's cascade of criticism. Perhaps, he reflected, this is why she believed him.

The beautiful woman smiled and dug into her purse. She wrote out a name and address – on a slip of paper not bearing her own name or phone number, of course. She slipped it to him and withdrew her hand quickly before he could touch her palm and grasp it in desperation and hunger, which in fact he was close to doing.

"Mr. Wang," she said, nodding at the card. "He is one of the best in the city. If your employer has money he will help him. He is most expensive. But he will do a good job. He helped me marry well, as you can see."

"Yes, my boss has money."

"Then he too can change his fortune. Goodbye." She stood, gathered her glossy bag and purse and strode out of the shop on her immaculate heels, leaving her check sitting prominently on the table for Sonny Li to pay.

"Sachs!" Rhyme looked up from the computer screen. "Guess what the Ghost blew the ship up with?"

"Give up," she called, amused to see the look of pleasure accompanying this gruesome question.

Mel Cooper answered, "Grade A, brand-new Composition 4."

"Congratulations."

This had put Rhyme in a good mood because C4 – despite being a movie terrorist's staple for bombs – was actually quite rare. The substance was available only to the military and a few select law enforcement agencies; it wasn't used in commercial demolition. This meant that there were relatively few sources for high-quality C4, which in turn meant that the odds of finding a connection between that source and the Ghost were far better than if he'd used common TNT, Tovex, Gelenex or any of the other commercially available explosives.

More significantly, though, C4 is so dangerous that by law it must contain markers – each manufacturer of the material adds inert but distinctive chemicals to its version of the explosive. Analysis of the trace at the scene of an explosion will reveal which marker was present and this tells investigators who manufactured it. The company, in turn, must keep detailed records of whom its products were sold to, and the purchasers must keep detailed files on where the explosive was stored or used.

If they could find the person who sold the Ghost this batch of C4, he might know where the snakehead had other safehouses in New York, or other bases of operation.

Cooper had sent the trace results to Quantico. "Should hear back in the next few hours."

"Where's Coe?" Sachs asked, looking around the town house.

"Down at INS," Rhyme said then added acerbically, "Don't jinx it by mentioning his name. Let's hope he stays there."

Eddie Deng arrived from downtown. "Got here as soon as you called, Lincoln."

"Excellent, Eddie. Put your reading specs on. You've got to translate for us. Amelia found a letter in the Ghost's sports coat."

"No shit," Deng said. "Where?"

"A hundred feet underwater. But that's another story."

Deng's eyes were fine – no reading glasses were required – but Mel Cooper did have to set him up with an ultraviolet reading hood to image the ink on the letter; the characters had been bleached out by the sea-water and were barely visible.

Deng hunched over the letter and examined it.

"It's hard to read," Deng murmured, squinting. "Okay, okay… It's to the Ghost. The man who wrote it is named Ling Shui-bian. He's telling the Ghost when the charter flight will be leaving Fuzhou and when and where to expect it at the Nagorev military base outside of St. Petersburg. Then he says he's wiring the money into an account in Hong Kong – no number or bank. Then it describes the cost of the airplane charter. It then says part of the money is enclosed – in dollars. Finally, there's a list of the victims – the passengers on the Dragon."

"That's all?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Have some of our people in China check out that guy – Ling," Rhyme told Sellitto. Then the criminalist asked Mel Cooper: "Trace in the paper?"

"Just what you'd expect," the lab man said. "Salt water, sea-life excrement, pollution, plant particles, motor oil, diesel fuel."

"How much money was there, Sachs?" Rhyme asked.

"A lot. Maybe a thousand. But it's hard to tell when you're swimming around in it."

The U.S. bills she'd collected were all in hundred-dollar denominations, freshly printed.

"Forged?" Rhyme asked.

Cooper examined one. "Nope."

The yuan she'd found – the Chinese paper currency – were faded and crumpled. "There were about thirty packs this size," she explained. Eddie Deng totaled the amount in this packet. "Thirty stacks, given the exchange rate," the young detective estimated, "equals about twenty thousand dollars U.S. "

Sachs continued, "I also found an Uzi and a Beretta but he'd taken the serial number off the Uzi and I lost the Beretta on the ship."

"Knowing the Ghost," Rhyme said, "any gun of his, even with serial numbers, is going to be untraceable."

The criminalist looked toward the hallway. "Thom! We need our scribe! Thom!"

The harried young man entered the room. He wrote down the information that Rhyme had dictated about the explosives, the letter and the trace on it, the guns.

There was an electronic trill as a cell phone rang and – typical nowadays – everyone looked down to see if it was his or hers ringing. Sachs was the winner and she pulled the unit off her belt.

"Hello?"

"Amelia?"

She recognized John Sung's voice. Her stomach did a little flip at the memory of last night.

"John."

"How are you?"

Been for one hell of a swim, she thought, but aside from that, doing okay. "Fine," she said. "Kind of busy right now."

"Of course," the doctor said. What a voice, she thought. Pure bedside manner. "Any luck finding Sam Chang and his family?"

"Not yet. We're working on that right now."

"I was just wondering if you might have some time to stop by later."

"I think that'll work out. But can I call you in a bit, John? I'm at Lincoln 's right now and it's a little crazy."

"Of course. I'm sorry to interrupt."

"No, no, I'm glad you did. I'll call you later."

She hung up and started to return to the evidence. But she glanced up and saw Lon Sellitto looking at her with what could only be described as a glare.

"Detective," she said to him, "can I talk to you outside for a minute?"

Gruffly Sellitto said, "What's there to -"

"Now," she snapped.

Rhyme glanced at them for a moment but lost interest in the curious exchange and returned to examining the evidence boards.

Sachs walked into the corridor and Sellitto followed, his feet pounding heavily on the floor. Thom had noticed something was wrong. "What's going -" But the aide's voice was lost as Sachs swung the door shut angrily. They continued down the hallway to where she gestured – the back of the town house – and they entered the kitchen.

She spun around, hands on her narrow hips. "Why've you been on my case for the past two days, Detective?"

The big man pulled his belt up over his belly. "You're crazy. It's your imagination."

"Bullshit. You have something to say to me, say it to my face. I deserve that."

"Deserve it?" he asked in a snide tone.

"What is all this?" she snapped.

There was a pause while he looked at the butcher block, where Thom had set a half-dozen tomatoes and a pile of basil. Finally he said, "I know where you were last night."

"Yeah?" she asked.

"The baby-sitters outside of Sung's apartment told me you went there after you left here and you didn't leave till one forty-five."

"My personal life is my own business," she said coldly.

The burly cop looked around and then whispered vehemently, "But it's not just your business anymore, Amelia. It's his business too."

She frowned. "His? Who?"

"Rhyme. Who d'you think?"

"What're you talking about?"

"He's tough. Tougher than anybody I know. But the one thing that'll break him into little pieces is you – if you keep going the way you're headed."

She was bewildered. "Headed?"

"Look, you didn't know him back then – that woman he was in love with, Clare. When she died, it took him forever to get over it. He came to work, he did his job, but it took a year for that light to come back in his eyes. And his wife… They had some fights, sure – I'm talking MGM Grand kind of fights. It wasn't the greatest marriage in the world but, after the accident, when he knew it wasn't going to work and he got divorced, that was hard for him, real hard."

"I don't know where you're going with this."

"You don't? It's pretty clear to me. You're the center of his life. He's let down all his defenses with you. You're going to break him. And I'm not going to let that happen." His voice dropped even further. "Just think about – if you keep seeing this guy it's going to kill Rhyme. It's… What the hell're you laughing at?"

"You're talking about me and John Sung?"

"Yeah, the guy you've been sneaking off to see."

Sachs's hands rose to her face and she began shaking with laughter. "Oh, Lon…" Then she turned away quickly from the detective because a moment later – as she'd suddenly known would happen – the laughter turned into tears.

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

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

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

"Jesus," Sellitto said, starting forward. Then stopping, hands at his side, awkward. "Amelia, what…"

She held up a hand and turned away.

"What's going on?"

Finally she caught her breath, wiped her face and turned back to the detective. "It's not what you're thinking, Lon."

Another tug of his belt. "Go on."

"You know Rhyme and I've talked about having kids."

"Yeah."

She gave a sour laugh. "It didn't work. It's not like we were trying that hard but I wasn't getting pregnant. I was worried that there was something wrong with Lincoln. So a few weeks ago we went in and we both had checkups."

"Yeah, I remember he went to the doctor."

She thought back to that day in the waiting room.

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

"Hello, Doctor."

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

"Yes?"

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

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

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

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

"Well, Lincoln 's doctor tells me that the results of his fertility workup are well within normal levels. A slightly diminished sperm count, which is typical of someone in his condition, but nowadays that's a very slight hurdle to pregnancy. I'm afraid, though, that you have a more serious problem. "

"Me?"

Staring at the butcher block next to her, she now told Sellitto about this conversation with the doctor. Then she added, "I've got something called endometriosis. I've always had problems but I never believed it was as bad as what the doctor told me."

"Can they cure it?"

Sachs shook her head. "No. They can operate, do hormonal therapy, but it wouldn't really help the fertility thing."

"Jesus, I'm sorry, Amelia."

She wiped her face again. A sad smile blossomed on it. "Dryness and heat in the kidney."

"What?"

Sachs offered a hollow laugh. "That's what I was doing at John Sung's. Dryness and heat in the kidney – those're the reasons for infertility, according to Chinese medicine. Last night he examined me and gave me an acupressure treatment. And he's getting some herbs that he thinks'll help. That's what he just called about. Wait here." Sachs walked to the hallway, dug into her purse and returned with what Sung had just given her when she'd seen him last night. She handed the book to the detective. The title was Herbal Treatments and Acupressure Techniques to Assist Fertility.

