The Stone Monkey

would go to only the best practitioners of the art, men of the sort that the Ghost too would hire.
    He continued, “If I could give my boss the name of someone good to arrange his home and office he might think more of me. It might help me keep my job and raise myself in his view.” With these words Li lowered his head but kept his eyes on her face and was pierced by what he saw: pity generated by his shame. What was so wrenching to him about that look, though, was that the phony shame emanating from Sonny Li the undercover cop was virtually identical to the true shame that Sonny Li the man felt daily from his father’s cascade of criticism. Perhaps, he reflected, this is why she believed him.
    The beautiful woman smiled and dug into her purse. She wrote out a name and address—on a slip of paper notbearing her own name or phone number, of course. She slipped it to him and withdrew her hand quickly before he could touch her palm and grasp it in desperation and hunger, which in fact he was close to doing.
    “Mr. Wang,” she said, nodding at the card. “He is one of the best in the city. If your employer has money he will help him. He is most expensive. But he will do a good job. He helped me marry well, as you can see.”
    “Yes, my boss has money.”
    “Then he too can change his fortune. Goodbye.” She stood, gathered her glossy bag and purse and strode out of the shop on her immaculate heels, leaving her check sitting prominently on the table for Sonny Li to pay.
    •   •   •
    “Sachs!” Rhyme looked up from the computer screen. “Guess what the Ghost blew the ship up with?”
    “Give up,” she called, amused to see the look of pleasure accompanying this gruesome question.
    Mel Cooper answered, “Grade A, brand-new Composition 4.”
    “Congratulations.”
    This had put Rhyme in a good mood because C4—despite being a movie terrorist’s staple for bombs—was actually quite rare. The substance was available only to the military and a few select law enforcement agencies; it wasn’t used in commercial demolition. This meant that there were relatively few sources for high-quality C4, which in turn meant that the odds of finding a connection between that source and the Ghost were far better than if he’d used common TNT, Tovex, Gelenex or any of the other commercially available explosives.
    More significantly, though, C4 is so dangerous that by law it must contain markers—each manufacturer of thematerial adds inert but distinctive chemicals to its version of the explosive. Analysis of the trace at the scene of an explosion will reveal which marker was present and this tells investigators who manufactured it. The company, in turn, must keep detailed records of whom its products were sold to, and the purchasers must keep detailed files on where the explosive was stored or used.
    If they could find the person who sold the Ghost this batch of C4, he might know where the snakehead had other safehouses in New York, or other bases of operation.
    Cooper had sent the trace results to Quantico. “Should hear back in the next few hours.”
    “Where’s Coe?” Sachs asked, looking around the town house.
    “Down at INS,” Rhyme said then added acerbically, “Don’t jinx it by mentioning his name. Let’s hope he stays there.”
    Eddie Deng arrived from downtown. “Got here as soon as you called, Lincoln.”
    “Excellent, Eddie. Put your reading specs on. You’ve got to translate for us. Amelia found a letter in the Ghost’s sports coat.”
    “No shit,” Deng said. “Where?”
    “A hundred feet underwater. But that’s another story.”
    Deng’s eyes were fine—no reading glasses were required—but Mel Cooper did have to set him up with an ultraviolet reading hood to image the ink on the letter; the characters had been bleached out by the seawater and were barely visible.
    Deng hunched over the letter and examined it.
    “It’s hard to read,” Deng murmured, squinting. “Okay, okay . . .It’s to the Ghost. The man who wrote it is named Ling Shui-bian. He’s telling the Ghost when the charterflight will be leaving Fuzhou and when and where to expect it at the Nagorev military base outside of St. Petersburg. Then he says he’s wiring the money into an account in Hong Kong—no number or bank. Then it describes the cost of the airplane charter. It then says part of the money is enclosed—in dollars. Finally, there’s a list of the victims—the passengers on the