"Get the masks ready. Check your weapons."
The two Turks complied.
Five minutes later the Wus left the drugstore. They were walking as quickly as they could, considering the wife's condition.
He said to Hajip, "You stay with the car. Keep the engine running. He and I"--a nod toward Yusuf--"will follow the Wus inside. We push them into their apartment and close the door. We'll use pillows for silencers. I want to bring the daughter with us. We'll keep her for a while."
Yindao would, he knew, forgive this infidelity.
The Wus were now five meters from their doorway, shuffling fast, heads down, oblivious to the gods of death who fluttered nearby.
The Ghost found his cell phone and called the Turk in the Wus' apartment.
"Yes?" Kashgari answered.
"The Wus're close to the building. Where are the children?"
"The boy's in the bathroom. The girl's with me."
"As soon as they walk into the alley we'll come in right behind them."
He shut off the power to the phone--so there'd be no distracting ring at inopportune moments. The Ghost and Yusuf pulled their masks down over their faces and climbed out. The other Turk slipped behind the wheel of the Blazer.
The Wus were moving closer to the door.
The Ghost stepped off the curb and walked straight toward his victims.
Afraid, you can be brave . . . .
GHOSTKILL
* * *
Easton, Long Island, Crime Scene
* Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.
* One immigrant wounded--Dr. John Sung.
* "Bangshou" (assistant) on board; identity unknown.
* Assistant confirmed as drowned body found near site where Dragon sank.
* Ten immigrants escape: seven adults (one elderly, one injured woman), two children, one infant. Steal church van.
* Blood samples sent to lab for typing.
* Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.
* Vehicle awaiting Ghost on beach left without him. One shot believed fired by Ghost at vehicle. Request for vehicle make and model sent out, based on tread marks and wheelbase.
* Vehicle is a BMW X5.
* Driver--Jerry Tang.
* No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.
* Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.
* Untraceable satellite secure phone. Hacked Chinese gov't system to use it.
* Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.
* Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.
* Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.
* Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.
* No trace of Honda found.
* Three bodies recovered at sea--two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.
* Drowned individual identified as Victor Au, the Ghost's bangshou.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
* No matches on any prints but unusual markings on Sam Chang's fingers and thumbs (injury, rope burn?).
* Profile of immigrants: Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, John Sung, baby of woman who drowned, unidentified man and woman (killed on beach).
Stolen Van, Chinatown
* Camouflaged by immigrants with "The Home Store" logo.
* Blood spatter suggests injured woman has hand, arm or shoulder injury.
* Blood samples sent to lab for typing.
* Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
* No matches.
Jerry Tang Murder Crime Scene
* Four men kicked door in and tortured him and shot him.
* Two shell casings--match Model 51. Tang shot twice in head.
* Extensive vandalism.
* Some fingerprints.
* No matches except Tang's.
* Three accomplices have smaller shoe size than Ghost, presumably smaller stature.
* Trace suggests Ghost's safehouse is probably downtown, Battery Park City area.
* Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority. Presently pursuing whereabouts.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Wus in the doorway.
The children in the apartment.
The Ghost and Yusuf, masks over their faces and guns at their sides, were sprinting across Canal Street. He felt the rush of excitement he always did before a kill. His hands vibrated slightly but would grow still when he lifted the gun to shoot.
He thought again about Wu's daughter. Seventeen, eighteen . . . pretty enough. He would--
It was at this moment that a loud crack echoed through the street and a bullet slammed into a parked car just behind the Ghost. The alarm began braying.
"Jesus," a man's voice called from somewhere. "Who fired?"
The Ghost and Yusuf stopped and crouched. They lifted their weapons, scanning the street for their attacker.
"Hell," came another voice. "Cease-fire!"
And another: "Who the fuck--"
The Wus too stopped, crouching down on the pavement.
The Ghost's head was swiveling. He gripped Yusuf's arm.
