The Stone Monkey

by Jeffery Deaver

  Shouting over the noise of the wind the dive chief said, "Too choppy to go off the deck. We'll get into the raft, put our flippers on and then fall backward into the water. Hold your mask and regulator to your face. Other hand on your weight-belt release."

  She tapped the top of her head--the hand signal for okay.

  He did the same.

  They climbed into the yellow raft, which was already in the water and reared up and down like a bucking horse. They sat on the side and checked their equipment.

  Twenty feet away was an orange buoy. The dive chief pointed to it and said, "There's a line from there that goes straight down to the vessel. We'll swim over to that and follow the line down. What's your plan for the search?"

  She called back, "I want to get samples of the explosion residue from the hull and then search the bridge and cabins."

  The other divers nodded.

  "I do the inside alone."

  This was a breach of the fundamental scuba rule that you be able to swim to your buddy on one breath. The dive chief frowned.

  "You're sure?"

  "Have to."

  "Okay," he said uneasily. Then he continued, "Now, sounds don't work well underwater--hard to tell where they're coming from--but if you're in trouble bang on your tank with the knife and we'll search for you." He held up her SPG--submersible pressure gauge--which showed how much air was in her tank. "You've got three thousand pounds of air. You'll burn it fast because you're going to be pumped up on adrenaline. We leave the bottom with five hundred. No less than that. That's an iron-clad rule. No exceptions. We come up slow--no faster than the bubbles from our regulator and we pause for three minutes fifteen feet down."

  Otherwise, Sachs knew, there was a risk of decompression sickness--the bends.

  "Oh, and what's the most important rule in scuba?"

  Sachs remembered it from her course years ago. "Don't ever hold your breath underwater."

  "Good. Why?"

  "Otherwise your lungs could explode."

  Then they started her air and she pulled on her fins then mask, gripped the regulator fiercely in her teeth. The dive chief gave the other "okay" sign--middle finger and thumb in a circle--and she responded the same way. She pumped some air into her BCD to allow her to float on the surface. They gestured for her to roll backward.

  She gripped the mask and regulator so they wouldn't be torn off by the entry and she held her weight-belt release so that if her buoyancy device failed and she dropped toward the bottom she could dump the weights and swim to the surface.

  Okay, Rhyme, here's one for Guinness: the record for searching the most submerged crime scene.

  One, two, three . . .

  Backward into the churning water.

  By the time she righted herself the others were in the water beside her and gesturing toward the buoy. In a few minutes they'd swum to it. Okay signs all around. Then a thumbs-down, which meant descend. Then they took their BCD control in their left hand and deflated the vests.

  Immediately, noise became silence, motion became stillness, heavy became weightless and they drifted downward placidly along the thick rope toward the bottom.

  For a moment Sachs was struck by the absolute peace of life underwater. Then the serenity was broken as she looked below her and saw the dim outline of the Fuzhou Dragon.

  The image was more unsettling than she'd expected. The ship on her side, a black gash in the hull from the explosion, the rust, the peeling paint, the encrusting barnacles on the plates. Dark and jagged and foreboding--and containing the bodies of so many innocent people.

  A coffin, she thought, with a clenched heart. It's a huge, metal coffin.

  Sharp pain in her ears; she pinched her nose through the soft plastic portion of the mask and blew to equalize the pressure. They continued downward. As they got closer to the ship she began to hear the noises--grating and moaning as the ship's thick metal plates scraped on the rocks.

  Hate that noise. Hate it, hate it. It sounded like a huge creature dying.

  Her escorts were diligent. They'd stop the descent occasionally and check on her. Okay signs were exchanged and they continued downward.

  At the bottom she looked up and found that the surface didn't seem as far away as she'd expected, though she recalled that water has the effect of acting like a lens and magnifying everything. A glance at her depth gauge. Ninety feet. A nine-story building. Then a glance at her pressure gauge. Jesus, she'd already used 150 pounds of air on the effortless descent.

