In recent weeks he had sat at his desk, a Rubik’s Cube always spinning in his hand, as he read all of the online postings by the Silk Road’s creator, looking for similarities in the author’s language. As the site had grown, DPR’s message had become more brazen. While at first the founder’s idea had been to make drugs legal, more and more he wrote about how terrible the U.S. government was, and how it was a place for the abuse of power. In one post DPR gloated that the “state is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on [the Silk Road].”
Based on all of his writings, Jared had started to build a profile of who this Dread Pirate Roberts might be. He was likely very educated, young, not rich but not poor either, and while he wanted to destroy the American legal system, he was also doing this for the money. DPR had even admitted this in postings on the site, noting that “money is one motivating factor for me. . . . I also enjoy a few first-world pleasures that I feel I have earned. . . . Compared to most I know, I still live quite frugally.” But from Jared’s readings it appeared that DPR also believed that what he was doing was making the world a better place. “As corny as it sounds,” Dread had written online, “I just want to look back on my life and know that I did something worthwhile that helped people.”
Jared, trying to find things that others couldn’t see, started to analyze DPR’s speech patterns. For one, Dread used the word “epic” a lot, which showed that he was likely younger. He also used emoji smiley faces in his writing, though he never used a hyphen as the nose, writing them as :) rather than the old-fashioned :-). Yet the one attribute about DPR that stood out to Jared was that rather than writing “yes” or “yeah” on the site’s forums, Dread instead always typed “yea.”
DPR was constantly recommending books to his followers—a litany of literature from the Mises Institute. Jared wanted to understand Dread’s thinking and read along too. But the books were so dense that nothing he read made any sense. To him it appeared that the arguments made by the authors were just a series of justifications for doing things in the world without taking responsibility for how those actions might affect other people.
All those books and all that research hadn’t brought Jared any closer to DPR.
To make matters worse, Jared had heard from his counterparts at the Homeland Security office in Baltimore that a DEA agent, Carl Force, had managed to get close to the Dread Pirate Roberts, and Carl had been chatting with him undercover.
Hearing this, Jared reluctantly asked the HSI Baltimore team to look through some of Carl’s chat logs to see if he could find more patterns in DPR’s language.
When an e-mail arrived containing some of the logs, Jared was shocked at what the DEA agent was writing to DPR. Carl Force appeared to be offering more information than he should to the man he was supposed to be hunting, explaining how drug-smuggling routes worked and how to buy and sell heroin in bulk. It was one thing to curry favor with a perp whom you were trying to lure into public, but this felt like it was going several steps too far.
As Jared sat at his desk in Chicago, staring at all the mail tubs on the floor, the Mises books on his desk, and the pictures of drugs that covered his walls, he felt so frustrated that he was being caught up in dead end after dead end. Jared needed a break in his case. Something, anything, just a little sign that he was on the right track.
Chapter 37
A PIRATE IN DOMINICA
Welcome aboard, and thanks for flying with us.” The voice crackled over the intercom as the plane slowly edged along the tarmac of San Francisco International Airport. “Just in case, a life vest is located under your seat.” Ah, yes. The ominous what-to-do-in-case-of-an-emergency warning. A cautionary tale that served as the perfect allegory for Ross, who sat in the middle of the plane, nervously thinking about the last two hours and the next two weeks.
Ross had expected an easy morning with some last-minute packing for his trip. But instead DPR had woken up to the discovery that the Silk Road was under attack by hackers who had brought the servers to a halt. To fend off the attack, Ross had been frantically working with Smedley, his lieutenant programmer, all morning.
“I think we should install that waffle so we can see the results from mod-sec,” Smedley wrote as he tried to figure out what was happening. “Everything with a .txt extension can go into etcmodsecurity/.”
“Let me think,” DPR replied, frantic as the clock ticked down to his flight.
“Disable everything.”
“OK. We’ll need mysql, yea?”
The morning had gone on like this for a couple of hours, and then Ross had no choice but to set off for his trip, leaving Smedley responsible for fending off the hackers.
For Ross that was all irrelevant now. Poor DPR would not be able to log on to the Silk Road for at least six hours, until his next layover. He’d just need to trust that Smedley and his team of employees, whom he was paying between $900 and $1,500 a week for their services, had it under control. Sleep. That’s what he would do. He would need it when he landed. As the plane leveled off at 35,000 feet, Ross leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
While he could have easily afforded to buy a Learjet (or two) and fly private, he had instead chosen to lie low and travel commercial. As a result, the travel alone for his trip was going to last almost two days and take him more than four thousand miles away from San Francisco. First he had to stop in Atlanta, Georgia, then catch a connection to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The following day, groggy and tired, he would take a small prop plane over a dozen tropical islands until he arrived in the Commonwealth of Dominica—smack in the middle of the Caribbean.
This wasn’t a vacation. It was his trapdoor—his out. The final touch of an escape plan that had been in the works since he’d begun his security overhaul months earlier. A what-to-do-in-case-of-an-emergency scheme. After months of research and seeking the advice of Variety Jones, it turned out the Commonwealth of Dominica, where citizenship can be picked up for an “investment” of around $75,000, would serve as the perfect place for Ross to hide the Dread Pirate Roberts from the Feebs. It was also the ideal spot for Ross to stash his millions of tax-free dollars without Uncle Sam asking where all that money came from.
The entire trip to Dominica was an exhausting slog. Ross would deboard a plane and find a private corner in the airport to open his laptop so that DPR could log on to the Silk Road and wage war against attackers before rushing off to the next flight. This went on again and again until Ross finally landed in the tropics.
He stepped off the plane to see a tiny airport with a blue roof surrounded by tentacle-like palm trees. The taxi from the airport took almost an hour to get to the Fort Young Hotel on Victoria Street, where Ross was staying.
When he arrived, he checked in, logged on to the site, and was immediately relieved to discover that Smedley had managed to squelch the assault against the Silk Road. Everything was back to normal—for now.