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The Stone Monkey Excerpt
They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.
To the human smugglers — the snakeheads — who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged
goods, they were ju-jia, piglets.
To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.
They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.
Who had the slimmest of chances
to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.
They were his fragile
cargo.
And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that
their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.
It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy
mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed as camouflage to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children's plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.
Despite the pitching seas, Captain Sen — a thirty-year veteran of the seas — walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold. He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who'd lived for two weeks in close proximity.
Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated "buckets" — human smuggling ships — and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Captain Sen didn't mistreat them. Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in Meiguo,
the Beautiful Country, America — and, of course, making a great deal of money for himself in the process.
On this particular voyage, however, most of the immigrants distrusted him.
And why not? They assumed he was in league with the snakehead who'd chartered the Dragon: Kwan Ang, known universally by his nickname, Gui, the Ghost. Tainted by the snakehead's reputation for
violence, Captain Sen's efforts to engage the immigrants in conversation had been rebuffed and had yielded only one friend. Chang Jingerzi — who preferred his western name of Sam Chang — was a
forty-five-year-old former college professor from a suburb of the huge port city of Fuzhou in southeastern China. He was bringing his entire family to America: his wife, two sons and Chang's widower father.
A half dozen times on the trip Chang and Sen had sat in the hold, sipped the potent mao-tai that the captain always had in good supply on his ship and talked about life in China and what the Chang family would do once they were in the United States.
Captain Sen now saw Chang sitting on a cot in a forward corner of the hold. The tall, placid man frowned, a reaction to the look in the captain's eyes. Chang handed his teenage son the book he'd been reading to his family and rose to meet the captain.
Everyone around them fell silent. "Our radar shows a fast-moving ship on course to intercept us."
Dismay blossomed in the faces of those who'd overheard.
"The Americans?" Chang asked. "Their Coast Guard?"
"I think it must be," the captain answered. "We're in U.S. waters."
Sen looked at the frightened faces of the immigrants around him. They looked at one another. Like most shiploads of illegals that Sen had transported, these people — many of them strangers before they'd met — had formed a close bond of friendship. And they now gripped hands or whispered, some seeking, some offering reassurance. The captain's eyes settled on a woman holding an eighteen-month-old girl in her arms. Her mother — whose face was scarred from a beating at a re-education camp — lowered her head and began to cry.
"What can we do?" Chang asked the captain. The immigrant took this news hard. Captain Sen knew he was a vocal dissident in China and had been desperate to flee the country. If he were deported he'd probably end up in one of the infamous jails in western China as a political prisoner.
"We're not far from the drop-off spot. We're running at full speed. It may be possible to get close enough to put you ashore in rafts."
"No, no," Chang said. "In these waves? We'd all die."
"There's a natural harbor I'm steering for. It should be calm enough for you to board the rafts. At the beach there'll be trucks to take you to New York."
"And what about you?" Chang asked.
"I'll head back out to international waters. They can't arrest me for shipping empty containers — that's not a crime. By the time they board, you'll be on highways of gold, heading toward the city of diamonds. . . . Now tell everyone to get their belongings together. But only the most important things. Your money, your pictures. Leave everything else. It will be a race to the shore. Stay below until the Ghost or I tell you to come up top."
Captain Sen hurried up the stairs, on his way to the bridge. As he climbed the steep ladder he said a brief prayer for their survival to Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, then dodged a wall of gray water that vaulted the side of the ship.
Captain Sen found the Ghost standing over the radar unit, staring into the rubber glare shade. The man stood completely still, bracing himself against the rolling of the sea.
Some snakeheads dressed as if they were wealthy Cantonese gangsters from a John Woo film but the Ghost always wore the standard outfit of most Chinese men — simple slacks and short-sleeved shirts. The Ghost was muscular but diminutive, clean-shaven, hair longer than a typical businessman's but never styled with cream or spray.
