RX Limited pharmacies. “The fact that people’s daily duties re- sumed, along with the pay, helped the mystery go unnoticed,” he said. “In retrospect it was extreme naïveté on all of our parts.”

In December, Hunter suddenly began receiving a flurry of calls and encrypted notes from Le Roux, writing from an old address he rarely used, [email protected]. Le Roux told Hunter that he was working on a new project, a big one, that would need him to be at the top of his game. It involved a group he would refer to only as the “South American partners.” As a first step, Le Roux wanted Hunter, operating under the names “Jim Riker” and “Ja- Rule,” and using his old “[email protected]” address, to assemble a team of skilled, reliable ex-military men who could handle “specialist jobs.” Hunter didn’t need him to elaborate.

Hunter sent word to, among others, his old partner Chris De Meyer—who along with “Daddy Mac” had quit the organization after the Edillor murder—that he was seeking new guys. De Meyer declined to rejoin but put the call out to his own network, and soon résumés of prospective new security team members were ar- riving over the transom.

From Manila to Cape Town, other members and former mem- bers of The Company were also hearing from Le Roux, who seemed rejuvenated and ready to launch an array of new ventures. Among the first was Marcus, the South African who had been Le Roux’s personal assassin. In early 2013, Le Roux proposed he take on a project in America. “He reopened my email account,” Mar- cus said, “and paid money to my bank account.” When Marcus balked at traveling to the States, Le Roux was ready with another idea: Marcus could organize a group of ex-military guys to work in Somalia. Le Roux also suggested that he would retain Marcus again as an assassin, this time to murder Ari Ben-Menashe, the Israeli whom he’d once employed to help procure land and a dip- lomatic passport in Zimbabwe. (In another strange development the DEA never quite parsed, the real Ben-Menashe reached out to Le Roux, saying he’d heard that Le Roux was in trouble. Ben- Menashe suggested Le Roux take harbor in Israel and work with