homa City bombing. On the warehouse lease they found the name of an Israeli Australian citizen, a former member of an elite division of the Israeli Defense Forces. When they raided the man's office and apartment, they turned up deeds for two stash houses, receipts for tens of millions of dollars in gold bars, and handwritten directions to a meeting in Buenaventura, Colombia, with a man named “Don Lucho”—the head of one of the world's biggest cocaine cartels.

Then, in November, a pair of spear fishermen diving off an atoll in Tonga discovered a wrecked forty-four-foot sailboat with a badly decomposed body on board. Lining the walls of the boat's cabin, local authorities found, were 204 bricks of cocaine, neatly wrapped in brown plastic and worth more than $90 million on the street in Australia, where they suspected it was destined.

In early December, three thousand miles to the northeast, a con- tractor for the National Security Agency named Edward Snowden organized a gathering of cryptography buffs in the back room of a strip mall storefront in Honolulu. After a couple dozen people had assembled, he plugged his laptop into a projector and began an instructional talk about a free program called TrueCrypt. It was, he said, the world's most secure software for encrypting a laptop hard drive, protecting it from the prying eyes of governments. Very little was known about the people behind TrueCrypt, he cautioned; the programmers who created it were anonymous. But Snowden also knew something about TrueCrypt that he was not yet ready to reveal: He had stolen documents from the NSA showing that the agency couldn't break it.

When I began trying to investigate this series of events later, they were tantalizing but baffling to me. As I rewound back through them, each seemed like a kind of message from an adjacent reality that few of us experience directly. In that world, I would learn, a brilliant self-made software programmer from South Africa could single-handedly build a dystopian company to rival today's tech giants. Through his creation, an online startup selling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of pills to American customers, he would become one of the largest individual contributors to America's