“That was it,” Klaussen said later. “We went back to the hotel.” He returned to his room and downloaded the watch video to a USB drive. When a DEA agent came by and knocked, he slid it under the door. Then he sat down and waited.

        The end, from Klaussen's perspective at least, was anticlimactic. He was idly staring out the window when he saw a group of offi- cers from the Liberian National Security Agency escorting a hand- cuffed Le Roux through the hotel's parking lot. They put him in the back of a van and drove off.

        Minutes later there was a knock at Klaussen's door. It was Stouch. “It's time to pack your bags, let's go,” he said. Everything so far had run exactly according to plan. But now that Le Roux was in custody, it was impossible to predict what would happen next—how soon his operators across the globe might find out, and what they might do. The agents hustled Klaussen out of his hotel and checked him into another one. A few days later, he was on a plane to the United States.

        Later, the agents filled him in on the details of what happened back in Monrovia. How, when the local officers had stormed Le Roux's room, the first thing he'd done was slam his laptop lid shut to activate the encryption software, just as he'd always instructed his employees to do. How for a few hours in a local Liberian jail he'd alternated between raging at the police and offering to bribe them. How, when he first saw an American agent, he had railed that they had no jurisdiction to arrest him in Liberia.

        None of it worked. The Liberians handed Le Roux over to a group of five DEA agents, including Stouch and Cindric. The agents calmly explained that he had been indicted in New York by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to import methamphet- amine, a violation of sections 959 and 960a of the U.S. federal code. He would be taken by chartered plane to the United States.

        “I apologize in advance, but I do not want to get on your plane,” Le Roux told them, and then went limp. Dragging his body into a