one point during the festivities, a pair of diversion investigators Bailey knew from the office buttonholed him.

“Hey, I want to ask you something,” Kimberly Brill said. She and the other investigator, Steven Holdren, had been poking around on a case for several months, something they thought could be big. Between beers, Brill and Holdren outlined the basics of what they’d found on RX Limited, trying to impress upon Bai- ley that it all amounted to something more than just a typical pill mill. Altgeld and the other pharmacies weren’t online businesses; they were merely the frontline fulfillment of a much larger net- work. “This is national scale,” Brill told Bailey. “We think it’s il- legal. Is there anything you can do to help?”

Bailey, after feigning outrage that they hadn’t called him sooner, said he’d take a look. “Send me the email addresses and whatever telephone numbers you have. I’ll start running them in our data- bases to see what’s happening.”

Le Roux’s name had surfaced several more times in the investi- gation, after Brill and Holdren had initially seen it on the FedEx package delivered in Manila. For one, they’d determined that RX Limited was renting server space at a company called Q9 in Can- ada, with an account tied to the email pleroux@swprofessionals .com. The email led them to a defunct website for a programming business called Software Professionals, registered in Mauritius but located in South Africa—and owned by one Paul Le Roux. The name had started to rise up their list of important figures in RX Limited.

They also noticed that several of the servers at Q9 were named after chess pieces, they told Bailey. It almost felt like an invitation to join the game. They’d christened the case Operation Check- mate.

A few days after his 2008 encounter with Brill and Holdren, Bailey was back at his desk in Virginia. The East Coast posting wasn’t