getting nervous, thinks people are cheating him, the dominos start to fall."

Felix Klaussen, who’d joined the organization largely to extend his beachfront life in the Philippines, found himself drawn deeper into The Company’s world with each passing month. His employer, whom he still knew only as Johan, or sometimes John, told him to come up with his own cover name. “He couldn’t repeat that enough to everybody: Don’t use your real name,” said Klaussen, who only discovered Le Roux’s real name months later. Klaussen selected “Jack Anderson.”

He had relocated permanently to Manila, moving into a shared house in Dasmariñas Village with Chris De Meyer, the friend who had gotten him the job. A third bedroom was occupied by a former American soldier, Joseph Hunter—or “Rambo,” as some called him. In his late forties, Hunter looked the part of a soldier of fortune: barrel-chested, with a shaved head, a bodybuilder’s neck, and a resting expression of menace. “He had this dark, omi- nous presence,” one of Le Roux’s former employees said. “You definitely knew what he was all about.”

Hunter was one of a handful of Americans—along with Tim Vamvakias, from California, and a North Carolina resident named Adam Samia—in a security operation that consisted largely of Is- raelis, South Africans, and Europeans. He had grown up in ex- treme poverty in Kentucky, without a father, raised by his mother and grandmother. He’d enlisted in the Army in 1983 and joined the Rangers two years later. But eight months into his career in special operations, a friend in his unit was killed during a training exercise, and Hunter, deeply traumatized by the death, took a medical discharge from the Rangers. He spent the rest of his twenty-one-year military career as a drill sergeant, military police trainer, and sniper instructor, rising to the rank of sergeant first class. He’d earned both a National Defense Service Medal and a Global War on Terrorism Medal, and his home state named him a