His emails would later reveal that seconds earlier he'd been repeatedly messaging his Lithuanian hosting provider about his server's unexplained outage. She remembers that Cazes, for a dark-web administrator whose site had just dropped offline and who was now dealing with a minor traffic accident at his front driveway, looked relatively unperturbed. Had Cazes stepped away from his computer? They had gotten the layout of the home on an earlier trip to the spec house, and they knew that this was the master bedroom. At that moment, a vertical shutter opened partially on a second-floor window on the front of the house-a detail, visible on the surveillance video feed, that sent a wave of excitement through the war room at NSB headquarters. Hadn’t he just told her to back straight out? Nueng and the other agent in her car stepped out of the vehicle, and Nueng stood on the street, scratching her head in a display of haplessness, apologizing and explaining to the security guard that she was still learning to drive. The security guard at the end of the cul-de-sac began shouting in exasperation at Nueng. The Camry had just plowed its rear fender into the fence of Cazes’ two-story home, bending the front gate, dragging it off its rails, and creating a clamor that ripped through the quiet of an otherwise peaceful morning on the outskirts of the Thai capital. Their plan B now centered on that inconspicuous Toyota and an agent who went by the nickname Nueng, sitting in the driver's seat, whispering Buddhist prayers to herself to slow her racing heartbeat.Ī few seconds later, a loud clang rang out across the cul-de-sac, followed by the sound of metal grinding on concrete. So they'd had to think up a last-minute alternative. The local post office had warned them that Cazes never signed for packages himself, that his wife often came to the door instead. Just the day before, the NSB colonel and his team had scrapped the postal delivery plan. Pisal gave a cue via police radio to the two female agents in the gray Toyota Camry at the mouth of the cul-de-sac. There was no choice: The team in the conference room frantically told the agents on the ground that they needed to arrest Cazes and do it now. All he would need to do was close his laptop and the game would be over. In a matter of moments, Cazes would be tipped off that AlphaBay was down, possibly due to foul play. Somehow, the agents there had accidentally crashed the AlphaBay server before they could finish imaging it. Then, moments later, a voice piped up from the conference phone on the table. She checked Rawmeo's profile and confirmed to the group that he was online and active: Cazes was at his keyboard. Even after all their international meetings and planning calls over the past months, and in spite of his usual hard-driving enthusiasm, Rabenn found himself quietly expecting their plan to fail.Īcross the table, Sanchez was logged in to Roosh V. He knew the possibility of achieving a Ross Ulbricht–style arrest and seizing Cazes' laptop in a live, logged-in state-not to mention his phone-was a long shot at best. Rabenn remembers the atmosphere of that war room as more dead silence and sweaty, anxious tension than eagerness or anticipation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |