nam that June. If I could be there on the half day when he had noth- ing planned, he would tell me whatever I wanted to know.

On a broiling afternoon a month later, I stood sweating under a chandelier in the marbled lobby of a hotel just south of Hanoi's Old Quarter. I texted Klaussen that I'd arrived, and a few minutes later he stepped out of the elevator, tall and tan at age forty, still holding on to the swimmer's build of his youth. We found an empty corner where we could order a drink and talk undisturbed. “I've seen so many crazy things, I could write a book myself just about the adventures,” he laughed. “It was mental.” We talked for the next thirteen hours, shifting from the lobby to the restaurant to Klaussen's room and back as he walked me through his story. We exited the hotel only to stand outside as Klaussen worked his way through a pack of cigarettes.

After it was all over, he told me, he'd found it impossible to re- turn to any kind of normal life. He'd tried going home, but had trouble relating to the people he'd grown up around. “You go back and you see the people you know in a local pub or whatever, and you hear the conversations these people have,” he said. “It's so uninteresting—people make such big dramas about nothing, about small, stupid things.” That's why he'd returned to the field as an informant, he said. He had discovered that he was good at it, and nothing else could match the feeling of bringing down evil men. (The pay wasn't bad, either. He had been approved for a siz- able reward from the U.S. government for his work on the Le Roux case, money that would secure his kids' futures.)

He often ruminated aloud on his own motivations—for joining Le Roux's organization to begin with, and then for devoting his life to destroying it, and him. “Of course at the end of the day I worked for a criminal. So people can call me a criminal as well,” he said. “Because I was aware of what he did and still I stayed because I wasn't breaking too many laws. The more and more I found out, the more and more I despised him.”

Still, he insisted, Le Roux could have avoided capture and