"They will intercept us in fifteen minutes," the snakehead said. Even now, facing interdiction and arrest, he seemed as lethargic as a ticket seller in a rural long-distance bus station.
"Fifteen?" the captain replied. "Impossible. How many knots are they making?"
Sen walked to the chart table, the centerpiece of all ocean-crossing vessels. On it sat a U.S. Defense Mapping Agency nautical chart of the area. He had to judge the two ships' relative positions from this and from the radar; because of the risk of being traced, the Dragon's global positioning system and her EPIRB emergency beacon and Global Maritime Distress and Safety System were disconnected.
"I think it will be at least forty minutes," Captain Sen said.
"No, I timed the distance they've traveled since we spotted them."
Captain Sen glanced at the crewman piloting the Fuzhou Dragon,
sweating as he gripped the wheel in his struggle to keep the Turk's head knot of twine, tied around a spoke, straight up, indicating that the rudder was aligned with the hull. The throttles were full forward. If
the Ghost was right in his assessment of when the cutter would intercept them they would not be able to make the protected harbor in time. At best they could get within a half mile of the nearby rocky shore —
close enough to launch the rafts but subjecting them to merciless pounding by the tempestuous seas.
The Ghost asked the captain, "What sort of weapons will they
have?"
"Don't you know?"
"I've never been interdicted," the Ghost replied. "Tell me."
Ships under Sen's command had been interdicted twice before — fortunately on legitimate voyages, not when he was running immigrants for snakeheads. But the experience had been harrowing. A dozen armed
Coast Guard sailors had streamed onto the vessel while another one, on the deck of the cutter, had trained a two-barreled machine gun on him and his crew. There'd been a small canon too.
He now told the Ghost what they might expect.
The Ghost nodded. "We need to consider our options."
"What
options?" Captain Sen now asked the Ghost. "You're not thinking of fighting them, are you? No. I won't allow it."
But the snakehead didn't answer. He remained braced at the radar stand, staring at the screen.
The man seemed placid but, Sen supposed, he must've been enraged. No snakehead he'd ever worked with had taken so many precautions to avoid capture and detection as had the Ghost on this voyage. The two dozen immigrants had met in an abandoned warehouse outside of Fuzhou and waited there for two days, under the watch of a partner of the Ghost's — a "little snakehead." The man had then loaded them onto a chartered Tupolev 154, which had flown to a deserted military airfield near St. Petersburg in Russia. There they'd climbed into a shipping container, been driven 120 kilometers to the town of Vyborg and were loaded onto the Fuzhou Dragon,
which Sen had sailed into the Russian port just the day before. He himself had meticulously filled out the customs documents and manifests — everything according to the book, so as not to arouse suspicion. The
Ghost had joined them at the last minute and the ship had sailed on schedule. Through the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel, then the Dragon had crossed the famous starting point of transatlantic voyages in the Celtic Sea — 530N 70W — and had begun steaming southeast toward Long Island.
There was not a single thing about the voyage that would arouse the suspicion of the U.S. authorities. "How did they do it?" the captain asked angrily.
"What?" the Ghost responded absently.
"Find us. No one could have. It's impossible."
The Ghost straightened up and pushed outside into the raging wind, calling back, "Who knows? Maybe it was magic."
* * *
"We're right on top of 'em, Lincoln. The boat's headin' for land but are they gonna make it? Nosir, no how. Wait, do I hafta call it a 'ship'? I think I do. It's too big for
a boat."
"I don't know," Lincoln Rhyme said absently to Fred Dellray. "I don't really do much sailing."
The tall, lanky
Dellray was the FBI agent in charge of the federal side of the efforts to arrest the Ghost. Neither Dellray's canary yellow shirt nor his black suit, as dark as the man's lustrous skin, had been ironed recently
— but then no one in the room looked particularly well rested. These half-dozen people clustered around Rhyme had spent the past twenty-four hours virtually living here, in this improbable war room — the
living room of Rhyme's Central Park West town house, which resembled not the Victorian drawing room it had once been but a forensics laboratory, chock full of tables, equipment, computers, chemicals, wires and
hundreds of forensic books and magazines.