A man's voice cried through a loudspeaker, "Kwan Ang! Stop. This is the United States Immigration Service!" Followed immediately by a second gunshot--from the man who'd called out, it seemed--and a side window of a nearby parked car exploded in a cloudburst of glass.
His heart vibrating from the shock, the snakehead scrabbled backward, his lucky gun up, as he looked for a target. The INS was here? How?
"It's a trap," he raged to Yusuf. "Back to the car!"
Chaos now filled Canal Street. More shouting, passers-by and store clerks diving for cover. Up the block the doors of two white vans opened and men and women in black uniforms, carrying guns, leapt out.
And what was this? The Wus themselves were drawing weapons! The husband pulled a machine pistol from the plastic bag he'd held. The wife was lifting a weapon from her running suit pocket . . . . And then the Ghost realized that they weren't the Wus at all. They were decoys--Chinese-American police officers or agents wearing the Wus' clothing. Somehow the police had found the couple and sent these people back in their place to lure him out of cover. "Drop your weapons!" the man masquerading as Wu shouted.
The Ghost fired five or six shots at random, to keep people down and stoke the panic. He shot out a window in a jewelry store, adding another siren to the tumult of sounds on the street and bolstering the chaos.
The Turk in the driver's seat opened the door and began firing at the white vans. Running, looking for cover and looking for targets, the police scattered on the far side of Canal.
As he crouched beside their four-by-four, the Ghost heard: "Who fired? . . . Backups aren't in position . . . What the fuck happened? . . . Watch the bystanders, for Christ's sake!"
A panicked driver in a car in front of the Wus' apartment started to speed up to get out of the line of fire. The Ghost fired two shots into the front seat. The window glass vanished and the car skidded into a row of parked vehicles with a huge bang.
"Kwan Ang," came an electronic shout from a bullhorn or vehicle loudspeaker, a different voice this time. "This is the FBI. Put down--"
He shut up the agent by firing twice more in his direction and climbed into the Blazer. The Uighurs climbed into the back. "Kashgari! He is inside," Yusuf cried and nodded toward the Wus' apartment, where the third Turk waited.
"He's dead or captured," the Ghost snapped. "Understand? We're not waiting."
Yusuf nodded. But just as the Ghost turned the key and started the engine he noticed a police officer step from a line of cars, motioning bystanders to get back and take cover. He lifted his pistol, aimed toward the front of the four-by-four.
"Get down!" the Ghost cried as the officer fired repeatedly. The three men ducked, expecting the windshield to shatter.
Bu
t instead they heard loud ring after loud ring as the bullets struck the front of the vehicle. Eight or nine of them. Finally there was a huge clanging as fan blades were knocked out of alignment and jammed into other parts of the engine, which gave a huge squeal, steam pouring from the pierced radiator. Finally it went silent.
"Out!" the Ghost ordered, jumping out and firing several shots at the officer to drive him under cover behind a row of cars.
The three men crouched on the sidewalk. For a moment there was a lull. The police and agents were holding their fire, probably waiting for the arrival of the backup officers--more emergency cars, sirens howling, were racing down Canal Street toward them right now.
"Drop your weapons and stand up," the staticky voice called through the loudspeaker again. "Kwan, drop your weapons!"
"We give up?" asked Hajip, his eyes huge with fear.
The Ghost ignored him and wiped his sweating hand on his slacks, then slipped another clip of ammunition into his Model 51. He looked behind him. "This way!" He rose and fired several times toward the officers then ran into the fish market behind them. Several patrons and clerks were cowering behind bins of fish and eels, racks of food, freezer cases. The Ghost and the two Turks ran to the back alleyway, where they found an old man standing beside a delivery truck. Seeing the guns and the masks, the man dropped to his knees and lifted his arms. He began wailing, "Don't harm me! Please! I have a family . . . . " His voice trailed off into sobbing.
"Inside," the Ghost shouted to the Turks. They leapt in the truck. The snakehead looked behind them through the doorway and could see several officers cautiously approaching the store. He turned and fired several shots in their direction. They scattered for cover.
