Jared began explaining what the Silk Road was and how it worked, and as he did, he placed envelopes from the mail tub on the table one by one, as if he were dealing a deck of cards at a casino. “This one,” Jared said as he pointed to one of the envelopes, “had LSD inside.” He reached down and grabbed another package. “This one had amphetamines.” And then another. “This one had cocaine.” “Ketamine.” “Heroin.” He then pulled a white square envelope with a Chicago address from the tub. “And this,” he said as he rummaged in his backpack for the Silk Road case file, laying a picture on the desk of what appeared to be a tiny pink pill, “had this hit of MDMA inside.”
Since June, when Jared had discovered that first pill of ecstasy in the envelope from the Netherlands, he had been trying to figure out how to persuade his supervisor, and now the U.S. Attorney’s Office, to let him build a case against the Silk Road Web site.
Everything over the past few months had been leading up to this very moment.
After his supervisor at HSI had given him the go-ahead to start investigating the site as a side project, Jared had obsessively started collecting every smidgen of evidence coming through Chicago O’Hare. Each night he would drive his ancient government-issued car (which other agents had nicknamed the Pervert Car because it looked like it belonged to a child molester) to the mail center at the airport where he would collect envelopes of drugs that had been plucked from the scrubs earlier that day.
“I need you to seize and store every single envelope,” Jared had said to Mike, the customs officer who found the first pink pill.
“What do you want it for?” Mike had asked, perplexed by the request. “No one ever wants these small packages of drugs.”
“I’m working on something,” Jared told Mike. “Just keep collecting them, bagging them as evidence, and I’ll keep getting them from you.”
After the Gawker article had published, the number of seizures had risen exponentially. In turn, Jared collected more envelopes, and his office at HSI had started to resemble a mail facility itself. There were now more than a hundred envelopes sitting neatly in three mail buckets on the floor behind his desk, a selection of which he was now presenting to the assistant U.S. attorney.
“It can’t be that easy,” the attorney said, dubious of the words coming out of Jared’s mouth and the images on his laptop. Even if it was “that easy,” these were such small amounts of drugs, the attorney wasn’t sure that this was the biggest drug-related issue his office should be dealing with.
“This isn’t about the drugs,” Jared said ardently. “This isn’t about that one little pill.” He had been practicing this speech for weeks, and he took a deep breath and continued. “This is about the site overall and what it stands for. It’s about how the people on this site are using our Internet—built by the United States government—to run an anonymous Web browser—also built by the United States government—and the United States postal system—to circumvent the laws of our country. And there is nothing we can do to stop them.”
The office was silent as the words sank in.
“This is just the beginning,” Jared continued. “It’s drugs now, but this could be used for terrorism next; imagine a worst-case scenario, where a group like al Qaeda uses the site, or the exact same setup, to coordinate attacks against America—all with tools built by the United States.” His point was simple. The Silk Road wasn’t just a digital drug cartel. It was a highly lucrative start-up with a lot of optionality. Amazon had begun as a virtual bookstore before becoming our everything supermarket. And Google, which had started as a search engine, was trying to build cars that could drive themselves. The issue, Jared reiterated, was not what the Silk Road was, but what it could be. The site was clearly run by some sort of genius who seemed to understand technology and politics as much as he understood his audience. And whoever that prodigy was, he or she had to be stopped before this site became a movement and ultimately unstoppable.
As Jared spoke, the totality of what he was saying hit the attorney with utmost fear. Jared was there warning that, in the same way the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center did so using American-owned jets, the people behind the Silk Road could destroy the very fabric of the United States using tools built by America. The implications were terrifying.
The attorney interrupted Jared midsentence. “Yes,” he said as he looked at the envelopes on his table and then up at Jared. “Yes, we’ll assign someone to your case.”
Chapter 16
FROM AUSTIN TO AUSTRALIA
I’m selling my truck,” Ross told all his friends on Facebook. “Make me an offer!”
Fall had blanketed over Austin, with 2011 nearing its end, and Ross had only two weeks to get his life packed into boxes and sell everything else before he left town.
Fudging Erica. If she hadn’t posted that tormenting message on Facebook about Ross being a drug lord or kingpin or whatever, he wouldn’t be in such a rush to leave the country. Weeks before the chaos erupted he had been thinking of going to see his sister, Cally, in Australia for a while, to get some space from Julia and his Texan friends and family, but now the trip was a must, and it was on fast-forward.
Ross was pretty sure he had deleted Erica’s terrifying post in time, but if he had not, and someone had actually seen it, he would find himself in more trouble than he was capable of dealing with. He also had no way of knowing if Erica’s Facebook outburst was the last he would hear from her. If she truly wanted to be vindictive, she could easily go one step further and tell the FBI or DEA, or even those senators who had painted a bull’s-eye on the Silk Road months earlier.
One thing was certain: Ross didn’t want to take any chances. He scrambled, getting his life in order to make a quick and easy break from Austin to Australia.
The truck sold quickly. His personal belongings were handed down or given away. He stuffed other things in boxes and hid them under his bed at his parents’ house, next to the box of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures he had painted as a child. He packed the few belongings he needed day to day, including his gray V-neck T-shirt, his single pair of jeans, and, most important of all, his laptop.
Paranoia had started consuming his thoughts, leaving Ross on edge about those around him. Was the DEA or the FBI hunting for him? Was he a cop? Was she? What did everyone know? But the most stressful thoughts centered around those whom he had told about the Silk Road.
It wasn’t that Ross had been stupid or naive in telling them about the site. Rather, back then, when he first shared his secret, Ross could never have predicted that the Silk Road would grow as big as it had. In his mind on opening day, he had imagined a few dozen people shopping in his online marketplace. That had quickly turned into thousands. Now, with the media, the senators, and who knew how many people in law enforcement looking for him, he needed to backtrack.