The team included both federal and state law enforcers. On the state side was Lieutenant Lon Sellitto, homicide detective for the NYPD, far more
rumpled than Dellray — stockier too (he'd just moved in with his girlfriend in Brooklyn, who, the cop announced with rueful pride, cooked like Emeril). Young Eddie Deng, a Chinese-American detective from
the NYPD's Fifth Precinct, which covered Chinatown, was present too. Deng was trim and athletic and stylish, sporting glasses framed by Armani and black hair spiked up like a hedgehog's. He was serving as
Sellitto's temporary partner; the big detective's usual coworker, Roland Bell, had gone down to his native North Carolina for a family reunion with his two sons a week ago and, as it turned out, had struck
up a friendship with a local policewoman, Lucy Kerr. He'd extended his vacation another few days.
Assisting on the federal portion of the team was fifty-something Harold Peabody, a
pear-shaped, clever middle manager who held a senior spot at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Manhattan office. Peabody was close-lipped about himself, as are all bureaucrats narrowing in on their
retirement pension, but his far-ranging knowledge of immigration issues attested to a lengthy and successful stint in the Service. He and Dellray had faced off more than once during this investigation. After the
Golden Venture incident — in which ten illegal immigrants drowned after a smuggling vessel of that name ran aground off Brooklyn — the President of the United States had ordered that the FBI take over
primary jurisdiction from the INS on major human smuggling cases, with backup from the CIA. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had far more experience with snakeheads and their human smuggling activities and
didn't take kindly to yielding jurisdiction to other agencies — especially one that insisted on working shoulder-to-shoulder with the NYPD and, well, alternative consultants like Lincoln
Rhyme.
Assisting Peabody was a young INS agent named Alan Coe, a man in his thirties with close-cropped dark-red hair. Energetic but sour and moody, Coe too was an enigma, saying not a
word about his personal life and little about his career aside from the Ghost case. Rhyme had observed that Coe's suits were outlet mall chic — flashy but stitched with obvious thread — and his dusty
black shoes had the thick rubber soles of security guard footwear: perfect for running down shoplifters. The only time he grew talkative was when he'd give one of his spontaneous — and tedious —
lectures on the evils of illegal immigration. Still, Coe worked tirelessly and was zealous about collaring the Ghost.
Several other underlings, federal and state, had appeared and
disappeared over the past week on various errands relating to the case.
Grand Central Station, Lincoln Rhyme had thought — and said — frequently in the past day or so.
Now, at 4:45 A.M. on this stormy morning he maneuvered his powered Storm Arrow wheelchair through the cluttered room toward the case status board, on which was taped one of the few
existing pictures of the Ghost, a very bad surveillance shot, as well as a picture of Sen Zi-Jun, the captain of the Fuzhou Dragon, and a map of Eastern Long Island and the ocean surrounding it. Unlike
during his bedridden days of self-imposed retirement after a crime scene accident turned him into a C4 quadriplegic, Rhyme now spent half of his waking hours in his cherry-red Storm Arrow wheelchair, outfitted with
a new state-of-the-art MKIV touch pad drive controller that his aide, Thom, had found at Invacare. The controller, on which his one working finger rested, gave him far more flexibility in driving the chair than the
older sip-and-puff controller.
"How far off shore?" he called, staring at the map.
Lon Sellitto, on the phone, glanced up. "I'm finding
out."
Rhyme frequently worked as a consultant for the NYPD but most of his efforts were in classic forensic detection — criminalistics, as the jargon-happy law enforcement
world now preferred to call it; this assignment was unusual.
Several days ago Sellitto, Dellray, Peabody and moody young Alan Coe had come to him at his town house. Rhyme had been
distracted — the consuming event in his life at the moment was an impending medical procedure — but Dellray had snagged his attention by saying, "You're our last hope, Linc. We got us a big
problem and don't have a single idea where else to turn."
