34856893457934

toward the World Trade Center on September 11 and who tomorrow would have to go to the hospital
for health checkups for their heroic efforts.
As these thoughts all piled up atop one another, Gary had had enough. He spun around in his
chair, looked directly at another detective on the Silk Road task force, and with vexation in his voice
proclaimed, “I think I’m right. You know? I think it’s him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s him. Ross Ulbricht,” Gary said.
“You really think you’re going to find him from a Google search?” Gary’s coworker said.
Gary had suspected that Ross Ulbricht might be in some way involved with the Silk Road and
had mentioned it to his coworkers months earlier, but the lead had gone nowhere. They couldn’t
pursue a case against someone based on the mere fact that they had posted about the Silk Road on the
Internet. But after Gary had seen the IP address from a café in San Francisco on the wall at the FBI
office, the city where this Ross Ulbricht character apparently lived, he had become convinced that he
was at least involved, if not actually the Dread Pirate Roberts.
“Yes!” Gary said, his hands animated, his voice growing louder. “I’m right. I’m telling you, I’m
right.”
After a few minutes laying out the facts again, Gary stood up and announced that he was going to
go back through the case again, starting from the beginning. Just as he had read every e-mail, blog
post, news article, and forum posting three times, Gary was going to go back through his investigation
three times, from start to finish. Maybe, he reasoned, he had missed something.
He wandered away from his cubicle and around the corner to a woman nearby who worked for
the Department of Homeland Security. “I need you to run Ross Ulbricht’s name,” Gary told her as he
sat down in an empty seat nearby, requesting the same background check he had done on Ross months
earlier. Gary didn’t expect the woman would find anything new. He just wanted to see if some small
detail had floated by unnoticed. A speck of DNA, a parking ticket, anything.
After a minute the records loaded onto her screen. The woman first reviewed Ross’s travel
record, noting that he had gone to Dominica, a data point that Gary knew about and that he thought
was suspect, as criminals often hid money in the Caribbean. She kept going through Ross’s file and
then she stopped suddenly. “You know there’s a hit on this guy?” the woman said.
“What?” Gary asked, confused.
“Yeah, there’s a hit on this guy from a few weeks ago.”
Gary was in shock as he heard the word “hit.” He was simply trying to dot his i’s and cross his
t’s three times over.
“You want me to read it?” the woman asked.
“Yes!”
She read aloud, explaining that Customs and Border Protection had “seized counterfeit identity
documents” and a Dylan Critten from DHS had visited Ross Ulbricht at his house on Fifteenth Avenue
in San Francisco. The file she read from noted that Ross’s roommates had said his name was Josh, not
Ross, and that Josh paid for his room in cash. She paused, looking over at Gary for a moment, and
said, “You want me to keep reading? Is this helpful?”
Gary’s brow furrowed. What he was hearing was surreal. “Yes!” he blurted out. “Keep reading!
Keep reading!”