34856893457934

Chapter 34
CHRIS IN THE PIT
It had been a few months since the FBI had taken down the LulzSec hackers, and the hangovers
from the subsequent celebrations at the Whiskey Tavern had since worn off. Yet there was one
aspect of that case that Chris Tarbell couldn’t get out of his mind.
He was sitting in an area known as “the Pit” at the New York FBI offices, talking with other FBI
agents—Ilhwan Yum and Thom Kiernan—weighing if the cybercrimes division of the FBI should get
involved in the Silk Road case or go after a different target instead.
The Pit, where they sat, looked like a sunken living room and was big enough for a handful of
desks and chairs. This enclave had been around for decades and was considered the top spot in the
New York City headquarters. Years earlier, before Tarbell and the nerdy computer agents started
occupying the desks there, the Pit was home to organized-crime agents. Back then they went after
mobsters who stayed as far away from technology as possible, fearing that something as
inconsequential as a pay phone could be used to track their location. Now the men in the Pit went
after mobsters who had adopted technology as a way to hide their whereabouts.
But the old guys and the new did share one thing in common: both generations of FBI agents were
practical jokers. Some days Tarbell and his colleagues would rub leftover deli meat on another
agent’s desk phone earpiece, then call from another room to watch the agent smear roast beef and
mayonnaise on his or her ear. Tarbell had once played a joke using another agent’s car, hooking the
car’s horn up to its brake pedal so every time the agent tried to slow down on his drive home, his
horn blared at the cars in front of him. And then Tarbell was always ready with a “would you rather”
question.
Tarbell’s desk was covered in papers and paraphernalia from previous cases. In the center of
this mess were his three computers, the two classified machines that were used only for internal work
and the one unclassified computer that couldn’t be traced back to the FBI, where on the screen the
Silk Road Web site currently sat looking back at the agents.
As they spoke about the site, Tarbell thought to himself that if they did go after the Silk Road, he
was going to do everything he could to avoid the unthinkable mistake the Bureau had made in the
recent LulzSec case.