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Chapter 62<br />
THE PINK SUNSET<br />
Pink.<br />
That’s what it was. Vast and pink and endless.<br />
A magnificently surreal pink sunset that covered San Francisco from above. Jared couldn’t take<br />
his eyes off it. He gazed down from the window of the plane, and for a moment he was reminded of<br />
just how insignificant we can all feel sometimes, plodding through our lives, working our menial<br />
jobs, and thinking we don’t really matter—and yet from a different viewpoint we get to see that we<br />
all do.<br />
As the plane banked to the left, preparing to land, Jared pulled out his smartphone and snapped a<br />
picture to preserve the moment. A memory to capture the pink sky before he, Jared Der-Yeghiayan,<br />
helped capture the Dread Pirate Roberts. That was, if they were actually able to catch him. According<br />
to Tarbell, there was a problem, and Jared had to get to the hotel as soon as possible to discuss the<br />
issue with the FBI team on the ground.<br />
At almost the second the United Airlines flight’s wheels screeched onto the tarmac of the airport,<br />
Jared reached for his laptop and a Wi-Fi hub and logged on to the Silk Road. He hadn’t wanted to<br />
take a chance that DPR would try to contact Cirrus while he was in the sky, so Jared had an HSI agent<br />
in Chicago pretending to be Jared, who was in turn pretending to be a woman from Texas, while<br />
Jared flew into San Francisco. It was complicated, but when he landed, he saw that the handoff had,<br />
thankfully, gone unnoticed.<br />
The undercover account had proved more useful than Jared could ever have imagined to ensure<br />
that Ross Ulbricht really was DPR. It was one thing to have a suspect; it was something entirely<br />
different to gather enough evidence to convict him.<br />
Shortly after the phone call among Gary, Tarbell, Jared, and Serrin, the FBI had assigned a team<br />
of undercover agents to trail Ross. For two weeks they followed Ross as he went for a walk in the<br />
park, peered over his shoulder as he was on a date with a girl at a restaurant in the Mission, or while<br />
he was out for a drink with his friends. But it was when he wasn’t doing those things that Jared’s<br />
account had become invaluable.<br />
Whenever Jared saw the Dread Pirate Roberts log on to the Silk Road, he would let the<br />
undercover FBI team on the ground know, and they would confirm that at that very moment, Ross had
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