"It turns out a lot of Western doctors recommend that women with endometriosis use Chinese medicine to treat it. Last night, when I took Lincoln upstairs we talked about it. He thought it was pretty silly but he'd noticed how upset I've been lately because of this. He's right – he said I've been distracted. It's even bothering me when I'm running scenes. So we decided I'd go ahead and see what Sung could do for me." She fell silent. Finally she said, "There's so much death around me, Lon… my father, my relationship with my boyfriend, Nick – when he went off to prison it was like he died. Then all the crime scenes I run. I wanted to have some life around us, Lincoln and me. I wanted so badly to fix what's wrong inside me."

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

Sung's treatment, she hoped, was a way to do this – to make herself whole.

Lifting his palms, Sellitto said, "I didn't know. You were real secret about it."

Angrily she said, "Because it's nobody's business but Lincoln's and mine." She nodded toward Rhyme's room. "Don't you know what he and I are to each other? How could you think I'd do something like that?"

The disorderly detective couldn't hold her gaze. "With Betty leaving and everything, I was just thinking about what happened to me." The big cop's marriage had broken up some years before. No one knew the details of Sellitto's divorce but it was a well-known fact that being married to a cop was tough and many a spouse had gone looking for a more attentive alternate. She supposed Betty had had an affair. "I'm sorry, Officer. I shoulda thought better." He extended his hand and she reluctantly shook his huge palm.

"Will that do any good?" He nodded at the book.

"I don't know," she answered. Then smiled wistfully. "Maybe."

"Back to work?" Sellitto asked.

"Sure." She wiped her eyes a final time and they returned to Rhyme's living room.

GHOSTKILL

Easton , Long Island,

Crime Scene

• Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.

• One immigrant wounded – Dr. John Sung.

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

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

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

• Vehicle is a BMW X5.

• Driver – Jerry Tang. • No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

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

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

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

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

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

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

• No trace of Honda found.

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

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

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

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

Stolen Van,

Chinatown

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

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

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

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

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS. • No matches.

Jerry Tang Murder

Crime Scene

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

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

• Extensive vandalism.

• Some fingerprints.

• No matches except Tang's.

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

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

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

• Uighurs from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens.

• Cell phone calls lead to 805 Patrick Henry Street, downtown.

Canal Street Shooting

Crime Scene

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

• Stolen Chevrolet Blazer, untraceable.

• No match on prints.

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

• Location of installations determined: 32 near Battery Park City.

• Fresh gardening mulch found.

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

• Details on immigrants:

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

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

Safehouse Shooting

Crime Scene

• Fingerprints and photos of Chang Jiechi's hands reveal father – and son Sam – are calligraphers. Sam Chang might be doing printing or sign painting. Calling stores and companies in Queens.

• Biosolids on deceased's shoes suggest they live in neighborhood near sewage treatment plant.

• Ghost uses feng shui practitioner to arrange his living space.

Fuzhou Dragon

Crime Scene

• Ghost used new C4 to blow up ship. Checking origin of explosive through chemical markers.

• Large quantity of new U.S. bills found in Ghost's cabin.

• Approx. $20,000 in used Chinese yuan found in cabin.

• List of victims, air charter details and bank deposit information. Checking name of sender in China.

• Captain alive but unconscious.

• Beretta 9mm, Uzi. Unable to trace.

Chapter Thirty-nine

"Fred," Rhyme said as Dellray – now wearing the orangest shirt that the criminalist had ever seen – walked into his living room laboratory.

"Hey," Sachs said to the agent. "They let you wear shirts like that? Say, is that a real color?"

"You gave us a hell of a scare," Rhyme said.

" 'Magine what I myself was feelin', settin' my ass down on a few sticks of Mr. Noble's creation." He looked around the room. "Where Dan?"

"Dan?" Rhyme asked.

"The SSA?"

Noting the blank stares, Dellray continued, "The supervisin' agent, the guy who took over for me. Dan Wong. From our San Francisco office. Wanna thank him for takin' over."

Rhyme and Sachs looked at each other. The criminalist said, "Nobody took over for you. We're still waiting."

"Still waitin'?" Dellray whispered in disbelief. "I talked to Dan myself last night. He's the man you need. Run dozens of human smuggling cases. He's some kinda expert in snakeheads and Chinese culture. He was gonna call you an' be out here on a army jet this morning."

"No word."

Dellray's expression of astonishment turned to anger. "What about SPEC-TAC?" he asked suspiciously. "They are here, ain't they?"

"Nope," Sachs said.

With a snarl he pulled his phone off his belt as if he were quick-drawing his weapon. One speed-dial button later he was connected. "This's Dellray… Put him on… Don't care. Want him now… Like I said, which mebbe you din't hear. I. Want. Him. Now…" A disgusted sigh. "Well, have him call me. An' you tell me – what happened to Dan Wong?" He listened for a long moment then snapped the phone off without a farewell.

"Dan got some emergency assignment in Hawaii. Word came from Washington, so it got priority over our li'l pissy insignificant case here. Somebody was s'posed to call me – and you – but it fell through the cracks."

"And SPEC-TAC?"

