Davis entered his office to see his giant map with a link-analysis chart staring back at him, yarn stretching between various note cards: Tanzania, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Cameroon. Everything was connected. Or was it? It didn’t matter either way, because only one connection would carry any weight for Director Wilkes. Only one connection could save Davis’s career.

He reached for a card over Sumatra, Indonesia, that read “Jemaah Islamiyah.” J.I. was a legitimate national security concern ever since the 2002 Bali bombing killed seven Americans, and it was all the agency was interested in. The J.I. card had a piece of red yarn connecting it to Macau, demonstrating the Sumatra connection Davis had sold them on. And it was bullshit. The tiger couldn’t have come from anywhere near Sumatra.

Davis suddenly began ripping all the yarn and photos off the wall. “Fuck you! And fuck you! And fuck you!” he shouted as he tore the photos into pieces and flung them angrily about the room, then swept all the papers off his desk onto the floor.

He glimpsed his secretary outside his office. She couldn’t hear anything through the glass, but she could see the skinny officer tearing apart the room as he yelled hysterically, letting every shred of pent-up rage loose like a wild animal. He picked up his trash can and hurled it against the wall.

CHAPTER 41 THE FEVER

CHAPTER 41
THE FEVER

hong kong

The dream was always the same: a flowing ocean of grass for a thousand miles. But Knight’s black horse would carry him the distance. It would nourish him with its blood and milk as he traversed infinity on its back. But this time there was no horse, and not a single sign of sentient life.

Knight was now all alone, wading in the sharp, knee-high grass that fought him for each labored step he took. He spun, finding nothing but cold, endless prairie that spanned the horizon in every direction. A sense of panic overwhelmed him. It began in his mouth and crept through his whole body, robbing him of breath as he wandered the empty Mongolian steppe, staggering through the void in terror, toward his inevitable doom.

He awoke from the dream around noon to find himself drenched in sweat except for his mouth, which was chalk dry. He raced to the bathroom, cupping water into his mouth and letting it run down his cheeks like the blood of the horse that had left him to die in his subconscious.

Knight placed a thermometer under his tongue, then gingerly peeled the bandage off his forearm. The gauze resisted, leaving wisps of fiber clinging to his grisly patchwork of stitches.

He pulled the thermometer and checked it. He had been well above a hundred degrees for the past week. Finally, he was back down to ninety-nine. He breathed a sigh of relief as he swept his pharmacy shopping bag and all its contents into the wastebasket.