“That’s okay.” Knight plugged the camera into his laptop and began playing the POV footage from the warehouse. At first glance, he knew he had just what he needed. Images of wild cats and other endangered species flickered past. It was just the kind of place Knight would expect to find counterfeit Sumatran rescue tigers. “Did you see any tigers in there?”

“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

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.