Knight departed and caught another taxi back to the Sands, where he checked into a room. The moment the business center in the casino opened the next morning, he stuck a Post-It note on the baggie with “PEI EXOTIC PETS” written in Sharpie and overnighted it to Lara Klesser’s lab at the University of Pretoria for testing. He hoped she might be able to give him some information on the source of the horn the white man had smuggled into Macau—information that might be useful should Knight want to squeeze the man for information.

CHAPTER 23 THE MONEY

CHAPTER 23
THE MONEY

Cobus sipped a Heineken as the dealer swept the cards off the table and dealt a new hand. Wearing a faded T-shirt and jeans, Cobus looked out of place in this remote section of the casino, which was populated almost exclusively with Chinese in couture attire. The marble hallway, located far from the bustling baccarat tables and slot machines of the main floor, was lined with luxurious VIP gambling rooms that could be rented for private junkets. Because China allowed only $3,200 worth of yuan to be moved out of the mainland at a time (and $50,000 total annually), this sort of private backroom game had become a popular way for China’s elite to move larger sums of money out of the country. Yuan would go in, and dollars would come out, deposited directly into foreign accounts. The practice was so prolific that in 2013, the Sands casino chain was fined $47 million for allowing a narco-trafficker to launder tens of millions of dollars through the Macau Venetian. But this did little to deter the billion-dollar gray market that flourished in the labyrinthine back corridors of Macau’s casinos.

The only other people at Cobus’s table were the dealer and a young, slim Chinese gambler wearing Gucci sunglasses, and earbuds connected to a phone in his pocket. A tattoo of a tiger crawled up the gap in the neck of his shiny tailored shirt.

The game was Texas hold ’em, and Cobus glanced down to see he’d been dealt a two and a four. It was a proper dog-shit hand, made worse by the three cards the dealer laid down on the flop. Cobus took a pull of his beer, then pushed a tall stack of chips forward, raising. Without a moment’s consideration, his young Chinese opponent folded, shoving his stack to Cobus’s ever-growing pile.