  Amelia Sachs pumped air into the BCD to neutralize her buoyancy--so that she floated level. She first pointed toward the gash in the hull and together the threesome swam toward it. Despite the pitching surface above them the currents here were gentle and they could move easily.

  At the site of the explosion Sachs used her blunt knife to scrape residue from the outwardly curled metal. She placed some of the black ashy material into a plastic bag, sealed it and put that in the mesh collection bag.

  She looked at the dark windows of the bridge forty feet away. Okay, Rhyme, here we go. They swam toward it.

  And the pressure gauge gave her its emotionless message: 2350 pounds.

  At 500 they left the bottom. No exceptions.

  Because the ship was on its side the bridge door now opened upward, toward the surface. It was metal and very heavy. The two Coast Guard officers struggled to lift it and Sachs swam through the opening and down into the bridge. They lowered the door into the closed position. It clanked shut with a chilling boom and Sachs realized that she was now trapped inside the ship. Without her companions she probably couldn't open the door herself.

  Forget it, she told herself, reached up to the light mounted on her wetsuit hood and clicked it on. The beam offered her faint comfort. She turned and swam away from the bridge down a dark corridor that led to the cabins.

  Faint motion too from the dimness. Coming from what? Fish, eels, squid?

  I don't like this, Rhyme.

  But then she thought about the Ghost searching for the Changs, about the baby, Po-Yee, the Treasured Child.

  Think about that, not about the darkness or confinement. Do this for her, for Po-Yee.

  Amelia Sachs swam forward.

  *

  She was in hell.

  No other word described it.

  The black hallway was filled with sooty debris and refuse, scraps of cloth, paper, food, fish with piercing yellow eyes. And overhead, a shimmering, like ice: the thin layer of air trapped above her. The sounds were harrowing: the scraping and groaning, moans. Squeals like human voices in agony, pings and snaps. The clank of metal on metal.

  A fish, gray and sleek, darted past. She gasped involuntarily at the motion and turned her head to follow it.

  She found herself looking at two dull human eyes in a white lifeless face.

  Sachs screamed through her regulator and jerked back. The body of a man, barefoot, his arms above his head, like a perp surrendering, floated nearby. His legs were frozen in the position of a runner's and, as the fish sped past, the small wake turned him slowly away from her.

  Clank, clank.

  No, she thought. I can't do this.

  Already the walls were closing in on her. Plagued all her life by claustrophobia, Sachs couldn't stop thinking of what would happen if she got caught in one of these tiny passages. She'd go mad.

  Two deep breaths of dry air through the regulator.

  She thought of the Chang family. She thought of the toddler.

  And she swam on.

  The gauge: 2300 pounds of pressure.

  We're doing fine. Keep going.

  Clank.

  That damn noise--like doors closing, sealing her shut. Well, ignore it, she told herself. Nobody's closing any doors.

  The rooms above her--on the side of the Dragon facing the surface--were not, she deduced, the Ghost's: two didn't appear to have been occupied on the voyage and one was the captain's; in this one she found seafaring memorabilia and pictures of
the bald, mustachioed man she recognized as Captain Sen from the pictures tacked up on Lincoln Rhyme's wall.

  Clank, clank, clank . . .

  She swam downward to check out the rooms on the other side of the narrow corridor--facing the bottom.

  As she did, her tank caught on a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall and she froze in position. Trapped in the narrow corridor she was seized with a flash of panic.

  It's okay, Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme's voice said to her in that deep, lulling voice he always fell into when speaking to her through her headset at crime scenes. It's okay.

  She controlled the panic and backed up, freeing herself.

  The gauge told her: 2100 pounds.

  Three of the cabins below her hadn't been occupied. That left only one more--it had to be the Ghost's.

  A huge groan.

  More clanks.

  Then a moaning so loud she actually felt it in her chest. What was happening? The whole ship was buckling! The doors would be jammed. She'd be trapped here forever. Suffocating slowly . . . Dying alone . . . Oh, Rhyme . . .

  But then the moaning stopped, replaced by more clanking.

  She paused at the entrance to the Ghost's cabin, below her feet.

