The Stone Monkey

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.
    Peabody 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 service had far more experience with snakeheads and their human smuggling activities than the FBI 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 AlanCoe, 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.
    Goddamn 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 battery-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, outfitted with a new state-of-the-art MKIV touchpad 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 offshore?” 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. Four days ago Sellitto, Dellray, Peabody and taciturn 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 clearinghouse on criminal intelligence—had issued one of its infamous Red Notices about the Ghost. According to informants, the elusive snakehead had surfaced in Fuzhou, China, 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 safehouse in France—in hopes that Rhyme could give them ideas where his trail might lead.
    “Why all hands on deck?” Rhyme had asked, surveying the group, which represented three major law enforcement organizations.
    Coe said,