eqfeihchqqlndcinrarnfhqdvmlqnmcrlphaccqmaefkzhlslnstmqgmma
Imagine yourself in a strange city where you have no close, trusted friends. You avoid the other people in your apartment building because your photo has been prominently displayed in supermarket tabloids, and in weekly newsmagazines. You’re being hunted by the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, and the Secret Service, so you’re afraid of getting too friendly with anyone. And your biggest form of entertainment is the very thing you’re being hunted for.
Although I hadn’t counted on needing to leave Seattle in a hurry, I had been giving some thought to where I would go next if I ever had to pull up stakes. I had considered Austin because it was known for its technology. And Manhattan because it was… well, Manhattan. But just as I had done when I chose Denver, I again relied on Money magazine’s annual assessment of the Ten Best Cities in America. That year, Raleigh, North Carolina, was listed as number one. The description sounded tempting: the people were supposed to be pleasant and laid-back, the surrounding area rural, with mountains in the distance.
Flying had always stressed me out, so once again I had decided to take the train. And it would be cool to see what the rest of the country looked like. After my Christmas stopover in Denver and the raid on Shimmy’s servers I boarded another Amtrak on New Year’s Eve for the three-day trip to Raleigh, as Michael Stanfill. The sleeper car was more expensive than flying, but what an eye-opening experience it turned out to be, watching the American landscape roll past.
The people I met on the train gave me a perfect opportunity to practice my cover story, providing details of my life and background as Stanfill. By the time I arrived in North Carolina, I had to have my identity down pat.
The train pulled into the Raleigh station after dark. I had heard so much about the South, how its culture and people were different, how it moved at a slower pace. Maybe its reputation was a remnant of the South of a long time ago. I was curious to find out for myself.
That evening I walked around the northern section of Raleigh, getting a feeling for the city. I had imagined the South would have a warm and cozy climate; instead it felt as cold as Denver. The winter temperatures in Raleigh, I would discover, were about the same as those in the Mile High City.
But as I walked around, getting a sense of the place, I spotted a restaurant familiar to me, one of the Boston Market chain. Not exactly Southern, but I went in for dinner anyway.
My waitress was a cute twentysomething girl with long, dark hair, a heartwarming smile, and one of those luscious Southern drawls I hadn’t known really existed anymore. She greeted me with a friendly, “Hi, how’re you?”
Reading her name tag, I said, “Hey, Cheryl, I’m doing great. I just arrived in town—my first time in North Carolina.” After she took my order, I said, “I’m going to be looking for an apartment. Maybe you can tell me a good part of town to settle in.” She smiled and said she’d be right back.
When she served my food, she and a couple of the other waitresses sat down to talk with me while I ate. I couldn’t imagine that happening in Los Angeles. Or Seattle. Or even in outgoing Denver. The ladies told me, “We just want to keep you company.” I was blown away by my first taste of Southern hospitality, friendliness sweeter than anything I had ever encountered. The girls talked up life in Raleigh. They told me about the different areas of town, where to live, what to do. It was tobacco-growing country still, but had also gone high-tech with the technology companies of nearby Research Triangle Park. They were boosters for their city, and for some reason I interpreted that as a good sign that this was where I needed to be.
Only a week after my arrival, I found a lovely apartment in northwestern Raleigh, in an elaborate complex called “The Lakes,” a suitable name since its eighty-plus acres included shorelines on two separate lakes. The place featured not just an Olympic-sized pool, tennis courts, and racquetball courts but two volleyball courts: the management had trucked in loads of sand to create a beachlike setting. The Lakes also featured parties every weekend for all the residents, described to me as lively, noisy affairs crowded with lots of smiling Southern beauties. My apartment was small, but who cared? I felt as if I were living a dream.
I stopped by U-Save Auto Rental, a one-man operation, the kind of place where the owner takes a hard look at the people who come in, as if he were thinking that they might not be planning on bringing his car back. He cast a doubtful expression at me, too, but I responded with friendly, unhurried chat, and he warmed up.
