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Chapter 13<br />
JULIA TELLS ERICA<br />
Calm washed over Julia as she lay on the floor listening to the orchestra of sounds outside the<br />
window. New York’s police sirens wailed; the trees rustled; the Bronx elevated subway trains<br />
screeched and squealed. As she waited for the weed to kick in, Julia felt relieved that she would be<br />
away from Ross for a week.<br />
“Here you go,” her friend Erica said as she leaned over and passed the joint back to Julia.<br />
Julia pulled the embers back toward her lips, swallowing the skunklike air into her lungs. She<br />
wondered if she should tell Erica the reason for the sudden visit to New York City. Julia hadn’t told<br />
anyone—not a solitary soul—about the Silk Road, the mushrooms, the senators, and the hackers Ross<br />
now employed to help him with his Web site. None of this had ever passed her lips. But lately she had<br />
become scared, not only for Ross but also for herself. She didn’t know if she was an accomplice in<br />
all this. She hadn’t written a line of code or profited a penny, but it still terrified her. For some<br />
perplexing reason, Ross had continued to share each new secret with her and expected her to keep<br />
them—and to be perfectly okay from a moral standpoint.<br />
In the beginning, eight months earlier when Ross had started the Silk Road, she had been fine<br />
with these random unknowns, as the site was so small and unimportant. But things had changed since<br />
then.<br />
Selling weed, she was fine with. She had never heard of a single recorded instance of someone<br />
overdosing from a bong hit. And mushrooms, well, they grew in the ground and they made you happy.<br />
But in recent months new products had become available on the site. Crack, cocaine, heroin,<br />
variations of highly addictive drugs she had never even heard of that were made in secret labs in<br />
Asia. Her doubts grew.<br />
“What if someone overdoses?” she said when crack and heroin surfaced on the Silk Road.<br />
“We have a rating system,” he replied resolutely. “So if someone sells bad drugs, they get a bad<br />
rating and no one will buy from them again.”<br />
“And if they’re dead? How are they supposed to give someone a bad rating if they’re dead?”<br />
These conversations would go on for hours, just spinning, spinning, spinning, and finding no end.<br />
No matter what Julia said, Ross always had an answer, often baked in intellectual analysis or
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