The Stone Monkey

rafts but subjecting them to merciless pounding by the tempestuous seas.
    The Ghost asked the captain, “What sort of weapons will they have?”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “I’ve never been interdicted,” the Ghost replied. “Tell me.”
    Ships under Sen’s command had been stopped and boarded twice before—fortunately on legitimate voyages, not when he was running immigrants for snakeheads. Butthe experience had been harrowing. A dozen armed Coast Guard sailors had streamed onto the vessel while another one, on the deck of the cutter, had trained a two-barreled machine gun on him and his crew. There’d been a small cannon too.
    He now told the Ghost what they might expect.
    The Ghost nodded. “We need to consider our options.”
    “What options?” Captain Sen now asked. “You’re not thinking of fighting them, are you? No. I won’t allow it.”
    But the snakehead didn’t answer. He remained braced at the radar stand, staring at the screen.
    The man seemed placid but, Sen supposed, he must’ve been enraged. No snakehead he’d ever worked with had taken so many precautions to avoid capture and detection as the Ghost on this voyage. The two-dozen immigrants had met in an abandoned warehouse outside of Fuzhou and waited there for two days, under the watch of a partner of the Ghost’s—a “little snakehead.” The man had then loaded the Chinese onto a chartered Tupolev 154, which had flown to a deserted military airfield near St. Petersburg in Russia. There they’d climbed into a shipping container, been driven 120 kilometers to the town of Vyborg and boarded the Fuzhou Dragon, which Sen had sailed into the Russian port just the day before. He himself had meticulously filled out the customs documents and manifests—everything according to the book, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Ghost had joined them at the last minute and the ship had sailed on schedule. Through the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel, then the Dragon had crossed the famous starting point of transatlantic voyages in the Celtic Sea—49 0 N 7 0 W—and had begun steaming southwest toward Long Island, New York.
    There was not a single thing about the voyage thatwould arouse the suspicion of the U.S. authorities. “How did the Coast Guard do it?” the captain asked.
    “What?” the Ghost responded absently.
    “Find us. No one could have. It’s impossible.”
    The Ghost straightened up and pushed outside into the raging wind, calling back, “Who knows? Maybe it was magic.”

Chapter Two
    “We’re right on top of ’em, Lincoln. The boat’s headin’ for land but are they gonna make it? Nosir, nohow. Wait, do I hafta call it a ‘ship’? I think I do. It’s too big for a boat.”
    “I don’t know,” Lincoln Rhyme said absently to Fred Dellray. “I don’t really do much sailing.”
    The tall, lanky Dellray was the FBI agent in charge of the federal side of the efforts to find and arrest the Ghost. Neither Dellray’s canary yellow shirt nor his black suit, as dark as the man’s lustrous skin, had been ironed recently—but then no one in the room looked particularly well rested. These half-dozen people clustered around Rhyme had spent the past twenty-four hours virtually living here, in this improbable headquarters—the living room of Rhyme’s Central Park West town house, which resembled not the Victorian drawing room it had once been but a forensics laboratory, chock-full of tables, equipment, computers, chemicals, wires and hundreds of forensics books and magazines.
    The team included both federal and state law enforcers. On the state side was Lieutenant Lon Sellitto, homicide detective for the NYPD, far more rumpled than Dellray—stockier too (he’d just moved in with his girlfriend in Brooklyn, who, the cop announced with ruefulpride, cooked like Emeril). Young Eddie Deng, a Chinese-American detective from the NYPD’s Fifth Precinct, which covered Chinatown, was present too. Deng was trim and athletic and stylish, sporting glasses framed by Armani and black hair spiked up like a hedgehog’s. He was serving as Sellitto’s temporary partner; the big detective’s usual coworker, Roland Bell, had gone down to his native North Carolina for a family reunion with his two sons a week ago and, as it turned out, had struck up a friendship with a local policewoman, Lucy Kerr. He’d extended his vacation another few days.
    Assisting on the federal portion of the team was fifty-something Harold Peabody,