The Stone Monkey (51 page)

Afraid, you can be brave...

This was the height of irony, he reflected. He did indeed have Americans on the take, even within the INS—a hearing officer included, which is why he'd been released so fast and easily yesterday morning. But he didn't know the names of everyone his agents had bribed here. And, as Yindao had just explained to Coe, he rarely had direct contact with any of them. As for knowing the location of the Wus' safehouse in Murray Hill—Yindao herself had given that information away when she'd asked if he wanted to join them there.

Since Coe was apparently working for him, should he now try to save the man?

No, better to cut him off. The arrest would be a good diversion. And Yindao and the others would be less cautious thinking they'd caught the traitor.

He watched as, on the sidewalk, she expertly cuffed the agent, holstered her weapon, then pulled Coe roughly to his feet. The Ghost rolled down his window and nodded toward the apartment. "Do you want me to talk to the Changs?"

"That's not their place," Yindao said. "It's still a few blocks from here. I lied—I had to keep Coe off guard. I picked it because there's a police precinct house around the corner. They're going to hold him for the FBI to pick up."

The Ghost looked Coe over and added a dismayed tone to his voice as he said, "You were going to tell the Ghost where they were. Those children ... you were going to let him kill those children. You're despicable."

The agent stared back angrily for a moment—until Yindao roughly led him to the corner, where she was met by three uniformed officers, who took him into custody. The Ghost glanced behind him and saw, at the end of the block, Yusuf's van idling at the curb.

Five minutes later Yindao returned, climbed in the car, fired up the engine. They resumed their drive. She looked at the Ghost and shook her head with a grim laugh. "I'm sorry. Are you all right?" Although the incident had shaken her some, she now seemed more like herself. Relaxed and confident.

"Yes." The Ghost laughed too. "You handled that perfectly. You're quite an artist at your profession." His smile faded. "A traitor within the INS?"

"All that crap about the Ghost killing his informant. He suckered us." She picked up her cell phone and made a call. "Okay, Rhyme, Coe's in custody at the precinct. ... No, no problems. John and I are going on to the Changs' now. ... Where're the teams? ... Okay, I'll be there in three minutes. We're not going to wait for ESU. The Ghost could be on his way there right now."

He could indeed, the snakehead reflected.

Yindao hung up.

So they would be there before everyone else. His liaison with Yindao would not have to wait after all. He'd kill the Changs, get Yindao into the Turks' van and escape. The Ghost's hand went to her shoulder and squeezed it. He felt his erection grow even more powerful.

"Thanks for coming along, John." She smiled at him. "What do I say for 'friend,'
'Yindao'?"

He shook his head. "That's what a man would say to a woman. You would say,
'Yinjing.'"

This was the word for male genitals.

"Yinjing,"
she said.

"I'm honored," he said, bowing his head slightly. He looked over her red hair, her pale skin, her long legs ... "Your friend Rhyme is quite a detective. I would like to visit him after all this is over."

"I'll give you a card. I have one in my purse."

"Good."

Rhyme would have to die too. Because the Ghost knew that he also was a man who would never stop until he'd defeated his enemies.
Po fu chen Thou. ...
Break the cauldrons and sink the boats. Too dangerous to stay alive. She'd told him that he was paralyzed. How could one torture him, the Ghost wondered. His face, eyes, tongue ... There would be ways, depending on how much time he had. Fire was always good.

Yindao turned abruptly down a one-way street and stopped. She examined the address numbers and then continued halfway down the block. She double-parked and left a police ID on the dashboard.

"That's the house there." She pointed to a three-story, redbrick house several doors away, the lights on in the ground-floor apartment. Modest but, the Ghost reflected, far more luxurious than the yellow-and-beige clapboard or cinder-block houses for which so many Chinese have Mao to thank.

They climbed out of the car and walked to the sidewalk, paused. "Stay out of sight," she whispered and led him close to a line of boxwood hedges. The Ghost glanced back. Yusuf had parked and, through the faint dusk light, the Ghost could just see him and the other Turk.

