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This wasn’t a vacation. It was his trapdoor—his out. The final touch of an escape plan that had
been in the works since he’d begun his security overhaul months earlier. A what-to-do-in-case-of-anemergency
scheme. After months of research and seeking the advice of Variety Jones, it turned out the
Commonwealth of Dominica, where citizenship can be picked up for an “investment” of around
$75,000, would serve as the perfect place for Ross to hide the Dread Pirate Roberts from the Feebs.
It was also the ideal spot for Ross to stash his millions of tax-free dollars without Uncle Sam asking
where all that money came from.
The entire trip to Dominica was an exhausting slog. Ross would deboard a plane and find a
private corner in the airport to open his laptop so that DPR could log on to the Silk Road and wage
war against attackers before rushing off to the next flight. This went on again and again until Ross
finally landed in the tropics.
He stepped off the plane to see a tiny airport with a blue roof surrounded by tentacle-like palm
trees. The taxi from the airport took almost an hour to get to the Fort Young Hotel on Victoria Street,
where Ross was staying.
When he arrived, he checked in, logged on to the site, and was immediately relieved to discover
that Smedley had managed to squelch the assault against the Silk Road. Everything was back to
normal—for now.
Ross closed his laptop, crawled under the soft white sheets on his bed, and slept for fourteen
long hours.
When he woke up, sounds from the Caribbean were waiting outside his window. Birds—
seagulls, pelicans, and colorful parrots—talked among themselves as the sound of the water washing
over the rocks below trickled into the hotel. He walked out onto his balcony and looked off to the
right, where the cruise ship dock sat empty. To his left he could see Champagne Beach and the top of
Pointe Michel. It should have been the perfect morning in paradise, but when DPR went online, he
found himself back in a living hell. While Ross had slept, the attackers had returned with a
vengeance, and the Silk Road was completely incapacitated. A hacker who went by the moniker “JE”
had e-mailed DPR and demanded a $10,000 Bitcoin bounty to stop the assault. DPR messaged his
consigliere, Variety Jones, and asked what to do. “Pay,” VJ counseled.
After all, $10,000 was nothing to DPR these days. Considering the Silk Road was now, on
average, facilitating a quarter million dollars in sales each day, an hour of the attack was costing DPR
more than the hacker’s measly ransom fee. (The $10,000 fee soon turned into a demand for a $25,000
payoff.) Reluctantly he sent the money.
“Had to swallow my pride there,” DPR wrote to Jones after transferring the Bitcoins to the
aggressor. But the site was back alive—again, just for now. Before the pummeling resumed, there was
a lot of work to do to plug holes in the ship. VJ said that he would work with Smedley to get
everything back in order and prepare for new assaults. “Take some time to meditate,” Variety Jones
told DPR. “Get centered ‘n shit.”
Ross was grateful that the relationship between the two men was now back at its peak, and they
had started offering affectionate quips to each other once again, especially when they signed off the
site at night. “Love ya :)” Dread would write to VJ, who replied, “Dude, you know I love ya’ too,
eh.” At other times they would end the day with “smooches ‘n shit” and a “smoochie boochie” back.
So when Variety Jones told Dread to go and meditate, that’s exactly what Ross did. He closed his
laptop and set off through the hotel in search of a Jacuzzi. The resort was a stunning three-hundred-