Holdren had, a half dozen years before. Like them, I started un- covering websites related to RX Limited, Le Roux's prescription pill empire—first a few, then hundreds, then thousands. Their reg- istrations seemed to switch over the years from addresses in the Philippines to the United States, to other countries and back. Many of them connected to a single location: Unit 1401 BDO Building, Paseo De Roxas, Makati City, in Manila's upscale shopping and business district. A search on that address, in turn, matched the location of call centers in the Philippines, with names like Call Xtreme, Dial Magic, and Global I-Net Bridge. Soon my digital files were stuffed with thousands of these interconnected nodes, spread across the United States, Panama, the United Kingdom, the Neth- erlands, Romania, Russia, and the Philippines. I found dozens of Le Roux-connected companies, with names as inscrutable to me as Paul Le Roux himself: Southern Ace, La Plata Trading, GX Port, Everplus, Cycom Tech, Wilex, East Asia Escrow, Martenius Trad- ing, MTCL, Quantcom Commerce, Vischnu Limited, Century Hold- ings, Amana Holdings, BNPay, Alpha Networks, Diko Limited, Maximum8. It seemed almost impossible that one person could have a hand in it all.

One night in October 2015, I was exploring the possible con- nections to an email address I'd found for Le Roux, pleroux@ swprofessionals.com, from a defunct software company called SW Professionals. The same address, I discovered, turned up in the instruction manual for a piece of encryption software called En- cryption for the Masses, or E4M. The software was designed to protect a computer's files from the prying eyes of law enforcement and the government. I looked up the old website for E4M and dis- covered that it had been controlled by an Australian company called World Away Pty. On the corporate registration for World Away, its owner was listed as a Zimbabwean named Paul Calder Le Roux. E4M was long since out of use, but its code had formed the basis of a more famous encryption program—among the most famous file encryption programs—called TrueCrypt. The favored software of everyone from National Security whistleblower Ed-