He leaned close and smelled scented soap on her skin and sweat. He found his arousal unabated and he pressed against her arm and hip as she examined the house. She nodded at the bay window in front. "We'll go through the back door—if it's unlocked. They'd be able to see us from the front and might run."

She gestured him to follow her around the back of the house nearest them, then together they cut through the backyards to the Changs'. They moved slowly, so they wouldn't knock into anything in the near-dark and announce their presence.

At the back door of the piglets' apartment they paused and Yindao looked into the window—at a small kitchen. No one was inside. "Always look through the back window first," she whispered. "My new police tactical rule." She smiled wistfully at this—though she didn't explain why.

"Come on," she said. "Move slow. Don't startle them. Tell them right away we're here to help. We want to protect them from the Ghost. And tell them there's a good chance for asylum."

The Ghost nodded and tried to imagine what their reaction would be when Sam Chang and his wife saw who the police translator was.

Yindao tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed it open quickly—so it wouldn't squeak, he supposed.

How should he handle this? he wondered. He realized that he should probably debilitate Yindao immediately. She was too much of a risk merely to threaten. The best thing to do, he decided, was to shoot her in the leg—the back of her knee would be ironic, he decided, considering her arthritis. He and the Turks would kill the Changs. Then back to the Windstar. They would speed to a safehouse or a deserted warehouse somewhere, for his hours with Yindao.

They walked silently through the small, stifling kitchen.

On the stove a pot of water was heating. Half an onion sat on a cutting board, a bunch of parsley nearby. What, he wondered, had Mrs. Chang been making for dinner?

Yindao walked through the kitchen. She paused at the doorway of the corridor that led to the living room, gestured that he stop.

The Turks, he noticed, were outside, in the alley beside the house. Yindao's back was to him and he motioned them around to the front. Yusuf nodded and the two men moved off.

The Ghost decided that he would let Yindao precede him. Give her a minute or so inside the living room with the Changs to put them at ease and to give the Turks a chance to get in position at the front door. Then he would push inside and shoot her, which would be a signal for the Turks to break in and help him finish off the family.

Hanging back, the Ghost reached under his windbreaker and pulled his gun from the waistband of his workout slacks.

Alone, Yindao began to walk slowly into the dark corridor.

A sound nearby.

A footstep? wondered Sam Chang, sitting on his couch, next to his youngest son.

In the front? In the back?

They sat in the dim living room of their apartment, clustered around the television on which a talk show was playing. The volume was up but still Chang had clearly heard a noise.

A snap.

Yes, a footstep.

What
was
it?

A phoenix rising from ashes, a dragon angered that this heavy house had been built on his home?

The spirit of his father returning here to comfort them?

Perhaps to warn them.

Or maybe it was Gui, the Ghost himself, who had found them.

It's my imagination, Chang thought.

Except that he looked across the room and saw William, where he'd been reading a year-old auto magazine. The boy was sitting up, his neck lifted, head swiveling slowly, like a heron trying to identify the source of danger.

"What is it, husband?" Mei-Mei whispered, now seeing both their faces. She pulled Po-Yee to her.

Another click.

A footstep. He couldn't tell where it came from.

Sam Chang was on his feet quickly. William joined him. Ronald started to rise but his father waved the young boy into the bedroom. A firm nod at his wife. She gazed into his eyes for a moment then slipped into the bedroom with the toddler and her youngest son and shut the door silently.

"Do what I told you, son."

William took his position beside the doorway that led to the back of the apartment, holding an iron pipe Chang had found in the backyard. Together father and son had planned what they would do if the Ghost came for them. Chang would shoot the first person through the door—either the Ghost or his
bangshou.
Hearing the shot, the others would probably hang back, giving William time to grab the fallen man's pistol, so he too would have a weapon.

Chang then shut off two of the lights in the living room so that he would not be so evident a target but could see the assailant in the doorway in silhouette. He'd shoot for the head; from here he couldn't miss.

