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By the end of Jared’s presentation, everyone was in awe at the work he had done. His choice to
speak had worked to his benefit, and the Baltimore agents, by comparison, looked worse than they
had forty minutes earlier.
But the grand finale was about to begin.
When it was the FBI’s turn to speak, Tarbell and his crew had decided that the assistant U.S.
attorney from New York would explain the FBI’s investigation thus far. And yet, as he stood up in the
conference room and began speaking, no one had any clue what they were about to hear.
“We have the server,” Serrin Turner declared abruptly.
The room fell silent. Not a single word was uttered. In New York Tarbell sat in the conference
room looking at the screen with a giant shit-eating grin on his face.
In a matter of seconds, as people realized what they had just heard, agents from all corners of the
room began to speak, asking when they could get access to the server.
“We don’t know what we have yet,” Serrin said. “Let us take a look at it first.” He noted that they
had gotten their hands on the server only a couple of weeks earlier, and their computer scientists were
still rebuilding it so they could search through its content.
After a discussion about this major revelation, Luke Dembosky said the meeting would be
coming to a close and he would be in touch with people individually to figure out how to move
forward. Until then, he instructed all of the agents in the room to keep pushing forward with their
individual cases.
“Anyone have anything else?” Dembosky asked as he peered around the room.
No one said anything. Including Gary Alford of the IRS.
“Okay, thanks for coming, everyone,” Dembosky said. “We’ll be in touch about next steps.”
• • •
The rain started with small sprinkles on Gary’s car window. A few drops here, a few there. The
wipers made them disappear. Then there were more. Hundreds, millions, maybe. The windshield
wipers thrashed back and forth but did nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. All the cars on the
freeway just stopped, unable to see a few feet in front of them, and Gary pulled his SUV over to the
side of the road.
Happy friggin’ birthday, Gary, he thought as he looked out the window and contemplated the
deconfliction meeting he had just left. A meeting that had left him crestfallen.
When he had been assigned to the Silk Road case, Gary had thought he was the star young agent
the government was bringing in to help take down the online drug empire. And yet in the middle of the
meeting with the DOJ, he had realized there were other stars too. An entire constellation of them.
Sure, he knew about the task forces in Chicago and Baltimore, but no one had told him about the FBI.
The same FBI that worked a few blocks away from his office. When Serrin Turner had stood up and
said, “We have the server,” Gary had felt a punch to his gut. No one had told him that this wasn’t a
collaboration but rather a competition.
So why was Gary wasting all of his time reading the discussions on the site’s forums (each three
times) and studying the language of the Dread Pirate Roberts (also three times) and spending his
birthday—the one day of the year when Gary had made the city go dark!—driving down to a meeting
in Washington, DC?