The Stone Monkey (44 page)

"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.

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 fathers 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. "Thorn! We need our scribe! Thorn!"

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. Thorn 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 Thorn 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?"