When everyone returned to the room, it was Jared’s turn to speak. He was anxious. While he had walked into the room that morning determined that he wouldn’t share much about his investigation, fearing the FBI would steal all the work he had done, Jared had just changed his mind. After that debacle he had just witnessed, with Luke Dembosky telling the Baltimore task force that their behavior was “completely improper,” Jared decided he was going to take a chance and tell the room everything.
He stood up and spoke for more than forty minutes, explaining that he had seized almost 3,500 packages of drugs. He shared the techniques he had developed to spot this incoming mail and how he knew which drugs had been purchased from the Silk Road by matching package contents to photos and locations on the site. He talked about dealers he had arrested or questioned, including people from the Netherlands, and others from all over the United States. He described the vendor accounts he had taken over on the site, and he explained the inner workings of the Silk Road, with charts and illustrations showing who was whom. Finally he talked about a recent account he had commandeered that had belonged to a high-level employee on the Silk Road and showed how the account had allowed Jared to be a fly on the wall in the meetings DPR held with his underlings.
Back in New York, in the middle of Jared’s presentation, Tarbell looked at the lead attorney sitting next to him and said, “I want to work with that guy.” The attorney nodded his head in complete agreement.
By the end of Jared’s presentation, everyone was in awe at the work he had done. His choice to speak had worked to his benefit, and the Baltimore agents, by comparison, looked worse than they had forty minutes earlier.
But the grand finale was about to begin.
When it was the FBI’s turn to speak, Tarbell and his crew had decided that the assistant U.S. attorney from New York would explain the FBI’s investigation thus far. And yet, as he stood up in the conference room and began speaking, no one had any clue what they were about to hear.
“We have the server,” Serrin Turner declared abruptly.
The room fell silent. Not a single word was uttered. In New York Tarbell sat in the conference room looking at the screen with a giant shit-eating grin on his face.
In a matter of seconds, as people realized what they had just heard, agents from all corners of the room began to speak, asking when they could get access to the server.
“We don’t know what we have yet,” Serrin said. “Let us take a look at it first.” He noted that they had gotten their hands on the server only a couple of weeks earlier, and their computer scientists were still rebuilding it so they could search through its content.
After a discussion about this major revelation, Luke Dembosky said the meeting would be coming to a close and he would be in touch with people individually to figure out how to move forward. Until then, he instructed all of the agents in the room to keep pushing forward with their individual cases.
“Anyone have anything else?” Dembosky asked as he peered around the room.
No one said anything. Including Gary Alford of the IRS.
“Okay, thanks for coming, everyone,” Dembosky said. “We’ll be in touch about next steps.”
? ? ?
The rain started with small sprinkles on Gary’s car window. A few drops here, a few there. The wipers made them disappear. Then there were more. Hundreds, millions, maybe. The windshield wipers thrashed back and forth but did nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. All the cars on the freeway just stopped, unable to see a few feet in front of them, and Gary pulled his SUV over to the side of the road.
Happy friggin’ birthday, Gary, he thought as he looked out the window and contemplated the deconfliction meeting he had just left. A meeting that had left him crestfallen.
When he had been assigned to the Silk Road case, Gary had thought he was the star young agent the government was bringing in to help take down the online drug empire. And yet in the middle of the meeting with the DOJ, he had realized there were other stars too. An entire constellation of them. Sure, he knew about the task forces in Chicago and Baltimore, but no one had told him about the FBI. The same FBI that worked a few blocks away from his office. When Serrin Turner had stood up and said, “We have the server,” Gary had felt a punch to his gut. No one had told him that this wasn’t a collaboration but rather a competition.
So why was Gary wasting all of his time reading the discussions on the site’s forums (each three times) and studying the language of the Dread Pirate Roberts (also three times) and spending his birthday—the one day of the year when Gary had made the city go dark!—driving down to a meeting in Washington, DC?
That’s it, Gary thought as the rain pounded against the window, I’m done. The FBI has the servers; they obviously know about all of the suspects in the case, and their names. What do they need me for?
A few minutes later, as the skies turned blue and the rain washed away, Gary pulled his car back onto the road, heading north toward New York City. He decided that, going forward, he would focus on people who were laundering money on the site, as he had been assigned. What had he been thinking, anyway? That a number-crunching black man from the projects who worked in the least-respected ranks of criminal investigations in government, and who knew nothing about coding or drugs, could take down the most notorious criminal drug enterprise of our time? Fuck that! As he sped up the freeway Gary decided he was done looking for the Dread Pirate Roberts, even if he had already found him.
Chapter 54
JARED BECOMES CIRRUS
When Jared Der-Yeghiayan was a freshman in high school, his math teacher would walk into class each day with a Rubik’s Cube in hand. Young Jared would watch as the teacher passed the colored square cube around the room, instructing every student to jumble it as much as possible. “If I can solve this Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, you all get homework,” the teacher said to the class each day. “If I can’t, you don’t get any homework.” Sure enough, every single class ended with students trudging home with a complicated math assignment.