The Stone Monkey (7 page)

"Stay out of the mud," Chang ordered his son and Wu. "Walk only on the grass or branches or stones. I don't want to leave footprints." Caution was instinctive for Chang; with both public security bureau and People's Liberation Army agents constantly following them, dissidents in China learn quickly to obscure their movements.

They moved on, through brush and trees whipped by the ferocious wind, past more houses, some dark, some showing signs of families waking: televisions flickering, breakfasts being prepared. Seeing this poignant evidence of normal life, Chang was stabbed by the hopelessness of their plight. But, as he'd learned to do in China, where the government had taken so much away from him, he pushed these sentimental feelings aside and urged his son and Wu to move more quickly. Finally they came to the last building on this strip of habitation: a small church, dark and apparently unoccupied.

Behind the weathered building they found an old white van. From his hours on the Internet and watching TV, Chang knew a little English but these words he didn't understand. At his urging, though, both of his sons had studied the language, and American culture, for years. William glanced at the van and explained, "It says 'Pentecostal Baptist Church of Easton.'"

Another soft crack in the distance. Chang froze at the sound. The Ghost had killed another one of them.

"Let's go!" an anxious Wu said. "Hurry. See if it's open."

But the van's door was locked.

As Chang looked around for something they could use to break the window William surveyed the lock closely. He called over the noisy wind, "Do you have my knife?"

"Your knife?"

"The one I gave you on the ship—to cut the rope holding the raft."

"That was
yours?"
What on earth had his son been doing with a weapon like that? It was a switchblade.

"Do you have it?" the boy repeated.

"No, I dropped it getting into the raft."

The boy grimaced but Chang ignored the expression—why, it was almost impertinent—and scanned the rain-pelted ground. He found a piece of metal pipe and swung it hard into the window of the van. The glass shattered into a hundred tiny pieces of ice. He climbed into the passenger seat and looked through the map box for keys. He couldn't find any and stepped out onto the muddy ground. Glancing at the building, he wondered if there would be a set inside the church? And if so, where? An office? There might be a caretaker inside; what if the man heard and confronted them? Chang believed that he couldn't hurt anyone innocent even if—

He heard a loud snap and spun around in alarm. His son was crouched in the driver's seat and had shattered the plastic housing of the ignition lock with a kick from his boot. As Chang watched, astonished and dismayed, the boy pulled out wires and began brushing them against each other. Suddenly the radio came on with a blare:
"He will always love you, let Our Savior into your heart.
..."

William touched a button on the dash and the volume lowered. He touched other wires together. A spark.... The engine fired up.

Chang stared in disbelief. "How did you know how to do that?"

The boy shrugged.

"Tell me—"

Wu clutched Chang's arm. "Let's go! We have to get our families and leave. The Ghost is looking for us."

The father pierced his son with a look of shock. He expected the boy to lower his eyes in shame. But William stared back coldly in a way that Chang himself never would have done with his own father, at any age.

"Please," Wu begged. "Let's go back for the rest."

"No," Chang said after a moment. "Have them come here. Follow our path—and make sure they don't leave any footprints."

Wu hurried off to get them.

In the van William found a booklet of maps of the area and studied them carefully. He nodded, as if memorizing directions.

Resisting his desire to interrogate his son about hot-wiring the ignition, Chang asked him, "Do you know where to go?"

"I can figure it out." The boy looked up. "Do you want me to drive?" Then he added bluntly, "You're not very good at it." Like most urban Chinese, Sam Chang's main means of transportation was a bicycle.

Chang blinked at these words of his son's—spoken once again in a tone that approached insolence. Then Wu appeared with the rest of the immigrants and Chang ran forward to help his wife and father into the van, calling back to his son, "Yes, you drive."

He'd killed two of the piglets on the beach—the injured man and a woman.

But there'd been about a dozen people in the raft. Where were the rest?

A horn blared. The Ghost whirled around. It was Jerry Tang, drawing his attention. He held up the police scanner, his gestures frantic. "The police will be here any minute! We have to go!"

The Ghost turned away and scanned the beach once more, the road. Where had they gotten to? Maybe they'd—

With a squeal of tires Tang's four-by-four pulled into the road, accelerating fast.

"No! Stop!"

Seized by fury, the Ghost aimed his pistol and fired once. The slug hit the rear door but the vehicle continued, not slowing, to an intersection and then skidded through the turn and disappeared. The Ghost stood frozen, the pistol at his side, staring through the mist at the road where his means of escape had just vanished. He was eighty miles from his safe-houses in Manhattan, his assistant was missing and probably dead, he had no money and no cell phone. Dozens of policemen and troopers were on their way. And Tang had just abandoned him. He could—

He tensed. Not far away a white van suddenly appeared out of a field on the other side of a church and turned onto the road. It was the piglets!

