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limbo for more than eighteen months. There hadn’t been enough information to charge him with anything other than immigration violations, but since Nash wouldn’t say where he was from, the NBI had nowhere to deport him to. They declined to let me see him. Nor did anyone seem to have known Nash by any other name. What’s more, Timothy Desmond, the Free Willy trainer who had hired Nash to run security, was now himself an interna- tional fugitive. In November 2014, after being accused of defraud- ing an investor behind Ocean Adventure, Desmond, too, had disappeared.

There seemed to be no end to the weirdness. Since I couldn’t get in to visit Nash, I decided to go see what I could find out about him in Subic. It was a three-hour trip from Manila, and as Almen- dral and I descended out of lush mountains with a driver we’d hired for the day, we could see the footprint of the former U.S. naval base. A local reporter suggested we inquire after Nash at the Blue Rock Resort, where Dave Smith had been a regular. Turning up the shore, we passed the pink façade of the Subic Bay Yacht Club, where Oz had embarked on his boat trip with Smith.

The Blue Rock turned out to be a large open-air joint on the beach, with a floating bar just offshore, reached by a hand-pulled ferry. On a weekday afternoon it was populated largely by leath- ery white guys, scattered at tables or wandering out to the beach with Filipina women who looked half their age, or less. The blend- ers were humming with tropical drinks. Almendral and I sat at the bar and ordered a round, then I ginned up the nerve to approach a table full of hulking, burned-out men sitting mostly in silence. They turned out to be Australian, and claimed never to have heard of John Nash. A woman who appeared to be the manager would only say, “I haven’t seen him around in a couple of years.”

We got a similar reaction up the road at Ocean Adventure, where patrons were streaming out at the end of the day’s last dol- phin show. When we introduced ourselves at the gate, a PR person emerged and proceeded to claim no recollection of Nash or even Desmond, then politely declined to answer any questions.