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Chapter 36<br />
JARED’S DEAD ENDS<br />
This is so frustrating! Jared thought.<br />
He held on to his son Tyrus’s hand as he continued walking down the aisles of the Barnes<br />
& Noble in Lincolnshire, Illinois. They trudged up one row of books and then down another. Every<br />
few feet Tyrus, who was now three and a half, looked up at his dad as Jared searched intently for<br />
something among the stacks.<br />
“Hello,” a chirpy woman at the information counter said to them finally. “Can I help you find<br />
something?”<br />
“Erm,” Jared said, “I’m looking for some books on the Mises Institute.” He looked around to<br />
make sure no one had overheard what he was asking about. The last thing Jared wanted to do was get<br />
into a discussion with a random person on this topic.<br />
“The My Says Institute?” the woman asked loudly, looking down at her computer.<br />
“No, it’s Mises, M-I-S-E-S,” Jared whispered. “It’s a libertarian think tank that focuses on<br />
Austrian economics and . . .” He trailed off, realizing this probably made no sense to the woman in<br />
front of him. After all, this made no sense to Jared.<br />
But still, he needed these books for the next phase of his investigation, which was starting to<br />
stall.<br />
Since the beginning of the year, Jared had seized almost two thousand new shipments of drugs<br />
coming into the country, all by figuring out what each package would look like, and in doing so had<br />
disrupted the Silk Road as best he could. Jared had also arrested and detained a few dealers on the<br />
site, including one of the busiest, who sold ecstasy and other drugs from the Netherlands. And he had<br />
subsequently taken over some dealers’ accounts on the Silk Road, gaining a better understanding of<br />
the inner workings of the operation.<br />
But he was still no closer to unearthing the founder of the site. So after finding himself circling<br />
around in too many online cul-de-sacs, Jared decided he would try to get inside the mind of the Dread<br />
Pirate Roberts, which was why he was standing in the Barnes & Noble in Lincolnshire, awkwardly<br />
asking about the Mises Institute.<br />
In recent weeks he had sat at his desk, a Rubik’s Cube always spinning in his hand, as he read all<br />
of the online postings by the Silk Road’s creator, looking for similarities in the author’s language. As
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