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Chapter 38<br />
CARL LIKES DPR<br />
On paper the Marco Polo task force was an all-star team of talent, composed of Carl Force at<br />
Baltimore’s local DEA and other agents hailing from various local departments of the federal<br />
government, including the postal service to help with seizures and the Secret Service to trail the<br />
money (Carl, of course, was in charge of the drugs). In the months since the task force had been<br />
realized, the group had proclaimed that it would be the first in the United States to crack the Silk<br />
Road case.<br />
Yet almost from the start the Marco Polo crew was entangled in disorder.<br />
First there were the serious turf wars that emerged. If you were the one who took down the site,<br />
you’d be lauded as a hero forever. This case could change a career. As a result, some on the task<br />
force were backstabbing more experienced agents to try to gain leadership control of this hot new<br />
case (and in many instances were succeeding).<br />
The cherry on top of that chaos was Carl Force, who wouldn’t take orders from anyone, even his<br />
own boss. More often than not, when requests came in from others on the task force, Carl just ignored<br />
them altogether.<br />
This wasn’t the first time in his career that Carl had acted this way. During one of his last realworld<br />
undercover operations, years before he started playing the lead role of Nob the drug smuggler<br />
on the Silk Road, he had gone rogue on a case and soon found himself in a lot of trouble with the<br />
DEA, and his wife.<br />
Back then Carl was working undercover among a group of drug dealers when he started to go<br />
deeper and deeper into their clandestine world with the hope that they would trust him more, which<br />
could lead to a big bust. But Carl was slightly too good at the undercover part of the job. While he<br />
was manipulating the people he was trying to arrest, he started to blur the line between cop and<br />
friend. At nightclubs he would get blackout drunk with the people he was monitoring. When women<br />
approached him and his new friends, Carl didn’t shoo them away to focus on trailing his subjects but<br />
rather embraced these bad girls with open, inebriated arms. Before long the line between pretend<br />
drug dealer and churchgoing DEA-agent dad faded so much that he had to quit the undercover work<br />
and go off to rehab, eventually landing, sober, with the desk job in Baltimore.
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