  The door was closed. It opened inward--well, downward. She gripped the knob and twisted. The latch released and the heavy wooden door eased downward. Looking beneath her into the darkness. Things were swimming around inside the room. Jesus . . . She shivered and remained where she was, hovering in the narrow corridor.

  But Lincoln Rhyme's voice, as clear as if he'd been speaking through her headphones, sounded in her thoughts. "It's a crime scene, Sachs. That's all it is. And searching crime scenes is what we do, remember? You grid it, you search it, you observe it, you collect evidence."

  Okay, Rhyme. But I could live without eels.

  She let some air out of the BCD and dropped slowly into the room.

  Two sights made her gasp.

  In front of her a man floated in the black space, eyes closed, his jaw down as far as it could go, arms outstretched, his coat billowing out behind him. His face was white as paper.

  The second thing she saw was less macabre but far stranger: what must have been a thousand hundred-dollar bills floated in the water, filling the room, like flakes in a plastic souvenir snow globe.

  The bills explained the man's death. His pockets were filled with money and she deduced that as the ship started to go down he'd run to the cabin to get as much of the Ghost's cash as he could but he'd been trapped here.

  She eased farther into the room, the bills swirling in her wake.

  The money soon proved to be a major pain in the ass. It stuck to her, it obscured the scene like smoke. (Add this to your book, Rhyme: excessive money at the crime scene can make searches extremely difficult.) She couldn't see more than a few feet past the cloud of bills. She grabbed several handfuls of the money for evidence and put them in her collection bag. Kicking her way to what was now the top of the room--originally the side--she noticed an open attache case floating in the thin air pocket. She found more currency inside--Chinese, it seemed. A handful of these bills went into the collection bag.

  Clank, clank.

  Jesus, this is spooky. Darkness around her, unseen things caressing the wetsuit. She could see only a few feet in front of her--the tunnel of dim illumination cast by the tiny spotlight on her head.

  She then located two weapons: an Uzi machine pistol and a Beretta 9mm. She examined them closely and found that the Uzi's serial number had been etched out. She let this weapon drop to the bottom. There was a number on the Beretta, though, which meant it might yield some traceable connection to the Ghost. She slipped it into her evidence bag. A glance at her pressure gauge: 1800 pounds of air. God, she was going through it fast. Breathe slowly.

  "Come on, Sachs, concentrate."

  Right, sorry, Rhyme.

  Clank, clank, clank.

  I hate that fucking sound!

  She searched the body of the corpse. No wallet or ID.

  Another shiver. Why was this scene so horrible, so eerie? She'd processed dozens of bodies. But then she realized: the corpses at those scenes had always lain like broken toys on the ground, pulled, inanimate, to the concrete or grass or carpet by gravity. They weren't real. But this man wasn't still at all. As cold as the heartless water around him, white as snow, he moved like an elegant dancer in slow motion.

  The stateroom was very small and the body would interfere with her search. So, with a respect that she wouldn't have felt anywhere outside of this horrible mausoleum, she eased the body upward into the corridor and pushed him away. Then she returned to the Ghost's cabin.

  Clank, clank . . . clank.

  Ignoring the spooky moans and the clanking, she looked around her. In a tiny room like this, where would one hide things?

  All the furniture was attached to the walls and floors. And there was only one small dresser. Inside were Chinese-brand toiletries, nothing that yielded any obvious evidence.

  She looked for anything hidden in the closet but found only clothes.

  Clank, clank . . .

  What do we think, Rhyme?

  "I think you've got, let's see, about fourteen hundred pounds of air left. I'd say if you don't find something soon, get the hell out."

  I'm not going anywhere yet, she thought. Hovering, she looked slowly around the room. Where would he hide things? He left his guns, he left the money . . . . That means the explosion took him by surprise too. There has to be something here. She glanced again at the closet. The clothes? Maybe. She kicked toward it.

