“Let me tell you a little parable,” Dread wrote to one employee. “It’s the middle ages in Europe. . . .” He went on with the story: A man walks onto a construction site and he sees a group of laborers carving stone blocks for a building. Most of the men are working slowly, with long, unhappy faces. “What are you doing?” the man asks the laborers, to which they reply, “What does it look like we’re doing? We’re carving stone blocks.” But then the man sees another worker who has a glint in his eye and a smile across his face. This worker seems to be toiling at twice the speed of the others, and his stone carvings are impeccable. So the man goes over and asks him, “What are you doing?” To which this laborer looks back and answers: “I’m building a cathedral to the glory of God.”
“If someone asked you what you’re doing,” DPR continued to his employee, “would you say ‘dealing with people’s problems’ or ‘working to free humanity’?”
This was why Ross had to go into hiding: because there was too much to lose. He wouldn’t be working from René’s spare bedroom anymore. He wouldn’t be traipsing off to Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street to hole up in his favorite coffee shop and work on the Silk Road. With so many government agencies searching for DPR and “DeathFromAbove” looking to kill him, it was imperative that he become more careful.
So as the bedroom door on Fifteenth Avenue near the Outer Sunset closed, the men outside in the living room assumed that their new roommate, “Josh,” was getting to work trading stocks or doing some freelance IT support.
But inside that room, Ross, Josh, and DPR knew that they were all working together to build their “cathedral to the glory of God” and, in doing so, working to free humanity from the tyranny of the U.S. government.
Chapter 49
CARL SWITCHES TEAMS
The smell of coffee lingered in the air as Carl sat in his cubicle at the DEA offices in Baltimore, working away on his laptop. Out of the silence his cell phone rang, again. He knew exactly who it was before he even picked up the phone, which displayed a Spanish Fork, Utah, area code. It was Curtis Green again, the Gooch! This must have been the eighth time today that Green had called, and it was getting really fucking annoying.
“I can’t believe you think I stole DPR’s money,” Green said on the phone in a high-pitched murmur. “I swear I didn’t steal anything from him.”
Carl disagreed. “You’re a liar.” After listening to Green whine some more, Carl told him to chill out and continue to lie low, as DPR still believed he was dead, and, twisting some fear into him, he warned that if the leader of the Silk Road found out Green was really still alive, you could be sure that wouldn’t last long.
“How long am I supposed to stay hidden for?” Green pleaded. “I haven’t been outside in months.” He then whimpered that he had nothing to do with the stolen money. Carl, fed up with this nonsense, hung up.
After the fake-but-not-so-fake torturing in the Marriott Hotel, DPR had asked Nob to have his “thugs” kill Green. Carl couldn’t be bothered to fly out to Spanish Fork, Utah, again, so he told Green to fake his own death. The instructions were simple: Dunk your head in water, as if you’ve been drowned. Then pop open a can of Campbell’s soup. A tomato flavor. And then pour that soup out of your mouth, like you died from being held underwater and there was a mucuslike eruption from your mouth. Finally, so we have something to show, have your wife snap a picture of your lifeless body with your cell phone.
Nob had then sent the grainy photo to the Dread Pirate Roberts as evidence that the thieving piece of shit Green had been murdered. “Died of asphyxiation / heart rupture,” Carl wrote to Dread.
That was supposed to be the end of it. Yet shortly after that interaction, Carl had noticed a change in Dread. It was as if the act of taking another man’s life, or at least believing he had done so, had given DPR a taste of power and control that he had never felt before. The leader of the Silk Road had started to become more demanding and more confident than ever. When Carl—in a friendly “I’m on your side” capacity—tried to warn DPR about the potential consequences of running the site, Dread responded in a recalcitrant tone that Carl had never seen before.
“I was not forced into this. I chose it,” Dread stated defiantly. “I chose it with full awareness of what the consequences would be.” He then offered his intransigent view that the Silk Road would grow so large that “it will force governments to legalize” drugs. Don’t question the Dread Pirate Roberts, because he was willing to do anything imaginable to see that through.
Dread had become more stern about smaller issues too. When Nob was late to a chat meeting they had scheduled to talk business, he was berated by DPR and given a long lecture about the importance of loyalty and “honoring your word.”
O captain, my captain.
It didn’t take long for DPR to go from feeling disheartened by the death of Curtis Green to believing that the murder was Green’s own fault. “I am pissed that he turned on me,” he wrote to Nob. “I’m pissed I had to kill him. I just wish more people had some integrity.”
Carl agreed wholeheartedly. “Integrity is probably the hardest thing to find [in people],” he wrote, pointing out that loyalty, fear, greed, and power are traits that most of us possess, “but integrity is rare.”
It seemed that “integrity” was a rare trait in Carl also.
Over the past couple of months, just like his co–case agent who had stolen $350,000 from the site, Carl had been trying to come up with a way to get money out of the Silk Road for his own personal gain too. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, Carl reasoned. No one would ever find out; these were Bitcoins; they couldn’t be traced; it was just like digital cash.
And so he came up with a plan. Several plans, actually.
One afternoon in the summer of 2012, he wrote to the Dread Pirate Roberts with a proposition. It turned out, just by chance, that Nob knew a corrupt government official. Well, whaddaya know? A guy who just so happened to be involved with the Silk Road case. Interesting. This official’s name, Nob explained, was Kevin, and he was willing to give information about the case to the Dread Pirate Roberts, but for a small donation.
Dread wanted to know how Nob knew this bad cop.
“He came to me,” Nob explained. “Told me about an investigation on me.”
“Why did he do that?” DPR asked.
“He did it for money :),” Nob said. “Kevin is a very smart and devious man.”
In the same way that Carl had borrowed what he knew about drug smuggling in South America when he created the fictitious character “Nob,” he was now borrowing from his own demons to create “Kevin,” an unscrupulous government agent who got a thrill from breaking the rules and was now about to cross one of the most sacrosanct lines in law enforcement. He was going to start selling secrets back to the man he was hunting.
Up until this point Carl’s supervisors had been able to see everything he wrote to DPR, as their chats were all put into evidence in DEA “Report of Investigation” documents. Aware of this, Carl suggested that Nob and Dread move some of their conversations, specifically those with information from Kevin, to PGP, a highly secure and private chat system that encrypts every single message. If Carl was going to commit a major felony, which he was about to do, he wanted to ensure that the government would never be able to find out by reading these messages.