Sam Chang crouched down behind a chair. He ignored his exhaustion from the ordeal on the ship, exhaustion from the loss of his father, exhaustion from the erosion of his soul in these two short days, and with his steady, calligrapher's hands, pointed the weapon at the doorway.

Inside the town house Amelia Sachs stepped forward slowly into the dark corridor.

"Wait here a minute, John," she whispered.

"Yes" came the faint reply.

She stepped into the corridor. Hesitated only a moment and then called, "Now."

"What?" the Ghost asked, hesitating.

But instead of responding she spun back toward him, raising her own pistol so quickly that the motion of the black weapon was a gray blur. The abyss of the muzzle settled steadily on the Ghost's chest before he could even lift his own Glock.

Sachs's utterance hadn't been directed to the Ghost at all, but to the half-dozen men and women in full combat gear—Bo Haumann and other Emergency Services Unit tactical cops—who pushed into the small kitchen. They rushed in from the back door and past her from the living room, guns pointed at the shocked Ghost's face, screaming their deafening litany, "Down, down, down, police, drop your weapon, on the floor, down!"

His pistol was torn from his hand and he was flung facedown to the floor and cuffed and frisked. He felt a tug at his ankle and the Model 51, his lucky gun, was lifted away, then his pockets emptied.

"We've got the subject down," an officer shouted. "Scene clear."

"Outside, we've got two, both down and locked." Meaning on their bellies with cuffs or plastic restraints on their wrists. These were the two men in the Windstar Sachs had spotted following them. More of the Uighurs from the cultural center in Queens, she'd assumed.

"Any other minders?" Sachs bent down and whispered harshly into the Ghost's ear.

"Any—"

"We've got the two men who were following us. Anybody
else?"

The Ghost didn't answer and Sachs said into her radio, "I only noticed the one van. That's probably it."

Then Lon Sellitto and Eddie Deng joined her from upstairs, where they'd been waiting, out of the way of the takedown team. They looked the Ghost over as he lay on the floor, breathless from the shock and the rough treatment. Amelia Sachs thought he looked harmless—just a handsome but diminutive Asian man with slightly graying hair.

Sellitto's radio blared with the message, "Snipers One and Two to Base. Okay to stand down?"

He turned the squelch down on his Motorola and said, "Base to Snipers. That's a roger." The big detective added to the Ghost, "They had you in their sights from the minute you stepped out of the station wagon. If you'd aimed your weapon in her direction you'd be dead now. Lucky man."

They dragged the Ghost into the living room and pushed him into a chair. Eddie Deng read him his rights—in English, Putonghua and Minnanhua. Just to make sure.

He confirmed that he understood, with surprisingly little emotion, Sachs observed, considering the circumstances.

"How're the Changs?" Sachs asked Sellitto.

"They're fine. Two INS teams're at their apartment. It almost got ugly. The father'd got his hands on a gun and was ready to shoot it out but the agents spotted him through a window with a nightscope. They got the apartment's phone number and called to tell them that they were surrounded. As soon as Chang realized it was a legit INS team and not the Ghost he gave it up."

"The baby?"

"She's fine. Social worker's on the way. They're going to keep them at their place in Owls Head until we're through with this piece of shit." Nodding toward the Ghost. "Then we can go over there and debrief them."

The town house in which they now stood, about a mile from the Changs', was a neatly decorated place, full of flowers and tchotchkes: a surprise to Sachs, considering that it was inhabited by one of the city's best homicide detectives.

"So this's
your
house, Lon?" she asked, picking up a porcelain Little Bo Peep statuette.

"It's my better other's," he answered defensively, using the cop's pet name for Rachel, his girlfriend (he'd combined "better half" and "significant other," in a rare display of levity). They'd moved in together several months ago. "She inherited half of this stuff from her mother." He took the figurine from Sachs and replaced it carefully on the shelf.

"This was the best we could do for a takedown site on such short notice. We figured if we drove too far from Owls Head, the prick'd start to get suspicious."

"It was all fake," the Ghost said, amused. It seemed to Sachs that his English was better than the dialect he'd affected when he'd been portraying John Sung. "You set me up."