Cobus could see a constellation of data points all gravitationally bound to a single star in Mozambique’s capital. “This number in Maputo?”
Jan nodded. As the new data from Nimpini’s phone continued to populate the map, it, too, orbited the Maputo number. “Looks like he was Nimpini’s buyer as well,” Jan added.
“Where does the horn go after this number in Maputo?”
Jan shook his head. “That’s the big question. After that, it goes down a black hole. No one has ever figured out what happens between this phone number and when it hits the streets in Asia.”
The revelation instantly triggered Cobus’s predatory instincts. “Why not? Who does the number belong to?”
Jan let the waitress pass before answering in a hushed tone, “A consular officer from Vietnam.”
“Why has no one exposed him?”
“He’s politically connected. The guy’s untouchable. There’s no legal way to get at him.”
“I’m not looking for a legal way.”
CHAPTER 14
THE SUMATRA CONNECTION
langley, virginia
Davis knew that his best—and only—shot at connecting animal trafficking to terrorism and thereby getting promoted was to prove that Jemaah Islamiyah was selling wild tigers captured near its base of operations. J.I., as it was known, was the same Southeast Asian extremist Islamic rebel group that Riduan Dwikarna had belonged to. At Guantanamo, Riduan had confirmed the rumors about J.I. being funded by animal trafficking, and now it was on Davis to track down just who in J.I. was sourcing the tigers. The traditional approach of working his way up the supply chain would be laborious and take time he didn’t have. Fortunately, Davis’s research indicated that only a few places in Sumatra still had tigers. Rather than follow the bread crumbs, he decided he would go straight to the bakery.
Davis began by sifting through stacks of CIA reports about all the known J.I. operations in Sumatra. He marked the group’s locations on a map while simultaneously gathering everything he could find out about wild tiger populations in Sumatra, hoping to identify areas where the two might overlap.
Because Indonesia in general, let alone a few tigers on one of its islands, was not a top priority for US intelligence resources, there were no human intelligence resources he could call on in the region, and what little signals intel the agency had was limited to dated satellite imagery. Instead, Davis would have to rely almost exclusively on open-source intelligence, or OSINT. In layman’s terms, this meant surfing Wikipedia pages and perusing articles by self-proclaimed experts whose credibility could not be verified.
In the early hours of his Internet browsing on the topic, a simple search for “Sumatran tigers” had turned up an interview with a slick-looking man in a suit discussing the state of the world’s wild tiger populations. Davis played it in the background as he worked.
The interviewer introduced his guest. “We’re here with Randall Knight, an insurance agent who’s spent his entire life in the business of animals.”
“I’m in the business of keeping animals alive,” Knight clarified.