AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His pistol was torn from his hand and he was flung facedown to the floor and cuffed and frisked. He felt a tug at his ankle and the Model 51, his lucky gun, was lifted away, then his pockets emptied.
"We've got the subject down," an officer shouted. "Scene clear."
"Outside, we've got two, both down and locked." Meaning on their bellies with cuffs or plastic restraints on their wrists. These were the two men in the Windstar Sachs had spotted following them. More of the Uighurs from the cultural center in Queens, she'd assumed.
"Any other minders?" Sachs bent down and whispered harshly into the Ghost's ear.
"Any--"
"We've got the two men who were following us. Anybody else?"
The Ghost didn't answer and Sachs said into her radio, "I only noticed the one van. That's probably it."
Then Lon Sellitto and Eddie Deng joined her from upstairs, where they'd been waiting, out of the way of the takedown team. They looked the Ghost over as he lay on the floor, breathless from the shock and the rough treatment. Amelia Sachs thought he looked harmless--just a handsome but diminutive Asian man with slightly graying hair.
Sellitto's radio blared with the message, "Snipers One and Two to Base. Okay to stand down?"
He turned the squelch down on his Motorola and said, "Base to Snipers. That's a roger." The big detective added to the Ghost, "They had you in their sights from the minute you stepped out of the station wagon. If you'd aimed your weapon in her direction you'd be dead now. Lucky man."
They dragged the Ghost into the living room and pushed him into a chair. Eddie Deng read him his rights--in English, Putonghua and Minnanhua. Just to make sure.
He confirmed that he understood, with surprisingly little emotion, Sachs observed, considering the circumstances.
"How're the Changs?" Sachs asked Sellitto.
"They're fine. Two INS teams're at their apartment. It almost got ugly. The father'd got his hands on a gun and was ready to shoot it out but the agents spotted him through a window with a nightscope. They got the apartment's phone number and called to tell them that they were surrounded. As soon as Chang realized it was a legit INS team and not the Ghost he gave it up."
"The baby?"
"She's fine. Social worker's on the way. They're going to keep them at their place in Owls Head until we're through with this piece of shit." Nodding toward the Ghost. "Then we can go over there and debrief them."
The town house in which they now stood, about a mile from the Changs', was a neatly decorated place, full of flowers and tchotchkes: a surprise to Sachs, considering that it was inhabited by one of the city's best homicide detectives.
"So this's your house, Lon?" she asked, picking up a porcelain Little Bo Peep statuette.
"It's my better other's," he answered defensively, using the cop's pet name for Rachel, his girlfriend (he'd combined "better half" and "significant other," in a rare display of levity). They'd moved in together several months ago. "She inherited half of this stuff from her mother." He took the figurine from Sachs and replaced it carefully on the shelf.
"This was the best we could do for a takedown site on such short notice. We figured if we drove too far from Owls Head, the prick'd start to get suspicious."
"It was all fake," the Ghost said, amused. It seemed to Sachs that his English was better than the dialect he'd affected when he'd been portraying John Sung. "You set me up."
"Guess we did."
Lincoln Rhyme's call--as they'd been driving through Brooklyn, on their way to the Changs' real apartment in Owls Head--had been to tell Sachs that he now believed the Ghost was masquerading as John Sung. Another team of INS and NYPD cops was on their
way to the Changs' real apartment to detain them. Sellitto and Eddie Deng were setting up a takedown site at Sellitto's house, where they could collar him without the risk of bystanders' getting killed in a shoot-out with the homicidal snakehead and capture any bangshous with him. Rhyme assumed that they would be following Sachs from the safehouse in Chinatown or else would be summoned by the snakehead via cell phone when they arrived at the Changs'.
As she'd listened to Rhyme's voice, it had taken all of Sachs's emotional strength to nod and pretend that Coe was working for the Ghost and that the man who was supposedly her friend, her doctor, the man sitting two feet from her and undoubtedly armed, wasn't the killer they'd been seeking for the past two days.
She thought too of the acupressure session last night--coming to him with her secret, with her desperate hope of being cured. She shivered with repulsion at the memory of his hands on her back and shoulders. She thought too with horror that she'd actually mentioned to him the location of the safehouse where the Wus were staying when she'd asked him if he wanted to join them.
The Ghost asked, "How did your friend, this Lincoln Rhyme, know that I wasn't Sung?"
She picked up the plastic bag containing the contents of the Ghost's pockets. Inside were the fragments of the shattered monkey amulet. Sachs held it close to his face.
"The stone monkey," she explained. "I found some trace under Sonny Li's fingernails. It was magnesium silicate, like talc. Rhyme found out that it came from soapstone--which is what the amulet's carved out of." Sachs reached out and roughly tugged down Ghost's turtleneck, revealing the red line from the leather cord. "What happened? He ripped it off your neck and it broke?" She released the cloth and stepped away.
The Ghost nodded slowly. "Before I shot him he was clawing the ground. I thought he was begging for mercy but then he looked up and smiled at me."
