Carlos: "How many pills a night do you take now?"

"Ten."

Ten? The agents tried not to flinch. Two years hooked on Ambien, at possibly lethal doses.

Carlos stepped gingerly. "Have you ordered any lately?"

The woman walked to a closet, where she hid her stash from her husband. She handed Carlos an envelope.

He spilled the pills across a coffee table and began to count.

QUEENS, N.Y.

Akhil felt pumped.

The meeting with Meherer had gone so well that the next day he took her to the Queens depot to show her how sophisticated his operation really was.

There was his fulfillment center, a clean, brick rowhouse secured by bars on the windows. He'd called ahead to send the workers home. Coffee and snacks were waiting.

Inside, Akhil gave Meherer and her Asian assistant the full tour:

Here, on the ground floor, was the office where supervisors David and Elizabeth Armstrong received e-mail orders from online pharmacies.

Here, on the second floor, the Indian women grabbed blister packs of pills from cubbyholes, each labeled with the names of the appropriate medicine.

And here, in the basement, the women packed the pills into boxes and labeled them.

Then, Akhil explained, the Armstrongs drove the packages to their nearby home, where UPS made a pickup daily.

As they moved through the tour, Patil could sense Meherer's assistant grow uneasy.

The volume. The audacity. The risk.

Patil overheard the assistant whisper to Meherer: "My God, this guy is crazy! I want to get out."

What if the police found out? What if they seized the pills? What was the plan?