"Go on."
Interpol — the international clearing house on criminal
intelligence — had issued one of their infamous Red Notices about Kwan Ang. According to informants, the Ghost had surfaced in Fuzhou, China, then flown to the South of France then gone to some port in Russia
to pick up a load of illegal Chinese immigrants — among whom was the Ghost's bangshou, or assistant, a spy masquerading as one of the passengers. Their destination was supposedly New York. But then
he'd disappeared. The Taiwanese, French and Russian police and the FBI and INS could find him nowhere.
Dellray had brought with him the only evidence they had — a briefcase
containing some of the Ghost's personal effects from his safe house in France — in hopes that Rhyme could give them ideas where his trail might lead.
"Why all hands on
deck?" Rhyme asked, surveying the group, which representing three major law enforcement organizations.
Coe said, "He's a fucking
sociopath."
More reasonable, Peabody offered, "The Ghost's probably the most dangerous human smuggler in the world. He's wanted for 18 deaths — immigrants, sure,
but also police or agents. Then there're twelve rape charges against him by women immigrants. And we know he's killed more. Illegals're called 'the vanished" — if they try to cheat a
snakehead, they're killed. If they complain, they're killed. And they just disappear. Their families never hear from them again. We're estimating at least fifty or sixty immigrants under the Ghost's
control have vanished over the past few years."
Dellray said, "Looks like mosta the high-level snakeheads like him don't make the trips themselves. Th'only reason
he's bringing these folk over personally is 'cause he's expandin' his operation here. We can't let that happen."
"If he gets into the country," Coe
said, "people're going to die. A lot of people."
"Well, why me? I don't know a thing about human smuggling."
The FBI agent said,
"We tried ever-thing else. But we came up with nothin'. We don't have any personal info 'bout him, no good photos, no 'prints. Zee–row. 'Cept that." A nod toward the attaché
case.
Rhyme glanced at it with a skeptical gaze.
"I don't know, gentlemen." He explained that he knew nothing, forensically, about France or
Russia, much less did he trust the French crime scene searchers to have followed his exacting procedures in collecting evidence. He had no standards against which to compare the trace in the items they'd found.
Without positive print exemplars, how could they even be sure the evidence was the Ghost's?
Doughy Harold Peabody said, "Mr. Rhyme, human smuggling isn't the same as it used
to be. Few years ago, the husbands'd come over alone. Now, it's families, women by themselves, children. And to the Ghost, if they're the least threat — hell, if they're inconveniences —
he'll kill 'em. Just like that. . . . We really need your help."
"We're just hopin' you can point us in some di-rection," Dellray said.
"I'll do what I can. But don't expect miracles."
Two days later Rhyme had summoned them back. Thom handed agent Coe back the attaché case.
"Was there anything helpful in it?" the young man asked.
"Not a thing. The French are apparently abysmal at crime scene collection. At least
those particular gendarmes, or whatever you call them."
"Hell," muttered Dellray. "So we're outta luck."
Which was a
good enough cue for Lincoln Rhyme. He had leaned his head back into the luxurious pillow Thom had mounted to the wheelchair and spoke rapidly. "The Ghost and approximately twenty to thirty illegal Chinese
immigrants are on board a ship called the Fuzhou Dragon, out of Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. It's a seventy-two meter combination container and break-bulk cargo ship, twin diesels, under the command of Sen
Zi-jun — that's last name Sen — 56 years old, and has a crew of seven. It left Vyborg, Russia, at 0845 hours fourteen days ago and is presently — I'm estimating now — about three hundred
miles off the coast of New York. It's making for the Brooklyn docks."
"How the hell'd you figure that out?" Coe blurted in astonishment. Even Sellitto, used to
Rhyme's deductive abilities, barked a laugh.
