Audrey left her son engrossed in an Avengers film, which would buy him at least two hours of amusement while she stepped out. She drove across town and double-parked outside the office building at the end of Ko Shing Street. She then slapped a police parking permit on her dashboard so she wouldn’t be towed, and holstered her SIG P250 in case the questions she intended to ask instigated violence. She would ask the old woman who poisoned the horn, and if the old woman didn’t know, she would trace the horn she had purchased up the supply chain to whoever was responsible.

Audrey got out of the unmarked car and entered the building. She strode through the arcade toward the traditional Chinese medicine shop. She peered through the security cage on the door.

The store had been cleared out.

CHAPTER 26 THE MESSAGE

CHAPTER 26
THE MESSAGE

macau

Cobus didn’t know what to expect when Wan Koi called him at midnight. He simply told him to come to the warehouse at the port, no questions asked. At every turn, Cobus had been careful to cover his tracks and backstop his cover story, so it seemed unlikely the triad knew he had tainted a small but meaningful percentage of his shipments with gopher poison. On the other hand, he could think of no other reason they would summon him at a time the triads would normally be pickling their livers and exploiting the women in Wan’s brothels.

Cobus had been trained in counterinterrogation and knew he could handle being tortured if it came to that. His cover was that of a crooked South African moving poached horn, and he had learned long ago in survival school that your cover is blown only on one condition: when you say it is. As long as you maintained the lie, no matter how implausible or outrageous it was, your captors would always have at least 1 percent doubt. And that 1 percent would keep you alive. Cobus knew he could maintain the lie and stay in his circle if his life depended on it.

He went to the docks and entered the warehouse, where he was surprised to find the entire gang assembled. The jittery hum of Wan’s foot soldiers awaiting orders gave Cobus the sense they were mustering for something big. Several of the men took note of the South African, trading comments in Chinese, which Cobus did not take to be flattery. Other triad soldiers began laying out rolls of duct tape and bricks on a table in the center of the room. Those would certainly submerge his body in the silt of the harbor, if that was the plan.

Then a triad placed a large meat cleaver on the table.

Cobus spotted Wan conferring with Broken Tooth. He wondered whether he still had a seat at Wan’s table. Or was he now on the menu?

“What did you call me for?” Cobus asked Wan.