in the homes of wealthy women who, because of Dubai's strict social codes, found it simpler to exercise in private.

Now, a man claiming to be an agent from the U.S. Drug En- forcement Administration was on the phone, telling Klaussen that his email to the CIA had been passed to the U.S. embassy in South Africa, where the agent had come across it. "I was wondering if you would still be willing to talk," he said.

For a moment, Klaussen wondered if the call might be a setup by Le Roux himself. Could he have intercepted Klaussen's original email? Since he'd persuaded his old boss to cancel the Joseph Hunter hit, and even garnered a kind of apology for accusing him of stealing, Klaussen hadn't felt like he was living under an active threat. "Still, knowing Le Roux, you keep it in your mind," he said. "It's automatic. Because too many people died."

The only contact he'd had with Le Roux in the previous year had been after the U.N. issued its report describing the Somalia operation and its collapse into chaos. Klaussen already knew most of the details, including that one Zimbabwean had been shot dead in a dispute over the equipment, and that his former Somali point man, Liban Mohamed Ahmed, had been briefly jailed as a result. "He was released, but in the meantime the whole business was fucked," Klaussen said. When the organization stopped paying rent, the compound was confiscated and everything they'd shipped in disappeared. Then the U.N. report hit the news. "I sent it to Le Roux. 'What the fuck is this?'" Klaussen said. "He said, 'Fuck them. They can't do anything. It's just a commission. They have no power.'" That was the end of it.

Now the man on the phone, whose full name was Thomas Cin- dric, was able to convince Klaussen that he did in fact work for the DEA's Special Operations Division, and was investigating Le Roux. In fact, he wasn't just looking for information. He was looking for someone who could help take down the organization from inside.

"Okay," Klaussen said, "how do you see this going?"

"First we'd like to meet and see what you have," Cindric said.