The Ghost then spun back and froze. The old man had grabbed a long filleting knife and had taken a step forward. He stopped and blinked in terror. The Ghost lowered his pistol to the old man's age-spotted forehead. The knife fell to the wet cobblestones at his feet. He closed his eyes.
*
Five minutes later Amelia Sachs arrived at the scene. She ran toward the Wus' apartment, her pistol in her hand.
"What happened?" she called to an officer standing beside a shot-up car. "What the hell happened?"
But the young cop was badly shaken and just glanced at her, numb.
She continued down the street and found Fred Dellray crouched over an officer who'd been shot in the arm, holding an improvised bandage on the man's wound. Medics ran up and took over.
Dellray was furious. "This is bad, Amelia. We were an inch away from him. A half inch."
"Where is he?" she asked, holstering the Glock.
"Stole a delivery van from that fish market 'cross the street. We got ever-body in town with a badge looking for it."
Sachs closed her eyes in dismay. All of Rhyme's brilliant deductions--and the superhuman efforts to put together a takedown team in time had been wasted.
What Rhyme, frustrated by the lack of leads, had noticed on the evidence chart was the reference to the injured immigrant's blood. The number Sachs had found for him was that of the Medical Examiner's office. He realized the lab had never called back with results of the tests. Rhyme had bullied a forensic pathologist into quickly completing the analysis.
The doctor had found several helpful things: the presence of bone marrow in the blood, indicating a severe bone fracture; sepsis, suggesting a deep cut or abrasion, and the presence of Coxiella burnetii, a bacteria responsible for Q fever, a zoonotic disease--one transmitted from animals to people. The bacteria were often picked up in places where animals were kept for long periods of time, like pens at seaports and the holds of ships.
Which meant that the immigrant was one very sick woman.
And that in turn was something that Rhyme believed might be useful.
"Tell me about this Q fever," Rhyme had asked the pathologist.
Though it wasn't contagious or life-threatening, the symptoms of the disease could be severe, he'd learned. Headache, chills, fever, possibly even liver malfunction.
"Is it rare?" Rhyme had asked.
"Very, around here."
"Excellent," Rhyme had announced, buoyed by this news, and had Sellitto and Deng put together a team of canvassers from the Big Building--One Police Plaza downtown--and the Fifth Precinct. They began calling all the hospitals and emergency clinics in Chinatown in Manhattan and the one in Flushing, Queens, to see if any female Chinese patients had been admitted with Q fever and a badly broken, infected arm.
After only ten minutes they'd received a call from one of the officers manning the phones downtown. It turned out that a Chinese man had just brought his wife into the emergency room of a clinic in Chinatown; she fit the profile perfectly--advanced Q fever and multiple fractures. Her name was Wu Yong-Ping. She'd been admitted and her husband was there too.
Officers from the Fifth Precinct had sped to the hospital--along with Sachs and Deng--to interview them. The Wus, shaken badly over their arrest, had told the police where they were living and that their children were still in the apartment. Then Rhyme had called to tell her that he'd just gotten the AFIS results from the Jimmy Mah killing: some of the prints matched those found at prior GHOSTKILL scenes; the snakehead had committed the crime. When Wu explained that Mah's broker had gotten them the apartment Rhyme and Sachs realized that the Ghost knew where the Wus were staying and was probably on his way to kill them at that moment.
Since the bureau's crack SPEC-TAC team was still not on hand to assist on the case, Dellray, Sellitto and Peabody put together a joint takedown team of their own and would have some Chinese-American officers from the Fifth Precinct masquerade as the Wus.
But, because of one premature gunshot, the whole effort was wasted.
Dellray snapped at another agent, "Anything more on the fish-store van? How come nobody's seen it? It's got the fuckin' name of the store on the side in big ugly letters."
The agent made a call on his radio and a moment later reported, "Nothing, sir. No reports of it on the road or abandoned."
