Brill had pressed Linda Marks for an indictment that never came were now coming back to haunt them.

“I’m sorry your lawyers suck and mine don’t,” the SOD group supervisor told Bailey.

A version of that conversation would repeat on a continuous loop over the coming weeks, after Brill and Bailey returned to Minnesota, denied a chance to sit across from their white whale. “Those guys were already saying, ‘It’s national security, he can’t talk to you,’” Bailey said. “My ass it’s national security.” As the agents back in New York were pumping Le Roux for information, Brill was sitting on a pile of evidence accumulated over years of investigation. “I said, ‘Come out and meet with her for a week, she’s got all the books,’” Bailey said. “Now he’s talking, and they are going and looking up those names, and she already had them. She had lists of targets.” The response, he said, was always the same. “ ‘Thanks, nope.’ And they went out not knowing. Because they wanted it to be their case.”

Everything that followed sprang from that decision, based on the hope that Le Roux would deliver to the U.S. government some- thing worth more than what they had: a multiple murderer, a pro- digious global drug and arms trafficker, a solicitor of rogue regimes, and a man who had supplied hundreds of millions of doses of painkillers to its citizens. If he failed to deliver, Team America would be the ones getting played.

While the agents in New York were recalibrating their plans for Le Roux, the yacht Je Re Ve was cruising across the Pacific with two hundred kilos of cocaine and the DEA’s tracker on board. Then, on October 5, the tracking signal died. The 960 group thought the two shipmates might have discovered it, while Bailey assumed a more conventional explanation: Its battery had drained, perhaps due to the extra days the boat had spent idling off the coast of Peru. Either way, somewhere north of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, the DEA lost the boat.