“I’ve just been through a hideous divorce,” I told him. “I came to Raleigh because it’s a long way from Vegas, you know what I mean?” This was my attempt to explain why I would be paying in cash. As part of the act, I handed him my business card for the company I had supposedly worked for in Vegas—the same phony company I’d created to get the law firm job in Denver.
By the time I was ready to climb into my temporary rattletrap, he let me drive away without even checking my references.
I kept thinking about the last remaining step of the Motorola hack: getting hold of a compiler that would translate the source code into a form the cell-phone chip could understand. Having the compiler would allow me to make changes to the source code and compile a new version of the firmware that would shrink my visibility—for example, letting me toggle on and off how my cell phone communicated with the mobile provider to disable tracking, and adding functions that would make it easy to change the ESN from the cell phone’s keypad, so I could easily clone my phone to any other subscriber’s number.
Once I was back in the saddle for this effort, a little research showed me that Motorola used a compiler from a company called Intermetrics, which quickly made it to the top of my list of hacking targets. I identified a computer called “blackhole.inmet.com” that was on Intermetrics’ internal network, directly accessible from the Internet.
When I realized that the company’s systems were patched against all the latest security vulnerabilities, I quickly changed tactics. “Blackhole” turned out to be vulnerable to the same IP spoofing attack that JSZ and I had used against Shimmy, so gaining root was easy.
System administrator Annie Oryell appeared to use the host blackhole as her personal workstation. I figured she would eventually want root privileges to perform an administrative task and would use the Unix switch user command, “su,” so I set up a way of capturing the root password when she did. (For the technical reader: using the source code I had obtained from Sun Microsystems, I added some additional code to the “su” program and recompiled it so when she su’ed to root, it would secretly log her password to a file hidden on her workstation.)
It worked just as I had expected. The root password was “OMGna!” Oh my God—no dictionary words, and with the exclamation mark thrown in to make guessing it that much more difficult.
The same root password worked on every other server I tried it on. Having that password was like having the keys to the kingdom, at least for Intermetrics’ internal network.
While I was using the system, I saw that two system administrators were logged in and apparently busy at work. Rather than risk being discovered in case one of them checked the currently established network connections, I looked for alternate ways to access the company remotely that would not be easily detected. Maybe I could find a dial-up number and connect over my modem.
Back again to the files of system administrator Annie Oryell, I found a file with a promising name: “modem.” Yes! The file held the text of an email she had sent to other employees, informing them of the dial-up numbers. It read, in part:
We currently have two dial-in hunt groups. The 661-1940 group consists of 8 9600bps Telebit modems which connect directly into the Annex terminal server. The 661-4611 hunt group has 8 2400bps Zoom modems which currently connect to the terminal server.
Bingo: “661-1940” and “661-4611” were the dial-in numbers I was looking for. I changed the password on what appeared to be a few dormant accounts on the Annex terminal server and dialed in to avoid the risk of being detected on any of the Internet-facing systems.
At this point, I logged in to “inmet.com,” which was the company’s domain used for receiving email from the outside world. I downloaded a copy of the master password file (which also contained the password hashes) so I could attempt to crack all the passwords offline.
Now I was in position to search emails looking for people who had been in contact with Motorola. My first lead was an email to an Intermetrics engineer named Marty Stolz, who had received a message from someone at Motorola explaining a problem they were having with the compiler. I hacked into Stolz’s workstation and examined his “shell history,” which showed a list of commands he had previously typed. He had run a particular program, a “shell script” called “makeprod,” which he had used to build compiler products that the company developed. In this case, I wanted the 68HC11 compiler so I could compile the Motorola source code for the MicroTAC Ultra Lite.
The engineer who wrote the script had also included detailed comments in his source code that led me to the location where the software developers kept the production releases of the Motorola chip compiler for various operating system platforms.
Along the way, I found that Intermetrics was producing this compiler in versions for several different OS platforms, including Apollo, SunOS, VMS, and Unix. Yet when I examined the server where all these compiler versions were supposed to be, not one of them was there. I spent hours searching other file servers and developer workstations, but the compilers weren’t there, either—not the source code, nor the binaries. Strange.
I checked the “aliases” file, which listed where incoming emails for particular individuals and workgroups were to be forwarded. By examining that file, I was able to identify which employees were associated with which departments, and found the name of a company employee in Washington, David Burton.