"The SAC's calling me back. But if they ain't here by now something's fucked up in a big way."

Rhyme said, "They told us it was on the 'scroll' for a meeting today."

"Hate that crappy way they talk," Dellray snapped. "I'ma get it taken care of when I get back to the office. No excuse for this."

"Thanks, Fred. We need the help. We've got half the Fifth Precinct trying to find the print shop or painting company where Sam Chang works and we're coming up with zilch."

"This ain't good."

Sellitto asked, "Where're you with the bomb investigation?"

"That's th' other reason I came by. Simon says zip… Can't make a baby step of headway. My CIs, they're scouring Brighton Beach but they ain't turning up anything. Not. A. Peep. And I run dozens of skels there."

"You're sure the device's Russian?"

"When're we sure 'bout anyfuckin'thing?"

That much was true. Rhyme nodded at a paper bag he carried. "What've you got?"

He dug out a plastic bag containing the bright yellow stick of explosive and tossed it across the room to Sachs.

She caught it one-handed. "Holy Mother, Fred," she called.

"S'only dynamite. And if it din't go off with a detonator it sure ain't gonna go bang with a little lob to left field. Hey, Aye-melia, you wanna play softball on the bureau team? That was a good catch."

She examined the stick of dynamite.

"Friction ridges?" Sellitto asked.

"Wiped clean. No prints."

She held it up for Rhyme, who noticed numbers printed on the side.

"What'd the lot numbers turn up?" he asked Dellray.

"Nothin'. Our boys said it was too old to trace. 'Nother dead end."

"One man's dead end is another man's door," Rhyme said, reminding himself to share this saying, which he'd just made up, with Sonny Li when the Chinese cop returned. "Did they test it for markers?"

"Nup. Said it was too old for marker additives too."

"Probably is. But I want to test it anyway." He shouted to Mel Cooper, "Get it over to the lab ASAP. I want it analyzed. The works."

Chromatography – the analytical process of choice to test the dynamite – usually required that the samples be burned. But Rhyme wasn't about to set fire to a piece of explosive in his town house. The NYPD lab downtown had special equipment for doing so.

Mel Cooper called one of his technicians downtown and made arrangements for the test then handed the stick back to Dellray, giving him instructions on where to drop it off.

"We'll do what we can, Fred."

Then Cooper looked over a second bag Dellray handed him. It contained a Duracell battery, wires and a switch. "All generic, nothing helpful. It's your tract housing of bombs," the tech announced. "Detonator?"

A third bag appeared. Cooper and Rhyme examined what was left of the scorched piece of metal. "Russian, military grade," Rhyme said.

A detonator was basically a blasting cap, which contained a core of fulminate of mercury or a similar explosive and wires, which heated up when an electrical charge was sent through them and set off the primer explosive, which in turn set off the main charge.

There wasn't much of this one left; it was the only part of the bomb that had actually gone off when Dellray sat on the device. Cooper put it under the compound microscope. "Not much. A Russian letter A and R. Then the numbers one and three."

"And nobody's database has a record of that?"

"Nope – and we checked ever-body: NYPD, ATF, DEA and Justice."

"Well, we'll see what the lab comes up with."

"I owe you, Lincoln."

"Pay me back by getting somebody from your shop to work GHOSTKILL, Fred."

Four blocks from the bubble tea house Sonny Li found the address of Mr. Wang, which the woman in red had given him.

The storefront showed no indication of what the occupant did for a living but in the dusty front window sat a shrine, illuminated by a red light-bulb and sticks of incense long burnt away. The faded letters said, in Chinese, fortunes told, truth revealed, luck preserved.

Inside, a young Chinese woman behind a desk looked up at Li. On the desk in front of her were both an abacus and a laptop computer. The office was shabby but the diamond Rolex watch on her wrist suggested that the business was successful. She asked if he was here to hire her father to arrange his home or office.

"I was pleased to see an apartment I believe your father did. Can you tell me if it was his work?"

"Whose apartment?"

"It was an acquaintance of another friend, who sadly has gone back to China. I don't know his name. I do know the address, though."

"And that is what?"

" Five-oh-eight Patrick Henry Street."

"No, no," she said. "My father does not work there. He does no work south of Midtown. Only for uptown people."

"But your office is here."

"Because people expect it to be here. All of our clients are on the Upper East and Upper West Sides. And only a portion of them are Chinese."

"And you don't live in Chinatown?"

She laughed. "We live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Do you know it?"

"No," he said. Disappointed, Li asked, "Can you tell me who might've arranged this apartment. It was very well done."

"This friend, he is wealthy?"

"Yes, very wealthy."

"Then I would say Mr. Zhou. He does many of the rich places downtown. Here's his address and name. He has an office in the back of a grocery and herb store. It's about five blocks from here." She wrote the name on another slip of paper and jotted down the directions.

He thanked her and she turned back to the computer.

Outside, for luck, Sonny Li waited until a taxi speeding down the street was three meters away then jumped in front of the car. The driver cursed and extended his middle finger.

