Davis closed his eyes, and the voice in his ear began to guide him on a body scan, focusing his attention on various parts of his anatomy. The stiller and clearer Davis tried to be, the more he became obsessed with the wet breath of the man next to him condensing on his neck. And then there was the maddening itch on the side of his nose. He tried to “let the sensation pass without judgment,” but he couldn’t. Davis feared he was at risk of failing at this too. Though he was supposed to be focusing on his knees, his lizard brain was skittering all over his body to places where his skin itched unbearably.

Finally, Davis pulled out the earbuds and began scratching all over like his goddamn fleabag rescue dog. When the sensation subsided, he deleted the app from his phone and allowed his anxious thoughts to dance like a dragonfly skipping from lily pad to lily pad.

Forty-eight hours and four layovers after leaving Washington, DC, Davis stepped outside Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in Southern Sumatra. The first snowfall of the year had hit the DC area only a week before, and now he was stepping off into ninety-degree heat with humidity that felt as if he had forgotten to turn on the bathroom fan during a hot shower. His pale skin immediately glistened with sweat, giving him the appearance of a man who had contracted some tropical flu. But Davis had never felt better. Victory—no, vindication—was within his grasp.

He immediately attracted a gaggle of drivers as he headed for the taxi stand. He chose the one with the cleanest-looking car—a Suzuki SUV—and unfolded his map on the hood. He pointed to the spot where the two circles denoting the terrorist and tiger locations overlapped.

“I need to go to this place. Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park.” Davis suspected he was butchering the pronunciation. “I’m looking for tigers.”

The driver nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Come, come. I take you.” He then seized Davis’s wheelie bag and loaded it into the SUV before Davis could commence a negotiation. Whatever the cost, the money didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was that Davis would soon be at the epicenter of J.I.’s trafficking operation. There, he would flash some cash posing as a buyer and see who came out of the woodwork offering Sumatran tigers. It was only a matter of time before he would generate some leads on who was running the animal side of the notorious terrorist organization.

It was a long and circuitous drive to the park—much longer than the satellite imagery would suggest. The SUV’s air conditioner was broken, and though Davis had the windows open, he still felt like a steamed vegetable. As they got deeper into the mountains, the smooth pavement gave way to a dirt road that was pitted with a minefield of deep puddles that had been filled by a tropical downpour that passed through earlier in the day. The SUV bounced past a large trailer truck rumbling downhill in the opposite direction. Davis followed it with his eyes, curious why such a large vehicle would find itself in such a remote stretch of protected forest.