Audrey hung her head and nodded at the doctor’s dismissal of the idea, feeling ashamed that she ever suggested it.

CHAPTER 11
WILLMORE

falls church, virginia

Ben Willmore twisted in his seat to stretch his lower back. Pinned on the wall of his cubicle was the quote “All good things are wild and free,” by Henry David Thoreau. It was ironic that Willmore, who had always loved the outdoors, now found himself chained to a desk. Nonetheless, he still wore the faded cargo pants and tucked-in polo shirt he had worn in the field, and still carried a Benchmade folding knife clipped in his pocket.

On this particular morning, he had been sitting at his desk for three hours straight, perusing dark-web marketplaces with endangered animals for sale. The anonymity of the dark web had made shopping for the rarest, most critically endangered, most illegal animals as easy as shopping on eBay. All you had to do was download Tor Browser, and within minutes you had a direct line into the kingpins and cartel leaders moving wildlife on an industrial scale. The technology was so impenetrable, none of the criminals even bothered with middlemen or code words for their products.

Early in his career, Willmore would have been shocked to come across a pangolin for sale, but now it all seemed so humdrum. The big challenge was tricking the sellers into giving up their identity. This meant baiting the hook correctly and reeling in the fish without scaring it off his line.

His first day on the job, now over a decade ago, Willmore’s boss had warned him of the number one rule of animal enforcement: Get out before the commercialization of wildlife hardens you so much that you accept it. The fish in the oceans and rivers were being depleted, but the fish Willmore was targeting seemed to be in endless supply. Though he was proud of the work he did in Special Operations at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, deep down, Willmore could feel himself inching closer to the precipice of apathy.

The phone rang. He checked his caller ID and recognized Knight’s number. He had known men like Knight when he worked as a fly-fishing guide on the Snake River, outside Jackson Hole. Situational conservationists, he called them. Willmore always kept his defenses up when Knight called. He suspected that Knight thought himself smarter than he, and also suspected that Knight probably was. But both men trafficked in information, so there could be symbiosis.

“What can you tell me about Pei Exotic Pets in Macau?” Knight asked.

“Pei, huh?” Willmore rubbed his weathered baseball cap against his weathered brow, the name striking a chord. “Can’t tell you much.”

Two hundred miles away, Knight rocked back in his leather office chair, looking out at Central Park from his metal-and-glass perch. “What if I told you they procured a Sumatran rescue tiger for a US zoo?”

“Ha!” Willmore laughed. “Pei Exotics selling a rescue tiger—that would be something.”