Li laughed. He'd cut the demon's tail very close and rendered him powerless. Now, blessed with invulnerability, he would find the Ghost.

He glanced at the slip of paper once more and started down the street toward the Lucky Hope Shop.

The Ghost, wearing his windbreaker to conceal his new Glock 36, a.45-caliber model, was walking down Mulberry Street, sipping the milk out of a whole coconut he'd bought at the corner. A short straw protruded from the opening the vendor had hacked into the top with a cleaver.

He'd just gotten the news from the Uighur that Yusuf had hired to break into the special NYPD safehouse where the Wu family was being kept in the Murray Hill section of the city. But the security was better than he'd expected and the guards had spotted him. They'd nearly caught him but the Turk had escaped. Undoubtedly the police had moved the family already. A brief setback but he'd eventually find out where they were.

He passed a store selling statues and altars and joss sticks. In the window was an effigy of his protector, the archer god Yi. The Ghost bowed his head slightly and then continued on.

As he walked, he asked himself: Did he believe in spirits?

Did he believe that the dragons inhabited hills?

He doubted that he did. After all, Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, might have shaken her finger at the tempestuous sea and calmed it but she'd done so only in a myth. In reality she hadn't saved the piglets trapped in the hold of the Fuzhou Dragon.

And his own prayers to the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, had gone unanswered years ago – she hadn't stopped the hand of the pimply student from beating his parents and brother to death for the ambiguous crime of being part of the old.

On the other hand, the Ghost certainly believed in qi – the life energy that flows through everyone. He had felt this force a thousand times. He felt it as the transfer between him and the woman he was fucking, felt it as the power of victory the instant he killed an enemy, felt it as a warning that he should avoid going into this room or meeting with that businessman. When he'd been sick or endangered he'd felt his qi impaired.

Good qi and bad qi.

And that meant you could channel the good force and divert or block the bad.

Down one alley, then down another, then across a busy street. Into yet another dim cobblestoned alley.

Finally he arrived at his destination. He finished the milk in the coconut and tossed the shell into a trash can. Then he carefully wiped his hands on a napkin and walked through the doorway, waving hello to his feng shui expert, Mr. Zhou, who sat in the back of the Lucky Hope Shop.

Sonny Li lit another cigarette and continued down a street called the Bowery.

Li knew snakeheads and he knew that they had money and a fierce sense of survival. The Ghost would have other safehouses in the area, and, since feng shui was such a personal matter, if the Ghost was satisfied with the work that Zhou had done on Patrick Henry Street he would have used the man for these other locations too.

He felt good. Good omens, good power.

He and Loaban had made their sacrifices to Guan Di, the god of detectives.

He'd been cutting demons' tails.

And he had a loaded German automatic pistol in his pocket.

If this feng shui man knew he was working for one of the most dangerous snakeheads in the world, he might be reluctant to talk about him. But Sonny Li would get him to.

Judge Dee – the fictional detective, prosecutor and judge in old China – conducted investigations very differently from Loaban. The techniques were similar to those used in modern-day China. The emphasis was on interrogation of witnesses and suspects, not on physical evidence. The key in criminal investigations, like so much else in Chinese culture, was patience, patience, patience. Even the brilliant – and persistent – Judge Dee would reinterview the suspect dozens of times until a crack was found in his alibi or explanation. The judge would then tear apart the man's story until the suspect delivered the all-important goal of criminal investigation in China: not a jury verdict, but a confession, followed by the equally important vow of contrition. Anything that could elicit a confession was fair – even torture (though in Judge Dee's day if you tortured a suspect and it later turned out that he was innocent the judge himself would be tortured and put to death).

Sonny Li was the namesake of a great American gangster, Sonny Corleone, son of the Godfather Vito Corleone. He was a senior officer and detective in the First Prefecture, People's Public Security Bureau, Liu Guoyuan, Fujian Province, a world traveler and the friend of loaban Lincoln Rhyme. Li would extract the Ghost's other addresses from the feng shui expert no matter what it took.

He continued along the street, past the bustling crowds, the fish markets in front of which were baskets of scrabbling blue crabs and bins of ice containing clams and fish – some of them sliced open, their tiny black hearts still beating.

He came to the Lucky Hope Shop, a small place but packed with merchandise: jars of twisted ginseng root, packs of dried cuttlefish, Hello Kitty toys and candies for children, noodles and spices, dusty bags of rice, bins of melon seeds, star noodles, tea for the liver and kidney, dried croaker, oyster sauce, lotus, jelly and gums, frozen tea buns and packs of tripe.

In the back he found a man sitting at a desk, smoking, reading a Chinese-language newspaper. The office was, as Sonny Li had expected, perfectly arranged: convex mirrors to trap the bad energy, a large translucent jade dragon (better than wood or ceramic) and – important for successful business – a small aquarium against what would be the north wall. In it swam black fish.

"You are Zhou?"

"Yes, that's right."

Li said, "I'm honored to meet you, sir. I was at the apartment of a friend at 508 Patrick Henry Street. I believe you arranged it."

