The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

* No matches except Tang's.

* Three accomplices have smaller shoe size than Ghost, presumably smaller stature.

* Trace suggests Ghost's safehouse is probably downtown, Battery Park City area.

* Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority. Presently pursuing whereabouts.

* Uighurs from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens.

* Cell phone calls lead to 805 Patrick Henry Street, downtown.

Canal Street Shooting Crime Scene * Additional trace suggesting safehouse is in Battery Park City area.

* Stolen Chevrolet Blazer, untraceable.

* No match on prints.

* Safehouse carpet: Arnold company's Lustre-Rite, installed in past six months; calling contractors to get list of installations.

* Location of installations determined: 32 near Battery Park City.

* 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 fath

er, 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.

Chapter Thirty-one

You 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.