“So you consider yourself an animal lover?” the host inquired.

“Animal protector.”

“Do you have any pets yourself?”

“I’m on the road too much to have anything counting on me back home. Properly taking care of animals is harder work than people think.”

Davis’s secretary poked her head into his office. Dropping a small stack of printouts on his desk, she said, “This is everything I could find on Sumatran tiger populations.”

Thumbing through the documents, he saw that because the tigers were such elusive animals, most of the recent sightings were from at least seven years ago, and that many researchers questioned how up-to-date the population estimates really were.

“India, Siberia, Sumatra,” Knight continued on the video clip. “These are the last places tigers can be found in their natural habitat. At this point, there are more tigers in private collections in the US than in the wild in the entire world. That makes these animals extremely valuable. And that’s where my company comes in. We protect this precious investment.”

“What about breeding programs to reintroduce the captive tigers back into the wild?”

Knight shook his head. “It would be great if it worked, but no big cat has ever been successfully reintroduced in the wild.”

“Literally? Not one?”

“Other animals, yes, but not cats. That means once tigers are gone from the wild, they’re never coming back.”

“And how soon will that be?”

“Maybe a decade.”

“I went to Princeton,” the interviewer noted. “So you’re predicting that our mascot, which has always been a symbol of strength and power, will exist only in cages.”

“Princeton won’t be alone. Most of the exotic wild animal mascots are on their way out the door: panthers, bears, wolves.”

Even Davis, a city creature who never thought much about wild animals, was shocked. It seemed that every few years, he would read something about how the tigers and polar bears and elephants were in dire straits, yet, somehow, they were still in the wild. He had grown numb to the environmentalists’ cries that the sky was falling. Now, it seemed, it finally was.

As he worked his way through the Internet articles about Sumatran tigers, he plotted the various populations on his map of J.I. operations, searching for places of intersection. One area of overlap emerged as the only plausible lead: a small section of forest in the remote southern tip of Sumatra. Reports as recent as five years ago estimated close to fifty tigers remaining. Aside from having the island’s most credible surviving tiger population, the national park where they lived was a short drive from where Riduan Dwikarna had operated his terror cell. Finally, Davis had a lead with some legs—that is, if the OSINT was reliable.

He fired off a message to his point of contact at Guantanamo, asking her to confirm his findings with the prisoner. By the next morning, Riduan had assured the officer that yes, indeed, the tigers they were sourcing came from Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park.