His phone buzzed with a text. The text contained only two words. “Mischief Reef,” it read.

Krieger ran a cleaning patch through the barrel of his father’s rifle, a single shot .416 Rigby. Great white hunter Harry Selby had carried the venerated rifle into the long grass, and Krieger’s father, a sometime client of Selby’s, had purchased it from him. A double rifle gave you a second opportunity—good for the animal, good for the hunter—but Krieger’s father believed that having only one shot intensified a man’s concentration. “Puts your heart inside the bullet, Terry,” his father used to say. Krieger found that to be true, and he applied his old man’s philosophy to other aspects of his life. He pursued one-of-a-kind business deals. Deals with genuine consequences. Deals that, if he missed, could turn and gore him.

He intended to use the rifle on a big buffalo in the morning. Zoeller claimed it was a legendary animal. “He’s called Minotaur, Tots. Very grumpy.” All the big animals had names now, apparently.

Krieger looked at the big male lion carcass hanging by its Achilles tendons from a skinning rack. Blaze would not be joining tomorrow’s hunt. In the end, he had been wrong about her.

THE PURGE

Pretoria, South Africa

The next morning, Hungry drove Klay and Tenchant to an industrial stretch on the outskirts of Pretoria, empty at this early hour of all vehicles but one. “Ncube’s spy,” Hungry said, pointing to a white Corsa van parked along the curb.

Klay saw the driver’s face in the van’s side-view mirror as they passed. He was asleep.

“Fortunately, they do not like to exert themselves.” She circled the block and parked in the back. “We’ll go in another way.” She led them to a brick building next door. A sign beside the entrance read, “WhiteOut Industro Laundry.”

Inside, Hungry nodded hello to a man holding a pad and pencil, recording stacks of folded bedsheets. “Abby. My radical friend,” Hungry said as they passed. “We grew up in Soweto together.”

She pushed a laundry cart out of their path, then opened a heavy door and ushered them into the building next door. “Welcome to the nest,” she said. “Sorry for the . . . everything. The building used to be a garage for diesel trucks. We’re up there.” Hungry pointed to a lighted doorway at the end of a catwalk that ran along the second floor’s back wall.

The garage was two stories of open space to accommodate trucks, illuminated from above by a row of filthy windows. A graveyard of greasy old truck parts and big jointed tools filled the floor. It stank of motor oil.

“Watch your step,” she said, taking hold of a metal pipe railing. As he climbed the bar grate stairs, Klay heard snippets of voices arguing.

A man’s voice said, “. . . for your own good, Miss Edna . . .”