The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

Ten minutes later they arrived. Hands were shaken and they gave their names: Hajip, Yusuf, Kashgari. They were dark, quiet, thin--of smaller stature than he, and the Ghost was not particularly big. They wore black suits, gold bracelets or necklaces and fancy cell phones on their hips like badges.

Uighurs spoke Turkic, a language the Ghost didn't understand, and they weren't comfortable with any of the Chinese dialects. They settled on English. The Ghost explained what was needed and asked if they'd have any trouble killing people who were unarmed--women and children too.

Yusuf, a man in his late twenties with eyebrows that met above his nose, was the spokesman; his English was better than the others'. Without consulting them he said, "No problem. We do that. We do what you want." As if he killed women and children regularly.

And perhaps, the Ghost reflected, he did.

The Ghost gave them each $10,000 from a cashbox he kept in the safehouse and then called the head of the Turkestan community center and handed the phone to Yusuf, who told his boss in English how much money the Ghost had distributed, so there would be no dispute about underpayment and where the money had gone. They hung up.

The Ghost now said, "I'm going out for a while. I need to get some information."

"We will wait. May we have coffee?"

The Ghost nodded them into the kitchen. Then he walked to a small shrine. He lit a joss stick of incense, muttered a prayer to Yi, the divine bowman in Chinese mythology, whom the Ghost had adopted as his personal deity. He then put his pistol into an ankle holster and left his decadent apartment.

*

Sonny Li sat on a Long Island Commuter Services bus, which was nudging its way through the rain-spattered early morning traffic, as the skyline of Manhattan slowly grew larger.

Cynical and hard by nature, Li nonetheless was in awe of what he was examining. Not the massive size of the city they were approaching--Li's world was the southeast China coast, which was the most populous metropolitan sprawl on earth. Shanghai was twice the size of New York and 50 million people lived in the Pearl Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

No, what fascinated him was the bus in which he rode.

In China the main means of public transit is buses. They're cramped, filthy vehicles, often broken down, stifling in the warm months, freezing in the fall and winter, windows greasy from smoke residue and hair oil and soot. The bus stations too were old, decrepit places. Li had shot a man behind the infamous North Bus Station in Fuzhou and had himself been knifed not far from the same spot.

So Li had never seen any vehicle like this behemoth--it was huge and luxurious, with thick pad

ded seats, clean floors and spotless windows. Even on this oppressive, dank day in August the air-conditioning worked perfectly. He'd spent two weeks being violently sick every day, was virtually broke, had no idea where the Ghost was. He had no gun, not even a pack of cigarettes. But at least the bus was a blessing from heaven.

After he'd fled from the beach where the survivors of the Fuzhou Dragon had landed, Li had begged a ride from a trucker at a rest stop on the highway several kilometers away. The man had looked over his wet, disheveled clothes and let him ride in the back of the truck. After a half hour or so the trucker dropped him at a sleek bus station in a massive parking lot. Here, the driver explained, Sonny Li could take a commuter bus to where he wanted to go--Manhattan.

Li wasn't sure what was required to buy a ticket but apparently no passports or documents were necessary. He'd handed one of the twenty-dollar bills he'd stolen from redheaded Hongse's car to the clerk and said, "New York City please." He enunciated in his best accent, mimicking the actor Nicolas Cage. Speaking so clearly, in fact, that the clerk, perhaps expecting unintelligible words, blinked in surprise and handed him a computer-printed chit along with six dollars in change. He counted the money twice and decided that either the clerk had robbed him or, as he muttered under his breath in English, he was now in "one fuck expensive country."

He'd gone to a newsstand connected to the station and bought a razor and comb. In the men's room, he'd shaved and washed the salt water out of his hair and dried it with paper towels. Then he combed the thinning strands back and brushed as much sand off himself as he could. He joined the well-dressed commuters on the platform.

Now, approaching the city, the bus slowed for a tollbooth and then continued through a long tunnel. Finally it emerged into the city itself. Ten minutes later the vehicle parked on a busy commercial street.

Li climbed out like everyone else and stood on the sidewalk.

His first thought: Where're all the bicycles and motorbikes? They were the main means of private transport in China and Li couldn't imagine a city this big without millions of Seagull bicycles coursing through the streets.

His second thought: Where can I buy some cigarettes?

He found a kiosk selling newspapers and bought a pack.

When he looked at his change this time he thought: Ten judges of hell! Nearly three dollars for a single pack! He smoked at least two packs a day, three when he was doing something dangerous and needed to calm his nerves. He'd go broke in a month living here, he estimated. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as he walked through the crowds. He asked a pretty Asian woman how to get to Chinatown and was directed to the subway.

Jostling his way through the mass of commuters, Li bought a token from the clerk. This too was expensive but he'd given up comparing costs between the two countries. He dropped the token in the turnstile, walked through the device and waited on the platform. He had a bad moment when a man began shouting at him. Li thought the man might be deranged, even though he was wearing an expensive suit. In a moment he realized what the man was saying. Apparently, it was illegal to smoke on the subway.

Li thought this was madness. He couldn't believe it. But he didn't want to make a scene so he stubbed out his cigarette and put it in his pocket, muttering under his breath another assessment: "One crazy fuck country."

A few minutes later the train roared into the station and Sonny Li got on board as if he'd been doing it all his life, looking around attentively--though not for security officers but simply to see if anyone else was smoking so that he could light up again. To his dismay, no one was.

At Canal Street Li stepped out of the car and climbed up the stairs into the bustling, early morning city. The rain had stopped and he lit the snuffed cigarette then slipped into the crowd. Many of the people around him were speaking Cantonese, the dialect of the south, but aside from the language, this neighborhood was just like portions of his town, Liu Guoyuan--or any small city in China: movie theaters showing Chinese action and love films, the young men with long slicked-back hair or pompadours and challenging sneers, the young girls walking with their arms around their mothers or grandmothers, businessmen in suits buttoned snugly, the ice-filled boxes of fresh fish, the bakeries selling tea buns and rice pastries, the smoked ducks hanging by their necks in the greasy windows of restaurants, herbalists and acupuncturists, Chinese doctors, shop windows filled with ginseng roots twisted like deformed human bodies.

And somewhere near here, he was hoping, would be something else he was very familiar with.

It took Li ten minutes to find what he sought. He noticed the telltale sign--the guard, a young man with a cell phone, smoking and examining passersby as he lounged in front of a basement apartment whose windows were painted black. It was a twenty-four-hour gambling hall.