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Chapter 21
CARL FORCE IS BORN AGAIN
The two-story white Colonial home on the outskirts of Baltimore looked idyllic. In the front, a
blissful stone walkway swerved past two giant oak trees. The back of the home overlooked a
serpentine brook, where foxes and deer ran through the bramble and past the fragrant crab apple trees.
This scene, a utopia, had been enough to make Carl Force and his wife fall in love with the home
—the perfect place to raise their kids and maybe one day retire.
Yet from the day Carl had signed the paperwork with the bank, the home had been nothing short
of a nightmare, plagued with every problem imaginable, including electrical issues, leaks, and the
painful discovery that most of the walls had no insulation. A house built of paper that had sapped the
family’s savings account of almost all its worth. “The Lemon,” as Carl called it, was just one more
box of stress to pile on top of all the other stresses. Carl often found himself lying awake at night,
staring up into the dark, the silence of suburbia screaming in the background, as he thought about his
past, his future, and how he was going to recoup his losses from the home.
Unlike most people who would ease their tension after a long day at the office by plopping on the
couch, turning on the TV, and cracking open a beer, sober Carl had done the polar opposite. He would
come home, a bald grown man with tattoos all over his body, and fluff pillows. He couldn’t help
himself; the stress of work, the stress of the decaying house, the stress of where he was in life all led
to a one-hour cleaning session before he could settle down for dinner. Sometimes he blamed this
quirk on his self-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, but really he didn’t care what it was.
Shaking a pillow in the air until all the feathers inside were evenly spaced was more calming than any
beer could ever be.
But in recent weeks, a change in the wind had made his stresses flit away. In fact, Carl—for the
first time in as long as he could remember—was invigorated by life. He was born again. Baptized by
the Silk Road.
At first when he was assigned to the HSI Baltimore team to help with the case, Carl had been
intrigued but nonchalant about the operation. It was an opportunity to work a different kind of case
from the normal jump-out, but it wouldn’t change his solar-agent lifestyle. Then one of the agents from
Baltimore had shown him how to download Tor and how to navigate the Silk Road forums, and Carl
had become obsessed.