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Chapter 35
BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES!
The argument between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Variety Jones didn’t last long. They needed
each other and knew it. But it would mark a turning point in the relationship between the two
men, where there was no question that DPR was now in charge. And Jones wasn’t going anywhere, as
he had warned. He was making tens of thousands of dollars a month in salary from the site and needed
that money whether he liked it or not. Ross needed VJ too. He was ready to take the next step in the
life of his business. It was time to close ranks and bring some corporate order to his illegal drug
empire.
“I wanted to raise a topic we haven’t discussed before,” DPR wrote to Variety Jones.
Ross knew VJ would be thrown off by the comment. While the two men had no idea what the
other looked like, over the past year they had discussed almost everything imaginable, from the
personal to the professional. They had shared their hopes, dreams, fears, and desires and counseled
each other on every aspect of those worlds. The Dread Pirate Roberts had even trusted Variety Jones
enough to tell him personal things about Ross Ulbricht, explaining that he had once been a physics
student in college and about having his heart broken by his old girlfriend from Texas.
So when Dread wanted to talk about something new, VJ was a bit taken aback. “Can’t imagine
there is a topic we haven’t discussed before.”
But there was one, and it might have been the most important topic of all. “Local Security,” DPR
wrote.
Ah, yes. That.
Ross had been working for months to try to fix security vulnerabilities, both in his life and on the
site. After many close calls, including instances of hackers attacking the servers, and constantly
having to move to different coffee shops and cities to cover up his secrets, he was fully aware that he
had to put together a plan to protect every single area of his life that made him vulnerable.
He hadn’t been caught yet. If he was more careful going forward, Ross reasoned, he would never
be caught. And given the amount of attention the site was receiving—being mentioned in hundreds of
news articles a week all over the world—the people hunting him would only grow more desperate.
Silk Road’s wares had expanded beyond drugs and guns to include synthetic drugs from China—
among them, new forms of synthetic heroin, like fentanyl, which was up to one hundred times stronger