Time for a little social engineering. I called Marty Stolz, introduced myself with David’s name, and said, “I have a major customer demo tomorrow morning, and I can’t find the compiler for the 68HC11 on the server that stores product releases. I’ve got an old version, but I need the latest version.”
He asked me a few questions—what department I was in, my location, the name of my manager, and so on. Then he said, “Listen, I’m going to tell you something, but you have to keep it a secret.”
What could he be talking about?
“I won’t tell anybody,”
In a half whisper, he said, “The FBI called us and told us there’s a guy who will probably be targeting us—a superhacker who broke into Motorola and stole their source code. They think this guy is gonna want a compiler for the Motorola code, and he’s gonna target us next!”
So the Feds had figured out I’d want the compiler, and they’d called Intermetrics to head me off? Hey, I had to give them some credit: that was good thinking.
“He broke into the CIA and got Level Three access,” Marty was telling me. “Nobody can stop this guy! He’s always one step ahead of the FBI.”
“Unbelievable—you’re putting me on! Sounds like that kid in WarGames.”
“Listen, the FBI told us we better take those compilers offline, or he’ll get to them for sure.”
I blinked. After I got the Motorola code, it had taken me a few days even to come up with that idea. And the FBI had thought of it before I did? That really was unbelievable.
“Jeez, I need to test my demo tonight so I’ll be ready for my client in the morning. What do I do now? Is there any way I could get a copy from you?”
Marty thought it over. “Well… I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll put the compiler on my workstation just long enough for you to get it.”
“Great. As soon as it’s up, I’ll transfer it to removable media so it won’t be on my workstation either. Then I’ll call you back to let you know I’m done,” I said. “And Marty?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll keep it secret. I promise.”
Marty gave me the hostname of his workstation so I could use FTP to transfer the file. To my surprise, he had enabled anonymous FTP access so I didn’t even need an account to get the files.
Like taking candy from a baby.
As far as I know, Marty never knew he was duped and will find out only if he reads it here.
Still high from the success of getting the compiler, I woke up to find that my phone was dead. I’d done something really stupid that put my freedom at risk.
Not willing to risk making business calls associated with my new identity from a cloned cell phone, I got dressed and went to the closest pay phone and called the phone company, Southern Bell, to find out why my phone wasn’t working. After keeping me waiting for a long time, a supervisor came on the line and began asking a lot of questions. Then she told me, “A Michael Stanfill called us from Portland and said you’re using his identity.”
“That guy must be mistaken,” I told her. “I’ll fax you a copy of my driver’s license tomorrow to prove my identity.”
Suddenly I realized what had happened. The Raleigh power company, Carolina Power & Light, required a large deposit. If you had references from your former utility company, you could avoid paying it, so I’d called the power company that Michael Stanfill used in Oregon—Portland General Electric—and asked for a reference letter to be faxed. I told the lady on the other end of the line that I still wanted to keep my account in Oregon but was buying property in Raleigh. When they sent the letter to me, they had apparently sent a courtesy copy to the real Stanfill, as well. I felt like a total idiot: by trying to save a $400 deposit, I’d completely blown my cover.
I had to move now.
I had to get a new identity now.
I had to get the hell out of my apartment now!
I’d never even had a chance to attend one of those all-residents’ parties or managed to meet a cute girl.
Finding a job had of course been one of my first priorities. I’d mailed out job résumés and cover letters as Michael Stanfill to more than twenty places—most of the potential employers in the area. Now, with my phone disconnected, none of these prospective employers would be able to reach me! Worse, it would be too risky to try the same places again under a different name. This put me at an extreme disadvantage.
I’d signed a six-month lease, so I told the round-faced lady in the rental office, “I really like this place, but I’ve had a family medical emergency and have to leave.”
She said, “If it’s an emergency, the company will let you out of the lease. But they aren’t going to refund you anything on this month’s rent.” I felt like saying, “Forget the refund, consider it a payoff, and if the Feds show up asking questions, I was never here.”
