The Stone Monkey (9 page)

Another car was approaching—a black sedan that smelled to Li like a government vehicle. Crouching, he made his way back to the road. Hidden once more in the bushes, he glanced out into the turbulent sea, observing now that Hongse seemed to be struggling in the choppy ocean just as much as the drowning man. He felt a pang that such a beautiful woman was in danger. But that wasn't really his concern; finding the Ghost and simply staying alive were his priorities now.

The effort of swimming against the battering surf to reach the drowning immigrant had nearly exhausted Amelia Sachs and she found she had to kick furiously to keep them both above water. Her knee and hip joints protested in pain. The immigrant himself wasn't any help at all. He was of medium build and trim—without much fat for buoyancy. He kicked his feet lethargically and his left arm was useless—thanks to a gunshot wound in his chest.

Gasping, spitting out the vile salt water that kept spilling into her mouth and nose, she fought her way toward shore. The water stung her eyes and blurred her vision but she could see on the sand near the breaking surf two medics with a stretcher and a large green oxygen tank, motioning broadly for her to swim toward them.

Thanks, boys.... I'm
trying.

She steered toward them as best she could but the undertow was fierce. She glanced back at the rock the immigrant had been clinging to and saw that, despite her massive efforts, they'd swum only about ten feet.

Kick harder. Harder!

Reciting to herself one of her personal mantras: When you move they can't getcha....

Another eight or nine feet. But Sachs finally had to stop and catch her breath, watching in dismay as the undertow tugged them back out to sea.

Come on, get out of here....

The listless immigrant, now nearly unconscious, kept pulling her down. Sachs kicked harder. A cramp seized her calf and she cried out and sank fast. The murky gray water, filled with seaweed and sand, swallowed her up. One hand holding the immigrant's shirt, the other pounding on her own calf to break the cramp, she struggled to hold her breath for as long as she could.

Oh, Lincoln! she thought. Going down ... Farther into the gray linen water.

Then: Jesus! What's this?

A barracuda, a shark, a black eel ... shot out of the foggy water and grabbed her around the chest. She instinctively reached for the switchblade she kept in her back pocket but her arm was pinned to her body by the terrible fish. It tugged her upward and a few seconds later she was on the surface, sucking sweet air into her stinging lungs.

She looked down. The fish turned out to be a man's arm encased in a black wetsuit.

The Suffolk County Rescue diver spit a regulator from a pony bottle of compressed air out of his mouth and said, "It's okay, miss, I got you. It's okay."

A second diver was gripping the immigrant, keeping his lolling head out of the water.

"Cramp," Sachs gasped. "Can't move my leg. Hurts."

He reached underwater with one hand, straightened her leg and then pressed her toes toward her body, stretching out the muscles of her calf. After a moment the pain went away. She nodded.

"Don't kick. Just relax. I'll take you in." He began to tow her and she leaned her head back, concentrated on breathing. His powerful legs, aided by the flippers, moved them rapidly toward shore. He said, "That was gutsy, going out. Most people would've just watched him die."

They swam through the chill water for what seemed like forever. Finally Sachs felt pebbles under her feet. She staggered onto the shore and took the blanket one of the medics offered her. After catching her breath she walked over to the immigrant, who was lying on the stretcher, an oxygen mask over his face. His eyes were dazed but he was conscious. His shirt was open and the medic was cleaning a bloody wound with disinfectant and bandages.

Sachs brushed as much sand off her feet and legs as she could then replaced her shoes and hooked her gunbelt around her once more. "How is he?"

"Wound's not bad. The shooter hit him in the chest but from an angle. But we'll have to watch the hypothermia and exhaustion."

"Can I ask him a few questions?"

"Just the minimum for now," the first paramedic said. "He needs oxygen and rest."

"What's your name?" Sachs asked the immigrant.

He lifted away the oxygen mask. "John Sung."

"I'm Amelia Sachs, with the New York City police department." She showed him her shield and ID, as procedure dictated. She asked, "What happened?"

The man lifted away the oxygen mask again. "I was thrown out of our raft. The snakehead on the ship—we call him the Ghost—he saw me and came down to the shore. He shot at me and missed. I swam underwater but I had to come back for air. He was waiting. He shot again and hit me. I pretended to be dead and when I looked again I saw him get into a red car and drive off. I tried to swim to the beach but I couldn't. I just held on to those rocks and waited."

Sachs studied the man. He was handsome and appeared to be in good shape. She'd recently seen a TV special on China and had learned that unlike Americans—who exercise temporarily, usually out of vanity—many Chinese work out all their lives.

The man asked, "How are..." He coughed again. The spasms turned violent. The medic let him cough out the water for a few moments and, when Sung stopped, knelt down and placed the oxygen mask on his face. "Sorry, Officer, but he really needs to suck air now."

But Sung lifted the mask off. "How are the others? Are they safe?"

It wasn't NYPD procedure to share information with witnesses but she saw the concern in his eyes and she said, "I'm sorry. Two are dead."

He closed his eyes and with his right hand clutched a stone amulet he wore on a leather strap around his neck.

"How many were on the raft?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. "Fourteen altogether." Then he asked, "Did he get away? The Ghost?"

"We're doing everything we can to find him."

Again Sung's face filled with dismay and he again squeezed the amulet.

The medic handed her the immigrant's wallet. She flipped through it. Most of it was turning to mush from the seawater and nearly all of the contents were in Chinese. But one card that was still legible was in English. It identified him as Dr. Sung Kai.