Dellray played with the knot of his purple-black tie, just visible above his body armor. "Somethin'. Ain't. Right."
"What do you mean, Fred?" Sachs asked.
But the agent didn't answer. He glanced back at the fish store and strode toward it. Sachs accompanied him. Standing near the large ice bin in the front were three Chinese--store clerks, Sachs assumed--and two NYPD police officers interviewing them.
Dellray looked over the clerks one by one and his gaze settled on an old man, whose eyes dropped immediately to the dozen gray-pink flounders resting on the bed of ice.
He pointed a finger at the man. "He told you the Ghost stole the van, right?"
"That's right, Agent Dellray," one of the cops said.
"Well, he was goddamn lying!"
Dellray and Sachs ran to the back of the shop and into the alleyway behind it. Hidden behind a large Dumpster thirty feet away they found the fish market's van.
Returning to the front of the store Dellray said to the old man, "Listen, skel, tell me what happened and don't fuck with me. We all together on that?"
"He going kill me," the man said, sobbing. "Make me say they stole van, three men. Had gun at my head. They drove down alley, hid van then got out and run. Don't know where go."
Dellray and the policewoman returned to the impromptu command post. "Can't hardly blame him. But still . . . shit and a half."
"So," she speculated, "they got onto a side street and 'jacked some wheels."
"Prob'ly. And killed the driver."
A moment later an officer indeed called in, saying that there'd been a report of a carjacking. Three armed men in ski masks had run up to a Lexus at a stoplight, ordered the couple out and sped off. Contrary to Dellray's prediction, though, the driver and passenger were unhurt.
"Why didn't he kill 'em?" Dellray wondered.
"Probably didn't want to fire his gun," Sachs said. "Draw too much attention." She added bitterly, "It would've been i
nconvenient."
As more emergency vehicles pulled up she asked Dellray, "Who was it? Who fired the shot that spooked him?"
"Dunno yet. But I'ma look this one over with a fuckin' magnifyin' glass."
But he didn't need to look too far, as it turned out. Two uniformed officers walked up to the FBI agent and conferred with him. The agent's face compressed into a frown. Dellray looked up and strode over to the guilty party.
It was Alan Coe.
"What in th'living hell happened?" Dellray barked.
Defensive but defiant, the red-haired agent looked back into the FBI agent's eyes. "I had to fire. The Ghost was going to shoot the decoys, didn't you see?"
"No, I did not. His weapon was at his side."
"Not from my angle."
"Crap on your angle," Dellray snapped. "It was at. His. Side."
"I'm getting sick of you lecturing me, Dellray. It was a fucking judgment call. If you had everybody in position we still could've collared him."
"We set it up to take him down on the sidewalk, without innocents around, not in the middle of a crowded street." Dellray shook his head. "Thirty li'l tiny seconds and he woulda been tied up like a Christmas package." Then the tall agent nodded at the big .45 Glock on Coe's hip. "An' even if he was moving on somebody, how the hell couldja miss with a piece like that from fifty feet? Even I coulda hit him and I don't fire my pissy weapon but once a year. Fuck."
Coe's defiance slipped and he said contritely, "I thought it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. I was worried about saving some lives."
Dellray plucked the unsmoked cigarette from behind his ear, looking like he was about to light it up. "This's gone way far enough. From now on INS is advisory only. No enforcement, no tactical."
"You can't do that," Coe said, an ominous look in his eyes.
" 'Cording to the Executive Order I can, son. I'm going downtown and doing what I gotta to put that in place." He stormed off. Coe muttered something Sachs didn't catch.
She watched Dellray climb into his car, slam the door and speed off. She turned back to Coe. "Did anybody get the children?"
"Children?" the agent asked, absently. "You mean, the Wus' kids? I don't know."
Their parents were frantic that the children be brought to them at the hospital as soon as possible.
"I told downtown about 'em," Coe said dismissively, meaning, she supposed, the INS. "I guess they're sending somebody to take custody. That's procedure."