34856893457934

He soon realized that this site could change everything. The DEA might become a cybercrimes
operation. Other agencies, like the FBI or NSA, which never led drug cases, might create new
divisions to go after these online targets. It was a new frontier, he saw, the Wild West. And he wanted
to be one of the sheriffs in the O.K. Corral.
He started inhaling anything he could find about the Silk Road. He scrolled through the endless
discussions on the Silk Road, from how to inject heroin into your eyeballs to how to secure packages
of drugs to ensure they weren’t discovered by the U.S. Postal Service. He read the writings of the
site’s leader, a character who used to call himself Admin but had recently renamed himself the Dread
Pirate Roberts.
Carl had been warned, sternly, by the HSI Baltimore agents not to sign up for an account on the
Silk Road yet. “Don’t do anything stupid on the site,” he was told by his supervisors. “We don’t want
anyone knowing that law enforcement is on there.”
But Carl had someone to hunt, and the feelings he had experienced in his early days as an agent
were returning. His body buzzed with the thrill. It was like someone had pulled back a Carl Force
curtain and a younger, sprightlier Carl Force was there waiting to prove himself to his boss, to his
coworkers, to his wife—to himself.
Soon his solar-agent days started to grow longer too. Now when the sun went down, Carl would
pull into his driveway, run upstairs to the spare room in the back of the house, and flip open his DEA
laptop to scour the Silk Road and read the new postings by its leader. For now the pillows in the
Colonial house would have to wait. There was work to do. He needed to burrow deeper into the Silk
Road and figure out a strategy to take down the site.