Sometime in the period before Smith went to work for Le Roux, the story went, a high-level political operative with connections to the Seychelles had summoned Donovan and Smith to a meeting at the Makati Shangri-La in Manila, looking for mercenaries who could carry out a coup. "They wanted to know would I be willing to train an army," Donovan told me. "So I said, 'Are you out of your fucking minds?' They said what's the problem, couldn't you do it? I said yes, it could be done. But you want to overthrow a fucking government. I'm not that guy." Nonetheless, he claimed, he and Smith decided to game out the idea, just to contemplate whether it was possible. "I drew up a plan for them, to show them how it could be done," Donovan told me. "At one time of the year, in a sports stadium, every single politician and police head is in that fucking stadium, for one particular event." If you targeted that event, Donovan surmised, you might collapse the government. "I said this is the best I can do to help you. That's the way you can do it. I'm out." He hadn't thought much about it, he told me, until Smith had left his firm. Smith, he said, had taken the coup plan and the contacts to Le Roux.

Donovan could have been lying to impress me. Only he and Dave Smith really knew what, if anything, transpired at the Shangri-La. It was all very elaborate for a man who hadn't wanted to talk to me in the first place. All the same, it was pretty easy to dismiss it as the kind of tale that gets circulated among mercenary types over too many drinks.

Except that I knew that in the U.S. government's case against Joseph Hunter, there were transcripts of Hunter describing a plan to invade a set of islands he remembered as the Maldives. "We have guys in Somalia buying weapons that are making an army," Hunter said on one of the videotapes. "They was making an army in Somalia because we were gonna invade an island, Maldives, you can't make it up. Not even in a movie. This is real stuff." And I knew that in my own interview with another of Le Roux's former security men, he'd made an offhand comment about how he and Dave Smith had once sailed a boat into the Indian Ocean, as a trial