The two-story white Colonial home on the outskirts of Baltimore looked idyllic. In the front, a blissful stone walkway swerved past two giant oak trees. The back of the home overlooked a serpentine brook, where foxes and deer ran through the bramble and past the fragrant crab apple trees.
This scene, a utopia, had been enough to make Carl Force and his wife fall in love with the home—the perfect place to raise their kids and maybe one day retire.
Yet from the day Carl had signed the paperwork with the bank, the home had been nothing short of a nightmare, plagued with every problem imaginable, including electrical issues, leaks, and the painful discovery that most of the walls had no insulation. A house built of paper that had sapped the family’s savings account of almost all its worth. “The Lemon,” as Carl called it, was just one more box of stress to pile on top of all the other stresses. Carl often found himself lying awake at night, staring up into the dark, the silence of suburbia screaming in the background, as he thought about his past, his future, and how he was going to recoup his losses from the home.
Unlike most people who would ease their tension after a long day at the office by plopping on the couch, turning on the TV, and cracking open a beer, sober Carl had done the polar opposite. He would come home, a bald grown man with tattoos all over his body, and fluff pillows. He couldn’t help himself; the stress of work, the stress of the decaying house, the stress of where he was in life all led to a one-hour cleaning session before he could settle down for dinner. Sometimes he blamed this quirk on his self-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, but really he didn’t care what it was. Shaking a pillow in the air until all the feathers inside were evenly spaced was more calming than any beer could ever be.
But in recent weeks, a change in the wind had made his stresses flit away. In fact, Carl—for the first time in as long as he could remember—was invigorated by life. He was born again. Baptized by the Silk Road.
At first when he was assigned to the HSI Baltimore team to help with the case, Carl had been intrigued but nonchalant about the operation. It was an opportunity to work a different kind of case from the normal jump-out, but it wouldn’t change his solar-agent lifestyle. Then one of the agents from Baltimore had shown him how to download Tor and how to navigate the Silk Road forums, and Carl had become obsessed.
He soon realized that this site could change everything. The DEA might become a cybercrimes operation. Other agencies, like the FBI or NSA, which never led drug cases, might create new divisions to go after these online targets. It was a new frontier, he saw, the Wild West. And he wanted to be one of the sheriffs in the O.K. Corral.
He started inhaling anything he could find about the Silk Road. He scrolled through the endless discussions on the Silk Road, from how to inject heroin into your eyeballs to how to secure packages of drugs to ensure they weren’t discovered by the U.S. Postal Service. He read the writings of the site’s leader, a character who used to call himself Admin but had recently renamed himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Carl had been warned, sternly, by the HSI Baltimore agents not to sign up for an account on the Silk Road yet. “Don’t do anything stupid on the site,” he was told by his supervisors. “We don’t want anyone knowing that law enforcement is on there.”
But Carl had someone to hunt, and the feelings he had experienced in his early days as an agent were returning. His body buzzed with the thrill. It was like someone had pulled back a Carl Force curtain and a younger, sprightlier Carl Force was there waiting to prove himself to his boss, to his coworkers, to his wife—to himself.
Soon his solar-agent days started to grow longer too. Now when the sun went down, Carl would pull into his driveway, run upstairs to the spare room in the back of the house, and flip open his DEA laptop to scour the Silk Road and read the new postings by its leader. For now the pillows in the Colonial house would have to wait. There was work to do. He needed to burrow deeper into the Silk Road and figure out a strategy to take down the site.
Chapter 22
“O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN”
The Silk Road tribe didn’t just like their leader’s new name; they fucking loved it. It was a rallying cry for everyone involved. A masked face for the leader of a revolution. If Cuba had Che Guevara and Ireland had Michael Collins, then the war on drugs would have the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The site’s forums, where people could discuss anything about the Silk Road, were bubbling with chatter about its leader’s nom de plume. The dealers and buyers were galvanized with a feeling that they weren’t simply buying or selling drugs but were on the fringes of an insurrection that was going to change the entire legal system forever.
Ross’s employees also immediately took to the new moniker, as it gave an identity to someone who, until now, had had no selfhood. One minute their boss was an anonymous elusive figure behind a keyboard; the next he was a feared pirate who was going to lead them into battle with the U.S. government. And by fucking God was he going to win that battle.
Everyone started respectfully referring to Ross as either the Dread Pirate Roberts or DPR for short. And those closest to him (mostly his employees) chose an even more important title: “Captain.” Dozens of times a day they addressed their commander this way.
“Mornin’, captain.”
“Ready when you are, cap’n.”
“My thoughts exactly, Captain.”
“Sweet dreams, captain.”
“Night, captain.”
Ross loved it—all of it. For the first time in months he felt invigorated by the site and the direction he could steer the ship. And it was his ship. No one else’s.
“O captain, my captain.”
Before meeting Variety Jones, Ross had questioned what he was doing. Was all of this worth it? At first he had lived with the constant fear that running the site could land him in jail for the rest of his life, or even force him to walk the green mile to an electric chair. He had come to terms with this by reminding himself that he was fighting for something he believed in, and because he was helping people, the risk was worth the reward. But after overcoming that obstacle, he couldn’t quite come to terms with the reality that he had to constantly lie to those around him.