Gary leaned back in his chair as Serrin leaned forward in his.

The Silk Road wasn’t just a digital drug cartel. It was a highly lucrative start-up with a lot of optionality.

Amazon had begun as a virtual bookstore before becoming our everything supermarket. And Google, which had started as a search engine, was trying to build cars that could drive themselves.

The decision about where to stay was simple. His pal from Austin, René Pinnell, who now lived in San Francisco, and his girlfriend, Selena, offered up a spare room in their small but welcoming apartment.

“I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age.”

Sometimes he listened to Hope 89.1, a local Christian radio station that would whisper the Lord’s Prayer into his ear, promising that if Carl followed the ways of the Bible and did the right thing, he would be granted the life he had always wanted.

Bone marrow, for example, sold for as much as $23,000 a gram (compared with $60 a gram for cocaine).

How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher. You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call

With these hints, and others, he searched through the list of incoming passengers arriving at O’Hare who fit his profile. Eventually he identified an inbound passenger who he believed would be smuggling the drug.