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.
Chapter Forty-five
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."
"Guess we did."
Lincoln Rhyme's call--as they'd been driving through Brooklyn, on their way to the Changs' real apartment in Owls Head--had been to tell Sachs that he now believed the Ghost was masquerading as John Sung. Another team of INS and NYPD cops was on their
way to the Changs' real apartment to detain them. Sellitto and Eddie Deng were setting up a takedown site at Sellitto's house, where they could collar him without the risk of bystanders' getting killed in a shoot-out with the homicidal snakehead and capture any bangshous with him. Rhyme assumed that they would be following Sachs from the safehouse in Chinatown or else would be summoned by the snakehead via cell phone when they arrived at the Changs'.
As she'd listened to Rhyme's voice, it had taken all of Sachs's emotional strength to nod and pretend that Coe was working for the Ghost and that the man who was supposedly her friend, her doctor, the man sitting two feet from her and undoubtedly armed, wasn't the killer they'd been seeking for the past two days.
She thought too of the acupressure session last night--coming to him with her secret, with her desperate hope of being cured. She shivered with repulsion at the memory of his hands on her back and shoulders. She thought too with horror that she'd actually mentioned to him the location of the safehouse where the Wus were staying when she'd asked him if he wanted to join them.
The Ghost asked, "How did your friend, this Lincoln Rhyme, know that I wasn't Sung?"
She picked up the plastic bag containing the contents of the Ghost's pockets. Inside were the fragments of the shattered monkey amulet. Sachs held it close to his face.
"The stone monkey," she explained. "I found some trace under Sonny Li's fingernails. It was magnesium silicate, like talc. Rhyme found out that it came from soapstone--which is what the amulet's carved out of." Sachs reached out and roughly tugged down Ghost's turtleneck, revealing the red line from the leather cord. "What happened? He ripped it off your neck and it broke?" She released the cloth and stepped away.
The Ghost nodded slowly. "Before I shot him he was clawing the ground. I thought he was begging for mercy but then he looked up and smiled at me."
So Li had scraped some of the soft stone under his nails intentionally to tell them the Ghost was actually Sung.
Once Cooper's report on magnesium silicate told them that the substance might be soapstone Rhyme remembered the contamination on Sachs's hands yesterday. He realized that it might've come from Sung's amulet. He'd called the officers who'd guarded Sung's apartment and they'd confirmed that there was a back entrance to the place, which meant that the Ghost had been able to come and go without their seeing him. He'd also asked if there was a gardening shop near the place--the likely source for the mulch that they'd found--and was told about the florist on the ground floor of the apartment building. Then he checked calls to Sachs's cell phone; the number of the cell that'd been used to call the Uighur center showed up in her records.
The real John Sung had been a doctor and the Ghost was not. But, as Sonny Li had told Rhyme, everyone in China knew something about Eastern medicine. What the Ghost had diagnosed about Sachs and the herbs he'd given her were common knowledge among anyone who'd been treated regularly by a Chinese doctor.
"And your friend from the INS?" the Ghost asked.
"Coe?" Sachs replied. "We knew he didn't have any connection with you. But I had to pretend Coe was the spy--we needed to make sure you didn't think we were on to you. And we needed him out of the way. If he'd found out who you were he might've gone after you again--like he did on Canal Street. We wanted a clean takedown. And we didn't want him to go to jail for killing someone." Sachs couldn't resist adding, "Even you."
The Ghost merely smiled calmly.
When she'd handed Coe over to the three cops from the precinct house, she'd explained to him what was going on. The agent, of course, had been shocked to have been sitting inches from the man who'd killed his informant in China and had begun to complain angrily that he wanted to be part of the takedown. But the order to keep him in protective custody had been issued by One Police Plaza and he wasn't going anywhere until the Ghost was in custody.
Then she looked him over. Shook her head in disgust. "You shot Sung, hid the body, then shot yourself. And swam back into the ocean. You nearly drowned."
"I didn't have much choice, did I? Jerry Tang abandoned me. There was no way I was going to escape from the beach without masquerading as Sung."
"What about your gun?"
"Stuffed it into my sock in the ambulance. Then I hid it in the hospital and picked it up after the INS officer released me."
"INS officer?" she mused, nodding. "You did get released awfully fast." The Ghost said nothing and she added, "Well, that's something else we'll look into." Then she asked, "Everything you told me about John Sung . . . you made it up?"
The Ghost shrugged. "No, what I told you about him was true. Before I killed him I made him tell me about himself, about everyone who was on the raft, about Chang and Wu. Enough so I could make my performance believable. I threw out his picture ID and kept the wallet and the amulet."
"Where's his body?"
Another placid smile was his response.
