The Stone Monkey

the southeastern coast of China. He’s probably working with the governor, but I don’t have any evidence about that. Not yet, anyway.”
    “Impossible,” offered Webley though with much less bluster than he’d displayed earlier.
    Rhyme said, “Not at all. Sonny Li told me about Fujian Province. It’s always been more independent than the central government likes. It has the most connections with the West and Taiwan—more money too. And the most activedissidents. Beijing is always threatening to crack down on the province, nationalize businesses again and put its own people in power. If that happens, Ling and his boys lose their income stream. So, how to keep Beijing happy? Kill the most vocal dissidents. And what better way to do it than by hiring a snakehead? If they die en route to another country it’s their own fault, not the government’s.”
    “And more likely than not,” Sachs said, “nobody’d even know that they died. They’d be just one more shipload of the vanished.” Nodding at Webley from State, she reminded, “Rhyme?”
    “Oh, right. The last piece of the puzzle. Why’s the Ghost going free?” He said to Webley, “You’re sending him back to keep Ling and his people in Fujian happy. To make sure our business interests aren’t affected. Southeast China is the biggest site for U.S. investment in the world.”
    “That’s bullshit,” the man snapped in reply.
    The Ghost said, “This is ridiculous. It’s the lie of a desperate man.” Nodding toward Rhyme. “Where’s the proof?”
    “Proof? Well, we have the letter from Ling. But if you want more . . . Remember, Harold? You told me that other shiploads of the Ghost’s immigrants disappeared in the past year or so. I checked the statements from their relatives in the Interpol database. Most of those victims were dissidents from Fujian too.”
    “That’s not true,” the Ghost said quickly.
    “Then there’s the money,” Rhyme said, ignoring the snakehead.
    “Money?”
    “The smuggling fee. When Sachs went for her little paddle in the Atlantic she found 120,000 U.S. dollars and maybe 20,000 worth of old yuan. I invited a friend of minefrom the INS over to my place to help me look at the evidence. He—”
    “Who?” Peabody asked sharply. Then he understood. “Alan Coe? It was him, wasn’t it?”
    “A friend. Let’s leave it at that.” In fact, the friend was Agent Coe, who’d also spent the day stealing classified INS files, which would probably cost him his job, if not earn him a jail sentence. This was the risk that Rhyme had referred to earlier—and that Coe had been only too happy to assume.
    “The first thing he noticed was the money. He told me that when immigrants contract with snakeheads they can’t pay the down payment in dollars—because there are no dollars in China, not enough to pay for transit to the U.S. anyway. They always pay in yuan. With a shipload of twenty-five or so immigrants, that means Sachs should’ve found at least a half million in yuan—just for the down payment. So why was there so little Chinese money on board? Because the Ghost charged next to nothing—to make sure that the dissidents on the hit list could afford to make the trip. The Ghost was making his profit from the fee to kill them. The 120,000? Well, that was the down payment from Ling. I checked the serial numbers on some of the bills and, according to the Federal Reserve, that cash was last seen going into the Bank of South China in Singapore. Which happens to be used regularly by Fujianese government ministries.”
    More rows were boarding. The Ghost was truly desperate now.
    Peabody had fallen silent and was considering all this. He seemed to be wavering. But the State Department official was resolute. “He’s getting on that plane and that’s all there is to it.”
    Rhyme squinted and cocked his head. “How high are we now on the ladder of evidence, Sachs?”
    “How about the C4?”
    “Right, the explosive used to blow up the ship. The FBI traced it to a North Korean arms dealer, who regularly sells to—guess who? People’s Liberation Army bases in Fujian. The government gave the Ghost the C4.” Rhyme closed his eyes for a brief moment. They sprang open. “Then there’s the cell phone that Sachs found at the beach . . . . It was a government-issue satellite phone. The network he used was based in Fuzhou.”
    “The trucks, Rhyme,” Sachs reminded. “Tell them about the trucks.”
    Rhyme nodded,