5

The Investigators

2008 . . . Operation Checkmate slows to a crawl . . . Le Roux all the way down . . . Tracking a ghost . . . A tip from Hong Kong . . . A river of money

Operation Checkmate was proving much more like a chess match than Kimberly Brill and Steven Holdren had origi- nally anticipated: drawn out, with attacks and counters, and an opponent thinking several moves ahead. Sitting in their respective cubicles in the Minneapolis DEA's diversion unit, they combed through what felt like endless dumps of data—company filings, shipping records, website registrations—and filled government- issue five-by-seven notebooks with charts and lines, trying to ar- range the scraps of what they found into a narrative. By mid-2008, RX Limited was essentially their full-time job. "We just went at it from start of shift till the end," Holdren said. And after the end, too: At home, the case rattled around in their brains. Brill often found herself back at her laptop long after she put her two young children to bed, plotting out strategy and making late-night calls to time zones around the world. The deeper they immersed them- selves into RX Limited's operation, the more elaborate the techni- cal architecture they found, and the more calculating the people—or person—behind it began to seem.