field supervisor in Minneapolis, running a team that did everything from street busts to multistate investigations. In September 2007, when he was offered the promotion to SOD, he viewed it as a step up in title but not necessarily in duties. The Internet division was staffed by diversion investigators, and dealt largely with offshore pharmacies in India and China. He'd worked the Southwest bor- der, and thought he should be chasing Mexican cartels, where the action was. I have to have agents help me get on the Internet, and I've taken Vicodin once in my life, he thought. What the fuck do I know about this?

But Bailey prided himself on outworking any problem. In Vir- ginia he chose a small desk under an air vent and set up a tele- phone and three computer screens: one for internal work only, one for classified documents, and one connected to the outside Inter- net. He viewed the job as a temporary way station. His wife and two kids had stayed back in Minnesota. He'd try to make the best of it.

Now, sitting in front of his monitors in the spring of 2008, he considered Brill and Holdren's pleadings at the bar. He examined the list of email addresses and phone numbers they had managed to gather off the FedEx account and their controlled buys. From the outset, he could see that whatever RX Limited was, it was in- ternational, its communications tracing arcs across the globe. The Special Operations Division existed for precisely this kind of case.

Bailey started with a phone number that particularly interested the investigators: a Philippine mobile they'd found registered to Paul Le Roux, the man who had received the package in Manila. Bailey passed the number to an analyst at SOD and got a report back listing its last thirty days' worth of calls. “I see numbers to Ghana,” he said. “I see numbers to the Congo. I see numbers to the Philippines, obviously. I see numbers in Brazil.”

Then Bailey saw a series of calls that stopped him cold. They were back and forth to Somalia. Suddenly he began to suspect that he was dealing with something larger than just RX Limited. He'd never been to Somalia, but “those are my brothers that went down