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plastic. When the woman from Texas arrived, he led her inside, handed her a tall cup of coffee, and
then they sat down and began speaking.
“So,” Jared said as he flipped open a notepad and took the cap off his pen. “I need you to tell me
everything: Tell me about the forums; tell me what your daily routine is. When do you log on? When
do you log off? How often do you stay online for? Where do you post? What do you post about?”
Jared was going to become her. And he wanted to make sure, in his obsessive manner, that he
knew every single detail about her account that others on the Silk Road would be aware of. Over the
next two days he learned how to write like her, to capitalize inflections, to repeat important points
twice, and even how to use emojis and smiley faces as she did.
She handed Jared dozens of screenshots she had taken of previous chats with DPR and his three
deputies, SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, and Inigo, all of whom were incredibly powerful on the
site and, as she warned, not to be fucked with.
Jared purchased a MacBook laptop that was identical to hers, and they spent the second day
downloading all of the same applications she used to access the site, ensuring that his avatars
matched hers (she had chosen to make her Silk Road avatar an image of Spider-Man eating a taco)
and that the versions of the programs they used were indistinguishable from each other. He set his
username to hers, which was Cirrus.
Then, at the end of the two days, the woman from Texas gave Jared her log-in credentials for the
Silk Road. As he typed the username and password into his computer, she voiced her concern about
what could happen if things went awry.
“I’m really worried DPR is going to find me,” she said. There were, after all, rumors floating
around the Dark Web that the merciless Dread Pirate Roberts had recently had some people killed.
The last thing the woman from Texas wanted was to get a knock on her door and . . . Well, the thought
terrified her.
Jared assured her that she had nothing to worry about and said he was available day and night if
anything happened. “Most of the people on this site are just nerds,” he said. “They’re not ruthless
drug lords.” From all of his investigations, it seemed that the Silk Road was less like The Godfather
and more like Lord of the Flies. Were these people capable of ruthless acts? Yes, absolutely. But with
a caveat: many of them were capable only from behind the safety of a keyboard. “My advice,” he said
to her, “is to just get off the grid for a while. Don’t go on social media. Don’t go to the site. Just lay
low.”
The people on the Silk Road would still see her online under her pseudonym, Cirrus. Only a
handful of people in the federal government would know that Cirrus was really Jared, undercover.
DPR had asked Cirrus to provide a driver’s license if she wanted to work for him, so Jared had
the undercover team at HSI put together a fake license with a photograph of a female agent, which he
sent to Dread.
“Hey I’m willing to do anything you need me to do on the site,” Jared told the Dread Pirate
Roberts in his first interaction with the man he had been hunting for two years. “I’m here to help.”
DPR responded with a list of mundane tasks to complete and told Cirrus to get to work. There
would be no small talk here.
Maybe this puzzle would be solvable after all, Jared reasoned.
As he dropped the woman from Texas back off at O’Hare, Jared was invigorated by the fact that
he was no longer just an employee with the Department of Homeland Security; he was now also