Klay heard himself and paused. When he was starting out with The Sovereign, he had resisted getting emotionally involved in his stories’ victims. His interest was limited to how and where animals or their parts were being trafficked. One day Eady had pulled him aside. “You have to see the animals in the wild, Tom. Get to know what you’re working to protect.” The old man had handed him a plane ticket to Tanzania. One evening during that trip, driving back to camp, Klay noticed a lone elephant standing among the trees. The light had fallen and the gray matriarch was nearly invisible among the trees’ bare branches. Something caught his eye. He turned in his seat and realized an enormous herd of elephants was lined up shoulder to shoulder along the road, just one tree deep in the bush. An entire society had been watching him, just a few feet away, and he’d almost missed it. Over the years, when he needed reminding why he did what he did, he thought about that evening.

Klay looked at Tenchant. “Tell Maggie we’ll do a quick game drive.”

“Excellent,” Tenchant replied, typing.

“It’s important to see what you’re working to protect,” Klay added, but Tenchant wasn’t listening. He was focused on his note.

Under a hot shower, Klay thought about Hungry. He thought about truth and lies, and who he was and who he hoped to be. Maybe she could handle the truth about him—or, more accurately, the lie. She’d hate him for his dishonesty. Dishonesty was betrayal—he knew that—but maybe she would see his lies differently after he told her what he’d been working to protect . . . No. He could not put her at risk like that. Their only chance was for him to quit. Once he was out, they could start over. He didn’t know the outcome, but he did know the sequence. Quitting came first.

He was drying himself when he heard Tenchant exclaim, “Holy shit!”

He poked his head out of the bathroom. “What?”

“Look at this!”

Klay pulled on the hotel bathrobe. “What is it?”

Tenchant spun his laptop around to show him a photograph of a large group of people standing on the steps outside The Sovereign building.

“We missed the staff photo,” Klay said, getting dressed. “No big deal.”

“Look.”

Klay buckled his belt and looked again. Sharon Reif was standing on the third step, in the middle of the photograph, wearing a white safari shirt. Porfle stood below her, grinning feverishly.

“The fuck are they all wearing?”

“Safari Fridays,” Tenchant said.

“Safari what?”

Everyone in the photograph wore a safari shirt complete with epaulets and a blue chest patch. Journalists wore tan, support staff dark green, management brown. Only Reif and two people Klay didn’t recognize wore white. They looked like a troop of Cub Scouts.