Zhou's eyes narrowed a millimeter then he nodded cautiously. "A friend."

"That's right, sir. Unfortunately, I need to get in touch with him and he is no longer at that apartment. I was hoping you could tell me where he might be. His name is Kwan Ang."

Another faint, faint contraction of the man's brows.

"I am sorry, sir. I don't know anyone of that name."

"That's unfortunate, Mr. Zhou. Because if you did know him and you were to direct me to any other places he might be found, there would be a lot of money in it for you. It's important that I find him."

"I can't help you."

"You know that Kwan Ang is a snakehead and a murderer. I suspect you do know that. I can see it in your eyes." Sonny Li could read faces the way Loaban could read evidence.

"No, you are mistaken." Mr. Zhou began to sweat. Beads appeared on his scalp.

"So," Li continued, "any money he has paid you has blood on it. The blood of innocent women and children. Does that not trouble you?"

"I cannot help you." Zhou gazed down at a sheaf of papers on his desk. "Now I must get back to work."

Tap, tap…

Li was gently striking the desktop with his pistol. Zhou stared at it fearfully. "So you must be considered a confederate of his. Perhaps you are his partner. You are a snakehead too. I think that is so."

"No, no. I honestly don't know who you mean. I am simply a practitioner of feng -"

"Ah," Li sneered. "I'm tired of this. I'll call the INS and let them take over from here. They can deal with you and your family." He nodded toward a cluster of family pictures on the wall. Then he turned toward the door.

"There's no need for that!" Zhou said quickly. "Sir… You mentioned money before?"

"Five thousand one-color."

"If he -"

"Kwan will never learn about you. You'll be paid in cash by the police."

Zhou wiped his face with his shirtsleeve. His eyes swept the desktop as he debated.

Tap… tap… tap…

Finally Zhou blurted, "I am not sure of the address. He and his associate picked me up here and drove me to the apartment through alleyways. But if you want him, I will tell you this – he was here not five minutes ago. He left just before you walked in."

"What? Kwan Ang himself?"

"Yes."

"Which way did he go?"

"Outside the store I saw him turn left. If you hurry you can find him. He's carrying a yellow bag with my store's name on it. He – Wait, sir. My money!"

But Li was sprinting out of the store.

Outside, he turned to the left and jogged down the street. He looked around frantically. Then, about a hundred meters away he saw a man of medium build, with short, dark hair, carrying a yellow shopping bag. His gait was familiar; Li remembered it from the ship. Yes, Li thought, his heart stuttering with excitement, it's the Ghost.

He supposed he should try to call Loaban or Hongse. But he couldn't risk the man's escaping. Li started after him, gripping the pistol in his pocket.

Sprinting, breathless, he closed the distance quickly. He was gasping loudly and as he got nearer, the Ghost paused. As he started to look behind him Li ducked behind a Dumpster. When he looked out again the snakehead was continuing through the deserted alley.

In Liu Guoyuan, Sonny Li had a pale blue uniform, white gloves and a hat with a patent-leather brim. But here he looked like a busboy. He had nothing on him to indicate that he was working with the New York Police Department and Lincoln Rhyme. He was concerned that if someone saw him arrest the Ghost they would think that he himself was an attacker, a bandit, and the police would arrest him, and the snakehead would escape in the confusion.

And so Li decided to take the man here, in the deserted alley.

When the Ghost turned down one more alley, Li made certain that no one was around and simply sprinted forward as fast as he could run, the pistol outstretched in his hand.

Before the snakehead realized he was being pursued, Sonny Li was on him, grabbing his collar and shoving his gun into the man's back.

The killer dropped the yellow bag and started to reach under his shirt. But Li pressed his gun against the Ghost's neck. "Don't move." He took a large pistol from his prisoner's belt and slipped it into his own pocket. Then he roughly spun the snakehead around to face him. "Kwan Ang," he intoned then recited the familiar incantation: "I'm arresting you for violation of the organic laws of the People's Republic of China."

But as he was about to continue the litany and present the particular offenses Li's voice faded. He glanced at the neck of the Ghost's shirt, which had been tugged open as he'd reached for his pistol.

Li saw a white bandage taped to the man's chest.

And dangling from a leather cord around the Ghost's neck was a soap-stone amulet in the shape of a monkey.

Chapter Forty

His eyes wide in shock, Sonny Li stepped back, holding the pistol level at the Ghost's face.

"You, you…" he stammered.

His thoughts were jammed as he tried to figure out what was happening. Finally he whispered, "You killed John Sung at the beach and you took his papers and the stone monkey. You've been pretending to be him!"

The Ghost looked at him carefully. Then he smiled. "We've both been doing some masquerading, it looks like. You were one of the piglets on the Fuzhou Dragon." He nodded. "Waiting to get me on U.S. soil to arrest me and turn me over to the police here."