The Ghost lifted his pistol again but the vehicle disappeared into the fog. Lowering the gun, the Ghost took several deep breaths. After a moment he grew serene. He was plagued by troubles at the moment, yes, but he'd experienced much adversity in his life, far worse than this.

You are part of the old.

You will reform your ways.

You will die for your old beliefs. ...

A reversal, he'd come to learn, was merely a temporary unbalance and even the most horrific events in his life had ultimately been harmonized by good fortune. His abiding philosophy was found in one word:
naixin.
This translated as "patience" in Chinese but meant something more in the Ghost's mind. The English equivalent would be "All in good time." He had survived these forty-some years because he'd outlasted trouble and danger and sorrow.

For the moment the piglets had gotten away. Their deaths would have to wait. Now there was nothing to do but escape from the police and the INS.

He put his old pistol into his pocket and trudged through the rain and wind along the beach toward the lights of the small town. The closest building was a restaurant, in front of which was a car with its engine running.

So, some good fortune already!

And then, glancing out to sea, he saw something that actually made him laugh. Yet more good luck: not far offshore he saw another piglet, a man struggling to stay afloat. At least he could kill one more of them before he escaped to the city.

The Ghost pulled his gun from his pocket and started back toward the shoreline.

The wind was wearing him down.

Making his way toward the small town, Sonny Li slogged through the sand. He was a slight man and in the hard, dangerous world in which he made his way he relied on bluff and surprise and wits (weapons too, of course), not on physical strength. He was now at his limits, exhausted from this morning's ordeal.

The wind ... Twice it actually knocked him to his knees.

No more, he thought. Despite the risk of being seen, struggling through the soft sand was simply too much for him and he stumbled back onto the rain-swept asphalt road and continued toward the lights of the small village. He pushed forward as best he could, afraid that the snake-head would leave before Li found him.

But a moment later he received the reassurance that the man was still here: several more gunshots.

Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.

Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he'd swallowed he was desperately thirsty.

Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost's. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.

He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man's footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.

INS? Security bureau officers?

Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.

Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman's body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.

"He's killing them, Rhyme," Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. "He's shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They're dead."

"Shot
them?" The criminalist's voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.

The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. "No sign of him," the man shouted over the wind. "People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago." The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.

"Lon'll put it on the wire," he said. "Was he alone?"

"Think so. Because of the rain there're no footprints in the sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then."

"So we'll assume his
bangshou's
still unaccounted for. He could've gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might've been in the wrecked one."

Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.

Then she said, "We're going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme."

She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed
all
the evidence. But he said simply, "Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid." The line went dead.

Search well but watch your back.
...

The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs's instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants—and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might've gone to ground.

They found neither.

Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who'd been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.

The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene—so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn't vanish, either accidentally or at the hands of souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew—there were plenty of other people to do that now—and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.

As the CS techs roped off the beach with yellow tape, Sachs pulled the latest in forensic couture over her soaked jeans and T-shirt. The NYPD's new crime scene overalls, a hooded full-body suit made of white Tyvek, prevented the searcher from sloughing off his or her own trace evidence—hair, skin or sweat, for instance—and contaminating the scene.

Lincoln Rhyme approved of the suit—he'd lobbied for something similar when he'd been running the Investigation and Resources Division, which oversaw Crime Scene. Sachs wasn't so pleased, however. The fact that the overalls made her look like an alien from a bad space movie wasn't the problem; what troubled her was that it was brilliant white—easily spotted by any perps who, for whatever reason, might wish to hang around the crime scene and try out their marksmanship on cops picking up evidence. Hence, Sachs's pet name for the garb: "the bull's-eye suit."

A brief canvass of the patrons in the restaurant, employees of the gas station and residents living in the few houses on the beach yielded nothing except facts they'd already learned about the Honda in which the Ghost had escaped. No other vehicles had been stolen and no one had seen anybody swimming to shore or hiding out on land or even heard the gunshots over the wind and rain.

So it fell exclusively to Amelia Sachs—and Lincoln Rhyme—to wring from the crime scene whatever information about the Ghost, the crew and the immigrants might reside here.

And what a crime scene it was, one of the biggest they'd ever run: a mile of beach, a road and, on the other side of the asphalt strip, a maze of scruffy brush. Millions of places to search. And possibly still populated by an armed perp.

"It's a bad scene, Rhyme. The rain's let up a little but it's still coming down hard and the wind's twenty miles an hour."

"I know. We've got the Weather Channel on." His voice was different now, calmer. The sound spooked her a bit. It reminded her of the eerily placid quality of his voice when he talked about endings, about killing himself, about finality. "All the more reason," he prodded, "to get on with the search, wouldn't you say?"