The men dismounted from the Honda and rolled it deep into a thicket, then covered it with a green tarp. The bike likely wouldn’t be found for several days, and even if it turned up sooner, it wouldn’t matter, since it had been purchased for cash across the border and sterilized of its plates and VIN number.

The riders removed their helmets as they got inside the black pickup.

“Do you think they know which direction we went?” Lawrence asked.

“We’re clean,” Cobus assured his accomplice.

They drove straight to the garage at Cobus’s house in White River. Cobus emptied their bags on a table, and the two men lined up the horns in four long rows. Seen all together under a naked lightbulb, it was an astonishing amount of horn, worth millions. How many millions, they wouldn’t know until it was all weighed, but it would be a nearly incomprehensible amount of money for two men of their station in life.

“Are you sure about this?” Lawrence asked the man who had convinced him to go along with his criminal endeavor.

Cobus stared at the horn, his resolve hardening. He was sure.

He would infect them with the darkness that he carried.

CHAPTER 16
TIGER COUNTRY

35,000 feet above the pacific ocean

Davis slid his shoes off and balled his toes as he reclined the two inches his economy-class middle seat would allow. Over the previous eight hours, he had worked his way through a thick stack of OSINT research, and he needed a break. With no magazines of his own, he opened an in-flight shopping catalog, thumbing through the advertisements for replica swords and premium pool floats. It wasn’t that Davis had forgotten to bring anything to read—it was that Davis was a man with no personal interests to read about. Several years back, his doctor had advised him to try taking up a hobby to help with stress reduction. Davis tried knitting, online ukulele lessons, and even painting but had failed to stick with any of them. Then he was told to get a dog—that fucking dog with its financially crippling irritable bowels. Davis was also a man without vices—not out of principle, but because he had failed at those too. He had sworn off alcohol in college after getting drunk and embarrassing himself at a rush party for a fraternity that later rejected him, and the smell of tobacco smoke always triggered his sensory issues. And as a young boy, Nancy Reagan had instilled in him a fear of drugs that stayed with him until he joined the agency, at which point he wouldn’t have been able to experiment with cannabis even if he wanted to.

Most recently, Davis had decided to take up mindfulness meditation after seeing a news piece about it on TV. He finished munching his snack pack of airline pretzels, then chased it with the last of his ginger ale. He popped in his earbuds and booted up a ten-minute meditation, hoping it might quiet his mind and allow him to drift off to sleep like the large Eastern European snoring on his shoulder.