“Where is Nimpini?” Pham asked, his voice trembling with fear.
Cobus placed a heavy bag in Pham’s lap. Pham eyed it nervously, probably wondering whether it contained the head of his former supplier—the weight was about right, and the contents were hard and curved like a skull.
“Nimpini’s in jail in South Africa,” Cobus said. “I’m the new supplier.”
The nervous young embassy official cracked the bag enough to glimpse a large single horn. The wide base of the cone still had dried blood and gristly pieces of nasal cartilage clinging to it from where the poachers had hacked it out of the rhino’s snout.
“There’s more,” Cobus told Pham. “A lot more.”
“How much?”
“Too much for you to smuggle in your dainty diplomatic pouches. I want to meet your buyer.”
“I can’t do that. The contact talks only to me.”
“Not anymore. Your services are no longer needed.”
Cobus watched the wheels turn in Pham’s head as he tried to run the calculus between the carrot on offer, and the potentially lethal stick if he refused.
“This horn is for you,” Cobus continued. “Two kilos—it’s worth one hundred and fifty thousand US. Call it a finder’s fee for making the introduction to your contact up north.”
“How will you transport the horn without me?” Pham wondered.
“I’ll deliver it personally.”
“What happens if I refuse your offer?”
“My associates and I will torture you with drills and power saws as long as it takes for you to give up your buyer, which I’m guessing won’t take long. Then we’ll burn your corpse to ashes so there will be no way for your family to identify the body.”
Pham’s face drained of blood, his expression one of abject terror.
“Pull up the number,” Cobus said. “I’ll tell you what to say.”
Pham picked up his phone from the cup holder, his hand trembling.
CHAPTER 18
WILD, WILD EAST
macau
Cobus stood at the window in the front of the hydrofoil ferry, peering through his own haggard reflection at the obsidian-black ocean stretched out before him. Surrounded by dozens of tourists dressed for a night out on the town, he was keenly aware that he looked sloppy and out of place in his faded jeans, flannel shirt, and loose-fitting green military-style jacket. In the distance, constellations of lights began to rise from the South China Sea, gradually resolving themselves into buildings and construction cranes.
Perhaps no city in the world had changed as much in the past twenty years. Macau had originally been built up as a trading post by the Portuguese. Though the Chinese and Portuguese cultures had been stirred together in Macau for centuries, the two were ultimately oil and water. The only area where the two worlds truly blended to create something new was the food—hot, greasy, and exploding with flavor.
On the eve of the millennium, the colonial port city had reverted to Chinese control, though it operated under a different system from most of mainland China. It became a special administrative region, making it the only place in all of China where gambling was legal. Overnight, it turned into the Vegas of the East. And just as the mob had used its illicit gambling expertise to build Vegas, the first homesteaders in Macau’s emerging casino industry were the triads, or “black societies,” as the ruthless gangsters were known. An entire ecosystem of prostitution, gambling, and narcotics blossomed overnight. Casinos like the towering pineapple-shaped Grand Lisboa offered the Chinese elite everything they couldn’t get on the strictly regulated mainland. By 2006, the former Portuguese port town had surpassed Vegas by every metric.