Li understood what the man had done. He'd stolen the red Honda from the restaurant on the beach. Loaban and the police assumed he'd driven it to the city. But, no, he'd stuffed Sung's body into the trunk and hidden it near the beach – where no one would think to look for it. Then he'd given himself a superficial wound with his own gun and swum back into the ocean, awaiting rescue by the police and the INS, who helpfully transported him into the city themselves – first to the hospital and then to the immigration hearing officer.

Ten judges of hell, Li thought again. Hongse had no clue that the "doctor" was the snakehead himself. "You were using the policewoman to find out where the Changs and the Wus were."

The Ghost nodded. "I needed information. She was happy to provide it." He now examined Li more closely. "Why did you do this, little man? Why did you come all the way after me?"

"You killed three people in Liu Guoyuan, my town."

"Did I? I don't remember. I was there a year ago, I think. Why did I kill them? Maybe they deserved it."

Sonny Li was appalled that the man didn't even remember the deaths. "No, you and a little snakehead started shooting. You killed three bystanders."

"Then it was an accident."

"No, it was murder."

"Well, listen, little man, I'm tired and I don't have much time. The police are close to finding the Changs and I have to get there first and then get out of this country and go home. So, one hundred thousand one-color," the Ghost said. "I can give it to you in cash right now."

"I'm not like most of the security bureau officers you're used to."

"You mean you're more greedy? Then two hundred thousand." The Ghost laughed. "You would have to work for a hundred years to make that much money in Liu Guoyuan."

"You are under arrest."

The smile on the Ghost's face faded, realizing that he was serious. "This will go badly for your wife and children if you don't let me go."

Li growled, "You will lie down on your belly. Now."

"All right. An honorable and honest security bureau officer. I am surprised… What's your name, little man?"

"My name is not your concern."

The Ghost knelt on the cobblestones.

Li decided to use his shoelaces to tie the Ghost's wrists. He then – Suddenly Li realized in shock that the shopping bag was between them and that the Ghost's right hand had disappeared behind it.

"No!" he shouted.

The Lucky Hope Shop bag exploded toward Li as the Ghost fired through it with a second gun he had hidden in an ankle holster or his sock.

The bullet zipped past Li's hip. He raised his hand in an automatic gesture, flinching. But by the time he was thrusting his own pistol forward the snakehead had knocked it from his hand. Li grabbed the Ghost's wrist and tried to pull the Model 51 from his fingers. Together they tumbled to the slick cobblestones and this gun too fell to the ground.

Desperately, they clutched at each other, clawing and striking when they could but mostly wrestling and trying to reach one of the weapons that lay on the cobblestones near them. The Ghost slammed his palm into Li's face and stunned him then spun away, struggling to pull the Glock from the cop's pocket.

Li recovered quickly and tackled the Ghost, knocking this weapon too to the ground. The cop's knee struck the killer's back and knocked the breath out of him. Still facing away from Li, the Ghost, gasping and moaning in pain, struggled to his knees. Li's arm remained around the snakehead's throat in a choke hold.

Unstoppable, the Ghost struggled toward the pistol.

Stop him, stop him, Li raged to himself. He's the man who would kill Hongse, the man who would kill the Changs.

Who would kill Loaban too.

Stop him!

He seized the leather thong around the Ghost's neck, the one that held the stone monkey amulet, and began to pull hard. The leather tightened. The Ghost's hands flailed uselessly and from his throat came a gurgling noise. The snakehead began to quiver. His heels were nearly off the ground.

Let go, Sonny Li told himself. Arrest him. Don't murder him.

But he didn't let go. He pulled harder and harder.

Until the leather snapped.

The monkey figurine fell to the ground and shattered. Li stumbled backward, falling hard into the alley, striking his head on the cobblestones. He nearly passed out.

Judges of hell…

The cop could faintly see the Ghost, also on his hands and knees, gasping and coughing, holding his throat with one hand as his other patted the ground for a weapon.

An image came into Li's mind: His stern father reprimanding him for some foolish comment.

Then another one: The bodies of the Ghost's victims in Li's town in China, lying bloody on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

And he pictured another terrible sight, one that had not yet happened:

Hongse dead, lying in darkness. Loaban too, his face as still in death as his body had been in life.

Sonny Li rolled to his knees and began crawling toward his enemy.

The crime scene bus left twenty-foot skid marks on the Chinatown street, which was slick with runoff from the melting ice from bins at a nearby fish market.

Amelia Sachs, her face grim, jumped out, accompanied by INS agent Alan Coe and Eddie Deng. They ran through the pungent alleyway toward the cluster of uniformed officers from the Fifth Precinct. The men and women stood casually, looking as matter-of-fact as police always did at crime scenes.

Even scenes of homicides.

Sachs slowed and gazed down at the body.

Sonny Li was lying on his stomach on the filthy cobblestones. Eyes partially open, palms flat beside him, level with his shoulders, as if he were about to start a series of push-ups.

Sachs paused, filled with the desire to drop to her knees and grip the man's hand. She'd walked the grid many times in the years she'd worked with Rhyme, but this was her first scene involving a fellow cop – fellow cop and, she could now say, friend.

