Carl perked up. He had heard about this strange Web site a month earlier at a law enforcement meeting when an investigator with the U.S. Postal Service had given a brief presentation on it. There was a new phenomenon, the postal inspector had said, that was starting to infect mail ports all across the United States, and lots of people were sending small amounts of drugs through the system. The inspector had explained that the connection point for these dealers and buyers was called “the Silk Road.”
Later, intrigued by what the postal inspector had said, Carl searched online and read a few articles, including Adrian Chen’s piece on Gawker. He then thought about the implications, which were momentous. You couldn’t do jump-outs online, he reasoned. But given that Carl had no knowledge of computer forensics, it wasn’t a case he would have even thought of being assigned to. That was, until Nick called Carl into his office and asked if he wanted to assist a group of HSI agents in Baltimore. “They’ve picked up an informant who says he can lead them to the owner of the site,” Nick told Carl.
When Carl asked why he was being asked to join the case, Nick explained: The HSI group in Baltimore was not a drug team and usually tracked counterfeit stuff or, as Nick put it, “fake Louis Vuitton bags and shit like that.” So if the Baltimore group wanted to go after drugs, they needed a DEA agent on the team. “You want in?” Nick asked.
Carl thought about it for a moment. He was at the point in his career where he could have easily said, “No, not interested,” walked out of Nick’s dark office, and continued living life as a solar agent, coaching his son’s football games, going to church with his wife and kids on weekends, and hopefully realizing one day that his tomorrow was his family. Or he could get involved in this investigation and maybe—just maybe—make a name for himself at the DEA.
“Sure,” Carl said to Nick. He would take on the case.
Carl walked out of his supervisor’s office unaware that with the single word—“sure”—he was about to enter an underground world so dark and full of avarice that it would drag him in headfirst, and that as a result of the temptations of the Silk Road, Carl Force was going to lose everything that mattered to him.
Chapter 18
VARIETY JONES AND THE SERPENT
Ross had been in Australia for only a few weeks when he woke up from a strange dream. In his sleep he found himself face-to-face with a giant hundred-foot-long centipede with dark eyes and massive, twiddling legs. Hovering in the background was a looming snake, larger and more sinister than the centipede, slithering around in the darkness.
When he awoke the next morning, Ross didn’t know what the dream meant or why he wasn’t afraid of these sinister creatures. To him they didn’t seem evil at all. Or maybe they were, and he simply wasn’t able to see their true nature. But as he set about his day, he couldn’t get those slithering creatures out of his mind, eventually sharing a story on Facebook about the dream, curious what it might mean.
Maybe it was just the daunting reality of the past few months breaking through his subconscious. Back in Texas, the twin pressures of maintaining the Silk Road and keeping his involvement a secret had worn him thin. At particularly fraught moments he even wondered if he should forfeit his business, just give it up. But ever since he had moved to Sydney to be closer to his sister, life had gotten so much better. His mounting anxiety in Texas was giving way to a laconic calmness Down Under. Now Ross spent his days surfing at the golden beaches, drinking beer with his new pals at tiki bars, successfully flirting with girls, and, in between these social gatherings, working on the Silk Road.
But even the pleasures of Bondi Beach, where he was staying, couldn’t entirely eradicate the fears that came with running a start-up that trafficked in the multinational drug trade. In particular Ross still could not entirely shake the fact that, other than Erica, whose words he could always deny as hearsay, two real people—Julia and his old friend Richard—definitively knew that he had created the Silk Road.
Sure, he had cobbled together a story for Richard, explaining that he had given the site away to someone else. But the Julia problem remained. And no matter what fabrication he could possibly come up with, both would always know he had fathered the site. Ross, though a genius at many things, was clueless when it came to untangling this particular mess.
Luckily, someone was about to become a staple in his life who knew exactly how to fix these issues, and many other formidable challenges that impeded the Silk Road’s progress.
Ross interacted with dozens of different people on the Silk Road each day, including vendors, customers, and a couple of new libertarian part-time employees who helped with the site’s various programming problems. They all went by pseudonyms to hide who they really were, names like SameSameButDifferent, NomadBloodbath, and SumYunGai. (Ross’s own nickname was simply Silk Road or Admin.) But one of the people Ross had recently started talking to on the site, a man who operated under the nom de plume Variety Jones, seemed almost immediately to be different from everyone else.
He sold weed seeds, but he wasn’t just any weed seed dealer. Variety Jones was a sommelier, someone capable of telling you a seed’s variety—its viticulture—along with the strain, just by looking at a picture of it. And unlike the hordes of impatient and pushy drug dealers on the Silk Road, Variety Jones, or “VJ” as he was known in the forums, was guileful and intelligent. He (assuming he really was a “he”) knew everything about everyone, on the site and off—even the creator of the site.
Just two days after the menacing serpent-and-centipede dream, Ross and VJ started chatting on TorChat, a messaging platform that promised privacy for those using it. “I want to talk to you about security stuff,” Variety Jones wrote in one of their earliest correspondences. “Lots of security stuff.”
Ross was eager to hear, now fully aware that he was no longer just being targeted by the U.S. government but was very likely being hunted by authorities in dozens of countries. Given that real money was now flowing into the site too, with Ross pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week in revenue for the sale of drugs and guns, there would surely be more authorities hunting him soon. The only way to hide from the cops was to build better security into the site. Ross was a gifted coder, sure, with a quixotic vision of the future, but he knew better than anyone that he was out of his depth when it came to fixing the site’s vulnerabilities.