"Simple. I assumed that they'd be sailing east to west — otherwise he would have left from China itself. I have a friend
on the Moscow police — a forensic scientist I've written some papers with. I asked him to call all the port masters in ports in western Russia. There aren't as many of them as you'd think. He
pulled some strings and got all the manifests from Chinese and Taiwanese ships that left port in the past three weeks. We spent several hours going over them. By the way, you're getting a very large bill for
phone calls. Oh, I told him to charge you for translation services too. I would."
The criminalist continued, "We found that only one ship took on enough fuel for an 8000-mile trip
when the manifest reported it was making a 4400-mile one. Eight thousand would get them from Vyborg to New York and back to Southampton, England, for refueling. They weren't going to dock in Brooklyn at all.
They were going to drop off the Ghost and the immigrants then scoot back to Europe."
"Maybe fuel's too expensive in New York," Dellray had
offered.
Rhyme had shrugged — one of the few dismissive gestures his body allowed him. "Everything's too expensive in New York. But there's more: The Dragon's manifest
said she was transporting industrial machinery to America. But you need to report your ship's draft — that's how far a ship sinks into the water, by the way — to make sure you don't run
aground in shallow ports. The Dragon's draft was listed at three meters. But a fully loaded ship her size should draw at least seven and a half meters. So she was empty. Except for the Ghost and the immigrants.
Not offended by calling the ship 'she,' anyone? It is customary. Oh, I say twenty to thirty immigrants because the Dragon took on enough fresh water and food for that many, when — like I said —
the crew was only seven."
Later that day, spy satellites had picked up the Dragon about 280 miles out to sea, just as Rhyme had predicted. The raging tropical storm battering the
eastern U.S. coast had slowed the progress of the ship; it appeared that she would make landfall on Long Island just before dawn on Tuesday. But the Coast Guard's right to interdict — stop and board —
vessels in international waters is limited. They can stop a U.S.-registered vessel and they can interdict a "stateless vessel," one that is apparently unregistered or is falsely registered. But the right
to board a properly documented ship outside of U.S. coastal waters is murky and the Fuzhou Dragon was a duly registered cargo ship of the People's Republic of China. The U.S. attorney was concerned that a court would throw out the Ghost's arrest if he were nabbed on the high seas. So the decision was made to hold off intercepting the Dragon until she entered U.S. waters.
The Coast Guard cutter Evan Brigant,
with a boarding party of 25 sailors, backed up by twin fifties and an 80mm canon, had gone to ready status but kept its distance, fearing the Dragon's radar would pick up the cutter's approach.
But the ship was now in U.S. waters and the Evan Brigant was in pursuit. The plan was to take control of the Dragon, arrest the Ghost, his assistant, and the ship's crew. The Coast Guard would sail the ship to the harbor at Port Jefferson, Long Island, where the immigrants would be transferred to a federal detention center to await deportation or asylum hearings.
A call was patched through from the radio of the Coast Guard cutter closing in on the Dragon.
"Agent Dellray? This is Captain Ransom on the Evan Brigant."
"I'm readin' you, Captain."
"We think they've spotted us — they had better radar than we thought. The ship's making for shore. We need some direction
on the assault plan. There's some concern that if we board, there'll be a firefight. I mean, considering who this particular individual is. We're worried about casualties.
Over."
"Among who?" Coe asked, "the undocumenteds?" The disdain in his voice when he used the word that described the immigrants was clear.
"Right. We were thinking we should just make the ship come about and wait until the Ghost surrenders. Over."
Dellray reached up and squeezed the
cigarette he kept behind his ear, a memento from his smoking days. "Negative on that. Follow your original rules of engagement. Stop the ship, board it and arrest the Ghost. The use of deadly force is
authorized. You copy that?"
"Five by five, sir. Out."
A moment later Rhyme's private line rang. Thom took the call in the corner of the
room. He listened for a moment then looked up. "It's Dr. Weaver, Lincoln. About the surgery." He glanced at the roomful of tense law enforcers. "I'll tell her you'll call her
back."
"No," Rhyme answered firmly. "I'll take it."
Copyright © Jeffery Deaver 2001
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