  She began to go through them. Nothing in any of the pockets. But she kept searching and--in one of his Armani jackets--found a slit he'd made in the lining. She reached in and extracted an envelope containing a document. She trained the light on it. Don't know if it's helpful or not, Rhyme. They're in Chinese.

  "That's for us to find out back home. You find it, Eddie'll translate it, I'll analyze it."

  Into the bag.

  Twelve hundred pounds of pressure. But don't ever, ever, ever hold your breath.

  Why was that again?

  Right. Your lungs'll explode.

  Clank.

  Okay, I'm outta here.

  She made her way out of the small stateroom and into the corridor, the treasures of evidence stashed in the bag tied to her belt.

  Clank clank clank . . .clank . . . clank . . . clank.

  She turned back down the endless corridor--the route by which she could escape from this terrible place. The bridge seemed miles away down the black corridor.

  The longest journey, the first step . . .

  But then she stopped, gripping the doorway. Jesus, Lord, she thought.

  Clank clank clank . . .

  Amelia Sachs realized something about the eerie banging she'd been hearing since she'd entered the ship. Three fast bangs, three slow.

  It was Morse code for S-O-S. And it was coming from somewhere deep within the ship.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  S-O-S.

  The universal distress call.

  S-O . . .

  Somebody was alive! The Coast Guard had missed a survivor. Should she go find the other divers? Sachs wondered.

  But that would take too long; Sachs imagined from the uneven pounding that the trapped air the survivor was breathing was nearly gone. Besides, the sound seemed to be coming from nearby. It should take only minutes to find the person.

  But where were they exactly?

  Well, obviously it hadn't come from the direction of the bridge, through which she'd entered the ship. It wasn't coming from the cabins here either. It had to be one of the holds or the engine room--in the lower part of the ship. Now, with the Dragon on its side, those areas were level with her, on her left.

  Yes, no?

  For this she couldn't ask Lincoln Rhyme's advice.

  There was no one to help her here.

  Oh, Jesus, I'm really going to do this, aren't
I?

  Less than 1200 pounds of air left.

  So you better get your butt going, girl.

  Sachs glanced at the faint illumination where the bridge was, then she turned away from it toward the darkness--and the claustrophobia--and kicked hard. Following the clanking.

  S-O-S.

  But when she came to the end of the black corridor, from which she thought she heard the code, Sachs found no way to get into the interior of the ship. The corridor just ended. She pressed her head against the wood, though, and could distinctly hear the clanging.

  O-S.

  Training the light on the wall she discovered a small door. She opened it and gasped as a green eel swam leisurely past her. She let her heart calm and gazed inside, looking to her left, into the bowels of the ship. The shaft was a dumbwaiter, presumably to cart supplies up to the cabin deck and the bridge from the lower decks. It measured about two feet by two feet.

  Confronting the thought of swimming into the narrow space, she now thought about going back for help. But she'd already wasted too much time finding the doorway.

  Oh, man . . .

  One thousand pounds of air.

  Clank, clank . . .

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  Can't do it. No way.

  S-O-S.

  Amelia Sachs, calm as tea when she hit 130 miles per hour in her Camaro SS, would wake up sobbing after dreams of herself imprisoned in chambers and tunnels and mine shafts.

  Can't do it! she thought again.

  Then sighed through her regulator and pulled herself into the narrow space, turned left as best she could and kicked her way deeper into hell.

  God, I hate this.

  Nine hundred pounds of pressure on her gauge.

  She eased forward, moving along the shaft that was just wide enough to accommodate her and her tank. Ten feet. Her tank suddenly caught on something above her. She fought down the shiver of panic, clamping her teeth furiously on the mouthpiece of her regulator. Rotating slowly, she found the wire that had snagged her and she freed herself. She turned back and found another blue-white face protruding through another doorway of the dumbwaiter shaft.

  Oh, my Lord . . .

  The man's eyes, opaque as jelly, stared in her direction, glowing in the bright light. His hair rose outward from his head like the coat of a porcupine.

  Sachs eased forward and kicked slowly past the man, struggling to ignore the chilling sensation of the crown of his head brushing her body as she swam past.