XXII PROLOGUE

burgeoning painkiller epidemic, and the most successful cyber- criminal in history. He would leverage that fortune into a sprawl- ing criminal empire, fulfilling his seemingly insatiable appetite for the clandestine and the illegal. His ambition for wealth and power would slip the bonds of the Internet and enter the realm of flesh and blood. "The scope of his criminal conduct," as one U.S. fed- eral prosecutor later put it, "is simply staggering."

In the adjacent world he came to occupy, everything was for sale if you knew what to offer and to whom. Pure methamphet- amine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun any coast guard. Police protection and judges' favor. Crates of military- grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder. Former soldiers from the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, drifting in the murky realm of global secu- rity contracting, could reinvent themselves as roving assassins for hire. Call center managers in Tel Aviv could wake up and find them- selves arms dealers. Family doctors could turn into conspirators in an international drug cartel at the click of a button.

That world lurks just outside of our everyday perception, in the dark corners of the Internet we never visit, the quiet ports where ships slip in by night, the back room of the clinic down the street. The events of 2012, I discovered, were simply the edges of that world crossing over into our own. And I came to understand how ordinary people could take one morally ambiguous step across that divide, then a second and a third, until suddenly cops or kill- ers were at their door.

There was one puzzle piece I couldn't get out of my head.

At 6:30 A.M. on the morning of February 13, 2012, Jeremy Ji- mena, a garbage collector in the Philippines, had just started his shift. He set out with his driver on their regular route through Taytay, an industrial city an hour east of Manila. It had rained most of the night, and a light drizzle fell as they turned down