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accused business partners, Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato and Mathias Ortmann. Dotcom’s aged 39 now. And he could be dead before he’s released, going by details of his medical history in one of the many files on him held at the High Court in Auckland.

But Dotcom wonders, sometimes, if he’ll die sooner. When yet more deceit, fraud, incompetence or trickery on the part of the prosecution emerges, he starts to think the United States might look for other ways of achieving its aims.

“If I die in the next three or four months, then don’t just let it go,” he asked a confidant in February 2013. “I’ve had a full medical. I’m in excellent health.”

It’s not the dying which bothers him. It’s dying without winning. Losing is unthinkable.

“If you go into that space [worrying about dying] you would be extremely frightened and depressed and always looking over your shoulder, and I’m not that kind of guy. I have this calm core, because I’ve had everything. I’ve really fulfilled all my dreams. If that would happen, all I’m worried about is that [wife] Mona and the [five] kids are taken care of. I made a contingency plan with my lawyers, so if something happened to me, I would have a smile on my face.”

Dotcom speaks with his phone turned off. He turns and checks to make sure there are no other people in the room. Is it paranoia to act this way, when one of the world’s most powerful spying networks actually has been out to get you? No — just an awful reality where few are trusted, most are suspected and “facts” are lies waiting to be exposed.

Hills ring the property where Dotcom sits, comfortable in an over-size chair, in the courtyard of New Zealand’s most palatial home. These hills have long held threats. Once, they served as surveillance points for police watching the property before raiding it.

Sometimes he wonders if they hide a more malign threat.

“The miracle everyone would be so glad about is if I would die tomorrow,” he says. “Sometimes when I sit here I think how easy it would be to just snipe me in the head from behind. How easy it would be to sneak in and inject me with some shit. There are one million ways to kill someone. I’m sure they would love for me to just disappear from the Earth.”

A Hollywood movie could script it that way. Much of this crazy tale of the takedown of Megaupload, was scripted in Hollywood. There are other elements, too, which help make sense of this story — but it is only by grasping one after another of its wildly divergent threads that a tapestry starts to emerge. And the longest and most enduring thread runs back to Kiel in northern Germany, where Dotcom was born in 1974.

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