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Chapter 18
VARIETY JONES AND THE SERPENT
Ross had been in Australia for only a few weeks when he woke up from a strange dream. In his
sleep he found himself face-to-face with a giant hundred-foot-long centipede with dark eyes
and massive, twiddling legs. Hovering in the background was a looming snake, larger and more
sinister than the centipede, slithering around in the darkness.
When he awoke the next morning, Ross didn’t know what the dream meant or why he wasn’t
afraid of these sinister creatures. To him they didn’t seem evil at all. Or maybe they were, and he
simply wasn’t able to see their true nature. But as he set about his day, he couldn’t get those slithering
creatures out of his mind, eventually sharing a story on Facebook about the dream, curious what it
might mean.
Maybe it was just the daunting reality of the past few months breaking through his subconscious.
Back in Texas, the twin pressures of maintaining the Silk Road and keeping his involvement a secret
had worn him thin. At particularly fraught moments he even wondered if he should forfeit his
business, just give it up. But ever since he had moved to Sydney to be closer to his sister, life had
gotten so much better. His mounting anxiety in Texas was giving way to a laconic calmness Down
Under. Now Ross spent his days surfing at the golden beaches, drinking beer with his new pals at tiki
bars, successfully flirting with girls, and, in between these social gatherings, working on the Silk
Road.
But even the pleasures of Bondi Beach, where he was staying, couldn’t entirely eradicate the
fears that came with running a start-up that trafficked in the multinational drug trade. In particular
Ross still could not entirely shake the fact that, other than Erica, whose words he could always deny
as hearsay, two real people—Julia and his old friend Richard—definitively knew that he had created
the Silk Road.
Sure, he had cobbled together a story for Richard, explaining that he had given the site away to
someone else. But the Julia problem remained. And no matter what fabrication he could possibly
come up with, both would always know he had fathered the site. Ross, though a genius at many things,
was clueless when it came to untangling this particular mess.
Luckily, someone was about to become a staple in his life who knew exactly how to fix these
issues, and many other formidable challenges that impeded the Silk Road’s progress.