A friend too of Rhyme's.

Still, she resisted the temptation toward sentiment. This was, after all, a crime scene no different from any other and, as Lincoln Rhyme often pointed out, one of the worst contaminants at scenes was careless cops.

Look past it, ignore who the victim is. Remember Rhyme's advice: Give up the dead.

Well, that'd be damn tough to do. For both of them. But for Lincoln Rhyme especially. Sachs had noticed that in the past two days Rhyme had formed an improbable bond with this man, as close as he'd come to a friendship since she'd known him. She was now aware of the painful silence of a thousand conversations never to occur, of a thousand laughs never to be shared.

But then she thought of someone else: Po-Yee, soon to be another victim of the man who'd committed this crime, if they didn't find him. And so Sachs put the pain away, the same way she closed and locked the storage box in which her Colt.45 competition shooting pistol rested.

"We did what you wanted," said another officer, a detective in a gray suit. "Nobody got closer'n this. Only the EMS tech was in." A nod toward the body. "He's DCDS."

Cop initials perfunctorily signifying the category of lifelessness: deceased confirmed dead at the scene.

Agent Coe walked slowly up to her. "I'm sorry," the agent said, running his hand through his scarlet hair. There seemed to be little genuine sadness in his voice, however.

"Yeah."

"He was a good man."

"Yes, he was." She said this bitterly, thinking: And he was a hell of a better cop than you are. If you hadn't fucked up yesterday we'd've gotten the Ghost. Sonny would still be alive and Po-Yee and the Changs would be safe.

She motioned to the cops. "I've got to run the scene. Could I have everybody out of here?"

Oh, man, she thought, dismayed at what she now had to do – though she was anticipating not the difficult and sad task of searching the scene but something far more arduous.

She pulled her headset on and plugged it into her radio.

Okay. Just go ahead. Do it.

She made the call to Central and was patched through to the phone.

A click.

"Yes?" Rhyme asked.

She said, "I'm here."

A pause then: "And?"

She sensed him trying to keep hope out of his voice.

"He's dead."

The criminalist gave no response for a moment. "I see."

"I'm sorry, Lincoln," she said softly.

Another pause and he said, "No first names, Sachs. Bad luck, remember?" His voice nearly caught. "All right. Get going. Run the scene. Time's running out for the Changs."

"Sure, Rhyme. I'm on it."

She quickly dressed in the Tyvek suit and went about processing the scene. Sachs did the fingernail scrapings, the substance samples, the ballistics, the footprints, the shell casings, the slugs. She took the pictures, she lifted prints.

But she felt she was just going through the motions. Come on, she snapped at herself. You're acting like you're some damn rookie. We don't have time to just collect evidence. Think about Po-Yee, think about the Changs. Give Rhyme something he can work with. Think!

She turned back to the body and processed it more carefully, considering everything that she found, demanding in her mind that every bit of evidence explain itself, offer an explanation of where it had come from, what it might mean.

One of the uniformed officers walked up to her but seeing her stony face he retreated quickly.

A half hour later she'd finished bagging everything, written her name on the chain of custody cards and assembled the evidence.

She made another call to the criminalist.

"Go ahead," Rhyme said grimly. How it hurt to hear the pain in his voice. For years she'd heard so much flat emotion, so much lethargy, so much resignation. That had been tough but it didn't compare to the pain now in Rhyme's voice.

"He was shot three times in the chest but we've got four casings. One casing's from a Model 51, probably the one we saw before. The others are.45. He was killed with that one, it looks like. Then I found the Walther that Sonny was carrying. There was trace on his leg – yellow paper flecks and some kind of dried plant material. And there was a pile of the same material on the cobblestones."

"What's your scenario, Sachs?"

"I think Sonny spots the Ghost leaving a store, carrying something in a yellow bag. Sonny follows him. He collars him in the alley here and gets the Ghost's new gun, the.45. He assumes that's his only weapon. Sonny relaxes and tells the Ghost to get onto the ground. But the Ghost pulls out his backup – the Model 51 – and shoots through the bag, spattering the plant material and flecks of paper on Sonny. The bullet misses but the Ghost jumps him. There's a fight. The Ghost gets the.45 and kills Sonny."

"Because," Rhyme said, "the yellow paper and the plant material were on Sonny's legs – meaning the Ghost had the Model 51 in an ankle holster and fired low. The gunshot residue was high on his body – from the.45."

"That's what it looks like."

"And how do we use that scenario?"

"Wherever the Ghost bought that stuff that was in the bag, a clerk might know him and have an idea where he lives."

"You want to canvass all the stores near there to see who has yellow bags?"

"No, that'd take too long. It'd be better to find out what the plant material is first."

"Bring it in, Sachs. Mel'll run it through the chromatograph."

"No, I've got a better idea," she said. A glance at Sonny Li's body. She forced herself to look away. "It's probably Chinese herbs or spices. I'm going to stop by John Sung's apartment with a sample of it. He should be able to tell me right away what it is. He only lives a few blocks from here."