THE MASTERMIND 83

you to come work for me. I'll pay you a lot more than what your company makes right now."

"Dude, I don't work for anyone, I work for myself. And as a matter of fact, if you don't stop fucking researching me"—at this point, Donovan said, he had pulled out his gun—"I will put a stop to it."

"There's no need for that," Le Roux said.

"I don't like you, I'm not going to work for you, stay the fuck away from me, you hear me?"

"Okay, I was just trying to give you a job."

"I don't want your fucking job," Donovan said. Then, he told me, he walked out.

A few months later, Donovan said, he noticed his friend and employee Dave Smith driving a nicer car and sporting a new ward- robe. Suspicious, he made some calls and discovered that after Donovan had rejected Le Roux, he'd met Smith and hired him in- stead, at $15,000 a month. "When I found out I said, 'Dude, just man up. If you are working for him, I don't own you, you are free to work for him. Good for you, get the fuck out of my office, and if I ever see you again I'll fucking kill you myself.'"

Smith, by Donovan's account, brought Le Roux Donovan's con- tacts, along with Smith's own international network of military contractors from his time in the United States, Iraq, Liberia, and beyond. With Smith as his right-hand man, hiring teams of merce- naries to do his bidding, Le Roux could now operate freely in the Philippines with little concern for legal repercussions. There was no problem that he couldn't buy his way out of, no law enforce- ment agency that couldn't be captured, no intelligence that was out of reach.

By the time Smith joined, RX Limited was earning Le Roux tens of millions of dollars from prescription drug sales in the United States. But the kid who had once locked himself in his bedroom, losing himself in code, had gone as far as his technical skills could take him. He wanted to be a different kind of businessman, a lord