“That’s what I thought at first,” Broken Tooth replied. “But the people who were poisoned bought the horn from three separate dealers. The only thing they all had in common is that the horn came from us.”

Wan approached a stack of packages of ground rhino horn on a table. Somewhere along the supply chain was a snake, and he needed to trace it to wherever in the chain it was hiding. “Did any of our men touch these packages yet?”

“They just came in last night,” Broken Tooth said. “The only person who has touched them is the South African.”

Wan carried one of the packages to the wall of caged exotic animals awaiting distribution. Most of them were diurnal and were sleeping. Snapping open his knife, he cut into the package. He stepped over to a small cage containing a live pangolin, then dropped a pinch of rhino horn powder in its water dish, mixing the powder and water together with his knife. “We will know the truth soon enough.”

The men waited and watched over the next hour as the slow-moving little ball of scales stuck out its long, slithering tongue and lapped from its water bowl. As its body processed the liquid, the creature began to spasm and curled up into a ball, quivering with each convulsion. Within minutes, it lay sprawled on its side, little toothless mouth agape, its long tongue dangling on the floor of the cage.

Wan stared at the carcass, boiling with rage at the revelation that Cobus had delivered him poisoned product.

Broken Tooth turned to him. “What do you want to do?”

CHAPTER 43 THE ACCOMPLICE

CHAPTER 43
THE ACCOMPLICE

kowloon

Knight scrolled through the e-mails on his laptop as he worked the phone in his suite at the Peninsula Hotel. “Knock off a hundred grand, and I could take the whole lot off your hands,” he told the man from Houston on the other end of the line.

The man knew Knight and knew that he always delivered. Knight hung up and added the inventory to a growing list of tigers on his notepad: Sumatrans, Amurs, Bengals, Malayans, Indochinese. He noted whether the cats were male or female, breeding age or cubs.

If his business venture with Lee was to succeed, he needed to procure dozens of tigers within the month. It was dusk in Hong Kong, which meant the breeders stateside would all be starting their days. Knight had carpet-bombed the breeding community with inquiries, and now the e-mails were pouring in: “Pet Tigers for Sale.”

Knight had a reputation for operating in moneyed circles, and all the breeders were chasing him with their best product. He clicked through photos of cubs with heads and paws too big for their tiny bodies. The photos were meant to tug at a buyer’s heartstrings: a cub hiding in a laundry bin, nursing on a bottle, playing with a bulldog, licking its owner’s face . . .