Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

• Fresh gardening mulch found.

• Body of Ghost's accomplice: ethnic minority from west or northwest China. Negative on prints. Weapon was Walther PPK.

• Details on immigrants:

• The Changs: Sam, Mei-Mei, William and Ronald; Sam's father, Chang Jiechi, and infant, Po-Yee. Sam has job arranged but employer and location unknown. Driving blue van, no make, no tag number. Changs' apartment is in Queens.

• The Wus: Qichen, Yong-Ping, Chin-Mei and Lang.

Y ou are part of the old. Do you repent?

The Ghost stood at the window of his high-rise apartment on Patrick Henry Street in Lower Manhattan and watched the boats sailing through the harbor, fifty meters below him, a mile away.

Some streaking fast, some bobbing awkwardly.

Some pristine, some rusty like the Fuzhou Dragon.

…part of the old. Your decadent way of life is disgusting…

He greatly enjoyed watching the panorama below him. He rarely had such views in China; once away from Beijing and the big cities in Fujian and Guangdong there were few towering buildings. Because there were few elevators.

Which was a condition that the Ghost's father came close to rectifying in the 1960s.

His father was a man blessed with the rare combination of careening ambition backed up by sensible schemes. The stocky businessman had his hands in many ventures: selling military products to the Vietnamese, who were gearing up to defeat the Americans in their appendix of a country to the south, operating junkyards, lending money, building private housing and importing Russian machinery – the most lucrative of which were Lemarov elevators, which were cheap, functional and rarely killed anyone.

Under the auspices of a Fuzhou collective, Kwan Baba – the given nickname meaning "father" – had signed contracts to buy thousands of these elevators, sell them to the building collectives and bring in Russian technicians to install them. He had every reason to believe that his efforts would change the skylines of China and make him even wealthier than he was.

And why wouldn't he succeed? He wore conformist unisex suits, he attended every CCP rally he possibly could, he had guanxi throughout the southeast and his cooperative was one of the most successful in the province of Fujian, sending a cascade of yuan to Beijing.

But his career was doomed. And the reason for this was simple: a solid, humorless soldier-turned-politician named Mao Zedong, whose capricious 1966 Cultural Revolution incited students across the country to rise up and destroy the four olds: old culture, customs, ideas and habits.

The house of the Ghost's father in an elegant part of Fuzhou was one of the first targets of the rampaging young men who took to the streets, practically shivering with idealism, on the orders of the Great Helmsman.

"You are part of the old," the leader raged. "Do you repent? Do you confess to clinging to the old values?"

Kwan Baba had met them in his living room, which had shrunk to the size of a prison cell due to the number of shouting youths surrounding the family, and had gazed at them not only in fear but in bewilderment too; he honestly hadn't been able to see the evil in what he'd done.

"Confess and seek reeducation and we will spare you!" another cried.

"You are guilty of old thought, old values, old culture…"

"You have built a lackey's empire on the backs of the people!"

In fact, the students had no idea what Kwan Baba did for a living or whether the cooperative he headed was based on the purest principles of J. P. Morgan capitalism or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communism. They knew only that his house was nicer than theirs and that he could afford to buy art from an abhorred "old" era – art that did nothing to inform the people's struggle against the oppressive forces of the West.

Kwan and his wife, along with the twelve-year-old Ang and his older brother, stood speechless before the seething crowd.

"You are part of the old…"

Much of that night was a terrible, confused blur to young Ang.

But one part was permanently branded into his memory and he thought of it now, standing in his luxurious high-rise overlooking the harbor, awaiting the Changs' betrayer.

The tall student leader of the cadre stood in the middle of the living room, wearing black-rimmed glasses, lenses slightly askew because they'd been made at one of the local collectives. Spittle flying from his mouth, he engaged in a furious dialectic with young Kwan Ang, who hovered meekly beside the kidney-shaped coffee table on which his father had taught him to use the abacus years before.

"You are part of the old," the student raged into the boy's face. "Do you repent?" For emphasis, with every line he spoke he swung the thick baton – heavy as a cricket bat – to the floor between them; it landed with a loud thud.

"Yes, I repent," the boy said calmly. "I ask the people to forgive me."

"You will reform your decadent ways."

Thud.

"Yes, I will reform my ways," he said, though he didn't know what "decadent" meant. "The old ways are a threat to the collective good of the people."

"You will die if you retain your old beliefs!"

Thud.

"Then I will reject them."

Thud, thud, thud…

So it continued for endless minutes – until the blows the student rained down finally stole the life from what the student had been striking with the iron-tipped baton: the Ghost's parents, who lay bound and gagged on the floor at their feet.

The boy gave not a single glance at the bloody forms as he recited the catechism the students thirstily sought to hear. "I repent my ways. I reject the old. I regret that I have been seduced by unbeneficial and decadent thought."

He was spared, but not his older brother, who fled to the gardener's shed and returned with a rake – the only weapon the foolish boy could find. Within minutes the students reduced him to a third bloody pile on the carpet, as lifeless as his parents.

The fervent youngsters took loyal Kwan Ang with them, welcoming the young boy into the heart of the Glorious Red Banner Fuzhou Youth Brigade, as they spent the rest of the night ferreting out more of the pernicious old.

None of the students noticed that the next morning Ang slipped away from their impromptu headquarters. It seemed that with so much reform to perpetrate none of them even remembered him.

He, however, remembered them. His short time as an old-despising Maoist revolutionary – no more than a few hours – had been spent quite productively: memorizing the names of the youths in the cadre and planning their deaths.

Still, he bided his time.

Naixin…

The boy's sense of survival was strong and he escaped into one of his father's junkyards near Fuzhou. He lived there for months. He would prowl through the huge place, hunting rats and dogs for food, tracking them through the skeletons of machinery and mounds of trash with a homemade spear and a club – a rusty shock absorber from a wrecked Russian truck.

When he grew more confident and learned that the cadres were not searching for him he began making forays into town to steal food from trash bins behind Fuzhounese restaurants.

Because of their seafaring history and extensive contact with the rest of the world the Fuzhounese have always been among the most independent of Chinese. Teenage Kwan Ang found that the Communist Party and the Maoist cadres steered clear of the waterfront and docks, where snakeheads and smugglers didn't give a shit about downtrodden masses, and spouting ideology was a sure way to get yourself killed. The boy was informally adopted by several of these men and began running errands for them, earning their trust, eventually being allowed to head up some of their smaller schemes, like thefts from the docks and extorting protection money from businesses in town.