Davis suddenly felt naked in front of the room—again. Soon, the meeting would adjourn and they would begin mocking him the second they rose from their seats. The jerks wouldn’t even pay him the courtesy of waiting until he was out of earshot.

“But I would like to put four agents under you,” Wilkes continued, to Davis’s surprise. “Would that be enough to get your Animal Trafficking Section up and running?”

Davis lit up with a smile so big, he felt that his face might crack. His luck had finally turned.

CHAPTER 50 THE CAGE

CHAPTER 50
THE CAGE

miami, florida

Knight wore a tan linen suit as he pressed through the crowd of tourists glistening with sweat and sunscreen in the muggy midday sun. The tail end of SafariWorld’s summer season was back in full swing, and things had returned to normal, thanks in large part to the fact the guests had no idea how grave the outbreak at the zoo had been. Or that the tiger deaths were connected to the deadly outbreak in Laos that had claimed thirty-seven human lives in the previous weeks. Those links were never made, nor could they be if Knight and Davis’s gambit was going to hold water. As far as the world was concerned, the infected cub had come from a national park in Sumatra, via Macau.

The insurance man found his way to the railing of the tiger exhibit. Beside him, scores of tourists observed the adult cats in their pens. They all had been procured through reputable suppliers and rescue shelters Knight could personally vouch for. They seemed as happy as they could be, given that they were wild animals that had evolved to roam thousands of miles in a natural habitat they would never see.

“Mr. Knight.”

He turned as Kate Henley, the mammal curator, joined him at the railing. Knight had been expecting her. The investigation was over, and he had come to SafariWorld today to close it out. But at the moment of Ms. Henley’s arrival, Knight wasn’t thinking about the insurance claim at all. He was focused on the pen that once held the infected tiger cub, which was now empty.

“Where’s the cub?” he asked.

“We put it down.”

The news hit him hard. His eyes lingered on the large toy ball the cub had left behind.

“You could have kept it isolated.”

Kate shrugged off the cold reality. “It wasn’t worth the money. At the end of the day, this place is a business. It’s all about the bottom line,” she lamented.

Knight struggled to process the death of the innocent young creature. He sensed that in some cosmic way, he was complicit in its annihilation.

“What did your investigation turn up?” she asked.