the U.K. authorities believed the story was bogus: The money had been transferred to him in small increments over several days, a practice known in the money-laundering world as "structuring." The British authorities froze the money with an aim toward pros- ecuting the mercenary. But Bailey feared it would spook Le Roux, and he pushed them to let the mercenary go. As it turned out, Le Roux didn't spook easily-he personally called the Metropolitan Police and demanded his money be returned. Bailey couldn't un- derstand why a man of Le Roux's means even bothered over a few hundred thousand dollars. "He's lost more money than that with- out even noticing," he said.

Over time, the investigators started to get the unnerving feeling that Le Roux sensed where and how authorities were tracking him. His name progressively disappeared from the FedEx accounts and website registrations they'd used to establish his role in the first place. Ownership of companies they had identified as Le Roux's, like Southern Ace and Ajax Technology, was gradually transferred to Zimbabweans like Robert McGowan and Robson Tandanayi, and a South African named Edgar van Tonder. Le Roux had built yet another impenetrable email server, "fast-free-email.com," and seemed to be moving his employees off of commercial services and onto it. It was as if he had realized his early errors and was now in the process of undoing them.

As Brill, Holdren, and Bailey struggled to get any foothold in- side his organization, Le Roux was descending deeper into his own systems. "He wasn't careful enough at the beginning to keep him- self out of it," a former official at the Department of Justice said later. "He was clearly the mastermind of the operation. If he had gone the anonymous route a little bit earlier in the enterprise, we would have had no chance of figuring out who was really behind this. It would have just taken too long to get past that first layer."