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.
After witnessing this spectacle several times, Jared was plagued by a desire to figure out how his teacher could always solve the riddle of the cube. He ran out and picked up his own Rubik’s Cube and spent weeks trying to solve the puzzle. With a lot of tenacity and a smidgen of help from the teacher, he was finally able to do the same thing. Over the years, Jared had collected dozens of different Rubik’s Cubes, now scattered all over his home and office. They hung from key chains and fell unexpectedly out of backpacks. To this day Jared had never met a cube he couldn’t solve in less than a minute.
The Silk Road case had proved to be an altogether different challenge, and it had become apparent to Jared that he wasn’t going to figure this one out alone. But he had no idea who he could collaborate with. Thankfully, after the deconfliction meeting in Washington, DC, that was about to change rapidly. The presentation Jared had given, showing all the work he had done so far on the case, had impressed the top lawyers at the Department of Justice so much that the New York FBI agents said they wanted to work with him in their quest to find the Dread Pirate Roberts. (This in itself was compliment enough, as the FBI didn’t like to work with anyone whose last name was not “of the FBI.”)
Jared had flown back to Chicago, stopped in to see his wife and son, and, as usual, fallen asleep while watching Antiques Roadshow. Though now when he passed out on the couch, his son, Tyrus, would curl up next to him. It had been difficult for Tyrus to be away from his dad so much, but Jared had explained that this was all temporary, and the travel was important because “I’m trying to catch a pirate who is doing bad things.” (Tyrus, hearing this, accepted his father’s quest. Pirates, after all, were bad characters in the storybooks he read, and needed to be caught.) But Tyrus had one request, that Jared Skype with him each night before bed.
“Of course,” Jared replied as they both curled up on the couch and fell asleep.
The next morning Jared woke up and left for work again. As he pulled his car into the parking lot of the HSI offices in Chicago and it chugged to a stop, his phone rang with a New York phone number.
“Agent Der-Yeghiayan here.”
“Hey, Jared,” a voice said, “this is Serrin Turner with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and I have Chris Tarbell, the lead investigator for the FBI on the Silk Road case.”
Jared immediately sat up in his seat, greeting the two men with respect.
“We really appreciated your honesty yesterday at the meeting,” a voice, clearly Chris Tarbell’s, said into the phone. He then explained that the FBI had so much evidence—Tarbell referred to the server as “the holy grail”—and given that the Bureau hadn’t been on the case long, agents were not sure where to begin. “We’d really love to get you out here to work with us.”
Jared was flattered and joked, “I’m on my way!” Then, in a more serious tone, he explained that he was wrapping up a new important part of his case and that he would arrange to fly out to New York City within a week.
They exchanged a few cordial comments and hung up. Jared sat there elated. The kid with no college degree who couldn’t get a job at the FBI years earlier was now being asked to work with what many considered the top men in law enforcement on one of the most important cybercrime cases of his generation.
But first Jared needed to deal with that “new important part of his case” he had mentioned to Tarbell on the phone. Though Jared didn’t know yet how important it would be.
A few days after the call, Jared drove the Pervert Car to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, as he had done ten thousand times before. But this time he wasn’t retrieving mail with drugs inside; he was picking up a passenger who was landing on a flight from Texas.
“Excuse me,” Jared said as he brushed by people at the airport, holding his Homeland Security badge in the air. As he approached the jet bridge, there, waiting for him, was a young, timid woman from Texas with dark hair, whom Jared had held at gunpoint a few weeks earlier. The woman worked as a volunteer moderator for the Silk Road, and over the past few weeks Jared had managed to befriend her on the site, and had tracked her down by saying he wanted to send her a gift in the mail. This led to a guns-drawn knock on her door in Texas (with some agents from Baltimore), where Jared gave her a choice to work with him or have to deal with someone else in government who wouldn’t be as nice.
Since that encounter they had spoken on the phone, and the woman from Texas had agreed to help Jared take over her account on the Silk Road. At around the same time, she explained to him that the Dread Pirate Roberts had contacted her, asking if she wanted a paid gig moderating the site’s forums and being a sort-of assistant doing trivial tasks for DPR. The pay would be $1,000 a week. Now the hope was that Jared would assume her identity and take the job as her.
He drove her to the hotel, apologizing the entire time for how messy his car was, and explained that in the morning they would meet at the HSI offices to get to work. “Don’t forget your computer,” he joked.
The conference room at HSI headquarters in Chicago was as drab as Jared’s personal office. There were no windows, the carpet was old and gritty, and the plants in the room were all made of plastic. When the woman from Texas arrived, he led her inside, handed her a tall cup of coffee, and then they sat down and began speaking.
“So,” Jared said as he flipped open a notepad and took the cap off his pen. “I need you to tell me everything: Tell me about the forums; tell me what your daily routine is. When do you log on? When do you log off? How often do you stay online for? Where do you post? What do you post about?”
Jared was going to become her. And he wanted to make sure, in his obsessive manner, that he knew every single detail about her account that others on the Silk Road would be aware of. Over the next two days he learned how to write like her, to capitalize inflections, to repeat important points twice, and even how to use emojis and smiley faces as she did.
She handed Jared dozens of screenshots she had taken of previous chats with DPR and his three deputies, SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, and Inigo, all of whom were incredibly powerful on the site and, as she warned, not to be fucked with.
Jared purchased a MacBook laptop that was identical to hers, and they spent the second day downloading all of the same applications she used to access the site, ensuring that his avatars matched hers (she had chosen to make her Silk Road avatar an image of Spider-Man eating a taco) and that the versions of the programs they used were indistinguishable from each other. He set his username to hers, which was Cirrus.
Then, at the end of the two days, the woman from Texas gave Jared her log-in credentials for the Silk Road. As he typed the username and password into his computer, she voiced her concern about what could happen if things went awry.
“I’m really worried DPR is going to find me,” she said. There were, after all, rumors floating around the Dark Web that the merciless Dread Pirate Roberts had recently had some people killed. The last thing the woman from Texas wanted was to get a knock on her door and . . . Well, the thought terrified her.
Jared assured her that she had nothing to worry about and said he was available day and night if anything happened. “Most of the people on this site are just nerds,” he said. “They’re not ruthless drug lords.” From all of his investigations, it seemed that the Silk Road was less like The Godfather and more like Lord of the Flies. Were these people capable of ruthless acts? Yes, absolutely. But with a caveat: many of them were capable only from behind the safety of a keyboard. “My advice,” he said to her, “is to just get off the grid for a while. Don’t go on social media. Don’t go to the site. Just lay low.”
The people on the Silk Road would still see her online under her pseudonym, Cirrus. Only a handful of people in the federal government would know that Cirrus was really Jared, undercover.
DPR had asked Cirrus to provide a driver’s license if she wanted to work for him, so Jared had the undercover team at HSI put together a fake license with a photograph of a female agent, which he sent to Dread.
“Hey I’m willing to do anything you need me to do on the site,” Jared told the Dread Pirate Roberts in his first interaction with the man he had been hunting for two years. “I’m here to help.”
DPR responded with a list of mundane tasks to complete and told Cirrus to get to work. There would be no small talk here.
Maybe this puzzle would be solvable after all, Jared reasoned.
As he dropped the woman from Texas back off at O’Hare, Jared was invigorated by the fact that he was no longer just an employee with the Department of Homeland Security; he was now also undercover as a worker for the Silk Road. And his boss wasn’t just any underling on the site, but rather the most ruthless pirate of them all.