The Stone Monkey (30 page)

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

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

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

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

Children ... Chang thought.

"William!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside, a screech of brakes.

Chang, his wife and father all froze.

Footsteps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The madness cannot be sustained.

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

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

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

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

How had they found the family?

Maybe it was magic...

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

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

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

Tomorrow, he would find the Changs.

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

Resist?
he wondered.

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

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

Disappointed, you can be fulfilled.

Hungry, you can be satiated.

Defeated, you can be victorious.

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

Time to call it a night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello?" a woman's voice answered.

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

"See you then, love."

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

The arrangement suited them.

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