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Chapter 28
THE ASPIRING BILLIONAIRE IN COSTA
RICA
Everything was so calm. The ocean, the air, the sky. Ross consumed it all in one gasp and felt
happy to his core. It was early morning in Costa Rica, and the wind blew softly from the east,
across the placid water where he sat bobbing on his surfboard.
The looming mutiny that had been bubbling to the top of the Silk Road for the past few months
had finally fizzled out, though some of those behind the insurrection had left for new, much smaller,
competitors on the Dark Web.
With those troublemakers gone, the site was now running relatively fluidly again—employees
were toiling away under the direction of the captain, Dread Pirate Roberts—and it was continuing to
grow at a staggering pace. Ross’s profits were multiplying by the second, quite literally, as the value
of Bitcoins was dramatically increasing. It was as if he stuck a dollar bill in his pocket before he
went to sleep and found two (or even three) dollars there the next day. As a result, his personal net
worth was well into the tens of millions of dollars.
He was tightening up security protocols too. To be sure that the people who worked for him had
not been compromised by the cops, Ross made his closest advisers adopt a question-and-answer
system that only those two people would know. So if he asked one of his employees, “How’s the
weather?” the employee would have to reply with the exact phrase: “Boy, is it cold here in the
Bahamas.” If the employee said something else, like “Oh, fine, how is it with you?” Ross would
know something was amiss and could immediately shut down their account. Each employee had their
own question and answer. “[If I say] can you recommend a good book?” Ross wrote to another
underling, “you reply, ‘Anything by Rothbard.’”
But more important than any of that was that Ross had finally figured out how to put the issue of
Julia’s knowledge about the Silk Road to rest—something he would address once and for all when he
returned to Texas in a couple of weeks.
He had flown down to Costa Rica at the end of May to stay at the hidden plot of magic that his
family owned there: a four-acre enclave called Casa Bambu at the southern tip of the country’s
peninsula. Paradise with an Internet connection.