He pulled up to the Sands Casino, where he valeted his rental car, then proceeded to the taxi line, carrying an envelope addressed to a “MR. LAO” under his arm. The Sands seemed to fit the character he was playing—an American tourist in Macau—and the request he would be making to potential drivers would not seem unusual in this particular context.

Knight made his way to the front of the taxi line and ducked his head in the driver’s window. “Hey, buddy, do you know any places where I can find young girls?” he asked. The first driver waved him off, so he proceeded down the line, and it wasn’t long before Knight found himself in the back of an old Toyota Corolla pulling away from the casino.

In reality, Knight had no interest in young girls this evening. Rather, he was looking for someone to do an errand for him—someone who wouldn’t ask questions if the price was right—and soliciting prostitutes was an effective moral litmus test. This cabbie would do just fine.

Shortly after they pulled away, Knight asked the driver if he could make a brief detour. “I need to deliver an envelope,” he said.

After hanging up with Ben Willmore at US Fish and Wildlife, Knight had tracked down an address for Pei Exotic Pets in Macau. According to his online map, it was only five minutes away. Knight needed to find out everything he could about their operation.

Across the harbor, on the island of Taipa, Cobus had just arrived at Wan’s warehouse. It had taken thirty hours to get there from Mpumalanga Airport in rural South Africa. He had made a point of taking a longer route that connected to Macau through Qatar and Malaysia, avoiding the tighter customs of the Beijing or Hong Kong ports of entry. He came straight from the Macau International Airport to the warehouse, where the Sun Yee On triads still insisted on frisking him. Though the boss was increasingly developing a bond with his fellow apex predator, he had instructed Broken Tooth and his security not to take any chances with Cobus. Cobus was also taking his own security precautions by insisting that he worked alone, never revealing that Lawrence was aiding him from the South Africa side. Cobus knew he had to be indispensable to Wan. Otherwise, the triad leader would circumvent Cobus and have him dispensed with.

Cobus set his suitcase on the table and removed the clothes and pair of shoes he’d packed inside. He then ripped open the false bottom he had painstakingly sewn shut the morning before.

Inside the secret compartment were bricks of powdered horn—the fifth shipment of its kind that Cobus had personally delivered. Broken Tooth took the bricks from Cobus and placed them on a scale. They weighed four kilos to the gram, just as Cobus had promised. Broken Tooth handed the bricks to Wan’s foot soldiers, who immediately set to work cutting them into smaller packets and stamping them with his trademark dragon logo.