He searched for the elevator, only to find its door crisscrossed with red masking tape. Clammy and feverish, he struggled up the stairwell, hauling himself by the bannister. By the time he reached the landing on the eleventh floor, his shaky legs could barely carry him. Ever since he returned from Thakhek, Knight had been running a temperature of 103 degrees and couldn’t keep food down. The sleeve of his white dress shirt was stained rust-colored from the pus and blood that oozed through the dressings. He had recently replaced the bandage he got at a Laotian roadside clinic, where a young nurse had stitched up his cut. The fever was likely just from the infection in his arm, and he tried to push the worst-case scenario out of his mind.

Knight approached a door and knocked. It cracked open an inch, and Cobus’s eye appeared above the security chain. Cobus unlocked the door and let Knight inside his spartan apartment, sealing both of them inside.

“You look like shit, bru,” Cobus told him.

“Truth in advertising,” Knight replied as he beelined for the sink. He took a glass from Cobus’s drying rack and filled it with murky tap water.

Cobus kept a safe distance from his sick guest. “What was that disease your tiger cub died of in Miami?” he asked, making no effort to hide his assumption about Knight’s illness.

Desperately thirsty, Knight chugged the water, then answered. “Feline leukemia.”

“You said it doesn’t jump to humans.”

“I just have a bacterial infection in my arm,” Knight said, though unconvinced of it himself.

Glancing around the apartment, he noticed a bucket of gopher poison on a shelf, confirming his suspicions about Cobus’s dark gambit. “I gather that the triads don’t know you live here.”

“I keep a nicer place across town that they know about. This is just where I work. Why did you want to see me?”

Knight had reached out to Cobus after investigating the tiger farms. He had grown concerned about the business venture he was about to enter into, but not to the point that he was willing to walk away from an eight-figure opportunity. Knight needed to know the depth of the depravity he was wading into, and what kind of moral backflips would be required to justify his participation. “How much do you know about their operation?” he asked the South African.

“Everything.”

“Show me.”

Cobus withdrew a stack of folders from his desk. One of them brimmed with maps. “These are the locations of all the farms.”

Knight flipped through the maps, recognizing the locations of the farms in Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, many of which were buried in the jungle, like illegal narcotics-growing operations.

Cobus withdrew more documents. “Shipping manifests,” he said. He then handed Knight several folders. Knight opened the top one to find a photo of Lee. “These are dossiers on all their major players.”