Brazilian partners to evaluate the location. They'd travel to Cebu overnight on one of Le Roux's yachts.

The next morning Le Roux picked up Oz at the hotel in his BMW. They stopped for breakfast at McDonald's, then headed west toward the coast, to the town of Subic, where Le Roux kept several boats. Le Roux pulled into the Subic Bay Yacht Club, where he put Oz up in a hotel for the night, paying the bill in ad- vance. The Brazilians would meet him at the marina the next morning, he said.

The whole thing felt off to Oz—the Brazilians, the boat, and especially the way that Le Roux had driven him personally, sepa- rating him from Berkman. He messaged a friend from his hotel room that night, "I don't know what is happening, but something is weird." His friend told him to check out and leave. But Oz had trouble comprehending what could be wrong. "Everything is going great with the company," he thought. And anyway, what real choice did he have at this point?

When Oz arrived at the dock the next morning, three men were waiting to meet him: a friendly gray-haired Brit named Dave and two quiet, muscled men with shaved heads—Joe and Chris—who Oz assumed must be the Brazilians. They looked to him more like bodyguards than partners in a call center. But Dave said he was eager to talk business, and invited Oz aboard a small yacht with three bedrooms. Dave said he'd take one, Oz another, and the Bra- zilians would share the third. The sun was shining as they cruised out to sea. Oz sat on the back deck, taking in the view.

A half hour into the trip, with the shoreline receding out of sight, one of the two Brazilians came to the back of the boat and asked Oz to stand up for a moment so he could retrieve something from a storage compartment. Before he could consider why the man seemed to lack a Brazilian accent, Oz was already overboard.

He assumed at first that he had tripped, and quickly regretted that he'd slid his cellphone into his sock. When he looked up, he was relieved to see the boat circling back around to pull alongside