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Chapter 37
A PIRATE IN DOMINICA
Welcome aboard, and thanks for flying with us.” The voice crackled over the intercom as the
plane slowly edged along the tarmac of San Francisco International Airport. “Just in case, a
life vest is located under your seat.” Ah, yes. The ominous what-to-do-in-case-of-an-emergency
warning. A cautionary tale that served as the perfect allegory for Ross, who sat in the middle of the
plane, nervously thinking about the last two hours and the next two weeks.
Ross had expected an easy morning with some last-minute packing for his trip. But instead DPR
had woken up to the discovery that the Silk Road was under attack by hackers who had brought the
servers to a halt. To fend off the attack, Ross had been frantically working with Smedley, his
lieutenant programmer, all morning.
“I think we should install that waffle so we can see the results from mod-sec,” Smedley wrote as
he tried to figure out what was happening. “Everything with a .txt extension can go into
/etc/modsecurity/.”
“Let me think,” DPR replied, frantic as the clock ticked down to his flight.
“Disable everything.”
“OK. We’ll need mysql, yea?”
The morning had gone on like this for a couple of hours, and then Ross had no choice but to set
off for his trip, leaving Smedley responsible for fending off the hackers.
For Ross that was all irrelevant now. Poor DPR would not be able to log on to the Silk Road for
at least six hours, until his next layover. He’d just need to trust that Smedley and his team of
employees, whom he was paying between $900 and $1,500 a week for their services, had it under
control. Sleep. That’s what he would do. He would need it when he landed. As the plane leveled off
at 35,000 feet, Ross leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
While he could have easily afforded to buy a Learjet (or two) and fly private, he had instead
chosen to lie low and travel commercial. As a result, the travel alone for his trip was going to last
almost two days and take him more than four thousand miles away from San Francisco. First he had to
stop in Atlanta, Georgia, then catch a connection to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The following day, groggy
and tired, he would take a small prop plane over a dozen tropical islands until he arrived in the
Commonwealth of Dominica—smack in the middle of the Caribbean.