The Stone Monkey

from any culture, provided, of course, that the role could be played by someone well over six feet with skin dark as an Ethiopian’s. Which still left an amazing range of parts for the agent—crime being perhaps the only aspect of society where one is judged solely on skill and not on race.
    Dellray’s talent, and lifelong passion for law enforcement, however, had proved his undoing. He’d been too good. In addition to working undercover jobs for his own outfit, the FBI, he’d been borrowed regularly by the Drug Enforcement Administration; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the police departments in New York, L.A., Washington, D.C. Bad guys have computers, cell phones and email too, of course, and little by little Dellray’s reputation spread within the underworld. It became too dangerous to put him into the field.
    He was promoted and put in charge of running undercover agents and CIs, confidential informants, in New York.
    For his part, Dellray would’ve preferred a different assignment. His partner, Special Agent Toby Doolittle, had been killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the death had sent Dellray on a perennial quest to be reassigned to the bureau’s antiterrorist unit. But he reluctantly recognized that a passion to collar a perp wasn’t enough to excel at that area of law enforcement—look atAlan Coe, for instance—and so he was content to remain where his talents lay.
    Being assigned to what would become GHOSTKILL had confused Dellray at first; he’d never run any human smuggling cases before. He’d assumed that he was recruited because of his extensive undercover network in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn—where the Chinese-American communities in this area were located. But Dellray soon learned that his traditional techniques for running snitches and undercover agents didn’t work. A viewer of thoughtful movies, Dellray had seen the famous film Chinatown, which made the point that the namesake neighborhood in old-time Los Angeles operated outside of Western laws. This, he found, wasn’t a scriptwriter’s device. And it was true about New York’s Chinatowns as well. Justice was administered through the tongs, and the number of calls to 911 and to the local police stations in Chinese communities of New York was much lower than in other neighborhoods. Nobody snitched to outsiders, and undercover agents were sniffed out almost immediately.
    So, with GHOSTKILL, he found himself running a complicated operation dealing with a type of crime he had little experience with. But after his efforts tonight at the office he felt much better. Tomorrow he was going to meet with the special agents in charge of the Southern and Eastern Districts and one of the assistant directors from Washington. He’d get himself named supervising special agent, which would open up a lot of the bureau’s resources to him and the GHOSTKILL team. As SSA, he’d bully and connive his way into getting what they needed for the case: the FBI’s—i.e., his —complete jurisdiction, the SPEC-TAC team in town and the INS relegated to an exclusively advisory role, which meant virtually cutting them out of thecase altogether. Peabody and Coe would be pissed but that was just too bad. He’d already framed his argument. Yes, the INS was vital in gathering intelligence about snakeheads and smuggling operations and interdicting their ships. But now GHOSTKILL was a full-out manhunt for a killer. That was the bureau’s expertise.
    He was confident the brass would buy his pitch; undercover agents like himself, Dellray had learned, are among the best persuaders—and extorters—in the world.
    Dellray snagged his office phone and called his own number, his apartment in Brooklyn.
    “Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.
    “I’ll be home in thirty,” he said softly. With Serena he never used the unique patois he’d developed working on the streets of New York and slung about as his trademark on the job.
    “See you then, love.”
    He hung up. No one in the bureau or the NYPD knew a single thing about Dellray’s personal life—nothing about Serena, a choreographer with the Brooklyn Academy of Music he’d been seeing off and on for years. She worked long hours and traveled. He worked long hours and traveled.
    The arrangement suited them.
    Walking through the halls of the bureau’s headquarters, which resembled the digs of a big, moderately unsuccessful corporation, he nodded at two agents in shirtsleeves, ties