Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

"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 snake-head 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."