Altgeld appeared to be just such a target. Brill and Holdren had come across it by searching the Internet for websites selling a drug called phentermine, a type of amphetamine. Phentermine is a “controlled substance” under U.S. law: illegal to sell without a prescription and heavily regulated because of its potential for abuse, making it a classic candidate for diversion. Brill and Hold- ren had little problem finding online sellers willing to ship it with- out a prescription. So they’d bought some using undercover names and credit cards, in what the DEA calls a “controlled buy.” When the drugs arrived via FedEx, they had the evidence they needed to go after the pharmacy for illegal distribution. All of this was rou- tine, the kind of low-level buy-and-bust operation that diversion investigators carry out all the time. But Brill and Holdren decided to look one layer deeper: They sent out the subpoena to FedEx requesting data on the shipping account used by Altgeld.

Looking back later, it would seem almost preposterous that such a small decision could lead them into a maze of complexity and criminality, one that connected a small pharmacy in Chicago to a murdered real estate agent in the Philippines. But every chess match has to start with an opening move.

Holdren wasn’t at his cubicle when the FedEx package arrived— he had just stepped out for a walk—so Brill opened it at her desk, extracted a small thumb drive, and popped it into her computer. She opened up the spreadsheet file on it and began scrolling through. Then she picked up the phone and called Holdren on his cell. “Oh my God, Steve,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.”

Brill and Holdren were, by most measures, still rookies at the DEA—not necessarily the investigators first on the list for big cases. They had met three years before at the DEA Training Acad- emy in Quantico, Virginia, and were both assigned to the Minne- sota office by chance. Brill, a native Minnesotan, had joined the DEA at the age of thirty-three. She’d graduated from the Univer- sity of North Dakota law school and worked for half a decade as