DEA OFFICES, CENTER CITY

Whenever DEA supervisor Jeff Breeden grew nervous, he would rub his forehead with his left hand. Now, as the arrest briefing began, Breeden dug deep into his brow.

Tomorrow's worldwide takedown of the Bansal network was to be monitored from this drab conference room overlooking Independence Mall.

The network supplied a rainbow of pills - painkillers, sleep aids, sedatives, stimulants, steroids, psychotropics, erectile-dysfunction medication. Thousands of orders a day.

Who knew who made this stuff, where it came from, what was in it? The public health risk that Internet drugs posed, Breeden thought, was incalculable.

Yet no one in DEA had ever worked a major global online pharmacy investigation. He knew it was a career case, one colleagues would always link to his name. Breeden? Yeah, he's the guy who supervised the Internet pill case out of Philly.

To take down the network, agents were using a number of weapons - surveillance, undercover buys, cell-tower pings, trash pulls, e-mail wiretaps, bank subpoenas, immigration reports, even provisions of the Patriot Act. Agents here had flown to Australia, Costa Rica and India.

As Breeden listened to the arrest briefing, he thought about everything that could go wrong.

Would foreign banks and governments cooperate? Or would they protect the targets, allowing Akhil and others to flee with millions? Would magistrates in several states authorize search warrants in time? Would the bad guys be there when agents raided their homes at dawn? Had any of them gotten wind of the premature arrest in New York? Did Akhil, as he implied in e-mails, really have a mole inside U.S. Customs?

Had they overlooked anything?

James Kasson, the top DEA official in Philadelphia, a weightlifter with a New York accent, began with a pep talk. What they were doing, he reminded the agents, was important, cutting-edge.

"The administrator is personally watching," Kasson said, citing Karen Tandy, DEA's top official in Washington.

Congress was pressuring Tandy to do something about illegal online pharmacies. She recognized the emerging public health threat. After all, any kid with a credit card and Internet access could order highly addictive drugs from the safety of home. But so far, DEA had struggled to take down the rogue pharmacies.

Tandy was counting on the Bansal case to make a splash.

In D.C., there was talk that the attorney general himself would announce the bust. In New York, DEA agents were going to let ABC News go along on the raids. In Philadelphia, U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan prepped for his news conference.

As the briefing broke up, the FBI agent on the case, Jason Huff, a bright young techie, approached the lead DEA agent, Eric Russ, a no-nonsense former Marine. Huff proposed an overnight stakeout of Akhil's Roxborough apartment, in case he and his roommate tried to flee.

Russ liked Huff, but Russ had a lot to coordinate, too much to accomplish before morning, and a stakeout wasn't part of the plan. He doubted anyone would run. These targets were computer nerds, not street thugs. If they hadn't detected surveillance trailing them for the last nine months, they weren't likely to be spooked at the eleventh hour.

Huff offered to have his FBI squad sit on the Roxborough apartment. Russ wasn't in the mood to argue. He thought, Knock yourself out, bud. I'm going home. I've got to be back here at 5 a.m. to coordinate arrests in five countries.

In the meantime, Kasson walked over to chat with Breeden, the nervous supervisor.