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Tarbell met Jared in the lobby and helped him negotiate getting his laptop and phone into the FBI
offices. Under normal circumstances the FBI police (who protected the building) barred anyone from
bringing devices inside—even other agents from within the government—for fear that a virus or some
kind of surreptitious surveillance software could make its way onto the FBI network. But Jared
wasn’t just any other government agent, Tarbell insisted; he was working undercover and needed
access to his computer at all times. The FBI police relented.
For the past few weeks Jared had had to stay online almost perpetually to mimic the behavior of
the woman whose identity he had co-opted. He had been forced to take his laptop on family outings,
to birthday parties, and even to his son’s weekly swim meet. (Parents of other kids, unaware of why
Jared was on his laptop all the time as Tyrus swam laps, were not impressed.)
When they reached the twenty-third floor, Jared was given a brief tour of the Cyber Division
before Tarbell led him past the Pit and back into lab 1A.
“You can set your computer up right here,” Tarbell said, pointing at the table in the middle of the
room where the agents often ate lunch. “And over here is the computer that has the Silk Road server
on it.”
As Jared unpacked his bag of gadgets, he noticed an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper that
had been pasted on the wall. In black marker, someone had written the words “silk road” across the
top. There were IP addresses all over the place with descriptions underneath explaining what each
series of numbers represented. One was a server for the chat clients of the Silk Road, another for a
server that stored the hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoins, and another, called a “mastermind”
section, for the site’s administrator. As Tarbell explained, this was all the information that had been
gleaned from the servers. (To mess with Tarbell, his co–case agents had created a mock chart next to
the Silk Road version that had pictures of all the characters from The Princess Bride, including
Princess Buttercup, Westley, and Prince Humperdinck, with nonsensical arrows pointing between
each.)
As Jared studied the Silk Road chart, he saw the name of a coffee shop called Momi Toby’s in
San Francisco. When he asked why it was on the chart, Tarbell explained that one of the servers they
found had been erased. Wiped clean of evidence like a murder scene that had been disinfected with
bleach. But when the person who had expunged the drive logged out of the server, they had
accidentally left one tiny clue behind: the IP address of the place where they had logged in to do their
cleaning. In other words, the Dread Pirate Roberts might have wiped the murder scene down, but he
had left the corner of a thumbprint on the front door when he walked out.
This digital fingerprint led the FBI agents to a small bistrolike café on Laguna Street in San
Francisco called Momi Toby’s. Whoever the Dread Pirate Roberts was, he was either living in San
Francisco or had spent some time there. But that was it. One measly clue that possibly pointed to the
whereabouts of the Dread Pirate Roberts. “Not much I can do with it,” Tarbell said to Jared. “What
am I going to do, send an FBI agent into a coffee shop in San Francisco and tell them to look for
someone on a laptop?” Still, they had been scouring the Internet traffic from the café, looking for other
leads.
After getting acquainted with everyone and being subject to a few of Tarbell’s “would you
rather” jokes, Jared sat down at the computer, which was now an off-line replica of the Silk Road,
and he began searching through its contents. He saw the chat logs where DPR had paid the Hells