have a problem, we help you. Your family has a problem, we help
them. Nobody has a problem. Just follow these rules, we are very
straight on that. So I tell you, we do business, you trust me one
hundred percent. We will deliver for you. One hundred percent."

"This is a trust deal," Pepe says, before the three men stand up
to shake hands. "That's exactly what we are going to do."

In the months before and after Paul and Pepe's meeting, a series of
strange events occurred in disparate parts of the globe, events that
appeared unrelated. I say "appeared" as if anyone on the outside
was observing them at all. At the time no one was, including me.
Even if anyone had been, none of these incidents appeared tied to
any other as they filtered into public view. Like a handful of ran-
dom jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without
an understanding of the larger picture. It would be a year before I
picked up even one of those pieces to examine it, and several more
before I began to understand the image that the whole collection
of them combined to reveal.

In March 2012, six months before Paul and Pepe's meeting in
Liberia, agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Admin-
istration walked through the glass doors of a small pharmacy on
Main Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They were armed with search
warrants targeting its eighty-two-year-old owner, Charles Schultz.
A pillar of the local community for four decades, Schultz had been
charged with shipping more than 700,000 illegal painkiller pre-
scriptions from the back of his two local pharmacies. In return, the
agents calculated, he had received over $27 million in wire trans-
fers from a mysterious Hong Kong bank account.

Roughly a month later, officers from the Organized Crime and
Triad Bureau in Hong Kong raided a warehouse in Tsuen Wan, a
bayside district north of the city. Inside they discovered twenty
tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, divided into a thousand bags
and falsely labeled as sodium chloride. It was enough to create an
explosive ten times more powerful than the one used in the Okla-