The next day, I took a new place across town at the Friendship Inn to live in while I searched for a new apartment. Even with my relatively few possessions, it took me several frustrating, nerve-racking trips in my compact rental car to move everything to my new temporary digs. The pressure of having to find a new job and build a new identity was weighing on me.
Little did I know that I had bigger things to worry about. I couldn’t begin to imagine how the net was beginning to close around me.
After settling in at the Friendship Inn, using my Portland State University file, I chose another temporary name: Glenn Thomas Case. Since he, like Stanfill, was a living person and so riskier to borrow an identity from, I decided to go by “G. Thomas Case” to change things up a bit.
Three days later, the certified birth certificate I had requested arrived in my newly rented mailbox. I went to the DMV and walked out with my new North Carolina learner’s permit, but I still had a lot of work ahead of me to secure the other forms of ID I would need.
The day after getting my learner’s permit, I found a studio apartment in a complex called the Players Club, which was suitable but nowhere near as appealing as my previous place. It was small but cozy; I didn’t have the luxury of being picky. The rent was $510 a month, meaning I had six months before my money would run out. Provided I didn’t have too much trouble finding a job, it was an acceptable risk.
Around the same time, the newspapers were carrying new stories about hacker Kevin Poulsen. He had been transferred from custody in Northern California and was being held in a place all too familiar to me: the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. He was being charged with hacking offenses and gathering national defense information, an espionage-related offense.
I was determined to talk to him—an ambition in keeping with my lifelong penchant for scheming to accomplish the impossible. I liked nothing better than to set myself a challenge that I didn’t think could be done, then see if I could do it.
Visiting Poulsen was obviously out of the question. For me, the Metropolitan Detention Center was like the Hotel California in the old Eagles song: I could check out anytime I wanted, but I could never leave.
My conversations with him would have to be by phone. But inmates couldn’t receive calls, and besides, all inmate calls are monitored or recorded. Given the charges Poulsen was facing, the prison staff had likely flagged him as high risk and were keeping him closely monitored.
Still, I told myself, there’s always a way.
Each housing unit at the MDC had a “Public Defender’s phone,” a telephone with what the phone companies call “direct-connect” service: when an inmate picked up the handset, he would be connected directly to the Federal Public Defender’s Office. I knew these were the only phones available to prisoners that weren’t subject to monitoring—because of attorney-client privilege. But they were also programmed at the phone company switch so that they couldn’t be used for incoming calls (“deny terminate,” in telco lingo), and couldn’t connect to any numbers other than the main telephone number at the Public Defender’s Office. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
First I needed to get the numbers. It took me only twenty minutes to social-engineer Pacific Bell and learn the ten direct-connect service numbers working in the prison.
Next I called the Recent Change Memory Authorization Center (“RCMAC”). I said I was calling from Pacific Bell’s business office and requested that “deny terminate” be immediately removed from those ten numbers. The RCMAC clerk gladly complied.
Then, taking a deep breath, I called the Receiving and Discharge Office at the prison itself.
“This is Unit Manager Taylor at Terminal Island,” I said, trying to sound like a bored, frustrated prison drone. Using the name of the Bureau of Prisons’ main computer system along with Poulsen’s inmate registration number, I went on. “Sentry is down here. Can you look up reg number 95596-012 for me?”
When the guy at the prison looked up Poulsen’s number, I asked what housing unit he was in. “Six South,” he said.
That narrowed it down, but I still didn’t know which of the ten phone numbers was located on Six South.
On my microcassette player, I recorded a minute or so of the ringing sound that you hear on the phone when you call someone. This would only work if an inmate picked up the phone to call his public defender during those two or three minutes when I was calling into the phone. I would have to try many, many times before someone picked up. Another of those times when it helped to be patient and doggedly determined.
When I hit it just right and an inmate picked up the receiver, I’d let him hear a few rings on my microcassette player, then I’d stop the ringing and say, “Public Defender’s Office, may I help you?”
When the inmate asked for his lawyer, I’d say, “I’ll see if he’s available,” then pretend to go off the line for a minute. I’d come back on, tell him his attorney wasn’t in at the moment, and ask his name. Then, nonchalantly, as if I were taking down all the relevant information, I’d ask, “And what housing unit are you in?”
