“No, but I wasn’t looking. Those are very dangerous men. I am not doing that again.” Knight ignored the driver as he found several improbable seconds of footage of a sturdily built white man standing next to Broken Tooth and a scale loaded with powdery white bricks.
“There was no Mr. Lao, was there?” the driver finally realized. “You made the whole story up to use me.”
“Must have been the wrong address,” Knight said breezily.
The driver glowered at him in the rearview mirror. “You lie to me! You try to get me killed!”
“You did good.” Knight tossed a Hong Kong $1,000 note forward between the seats. It fluttered onto the driver’s lap.
The driver asked Knight to get out of his car, but Knight informed him that he had another task for him and that it would be financially worth his time. For now, he told the driver, they would park down the street and wait.
CHAPTER 22
SOLICITATION
Cobus made his way through the old town of Macau, toward the red-light district. He knew that the game he was playing couldn’t last forever and that the walls would soon close in. He approached the Emperor Sauna, where he planned to tell Wan that he had a massive shipment of horn coming in from his contact in Mozambique. What he wouldn’t be telling Wan was that it would be his last shipment. Nor would he mention that the entire shipment would be laced with strychnine.
Though Cobus had thus far limited his exposure by poisoning only a fraction of the horn he was bringing in, there was no getting around the fact that all the poisoned horn he had supplied could ultimately be traced to a single South African supplier. As soon as Wan connected those dots, he wouldn’t settle for just an arm. He would want Cobus’s head as well. But if Cobus could maintain the lie just a little bit longer, he could inflict maximum harm on the syndicate, and on the demand for rhino horn, without being harmed himself.
His ultimate act would be to adulterate the remaining forty kilos of horn he and Lawrence had taken from Kruger and flood the Chinese market with it—enough to poison thousands of people—then take the $2 million he had amassed and disappear.
Once he was safely back in Africa, Cobus intended to use the money to purchase a canned hunting reserve in Zimbabwe and convert it to a private game park. Perhaps, he could even entice his good friend Lawrence to come join him and run ranger operations.
A security guard in a suit unhooked the velvet rope and ushered Cobus to the VIP area without a word. Heading upstairs, Cobus prayed under his breath that no one had connected the initial wave of poisonings to him quite yet.
As Knight reviewed the footage the taxi driver had taken for him, he had been less interested in the evidence of international crimes and much more interested in the sole white face he had seen in the background. Knight knew that the Sun Yee On triad was all Chinese nationals, and putting pressure on the Chinese to arrest their own people would be an arduous task. Their Caucasian compatriot, however, likely came from a country with strong diplomatic ties to the States—one that US Fish and Wildlife could undoubtedly lean on to clean up an animal trafficker traveling under their flag. And the Chinese would have no problem deporting a vile foreigner who had come to their shores to commit crimes. Though Knight didn’t plan to make good on any of these threats, he could use them as leverage on the white man, to find out where the triad had sourced the tiger that wiped out SafariWorld’s feline population. For that reason, Knight had instructed the cab driver to follow Cobus when he left the triad warehouse at the port.