The fact that Ross went by “Josh” wasn’t necessarily a red flag to Dylan. He had met plenty of people in Silicon Valley who subscribed to a “libertarian” philosophy and were borderline paranoid about their privacy. But Dylan was still hopeful that he could make Ross into a source and, with the goal of eventually tracking down the creator of the fake IDs, the agents collected the information they needed about Ross’s roommates.
“Take care,” Dylan said politely as he turned around with his partner and walked down the steps. As they reached the driveway, Ross closed the door behind them.
The agents then got into their Jeep and checked Ross Ulbricht’s name in the DHS database, which came back empty. “That guy sure was smart,” Dylan said to the other agent, who agreed, as he pulled away. “There is something to this Silk Road thing, we should really look into it.”
Inside the home on Fifteenth Avenue, Ross rushed down the hallway and back into his bedroom. He knew he had to do something before the agents realized the e-mail he had given them was fake, or before the Department of Homeland Security called Andrew Ford, the man he was subletting the apartment from, and told him that “Josh,” his tenant, was really Ross and that he had been ordering illegal documents from a Web site that sold drugs, guns, hacker tools, and fake IDs and having them mailed to 2260 Fifteenth Avenue in Andrew Ford’s name.
Chapter 57
ONWARD TO FEDERAL PLAZA
From the window of his hotel room Jared could see the two massive square imprints in the ground where the two towers had once stood. Cranes and trucks and construction debris surrounded the holes now, and yet a mere decade earlier 2,606 people had lost their lives there.
As he looked out at the transforming landscape, a million thoughts climbed through Jared’s mind. He replayed the moment the planes tore into those towers. Explosions and fire and people left with no choice but to jump to their deaths. He thought of those firefighters and police officers who had clambered inside to help whomever they could. And then everyone turning to dust, right at the foot of where Jared now contemplated the totality of it all. He thought about the families who had lost their mothers and fathers and sons and daughters that day. Tears began welling up in his eyes as he reached for his phone to video chat with his son, Tyrus, to tell him he loved him and to update him on the hunt for the bad pirate he was searching for.
After Jared hung up, blowing a kiss from that New York hotel room to his son’s bedroom in Chicago, it was time to get back to his laptop, working undercover for DPR. Jared hoped that he could help stop an attack on America that happened not with 747s flying into buildings at six hundred miles per hour, but rather in slow motion through a Web site that wanted to topple the country’s democracy.
Jared feared almost daily that operatives from al Qaeda could come into the country legally, without any weapons at all, and then buy an arsenal of bombs or guns or poisons from within the United States, all from the Silk Road with a few Bitcoins and the Tor Web browser. On a more personal level, as he thought about his son, he worried that a teenager could buy a gun on the site and go on a shooting rampage in a preschool in Chicago. Jared was determined to do everything in his power to stop either of those atrocities from happening.
The following morning after a long night working for DPR on the site, managing administrative tasks, Jared walked along Church Street and then Broadway until he arrived at 26 Federal Plaza, the giant black building that was home to the Cyber Division of the FBI.
It was early August 2013, and Jared had come to New York City to work with Chris Tarbell, to delve through the servers and see if they could use Jared’s knowledge and his undercover account, Cirrus, to piece together details about who DPR might be.
Tarbell met Jared in the lobby and helped him negotiate getting his laptop and phone into the FBI offices. Under normal circumstances the FBI police (who protected the building) barred anyone from bringing devices inside—even other agents from within the government—for fear that a virus or some kind of surreptitious surveillance software could make its way onto the FBI network. But Jared wasn’t just any other government agent, Tarbell insisted; he was working undercover and needed access to his computer at all times. The FBI police relented.
For the past few weeks Jared had had to stay online almost perpetually to mimic the behavior of the woman whose identity he had co-opted. He had been forced to take his laptop on family outings, to birthday parties, and even to his son’s weekly swim meet. (Parents of other kids, unaware of why Jared was on his laptop all the time as Tyrus swam laps, were not impressed.)
When they reached the twenty-third floor, Jared was given a brief tour of the Cyber Division before Tarbell led him past the Pit and back into lab 1A.
“You can set your computer up right here,” Tarbell said, pointing at the table in the middle of the room where the agents often ate lunch. “And over here is the computer that has the Silk Road server on it.”
As Jared unpacked his bag of gadgets, he noticed an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper that had been pasted on the wall. In black marker, someone had written the words “silk road” across the top. There were IP addresses all over the place with descriptions underneath explaining what each series of numbers represented. One was a server for the chat clients of the Silk Road, another for a server that stored the hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoins, and another, called a “mastermind” section, for the site’s administrator. As Tarbell explained, this was all the information that had been gleaned from the servers. (To mess with Tarbell, his co–case agents had created a mock chart next to the Silk Road version that had pictures of all the characters from The Princess Bride, including Princess Buttercup, Westley, and Prince Humperdinck, with nonsensical arrows pointing between each.)
As Jared studied the Silk Road chart, he saw the name of a coffee shop called Momi Toby’s in San Francisco. When he asked why it was on the chart, Tarbell explained that one of the servers they found had been erased. Wiped clean of evidence like a murder scene that had been disinfected with bleach. But when the person who had expunged the drive logged out of the server, they had accidentally left one tiny clue behind: the IP address of the place where they had logged in to do their cleaning. In other words, the Dread Pirate Roberts might have wiped the murder scene down, but he had left the corner of a thumbprint on the front door when he walked out.