“So you don’t think the tiger came from Sumatra?”
“I assume you’ve been there. There are no tigers where there’s no habitat.”
“If the tiger didn’t come from there, where did it come from?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Knight studied Davis, his curiosity nagging at him. He couldn’t picture this mousy guy with a gun if he were shooting water balloons at a carnival. “What, exactly, do you do at the CIA?”
“I’m a money laundering analyst.”
“You get a degree for that?”
“The agency recruited me from Wall Street after 9/11.”
“Talk about a pay cut.”
Knight hesitated as he moved toward the door. Maybe he had read Davis wrong. Maybe Davis really was one of those true believers who got all weepy when he heard the national anthem at baseball games.
“I have a plane to catch. You want my professional opinion? Stop wasting my hard-earned tax dollars. The next 9/11 won’t be coming from a bunch of ponytailed herp fanatics at a reptile convention. It’s bad for business.”
Davis blocked Knight, desperation creeping into his voice. Knight had answers of great import to Davis, both professionally and personally. “I just need to show that dollars from animal trafficking are supporting known terror groups. Can you help me out? Please.”
For a fleeting moment, Knight regretted the snarky tone he had used. This guy had given up a solid six-figure job with a promising future to fight injustice for low-to-mid five figures. Knight couldn’t help but respect the nobility of it in spite of himself.
“Try ivory. Boko Haram is on your terror watch list, right?”
“Yeah.”
Knight called back as he slipped into the hallway. “Leave your card with my assistant. I’ll text you a guy in Cameroon. You might have some common enemies. Just tell him I sent you.”
Davis reflected on his victory as he watched Knight depart. It was a successful interrogation. He had seen the glimmer of shame when he told Knight he had nobly quit his Wall Street job to join the agency. He then used that shame to create the conditions for Knight to want to help him. From the interviews he had watched online, he also suspected that Knight had a monumental ego, and by feigning desperation, Davis could offer Knight’s ego a win. Knight, the master bullshit detector, had been swayed by a moment of earnest personal revelation about Davis’s past, and decided against his selfish nature to grace Davis with the charity of knowledge and connections. Never mind that Davis had made the whole thing up. He would have to remember that approach if he crossed paths with Knight again.
As Knight tugged his wheelie bag toward a black town car idling on Columbus Circle, he received a call he had been expecting all day from Dr. Lara Klesser. Lara ran the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory in Pretoria, which was the leader in sequencing exotic animal DNA. And in a business where provenance was nine-tenths of the law, that kind of data was invaluable. While Knight’s company relied on all sorts of private labs in its forensic investigations, Lara’s animal DNA lab was the only one of its kind in the world.