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Even if anyone had noticed the SUV as it swirled around the blocks that morning, no one would
have guessed what was inside the vehicle.
2:42 p.m.
Tarbell paced in front of a coffee shop on Diamond Street, staring down at his phone, trying
desperately to figure out what to do. He had gone to the local FBI offices and made his case that they
shouldn’t use a SWAT team, but the supervisor in charge of the local Bureau had issued a flat-out
“no.” The supervisor said he wasn’t going to risk losing an agent over an open laptop. Clearly he
didn’t know how important that computer was. Tarbell called everyone he knew in government, trying
to persuade them not to go into Ross’s house with a battering ram and guns drawn, but all he could get
out of the local FBI office was an agreement to delay the SWAT team raid by one day.
Jared, Thom, and Brophy stood in front of the café near Ross’s house, listening to Tarbell explain
this, unsure what they were going to do. They knew that Ross was at home on his laptop because the
FBI had an undercover SUV circling his block and monitoring his Wi-Fi traffic. The system they were
using would check the signal strength of the Wi-Fi on his computer and then, by triangulating that data
from three different points they had captured as they drove around the block, they were able to figure
out Ross’s exact location, which at this very moment was his bedroom, on the third floor of his
Monterey Boulevard apartment.
As the agents stood outside the café discussing their conundrum, Jared looked at his computer to
check his battery level, now in the red and quickly falling past 18 percent. In that moment he noticed
that the icon next to the Dread Pirate Roberts vanished from the chat window. “DPR just logged off,”
Jared said. “I’m going to go into Bello Coffee and charge my shit and get a coffee.”
Thom followed him, leaving Brophy and Tarbell outside.
The coffee shop was bustling and every seat was occupied by a laptop-toting patron. A few
moms sipped tea with a hand on their strollers, and others stared at their phones. Jared found a single
free power outlet along the wall, plugged in his computer, and ordered a coffee.
After two years of slogging up a mountain of shit, they were so close to DPR they could
practically hear him breathing, and yet they had lost. The SWAT team was going in. They wouldn’t
capture the open laptop; they wouldn’t get Ross Ulbricht logged in to the site.
2:46 p.m.
Ross grabbed his laptop, stuffed it into his shoulder bag, and headed down the stairs and onto
Monterey Boulevard. The air was unusually warm, with just a slight chill from the San Francisco
breeze.
He had been in the house all day and needed to change locations. Plus he wanted to find a fast
Wi-Fi connection so he could download an interview with the creator of the show Breaking Bad. The
show’s final episode, “FeLiNa,” had aired the night before and had left the protagonist, Walter White,
and his alter ego, Heisenberg, dead.