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Chapter 57
ONWARD TO FEDERAL PLAZA
From the window of his hotel room Jared could see the two massive square imprints in the
ground where the two towers had once stood. Cranes and trucks and construction debris
surrounded the holes now, and yet a mere decade earlier 2,606 people had lost their lives there.
As he looked out at the transforming landscape, a million thoughts climbed through Jared’s mind.
He replayed the moment the planes tore into those towers. Explosions and fire and people left with no
choice but to jump to their deaths. He thought of those firefighters and police officers who had
clambered inside to help whomever they could. And then everyone turning to dust, right at the foot of
where Jared now contemplated the totality of it all. He thought about the families who had lost their
mothers and fathers and sons and daughters that day. Tears began welling up in his eyes as he reached
for his phone to video chat with his son, Tyrus, to tell him he loved him and to update him on the hunt
for the bad pirate he was searching for.
After Jared hung up, blowing a kiss from that New York hotel room to his son’s bedroom in
Chicago, it was time to get back to his laptop, working undercover for DPR. Jared hoped that he
could help stop an attack on America that happened not with 747s flying into buildings at six hundred
miles per hour, but rather in slow motion through a Web site that wanted to topple the country’s
democracy.
Jared feared almost daily that operatives from al Qaeda could come into the country legally,
without any weapons at all, and then buy an arsenal of bombs or guns or poisons from within the
United States, all from the Silk Road with a few Bitcoins and the Tor Web browser. On a more
personal level, as he thought about his son, he worried that a teenager could buy a gun on the site and
go on a shooting rampage in a preschool in Chicago. Jared was determined to do everything in his
power to stop either of those atrocities from happening.
The following morning after a long night working for DPR on the site, managing administrative
tasks, Jared walked along Church Street and then Broadway until he arrived at 26 Federal Plaza, the
giant black building that was home to the Cyber Division of the FBI.
It was early August 2013, and Jared had come to New York City to work with Chris Tarbell, to
delve through the servers and see if they could use Jared’s knowledge and his undercover account,
Cirrus, to piece together details about who DPR might be.