"Kai? Is that your first name?"

He nodded. "But I use John mostly."

"You're a doctor?"

"Yes."

"Medical doctor?"

He nodded again.

Sachs was looking at a picture of two young children, a boy and a girl. She felt a jolt of horror, thinking that they'd been on the ship.

"And your..." Her voice faded.

Sung understood. "My children? They're at home in Fujian. They're living with my parents."

The medic was standing near his patient, unhappy that he kept lifting off the mask. But Sachs had her job to do too. "Dr. Sung, do you have any idea where the Ghost might be going? Does he have a house or apartment here in this country? A company? Any friends?"

"No. He never talked to us. He never had anything to do with us. He treated us like animals."

"How about the other immigrants? Do you know where they might've gone?"

Sung shook his head. "No, I'm sorry. We were going to houses somewhere in New York but they never told us where." His eyes strayed back to the water. "We thought maybe the Coast Guard shot us with a cannon. But then we realized he sank the ship himself." His voice was astonished. "He locked the door in our hold and blew the boat up. With everyone on board."

A man in a suit—an INS agent Sachs remembered meeting in Port Jefferson—stepped out of the black car, which had just joined the rescue vehicle on the sand. He pulled on a windbreaker and crunched through the sand toward them. Sachs handed him Sung's wallet. He read through it and crouched down. "Dr. Sung, I'm with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Do you have a valid passport and entry visa?"

Sachs thought the question was absurd, if not provocative, but she supposed this was one of the formalities that needed to be performed.

"No, sir," Sung replied.

"Then I'm afraid we're going to have to detain you for illegally entering United States territory."

"I'm seeking political asylum."

"That's fine," the agent said wearily. "But we're still going to have to detain you until the bond hearing."

"I understand," Sung said.

The agent asked the medic, "How is he?"

"He'll be all right. But we need to get him to a trauma center. Where's he being processed?"

Sachs interrupted to ask the INS agent, "Can he go to your Manhattan detention center? He's a witness in the case and we've got a task force working there."

The INS agent shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me. I'll do the paperwork."

Sachs rocked from one leg to the other and winced as the pain shot through her knee and hip. Still absently clutching the amulet around his neck, Sung studied her and said in a low, heartfelt voice, "Thank you, miss."

"For what?"

"You saved my life."

She nodded, holding his dark eyes for a moment. Then the medic replaced the oxygen mask.

A flash of white from nearby caught her eye and Amelia Sachs looked up to see that she'd left the door of the Camaro open and that the wind was blowing her notes on the crime scene out to sea. Wincing, she trotted back to her car.

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

The battle is won by the player who sees the furthest—the one, that is, who can see through his opponent's move, can guess his plan and counter it, and who, when attacking, anticipates all the defensive moves of his opponent.

—
The Game of Wei-Chi   

The life of a tollbooth operator guarding the portals to New York City is not particularly glamorous.

Occasionally there's a little excitement—like the time a thief stuck up a toll taker and netted a clean $312, the only problem being that the robber struck at the
entrance
to the Triborough Bridge, at the other end of which a dozen bemused cops were waiting for him at the only possible exit he could take.

But the operator sitting in a Queens Midtown Tunnel booth this stormy morning, just after 8 A.M.—a retired NYC transit cop working part-time as a toll taker—hadn't seen any serious trouble in years and he was excited that something had happened to break the monotony: all the tollbooth operators in Manhattan had gotten a priority call from Port Authority headquarters about a ship that'd sunk off the coast of Long Island, one of those illegal immigrant ships. The word was that some of the Chinese on board were now headed into town, as was the smuggler himself. They were in a white van bearing the name of a church and in a red Honda. Some or all of them were reportedly armed.

There were several ways to get into the city from Long Island by surface transportation: bridges or tunnels. Some of these were free—no tolls were charged at the Queensboro or the Brooklyn bridges, for instance—but the most direct route from the end of Long Island was through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The police and FBI had gotten permission to shut down all of the express pass and exact change lanes, so that the perps would have to go through a manned booth.

The ex-cop had never thought that he'd be the one to spot the immigrants.

But it looked like that was the way things were going to fall out. He was now wiping his sweaty palms on his slacks and watching a white van, some writing on the side, driven by a Chinese guy, easing toward
his
booth.

Ten cars away, nine...

He pulled his old service piece from its holster, a Smith & Wesson .357 with a four-inch barrel and rested the pistol on the far side of the cash register, wondering how to handle the situation. He'd call it in but what if the guys in the van acted funny or evasive? He decided he'd draw down on them and order them out of the van.

But what if one of them reached under the dash or between the seats?

Hell, here he was in an exposed glass booth, no backup, with a vanload of Chinese gangsters heading toward him. They might even be armed with Russia's crowning contribution to small arms: AK-47 machine guns.

Fuck it, he'd shoot.

The operator ignored a woman complaining about the E-ZPass lanes' being closed and looked at the line of traffic. The van was three cars away.

He reached onto his belt and pulled off his Speedloader, a metal ring holding six bullets, with which he could reload his Smittie in seconds. He rested this next to his pistol and wiped his shooting hand on his slacks once again. He debated for a moment, picked up the gun, cocked it and set it back on the counter. This was against regulations but then
he
was the one in the fishbowl, not the brass who wrote the regs.

At first Sam Chang had worried that the long line of cars meant a roadblock but then he saw the booths and decided this was some kind of a border crossing.