Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

"Fifteen hundred."

"Yuan?"

Mah laughed. "One-color."

Chang showed no emotion but he thought: Fifteen hundred U.S. dollars! That was insane. In the money belt around his waist he had about five thousand dollars' worth of Chinese yuan. It was all the cash that his family had left in the world. Shaking his head. "No, impossible." After a few minutes of animated haggling they settled on $900 for all the documents.

"You too?" Mah asked Wu.

The gaunt man nodded but added, "Only for myself. That will be less, won't it?"

Mah drew heavily on his cigarette. "Five hundred. I won't go lower than that."

Wu tried to bargain too but Mah held firm. Finally the skinny man grudgingly agreed.

Mah said, "You'll have to get me pictures of everybody for the drivers' licenses and employee cards. Go into an amusement arcade. You can have the pictures made there."

Chang remembered poignantly the night he sat with Mei-Mei in such a booth at a large entertainment center in Xiamen years ago, not long after they'd first met. The pictures were presently in a suitcase sitting within the corpse of the Fuzhou Dragon at the bottom of the dark ocean.

"We also need a van. I can't afford to buy one. Can I rent one from you?"

The tong leader scoffed. "Don't I have everything? Of course, of course." After more bargaining, they agreed on a rental. Mah calculated the total that the men owed and then figured the exchange rate for paying in yuan. He told the men the astonishing sum and they reluctantly agreed. "Give me the names and address for the documents." He turned to his computer and, as Chang dictated the information, Mah typed with fast keystrokes.

Chang himself spent a lot of time on his old laptop computer. The Internet had become the main means for dissidents in China to communicate with the outside world, though doing so was very difficult. Chang's modem was woefully slow and the public security bureaus, as well as agents from the People's Liberation Army, were constantly looking for emails and postings by dissidents. Chang had a firewall on his computer that would often give a beep, signaling that the government was trying to break into his system. He'd log off immediately and have to establish a new service provider account. His laptop too, he thought sadly, was sleeping forever inside the Fuzhou Dragon.

As Chang dictated the address, the tong leader looked up from the keyboard. "So you'll be staying in Queens?"

"Yes. A friend arranged a place for us."

"Is it a big place? Is it comfortable for all of you? Don't you think my broker could do better? I'm thinking he could. I have contacts in Queens."

"He is my best friends brother. He's already arranged for the lease."

"Ah, friends brother. Good. Well, we have an affiliated association there. The Flushing Neighborhood and Merchants Association. Very big. Powerful. That's the new Chinatown in the New York area: Flushing. Maybe you won't like your apartment. Maybe the children won't be safe. That's possible, don't you think? Go to the association and mention my name."

"I'll remember that."

Mah nodded toward the computer screen and asked Wu, "You're both at this address?"

Chang started to say that they were but Wu interrupted. "No, no. I want to stay in Manhattan, Chinatown here. Can your broker find us a house?"

"But -" Chang said, frowning.

"You don't mean house, do you?" Mah inquired, amused. "There are no houses." He added, "That you could afford."

"An apartment then?"

Mah said, "Yes, he has temporary rooms. You can get a place today and then stay there until he finds you a permanent home." As Mah typed some more and the hiss of the modem filled the office, Chang put his hand on Wu's arm and whispered, "No, Qichen, you must come with us."

"We're staying in Manhattan."

Leaning closer so that Mah could not hear, Chang whispered, "Don't be a fool. The Ghost will find you."

Wu laughed. "Don't worry about him."

"Don't worry? He just killed a dozen of our friends." Gambling with Wu's own life was one thing but to risk his wife and children was unthinkable.

But Wu was adamant. "No. We are staying here."

Chang fell silent as Mah logged off the computer and then wrote a note, handed it to Wu. "This is the broker. He's only a few blocks from here. You'll pay him a fee." He added, "I won't charge you for this. Am I generous? Everybody says Jimmy Mah is generous. Now, for Mr. Changs car." Mah made a call and began to speak quickly into the phone. He made arrangements for a van to be brought around. He hung up and turned to the two men. "There. That concludes our business. Isn't it a pleasure to work with reasonable men?"

They rose in unison and shook hands.

"Do you want a cigarette to take with you?" he asked Wu, who took three.

When the immigrants were at the door Mah asked, "One thing. This Mexican snakehead? There's no reason for him to come after you, is there? You're even with him?"

"Yes, we're even."

"Good. Don't we have enough reason to look over our shoulders?" Mah asked jovially. "Aren't there enough demons after us in this life?"

In the distance, sirens pierced the early morning air.

The sound grew louder and Lincoln Rhyme hoped it would mark the arrival of Amelia Sachs. The evidence she'd gathered at the beach had already arrived, delivered by a young tech who'd sheepishly entered the den of the legendary Lincoln Rhyme without a word and scurried about to deposit the bags and stacks of pictures as the criminalist gruffly directed.

Sachs herself had been diverted on the way back from the beach, however, to run a secondary crime scene. The church van stolen at Easton had been found in Chinatown – abandoned in an alley next to an uptown subway stop forty-five minutes ago. The van had slipped past the roadblocks because not only did it sport stolen plates but one of the immigrants had painted over the name of the church and replaced it with a good facsimile of the logo for a local home improvement store.

"Smart," Rhyme had said, with some dismay; he didn't like smart perps. He'd then called Sachs – who was speeding back to the city on the Long Island Expressway – and ordered her to meet a crime scene bus downtown and process the van.

The INS's Harold Peabody was gone – summoned to juggle press conferences and calls from Washington about the fiasco.

Alan Coe, Lon Sellitto and Fred Dellray remained, as did the trim, hedgehog-haired detective Eddie Deng. An addition as well: Mel Cooper, slim, balding, reserved. He was one of the NYPD's top forensic lab workers and Rhyme often borrowed him. Walking silently on his crepe-soled Hush Puppies, which he wore during the day because they were comfortable and at night because they gave him good traction for ballroom dancing, Cooper was assembling equipment, organizing examination stations and laying out the evidence from the beach.

At Rhyme's direction Thom taped a map of New York City on the wall, next to the map of Long Island and the surrounding waters, which they'd used in following the Fuzhou Dragon's progress. Rhyme stared at the red dot that represented the ship and he once again felt the pain of guilt that his lack of foresight had resulted in the deaths of the immigrants.

The sirens grew louder then stopped outside his window, which faced Central Park. A moment later the door opened and Amelia Sachs, limping slightly, hurried into the room. Her hair was matted and flecked with bits of seaweed and dirt and her jeans and work shirt were damp and sandy.

Those in the room nodded distracted greetings. Dellray studied her clothes and lifted an eyebrow.

"Had some free time," she said. "Went for a swim. Hi, Mel."

"Amelia," Cooper said, shoving his glasses higher on his nose. He blinked at her appearance.