That night, Cobus returned to the safe house he had rented. He imported the photos from his phone onto his laptop and ran the images through translation software with optical character recognition. Scanning the patchy translation of the boy’s medical chart, he was horrified to discover that the weakened child had nearly perished from strychnine poisoning. The revelation kicked Cobus in the stomach. Though he had done plenty of evil in his life, he had always been able to justify it with his simple moral code: You’re either in the game or not, and if you’re in the game, you accept that you’re playing for the ultimate stakes. Whether a poacher pulled the trigger or not, if he wandered into Kruger with a rifle, he was in the game. Same with the gun-toting sixteen-year-old Iraqi Cobus had dropped from five hundred yards on a ridgeline, or the Vietnamese diplomat who formed an alliance with a Mozambican kingpin. And by Cobus’s math, anyone who knowingly purchased the horn of a dead rhino was also in the game. But the young Chinese boy fighting the ultimate fight against a horrible disease was no more in the game than the animals in Kruger that Cobus had sworn to protect. It violated everything he stood for, and no amount of moral gymnastics could justify the suffering he had inflicted on the innocent creature. In the name of the greater good, he had become nothing more than a human poacher.

He rose and aggressively paced the tiny cage of an apartment, trapped in his own horrible sins, huffing about in an infinite loop. Just like an animal in captivity, he was suffering from zoochosis as the prolonged stress of being trapped caused him to exhibit repetitive stereotypic behavior. He marched back and forth, rubbing his face and scratching at the top of his head.

Finally, Cobus exploded, driving his fist into the wall, rebreaking the bones in his right hand that had been crushed in the brick-slinging mayhem at the docks. The pain sent a wave of electricity from his skull to his feet, forcing him to slump against the wall just to support his own weight.

Knight parked outside a run-down apartment block in the Taipa district of Macau. Nearly every balcony of the thirty stories that towered over him was strung with laundry—the flags of the tenements. Though the evening was cool, he was drenched in sweat and his hands shook.