“Listen to me, Kev. The next wave of cuts is coming any day, and you don’t want to be looking for a chair when the music stops. You need a plan—a real one.”

But Davis did have a real plan, and he was about to put it into effect. He braced himself for battle, then pushed through the doors.

Davis felt that it was going well. He had never delivered a presentation to a director-level meeting, let alone at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which was Mount Olympus for case officers. He tried to project confidence, and thanks to the mercy of optical physics, he couldn’t see the anxious boredom on the faces of the attendees through the wall of light cast by the projector beaming his PowerPoint deck. The officers checked messages, tapped pens, all of them having a million places to be besides here.

Davis’s years on Wall Street before joining the agency had honed his graphic design skills, and he was confident that at the very least, his charts looked professional and sold the magnitude of the threat.

“Animal trafficking is a ten-billion-dollar industry, making it the second-largest illicit market after drugs, just ahead of arms dealing—”

A voice cut him off. “Look, we can all agree that it’s real sad for these furry little animals. But we’re the agency, not the park rangers.”

Davis found the source of the objection: Ron Nelson. Shit. Nelson was a throat-slitter, a political animal within the agency who had hitched himself to the right star early on. And that star was Director Wilkes, the avuncular CTC chief, reclining in his seat at the head of the table.

Davis dug in, having rehearsed his answer should objections arise concerning the CIA’s mission. “We’ve all seen terrorists benefiting from commodities under their control, whether it’s oil in Syria or heroin in Kashmir. Where do you think all that money from animal trafficking goes? It finances terror attacks like the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.”

Davis pulled up a grainy CCTV video of African men with AK-47s slaughtering shoppers. He continued, hitting the audience with more images: Janjaweed death squads on horseback in Sudan, Joseph Kony’s child soldiers in Congo, Maoist rebels in Nepal. He presented the theory du jour in the conservation community: that many of the worst terrorists in the world had tentacles into the illicit animal trade. Even Hillary Clinton had publicly drawn the connection. Davis stammered as he tried to defend himself before Nelson cut him off again.

“Bad people do bad things in bad places. This doesn’t establish a causal relationship or even signify that the two are related.”

Director Wilkes finally weighed in for the first time, and Davis stood at attention, trying to project confidence he didn’t have. Wilkes knew that good leads could come from unlikely places. Hell, Saddam had been apprehended through tracking fish sandwiches. But even by the “fish-sandwich standard,” Davis’s case seemed thin.

“Do you have any substantive leads?”