If only time could have stood still in that instant, these next few hours could have lasted forever. But that wasn’t possible. The laws of time, like gravity, are nonnegotiable. And time for Ross was running out.
But still, the San Francisco night was willing to offer up something special for Ross as a last hurrah. A night of revelry. Out of the darkness behind him, a friend yelled, “Let’s build a bonfire!”
They began unloading the pickup truck, which Ross had helped fill two beds high with dead logs and scraps of wood, all scavenged from Glen Canyon Park, a few blocks from Ross’s home.
His new roommate, Alex, was there. René and Selena too. Other friends were in town from Austin, a dozen people in all. The fire was lit and soon began to roar. Champagne was popped open. Beers too. A joint was passed around. Ross grabbed his djembe drum, his hands slapping the goblet-shaped leather as loud thuds hit the air.
The sounds were reminiscent of his days in college when he had joined the NOMMO group at Penn State. If it hadn’t been for that drum circle, he might never have met Julia in a nondescript basement at school. If it hadn’t been for the libertarian club he had joined, he might never have become who he was today.
He had sailed a million miles since then and helped a million people along the way. The Ross of back then had been an idealistic lost soul; this Ross had changed the world. The other Ross had been worth a few hundred dollars; this one was valued at a few hundred million. That guy had read the works of influential libertarians like Rothbard, Mises, and Block; and yet now Ross Ulbricht was a ghostwriter for the most influential libertarian of them all: the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Or maybe it was Ross alone penning those words. In many respects the two of them were now indistinguishable. Sweet Ross was still in there somewhere. He had recently seen a piece of trash caught in a tree in the park and had climbed the branches, higher and higher, to rid the park of the dangerous plastic bag. But his kindness had come with consequences. “I have poison oak rash from head to toe,” he had e-mailed Julia a few days later. “I wish you were here to comfort me :(.”
Still, the ointment that could fix the pain would come soon enough, when Ross would be able to see Julia again. He had booked a flight to Austin, planning to leave in a couple of weeks. He was done with San Francisco. What choice did he have? The city knew too much. He would go to Austin first, find another hiding place. Probably somewhere far, far away, where he could see his vision through. Maybe it would all be a new beginning.
The site was making more money than he knew what to do with. He had tens of millions of dollars on thumb drives scattered around his apartment. The problems, though abounding, had simply become daily work obstacles for Ross. When he wrote in his diary that he had loaned a dealer half a million dollars, or had Variety Jones deploy one of his soldiers to deal with another problem, or paid hackers or informants $100,000 apiece, it was just a day in the office for Ross. Murders, extortion, reprisals, and attacks had all just become the job. Sure, it was stressful at times, but in Ross’s alternate universe he was king.
On the beach, as the fire roared, a massive fireworks display began exploding in the distance like a magical, colorful rain. Boom! Boom! Boom! The thuds of the drum mixed with the sound of fireworks bursting overhead, their burning embers sprinkling into the ocean.
At around midnight two new visitors joined the group, though not the kind that Ross wanted to see: two San Francisco police officers walked up, inquiring into what was going on. But they weren’t here for him. They politely said it was time to put out the fire; the beach was closing. One minute red sparks shot violently into the sky, the next sand was being kicked over the embers as darkness returned to the beach.
The troupe of friends gathered their things and walked back toward the parking lot, in the direction of the white pickup truck.
The party, it seemed, was over.
As Ross slipped his black jacket back on and looked out into the darkness, he had no idea that a team of undercover FBI agents were looking back at him, and that for the past two weeks they had been watching his every move.
PART V
Chapter 62
THE PINK SUNSET
Pink.
That’s what it was. Vast and pink and endless.
A magnificently surreal pink sunset that covered San Francisco from above. Jared couldn’t take his eyes off it. He gazed down from the window of the plane, and for a moment he was reminded of just how insignificant we can all feel sometimes, plodding through our lives, working our menial jobs, and thinking we don’t really matter—and yet from a different viewpoint we get to see that we all do.
As the plane banked to the left, preparing to land, Jared pulled out his smartphone and snapped a picture to preserve the moment. A memory to capture the pink sky before he, Jared Der-Yeghiayan, helped capture the Dread Pirate Roberts. That was, if they were actually able to catch him. According to Tarbell, there was a problem, and Jared had to get to the hotel as soon as possible to discuss the issue with the FBI team on the ground.
At almost the second the United Airlines flight’s wheels screeched onto the tarmac of the airport, Jared reached for his laptop and a Wi-Fi hub and logged on to the Silk Road. He hadn’t wanted to take a chance that DPR would try to contact Cirrus while he was in the sky, so Jared had an HSI agent in Chicago pretending to be Jared, who was in turn pretending to be a woman from Texas, while Jared flew into San Francisco. It was complicated, but when he landed, he saw that the handoff had, thankfully, gone unnoticed.
The undercover account had proved more useful than Jared could ever have imagined to ensure that Ross Ulbricht really was DPR. It was one thing to have a suspect; it was something entirely different to gather enough evidence to convict him.
Shortly after the phone call among Gary, Tarbell, Jared, and Serrin, the FBI had assigned a team of undercover agents to trail Ross. For two weeks they followed Ross as he went for a walk in the park, peered over his shoulder as he was on a date with a girl at a restaurant in the Mission, or while he was out for a drink with his friends. But it was when he wasn’t doing those things that Jared’s account had become invaluable.
Whenever Jared saw the Dread Pirate Roberts log on to the Silk Road, he would let the undercover FBI team on the ground know, and they would confirm that at that very moment, Ross had opened his laptop too. Then, when DPR logged off the site, the undercovers would confirm that Ross had closed his laptop. So ensuring Jared was online all the time was imperative to the investigation.