found it. I watched him closely and was certain I saw a small smirk pass across his face when his eyes rested on Joseph Hunter, glaring at him from the defendant's table.

Bove quickly established that Le Roux was now forty-five years old, born in Zimbabwe and raised partly in South Africa, and that he had once employed both Hunter and Samia as mercenaries. Then he turned immediately to the matter at hand. "Do you know a woman named Catherine Lee?" he asked Le Roux.

"Yes, I do," Le Roux said.

"Who was Catherine Lee?"

"Catherine Lee was a real estate broker in the Philippines."

"Sir, where is Catherine Lee today?"

"I had her killed."

"Why?"

"I believed that she was involved in stealing money from me."

"How do you know that Catherine Lee was murdered?"

"I was told she was killed by Joseph Hunter." Le Roux paused to correct himself. "Sorry. What I mean is I was told by Joseph Hunter that she had been killed."

"Did Hunter tell you who participated in the murder?"

"Yes. Joseph Hunter told me that the kill team consisting of Adam Samia and his partner were the ones that killed Catherine Lee."

For the next two days, through his deliberately precise answers, Le Roux recounted many of the same facts that I had spent years prying from the hard-to-find and the reluctant. He claimed that he had made $300 million in his illegal online pharmacy business, employing between one and two thousand people, and then laun- dered it through gold, diamonds, and timber in Africa and Asia. He detailed how, in 2005, he met Dave Smith, who gave him an entry into the world of mercenaries. At times he seemed to have been overprepared by the prosecutors, mechanically repeating prac- ticed sentences about how his "Echelon mercenaries"—referring to the front company sometimes used to hire Smith's men—were