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Chapter 27<br />
A BILLION DOLLARS?!<br />
Carl sat at his laptop reading the e-mail from the Dread Pirate Roberts. “It’s a tough question.<br />
This is more than a business to me, it’s a revolution and is becoming my life’s work,” it began,<br />
and then proclaimed a price: “I think an offer for the entire operation would need to be 9 figures for<br />
me to consider it.”<br />
Nine figures! Carl almost choked when he read that number. That could mean as low as $100<br />
million or as high as $999 million, and he knew full well it wasn’t going to be on the low end of that<br />
spectrum. But he was also baffled at how big the Silk Road must be.<br />
Until now, everyone on the Baltimore task force and those inside the DEA had assumed the site<br />
was a relatively small operation, but this valuation seemed extraordinarily high. DEA agents had<br />
imagined that the site might be worth a few million. At the highest maybe—just maybe—Carl<br />
believed it was worth $25 million, tops. But nine figures?<br />
Now Carl was gleeful that he had to figure out how to respond to this high number.<br />
Carl had become particularly excitable as of late. He was almost erratic in his temperament,<br />
constantly flipping between a buzzing enthusiasm and an irritable stress about the case. These feelings<br />
were only exacerbated by the time he had to wait for DPR to respond to his e-mails, which was<br />
sometimes days.<br />
To relieve this stress, Carl sometimes exercised—well, sort of exercised. While he occasionally<br />
ran on the treadmill in the DEA office gym, he would also relieve stress by wrestling with his<br />
coworkers. As if they were in some sort of secret fight club, he would roll on the ground with other<br />
grown men as they tried to pin each other to the floor of the Baltimore offices of the DEA. Then,<br />
panting and breathless, it was back to his laptop to see if DPR had replied.<br />
Technically, by writing back to DPR, Carl was breaking protocol again. He had recently been<br />
given a talking-to by his boss, Nick, who said that whenever Carl spoke to DPR, he must liaise with<br />
the Baltimore team (which had been nicknamed the Marco Polo task force) and that he should run any<br />
correspondence by the higher-ups. But Special Agent Carl Force had been on the job fourteen years,<br />
and he hated two things: one was authority, and the other was authority from people younger than him<br />
(which included everyone on the Marco Polo task force).
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