A few days before he left for Australia, his bags packed, his passport and laptop ready to go, Ross went over to his friend Richard Bates’s house and knocked on his door. Richard had all but stopped helping Ross with the programming problems on the Silk Road, fearing the site was growing too big and terrified by the attention it was receiving in the press. But he was still the only person besides Julia who knew the true identity of the site’s creator. Ross had to fix that before anyone else found out.
It was early evening on November 11, 2011, and for weeks nerdy Richard had been planning a party to celebrate the mathematical anomaly of 11/11/11, when the day, the month, and the year all lined up to create a string of elevens. Ross showed up before the festivities began, knocking on Richard’s door with a somewhat panicked rattle.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Ross declared. They both wandered inside Richard’s stark white, almost medically clean apartment, marred only by a few decorations for that night’s festivities. “Have you told anybody about—you know—about my involvement in the Silk Road?”
Richard spoke in his usual timid whisper, explaining nervously that he had almost told someone but then hadn’t, so in short, no. No one else knew.
Ross expanded on his question, telling Richard that someone had posted a message on Facebook about Ross running a drug Web site that the authorities would surely like to know about.
Hearing this, Richard felt that familiar wave of fear shroud him. Surely he was an accomplice to Ross, having helped him build the site and knowing who ran it. Frail Richard could go to jail for the rest of his life, as could Ross. And if there was one thing Richard was definitely not built for, it was life behind bars. “You’ve got to shut the site down,” Richard pleaded. “This is not worth going to prison over.”
Ross had anticipated this response. “I can’t shut the site down,” he replied.
“Why?”
“Because,” Ross solemnly said to his friend, “I gave the site to someone else.”
PART II
Chapter 17
CARL FORCE’S TOMORROW
Most people go through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.
Carl Force knew this feeling well. He never thought he’d end up this way, sitting in a mauve-colored cubicle in a nondescript skyscraper in downtown Baltimore, staring at his computer until the moment he could collect his things and leave.
Another day, another tomorrow.
Carl was what’s known in law enforcement as a “solar agent,” a guy who works only when it’s light outside. (He often referred to himself this way, half joking and half proud of the title.) When the clock struck three, Carl would slip out of the office and drive back across Baltimore to his wife and kids in his government-issued Chevy Impala.
To anyone who walked by his cubicle, Carl looked like the kind of person he was trying to scrub off the streets: a drug dealer. He almost always wore a black beanie over his bald head. His sunken dark eyes and a peppery beard of stubble hid the wrinkles in his stout face. And then there were the tattoos covering his body, including the black Celtic tribal pattern that swerved across his back and down his arms.
Like most of the old-timers at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Carl was in his midforties and jaded. Sure, he was a narcotics cop, but his job was as mundane as any other corporate office worker’s. He spent most of his days staring at his desktop computer, sipping stale coffee from one of the promotional mugs he had picked up at DEA conventions over the years. Sometimes he listened to Hope 89.1, a local Christian radio station that would whisper the Lord’s Prayer into his ear, promising that if Carl followed the ways of the Bible and did the right thing, he would be granted the life he had always wanted.
Life hadn’t always been this way. Thirteen years earlier, in late 1999, when he joined the administration, he ate, slept, and shit the DEA. In those early days he absolutely loved the thrill of a bust. Waking at 4:00 a.m., slipping on his bulletproof vest, checking the chamber of his gun, and kicking in a door or two, yelling at some big-time dealers or low-level meth heads to “freeze!” and “get the fuck on the floor!”
It was as exciting a job as anyone could wish for. But over time the early mornings started to strain. The door kicks were less exciting. When one dealer went to jail, another filled his seat on the street.
The metamorphosis from rash young newbie to jaded old-timer had happened slowly. At first Carl couldn’t find good cases on his own. Then he had trouble making busts. There was also the high pressure of undercover work, where you have to catch someone or they’ll catch you. His downward trajectory was compounded by the fact that he’d secretly developed his own substance abuse problem. Finally, all the strain had been too much, and Carl was eventually arrested for a DUI while he was an agent, which led to a mental breakdown four years later. He almost lost it all—the family, the job, the cat. But the Lord had stepped in, and Carl had been offered amnesty with this desk job as a solar agent. Since then there hadn’t been many opportunities arriving at his cubicle.
But on a late-January day in 2012, that was about to change.
He was sitting at his desk waiting for another day to pass when his supervisor, Nick, yelled for Carl to come into his office. These moments came often: a shriek from Nick and some sort of order to take on cases that most agents thought were ridiculous. This included the regular request to go and do “jump-outs,” the name given to the act of driving around Baltimore, pulling up to a street corner, jumping out of the car, and grabbing low-level dealers. Most agents thought this was a pathetic way of trying to beat the drug problem, as opposed to going after the big bosses, where they believed they could actually have an impact.
Still, when Nick called, you went. Nick’s office was dark, as usual. While Carl’s supervisor was lucky enough to have a window with a paltry view of frozen and barren Baltimore, he always kept the blinds drawn, blocking out even the tiniest pinprick of light. Adding to the darkness, Nick had pinned posters of Iron Maiden and Metallica all over his office walls.
“So,” Nick said to Carl, “I just got a call about the Silk Road Web site.”