ing the M/V Ufuk untouched, and was killed because he kept a piece for himself.

Sitting in the NBI office, I suddenly felt lost in the maze of graft and murders, where every new branch seemed to lead back to Le Roux. Could I even trust the accounts of the agents sitting across from me? I was no longer sure. The only thing I knew for certain was that Le Roux had operated here with a staggering level of impunity. “I don't know how deep this goes,” Lugay told me. “We tried to talk to the prosecutor, to set up a meeting about the case, and you know what the prosecutor said? ‘Tell your boss I'm not talking to him, because people disappear in this case.’”

By now I was so far down the rabbit hole that there seemed noth- ing to do but press on, looking for some semblance of logic on the other side. Together with Aurora Almendral, the reporter I'd been working with in Manila, I eventually tracked down one of the Philippine National Police officers who had investigated the Her- bert Tan Tiu case in late 2010. The officer had long since been transferred to a small city an hour's flight outside Manila. He would only talk, he said, if Almendral and I came to see him in person. When our flight landed at a single-runway airport nestled in the mountains, a pair of officers picked us up in a black Chevy Blazer and drove us out to the local headquarters, a series of white block buildings spread across a kind of campus. The officer, whom I'll call Inspector R, was now a regional police coordinator here. It was a Sunday, and he greeted us in orange shorts and running shoes, along with what looked to be a bike racing jersey, white and blue with a PNP patch on one arm. On his desk were a series of neatly stacked reports marked “CONFIDENTIAL” and “SECRET.”

We sat down across from him, and as he talked he toyed with a pair of cellphones sitting on his desk. In English, he explained that he'd just returned from a special assignment in Mindanao, an is- land in the south where the Philippine government was fighting a pitched battle against religious extremists loyal to ISIS. These days,