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Chapter 20
THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS
Fireworks exploded in front of Ross from every direction, and with them came the ferocious
sounds from above. Boom! Boom! Boom! Reds and greens and pinks reflected across the lake.
He watched in awe as he brushed up against his new friend Laura and her sister to stay warm. He had
landed in Vietnam a couple of days earlier, after spending the night on a bench in Singapore’s airport
—an accommodation more befitting the old Amazing Race Ross than the millionaire he was now on
his way to becoming. The Silk Road, which he had started only a year earlier, had just crossed a line
of $500,000 a month in drug sales, which would subsequently turn into hundreds of thousands of
dollars in commissions that flowed right into Ross’s pocket. Still, to Ross money wasn’t something
that was meant to be spent on ostentatious things, so when he landed in Hanoi, the American kingpin
settled into his hostel and was elated to find he made it just in time to celebrate the Lunar New Year
and see the divine fireworks show.
The Lunar New Year was the perfect revelatory moment for Ross. It was a signal of a new
beginning. A time, as Ross had read, when it was okay to forget about the troubles of the past year and
to hope for a better year to come. More important, this cultural celebration was a reinvention of sorts,
which was exactly what Ross had been through over the past week.
A few days earlier he had been working on the Silk Road when his new confidant and friend,
Variety Jones, had messaged him with a bizarre question. “Have you even seen The Princess Bride?”
VJ asked.
It was a completely random query, even for Variety Jones. And even more bizarre given that a
few minutes earlier Ross had been talking to VJ about coding problems and drug sales. The movie he
had asked about, The Princess Bride, was a cult dark comedy from the mideighties about a farmhand
who becomes a pirate and has to save Princess Buttercup from a fire swamp.
A very random question from VJ, indeed. But often the conversations between the two men
would veer in any number of directions.
Over the past few weeks they had chatted for several hours a day about a medley of different
topics. Since they had become friends, there was barely an hour that went by without Ross and
Variety Jones checking in with each other.