Tariq
Tariq is a long-tailed macaque and an intelligence analyst with ZSI in We Can Fix Pawbert. He is introduced in the W-Series episode "Mawlaysia" as the compromised asset a four-mammal tactical team is sent overseas to recover.
Background
Tariq is young, forty pounds, and small even for a macaque. He grew up in Zootopia's Rainforest District among walkways and cable systems, and that upbringing carries him through his own episode. ZSI posted him to the tropical port city of Pawang, Mawlaysia, eight months before his extraction, to watch the money moving through the port authority. His reports to Director Costa were unremarkable until the last one.
Personality
He is a meticulous analyst and a cautious one, flagging the anomalous transactions in his final report without naming the sovereign wealth fund behind them. Three days of hiding leave him frightened enough to say so out loud, and angry underneath it at being hunted through his own kind of terrain.
Series History
W-Series
In "Mawlaysia", Tariq traces billions draining out of a sovereign wealth fund through shell companies in Pawang's free trade zone, following the routing until it reaches real property in Savanna Central. Documenting the Zootopia end gets him noticed. Private security empties his cover office; he goes out the window and upward, into the canopy district built for primates, and wedges himself into a maintenance crawlspace eighteen inches wide with his hard drive in one paw and an infected cut on his forearm.
Neagley finds him there on the third day. Their way down is a cargo gondola, and the descent becomes a running fight with silat-trained primates dropping onto the platform from the cable overhead — including the moment Tariq yells for the brake lever in Mawlayan and Neagley hears him announce his own name instead. He runs the plaza behind her, past O'Donnell, and boards the ship before the refueling window closes.
On the voyage home he perches on the foredeck rail beside Reacher and says he means to request a transfer — not out of ZSI, but home, to monitor foreign ports from the Rainforest District. Pawang looked near enough to home to fool him and smelled and sounded like nowhere he belonged.
Key Relationships
Frances Neagley
Neagley reaches Tariq alone, in terrain none of her team can enter, and tells him flatly that he is going to make it. He reads the certainty for what it is: she has already written him into the plan, and comfort has nothing to do with it.