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.
He got off the plane at SFO, his laptop in one hand, his bags in the other, and he set off to the hotel, utterly exhausted. He hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours at a time since the phone call three weeks earlier, and there was no sign that was going to let up anytime soon.
Jared checked into his room at the hotel and made plans with Tarbell to meet at the steak restaurant in the lobby to go over the logistics of the coming days. Tarbell introduced Jared to a large ex-marine called Brophy, who was a “badass” special agent with the New York FBI and had come out to San Francisco to assist with the actual arrest. Thom, the computer scientist from the New York office, whom Jared had met before in New York City, was there too. Thom had one job, which was to keep Ross’s computer powered on and logged in if they captured him with his hands on the keyboard. But there was a problem with that part of the operation. As they ordered beers, Tarbell explained that the local FBI team in San Francisco was going to be responsible for the arrest, as this was in their jurisdiction (this was standard FBI procedure) and that the local agents wanted to go into Ross Ulbricht’s house with a SWAT team.
“Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah.”
Tarbell had made this mistake before during his LulzSec bust, and he knew that they could arrest Ross Ulbricht ten thousand times over, but unless they caught him with his hands on his laptop, they might not be able to prove that they had captured the Dread Pirate Roberts. All it would take was a glimpse of a Fed or the sound of a footstep, and Ross could touch his keyboard, encrypting the evidence on it. Sure, they could tie him to the site with the log-ins from Momi Toby’s café and the surveillance the Feds and Jared were building together. But a good lawyer could say that was all coincidence.
“What are we going to do?” Jared asked.
“I’m going down to the local FBI office tomorrow to try to talk them out of going in with SWAT,” Tarbell replied.
“You think it’ll work?”
“It has to.”
But Tarbell knew it would be a tough sell. As the FBI briefing reports noted, the Dread Pirate Roberts was dangerous. From what Tarbell and his crew had pulled from the servers, it appeared that DPR had had people murdered—several people—and that he had ties to the Hells Angels and other hit men. For all they knew, DPR was going to go down with a fight. Maybe a fight to the death. And the higher-ups at the Bureau weren’t going to risk losing a single FBI agent if that proved to be true. To top it off, the director of the FBI had briefed the White House about the sting, which meant the president of the United States would know if the operation was a success.
Brophy, the gruff agent, interrupted. “I should’ve grabbed him today.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Jared asked.
Earlier that day, Brophy explained, the undercover team had tracked Ross to a nearby coffee shop, where he sat on his computer for a couple of hours. Brophy walked into the café and sat right next to him, and while Brophy was big enough that he could have taken him right there and then, there was a chance that Ross wasn’t logged in to the Silk Road, and they would have captured him simply checking his e-mail. If Jared had not been on that plane, they might have been able to check if DPR was logged in to the site and arrested him if he was, but they couldn’t take that chance, so Brophy let him go.
“No shit?!”
“Yep.”
“Well,” Jared sighed as he observed his laptop, “he’s logged in now.” He then asked, “So what are we going to do?”
“I’m not sure. Let’s see what the ASAC says tomorrow,” Tarbell said, referring to the local assistant special agent in charge. Tarbell swallowed a gulp of his beer the way someone downs a shucked oyster, and as he did, he was reminded of something he had forgotten to share with Jared. “You wouldn’t believe who fucking called me before I flew out!”
“Who?” Jared queried as he took a bite of his burger.
“Carl Force! And he was being adamant that he wanted to see the server; he was almost defiant about it, acting like a real dick. I told him if he wanted to see it he had to go through my ASAC.”
“The Baltimore guys are so fucking unprofessional,” Jared said as he shook his head. “I swear something’s up with Carl; something doesn’t feel right.”
The agents spent the next forty-five minutes telling stories about just how unprofessional Carl and the team in Baltimore had acted toward them during the investigation, with Brophy and Thom listening in shock. Though none of them had any idea yet just how unprofessional.
“I have to get to work for DPR,” Jared said as he stood up to leave the bar, knowing full well that he had a long night ahead of him. Tarbell had his own work cut out for him. The next day he would have to head down to the local FBI office and somehow try to persuade them not to go into Ross Ulbricht’s house with a SWAT team.