His serenity infuriated her. He was caught--and was going to jail for the rest of his life and might possibly be executed but he looked as if he were only being inconvenienced by a late train. Fury seized her and she drew back her hand to strike him in the face. But when he gave no reaction--no cringe, no squint--she lowered her arm, refusing to give him the satisfaction of stoically withstanding the blow.
Sachs's ringing phone intruded. She stepped away and answered. "Yes?"
"Everyone having fun?" Rhyme's voice demanded sarcastically.
"I--"
"Having a picnic maybe? Taking in a movie? Forgetting about the rest of us?"
"Rhyme, we were in the middle of a takedown."
"I suppose somebody was going to call me eventually and let me know what happened. At some point . . .No, I won't, Thom. I'm pissed off."
"We've been a little busy here, Rhyme," she answered.
"Just wondering what was going on. I'm not psychic, you know."
She knew he'd already heard that none of their team was injured--otherwise he wouldn't be riddling her with sarcasm.
She responded, "You can stow the attitude--"
"'Stow'? Spoken like a true sailor, Sachs."
"--because we caught him." She added, "I tried to get him to tell me where John Sung's body is but he--"
"Well, we can figure that out, Sachs, can't we? It is obvious, after all."
To some people maybe, she reflected, though she was delighted to hear his characteristic barbs, rather than the flat-line voice of earlier.
The criminalist continued, "In the trunk of the stolen Honda."
"And that's still out on the eastern end of Long Island?" she asked, understanding finally.
"Of course. Where else would it be? The Ghost stole it, killed Sung and then drove east to hide it--we wouldn't look in that direction. We'd assume he headed west--into the city."
Sellitto hung up his phone and pointed to the street.
Sachs nodded and said, "I've got to go see some people, Rhyme."
"See some people? See, you are treating this like a goddamn picnic. Who?"
She considered for a moment and said, "Some friends."
Chapter Forty-six
She found the family standing outside a run-down house near Owls Head Park. The smell of sewage was heavy in the air--from the treatment plant that had both betrayed them and saved their lives.
None of the family was in handcuffs and Sachs was pleased at that. She was also pleased that two uniformed NYPD police were chatting good-naturedly with the boy who must've been the Changs' youngest son.
His father, Sam Chang, stood with his arms crossed, grim and silent, head down, as an Asian-American man in a suit--an INS agent, she assumed--talked with him, jotting notes.
At his side was an unhappy, stolid woman in her forties, holding the hand of Po-Yee. Sachs felt a huge thud within her when she saw the Treasured Child. The toddler was adorable. A round-faced girl with silky black hair cut in bangs and short on the sides. She wore red corduroy jeans and a Hello Kitty sweatshirt that was about two sizes too big for her. br />
A detective recognized Sellitto and walked up to him and Sachs. "The family's fine. We're taking them to INS detention in Queens. It looks like with Chang's record of dissident activity--he was at Tiananmen and has a history of persecution--he's got a good shot at asylum."
"You have caught the Ghost?" Sam Chang asked her in unsteady English as he joined them. He would have heard the news but understandably couldn't get enough reassurance that the killer was in fact safely in custody.
"Yes," she said, her eyes not on the man she was speaking to, though, but on Po-Yee. "He's in custody."
Chang said, "You were important with his capture?"
Sachs smiled. "I was at the party, yep."
"Thank you." The man seemed to want to add more but the English was perhaps too daunting. He thought for a moment and then asked, "I may ask you? The man, old man, killed in Ghost's apartment building? Where is body?"
"Your father?"
"Yes."
"At the city morgue. Downtown in Manhattan."
"He must have proper funeral. Is very important."
Sachs said, "I'll make sure he's not moved. After you're through with the INS you can arrange to have a funeral home pick him up."
"Thank you."
A small blue Dodge with a City of New York seal pulled up to the scene. A black woman in a brown pants suit got out, carrying an attache case. The woman spoke to the INS agent and Sachs. "I'm Chiffon Wilson. I'm a social worker with Children's Services." An ID card was flashed.
"You're here for the baby?"
"Right."
Chang looked quickly at his wife. Sachs asked, "You're taking her?"
"We have to."
"Can't she stay with them?"
Wilson shook her head sympathetically. "I'm afraid not. They have no claim to her. She's an orphaned citizen of another country. She'll have to go back to China."
Sachs nodded slowly then gestured the social worker aside. She whispered, "She's a girl. You know what happens to baby girl orphans in China?"
"She'll be adopted."
"Maybe," Sachs said dubiously.
"I don't know about that. I just know that I'm following the law. Look, we do this all the time and we've never heard about any problems with the kids who go back to the recipient country."
Recipient country . . . The phrase troubled her as much as Coe's harsh "undocumenteds." Sachs asked, "Do you ever hear anything at all after they go back?"