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look for anything out of the ordinary: a package with a small bulge; return addresses that looked fake;
the sound of plastic wrap inside a paper envelope; anything fishy at all. There was nothing scientific
about it. There were no high-tech scanners or swabs testing for residue. After a decade in which e-
mail had largely outmoded physical mail, the postal service’s budgets had been decimated. Fancy
technology was a rare treat allocated to the investigation of large packages. And Chicago’s mailsniffing
dogs—Shadow and Rogue—came through only a couple of times a month. Instead, whoever
was hunting through the scrubs simply reached a hand inside and followed their instincts.
Thirty minutes into his rummaging routine, the white square envelope caught Mike’s eye.
He held it up to the lights overhead. The address on the front had been typed, not written by hand.
That was generally a telltale sign for customs agents that something was amiss. As Mike knew,
addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump,
which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands. Mike grabbed an evidence folder
and a 6051S seizure form that would allow him to legally open the envelope. Placing a knife in its
belly, he gutted it like a fish, dumping out a plastic baggie with a tiny pink pill of ecstasy inside.
Mike had been working in the customs unit for two years and was fully aware that under normal
circumstances no one in the federal government would give a flying fuck about one lousy pill. There
was, as every government employee in Chicago knew, an unspoken rule that drug agents didn’t take on
cases that involved fewer than a thousand pills. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would scoff at such an
investigation. There were bigger busts to pursue.
But Mike had been given clear instructions by someone who was waiting for a pill just like this:
Homeland Security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan.
A few months prior, Mike had come across a similar piece of illicit mail on its way to
Minneapolis. He had picked up the phone and called the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations office at the airport, half expecting that he would be
laughed at or hung up on, as usual. But the HSI agent who answered was surprisingly receptive. At the
time, Jared had been on the job for only two months and frankly didn’t know any better. “I can’t fly to
Minneapolis to talk to a guy about one single pill,” Jared said. “So call me if you get something in my
area, in Chicago. Then I can go over there and do a knock-and-talk.”
Four months later, when Mike found a pill destined for Chicago, Jared rushed over to see it.
“Why do you want this?” Mike asked Jared. “All the other agents say no; people have been saying no
to meth and heroin for years. And yet you want this one little pill?”
Jared knew very well that this could be nothing. Maybe an idiot kid in the Netherlands was
sending a few friends some MDMA. But he also wondered why one single pill had been sent on such
a long journey and how the people who mailed such small packages of drugs knew the recipients they
were sending them to. Something about it felt peculiar. “There may be something else to this,” Jared
told Mike as he took the envelope. He would need it to show his “babysitter.”
Every newbie agent in HSI was assigned one—a training officer—during their first year. A more
seasoned officer who knew the drill, made sure you didn’t get into too much trouble, and often made
you feel like a total piece of shit. Every morning Jared had to call his chaperone and tell him what he
was working on that day. The only thing that made it different from preschool was that you got to
carry a gun.
Unsurprisingly, Jared’s training officer saw no urgency to a single pill, and it was a week before
he even consented to accompany his younger colleague on the “knock-and-talk”—to knock on the