So, one night about three weeks after the AlphaBay takedown, Gambaryan took a carefully timed nap at his desk in the IRS’s D.C. office. He woke before dawn to start coordinating his team. There were Secret Service agents in Greece, the prosecutor Alden Pelker on her couch in her home across the Potomac, and Excygent’s Aaron Bice, who was inside a data center in New Jersey. Since Gambaryan had first tracked down BTC-e’s servers in Virginia, its administrators had moved them to a hosting company a few states north.
