then funneled, virtually, to real American doctors who wrote real prescriptions, without ever meeting their patients. Those prescrip- tions were then sent electronically to real independent pharmacies to be filled and shipped using RX Limited-supplied technology. The doctors and pharmacies themselves were disposable to the or- ganization, Brill realized. Take one out, and another could simply be slotted into place. The network kept humming on.

The scheme was so multilayered that none of the deliveries Brill and Holdren had received made any reference to RX Limited. “The pharmacies don't know the other pharmacies, the doctors don't know the other doctors,” Brill said. “None of them ulti- mately know who they are working for.”

Neither, at this point, did Brill or Holdren. There was, however, one unusual name that surfaced several times in the data. It was the thinnest of reeds at first, one they had spotted in the hundreds of thousands of lines in the FedEx spreadsheets. Amid the ship- ments of pills fanning out across the United States, they found one international order: a package delivered to a hotel in Manila in 2005 to someone named Paul Le Roux.

Kent Bailey was at a bar in Minneapolis when he first heard the name that would come to dominate his life. It was the spring of 2008, and Bailey, a veteran special agent with the DEA—the gun- toting kind—had recently transferred from the Twin Cities to Chantilly, Virginia, to join the agency's Special Operations Divi- sion. Located at its own headquarters twenty-five miles east of D.C., SOD was formed in 1994 to coordinate complicated investi- gations involving multiple agencies and jurisdictions, cases that spanned domestic and international drug trafficking. After a de- cade and a half chasing dealers on the street, Bailey had been pro- moted to SOD, as a supervising agent in the Pharmaceutical, Chemical, and Internet division. A weekend visit back to Minne- sota coincided with a going-away party for one of the agents on his former team, at a downtown sports bar called Matty B's. At