It was still dark outside when Jared opened his eyes and looked through the open window in the living room. It took him a few groggy seconds to realize that he had fallen asleep on the couch, once again, still fully clothed with the television flickering. He’d come home from work at midnight and probably dozed off around 2:00 a.m. watching his favorite program, Antiques Roadshow. Given that it was now almost 6:00 a.m., he had maybe—3:00, 4:00, 5:00 . . .—pulled off four whole hours of sleep. For Jared that seemed like something of a record.
Most nights he was kept up by his idée fixe: the Silk Road, a case that Jared was trying to solve alone, but that was mired in soupy bureaucratic minutiae and nonstarters. Every direction he had been turning to was tangled in red tape. Bosses, bosses of bosses, and people he didn’t even know existed in government were starting to ask what this young newbie agent was doing and why he was doing it. Should an HSI agent really be going after a Web site that appeared to be selling a few bags of drugs? Weren’t there more important things that kid should be working on? Who the fuck did he think he was?
The case had been such a burden, with all the work adding a heavy strain to Jared’s marriage, and his wife, Kim, growing understandably frustrated that Jared spent less time in the house than he spent out of it. On top of that, all the hours were not amounting to much. He had no leads and no idea how to tackle a Web site that was a den of anonymity.
Thankfully for Jared, that was about to change.
For weeks he had been working on his plan of attack. He knew he couldn’t find the leader of the site—or leaders, perhaps, he acknowledged—as they were securely cloaked by the Tor browser online. But he also knew how any crime network worked, and that if you start at the bottom, you will eventually make your way to the top. The bottom for Jared meant buying drugs. Lots of drugs.
He hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to buy narcotics online. Not because it was hard to procure heroin or crack from the Silk Road (it was actually shockingly easy) but rather because no one in the Department of Homeland Security had ever before embarked upon an online drug-shopping spree. Unlike seizing some contraband at a port or orchestrating a controlled delivery in the street to arrest someone, online drugs were a true Wild West with no existing protocols. It took several layers of approval, numerous meetings, and copious paperwork before Jared was finally allowed to commence his binge-shopping on the Amazon of drugs.
Then there was the challenge of buying the Bitcoins. He was allocated $1,001 for his shopping excursion. So he took the cash, deposited it in a bank, then went to a Bitcoin exchange Web site where he could swap the dollars for Bitcoins. It wasn’t as easy as picking up drugs with cash on the street or finding a used bicycle on Craigslist, but it was still surprisingly painless considering what he was buying.
During his first expedition to the Silk Road, Jared had three goals. The first was to trace drugs back to their dealers. The second was to match listings on the Web site to actual physical drugs and packaging, enabling him to build a profile of what mail from the Silk Road looked like, as he had done with the khat back at Customs and Border Protection. And finally, Jared wanted to perform a small but important test.
He knew that the postal workers at ports across the United States were finding drugs in the mail system, but—and this was a big “but”—no one had any idea what percentage of drugs were not being found; how many pills and bags of powder were just swimming past officials. As far as Jared knew, the Silk Road could be a site peddling a few thousand dollars a year of narcotics, or it could be vending tens of millions of dollars in illegal contraband a month. Nobody knew which it was. But Jared had a hunch he could figure it out.
First Jared filled his shopping cart on the Silk Road, picking up a few pills of ecstasy, some opium “tea,” some synthetic weed, and a miscellany of stimulants from more than half a dozen countries around the world. In all he purchased from eighteen different dealers on the site and directed them to send his narcotics to a secret PO box at O’Hare.
Besides Mike, who had discovered that first luminous pink pill, and a few higher-ups at HSI, no one knew anything about his orders—or that they would be arriving today, on a mid-January morning in 2012.
As Jared sat up from the couch and rubbed his weary eyes, a plane was flying through the air 35,000 feet above him, getting ready to touch down at Chicago O’Hare International Airport with a few envelopes on board, destined for that secret PO box. Despite his exhaustion, Jared was invigorated. This was exactly the meaningful work he craved. For years, indeed, he had felt like that pink pill: a tiny droplet in a giant ocean. Now he was afforded the chance to have an impact. Maybe even make a name for himself.
He rolled off the couch and sluggishly wandered upstairs to help his wife get their son, Tyrus, ready for day care. There were kisses good-bye, a couple of giggles from Tyrus. Then it was out to the Pervert Car to work.
His day began like any other, at HSI as he worked on other cases, then by nightfall it was back to the airport to look for drugs. As evening came, so did the cold. Jared felt it as he walked up to the colossal mail center at the edge of the airport, trudging across the frozen ground toward the back door of the mail unit and stepping inside the land of halogen lights.
Mike was waiting for him in the seizure room, gleeful. He had a surprise for Jared: a couple of four-by-eight white envelopes from the same dealer with Jared’s PO box address on the front. “I found your drugs!” Mike said proudly.
But that would be the only package Mike would find that day, or any other. Of the eighteen orders that Jared had placed on the Silk Road, one was lost en route, and the other sixteen arrived in his PO box unnoticed by anyone in the federal government. It didn’t bode well for the new war on drugs.
That evening Jared, Mike, and another mail-room worker grabbed all of the drugs, slipped on protective blue rubber gloves, and splayed everything out on the conference room table at the mail center, taking pictures, tagging what they had found, and marking every mundane detail as evidence.
By midnight Jared would begin his hour-long drive home, and as he made it back to the couch and Antiques Roadshow, his mind was filled with a single thought: who were the leaders of the Silk Road, and what could Jared do to capture them?