THE MASTERMIND 65

Once in England, Le Roux was able to support himself on his tech- nical acumen, answering an ad in a local paper that landed him a job with a small software development company called BEI. “He had very little personality,” one of his early employers recalled. “He was against doing anything social. He had no interest in building relationships with anyone, as far as I could see. He just put his head down and got on with the work.” He wasn’t a bril- liant pure coder at first, his boss at BEI said, but someone who could adapt other programmers’ code through a mix of cleverness and diligence. “Programming is oftentimes building on someone else’s work,” said the boss. “It’s like Lego bricks: You can put them together and make something new.”

Le Roux remained restless, relocating to Seattle to work for BEI remotely for a month, then spending six months in Virginia Beach. In 1994, now twenty-one and back in London, Le Roux met an Australian woman named Michelle and they started dating. A year later, he followed her to Sydney. She was brash and swore like a sailor, according to his relatives, and they married in 1995. Le Roux picked up a variety of contract programming jobs, gigs that gave him a window into the increasingly digital world of corporate banking. At an Australian bank, he was hired to develop “credit process automation,” and to implement software to simplify the SWIFT system for international bank transfers. At a travel soft- ware company, he built accounting systems. For a Hong Kong brokerage, he created a system to automate the paperwork associ- ated with trading. All of it, intentional or not, was experience that would prove valuable in his more entrepreneurial endeavors down the road.

To his wife, Le Roux seemed obsessed with his work. But he was also living an alternate life online, one in which he expressed naked disdain for his adoptive country. In chat forums about Aus- tralia, Le Roux seemed to revel in what would now be recognized as trolling, deploying exaggerated opinions to stir up outrage on- line. Most of what he posted consisted of juvenile provocation aimed at Australia and its citizens. “This message contains my