Brill and Holdren found his email address in an account they were monitoring, they wrote up a warrant for Wall's email. The mes- sages revealed his main job to be purchasing goods in the United States and shipping them to Le Roux and his employees across the globe, using a shell company he’d registered in Kentucky called Phalanx Trading. “The supply officer,” Brill and Holdren took to calling him. Some of the purchases, like computers and servers, made sense for an operation with the technical infrastructure of RX Limited. Others, like cars, a yacht, artwork, jewelry, and a Westwind jet, could be chalked up to a wealthy businessman’s whims. But shipments of vacuum hoods, mining gear, logging equipment, and drone parts pointed to something else. What, ex- actly, the investigators had no idea. In one email exchange, Le Roux’s employees discussed purchasing helicopters to ferry em- ployees out to logging sites in the Congo. “None of it made sense,” Bailey said. “Why are you looking to set up a timber company in the Congo?”

At least one of the shipments, of military-grade scuba-diving gear Wall had purchased, was suspicious enough that the FBI inde- pendently flagged it as a prohibited export. They brought Wall in for questioning, but accepted his explanations and let him go.

Bailey, Brill, and Holdren tried tracking the shipments to their ultimate destination, in the hopes of learning more about Le Roux’s aims. They had an agent in Chicago intercept two boxes of engine parts bound for the Congo and add a tracking device. The device died before the shipment left the States. They tried again with cars, arranging to attach trackers to a Ford Explorer leaving South Carolina and a BMW that Wall shipped through Long Beach, California. After the laborious process of convincing fed- eral judges in both districts to grant warrants, they watched hope- fully as the cars crept across the ocean to Hong Kong, on to Manila, and finally to Le Roux’s house in Dasmariñas Village. And then they barely moved. “We found out that he didn’t leave the house that often,” Bailey said. “He clearly wasn’t going to work every day.”