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“Holy shit!” Tarbell yelled.
“Holy shit is right.”
“It’s open. It’s wide open,” Tarbell said to Serrin over the phone.
“Hell, yes!” Serrin squealed. “Hell. Yes!”
As Thom got to work with the other agents, rebuilding the database and setting up a virtual
computer that would house the Silk Road, Chris Tarbell wandered into the back room and pulled a
giant piece of butcher paper, about eight feet long, from a plotter printer. With the long sheet of paper
in hand, he taped it to the wall of lab 1A. He then pulled out a black marker and wrote the words
“silk road“ across the top, followed by a series of boxes and numbers below.
In the same way that the organized-crime FBI agents who had worked out of the Pit decades
earlier used to create charts on that same wall noting where mobsters sat in a crime family they were
hunting, Tarbell was going to create a chart full of numbers and IP addresses that noted where the
servers that belonged to the Silk Road were hidden. And just as in times past when lower-level
mobsters would lead the Feds to the Don, the hope was that one of those servers would lead them
directly to the Dread Pirate Roberts.