Then I’d say, “Try calling back in an hour or two,” so no one would notice that a lot of public defenders never seemed to get their messages. Each time an inmate did answer, I was able to identify another housing unit and take that number off my list. Jotting down the details on a notepad, I was slowly constructing a map of which phone numbers connected to which inmate housing units. At last, after several days of dialing phone numbers, I reached an inmate on Six South.
I remembered the internal extension for Six South from when I was in solitary confinement at MDC. Among the things I had done during that time to keep my mind active and preserve my sanity was to listen to announcements over the prison’s PA system and store in my memory every phone extension I heard. If an announcement said, “C.O. Douglas, call Unit Manager Chapman on 427,” I’d make a mental note of the name and number. As I’ve said, I seem to have an uncanny memory for phone numbers. Even today, years later, I still know quite a few of the phone numbers at that prison, as well as many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of numbers for friends, phone company offices, and others that I’ll probably never have any use for again but that were seared into my brain anyway.
What I needed to do next seemed impossible. I had to find a way to call the prison itself and make arrangements for a phone call with Kevin Poulsen that would not be monitored.
Here’s how I went about it: I called the main number of the prison, identified myself as “a unit manager at TI” (Terminal Island Federal Prison), and asked for extension 366, the number to the Six South guard. The operator put me through.
A guard answered, “Six South, Agee.”
I knew this guy from when I had been a prisoner there myself. He had gone out of his way to make my life miserable. But I had to keep my anger in check. I said, “This is Marcus, in R and D,” meaning Receiving and Discharge. “Do you have Inmate Poulsen there?”
“Yeah.”
“We have some personal property of his that we wanna get out of here. I need to find out where he wants it shipped.”
“Poulsen!” the guard screamed, much louder than necessary.
When Kevin came on the line, I said, “Kevin, act like you’re talking to someone in R and D.”
“Yeah,” he said in a completely flat tone.
“This is Kevin,” I said. We had never met, but I knew him by reputation and figured he’d know about me the same way. And I figured he’d know there wasn’t any other Kevin who could be calling him in prison!
I told him, “Be at the Public Defender’s phone at exactly one o’clock. Pick up the phone, but keep flashing the switch hook every fifteen seconds until I connect.” (Since the ringer was turned all the way down, he wouldn’t know the exact moment when I would be calling in.) “Now, give me your home address so Agee hears it. I told him I was shipping your property there.” After all the trouble Agee had caused me, it was sweet to have tricked him into getting Poulsen on the line.
At exactly one o’clock, I called the Public Defender’s phone in Six South. Because Poulsen hadn’t said much in the first call and I wasn’t familiar with his voice, I wanted to be sure I was really talking to him when I called back, so I tested him. “In C, give me a syntax for incrementing a variable.”
He easily gave the correct answer, and we chatted at leisure, free from any concerns about Federal agents listening to our conversation. I was amused to think that as I was evading the Feds, I was also hacking into a prison to speak to an inmate charged with espionage.
On January 27, a lucky break provided Shimmy and his team with the first strand of the net they would weave in the hope of closing in on me. The Well had an automated “disk hog” program that would periodically send emails to users who were using a lot of disk space. One of these messages went to Bruce Koball, who had a role in staging an annual public-policy event called the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP).
The email message noted that the conference’s account was taking up more than 150 megabytes on the Well’s servers. Koball checked the account and discovered that none of the files belonged to CFP. Looking at files that contained emails, he saw that all were addressed to tsutomu@sdsc.com.
That night Koball looked at his next-day edition of the New York Times and saw a page-one story in the Business section by John Markoff, under the headline “Taking a Computer Crime to Heart.” The story included this:
It was as if the thieves, to prove their prowess, had burglarized the locksmith. Which was why Tsutomu Shimomura, the keeper of the keys in this case, was taking the break-in as a personal affront—and why he considers solving the crime a matter of honor.
Mr. Shimomura, one of the country’s most skilled computer security experts, was the person who prompted a Government computer agency to issue a chilling warning on Monday. Unknown intruders, the agency warned, had used a sophisticated break-in technique to steal files from Mr. Shimomura’s own well-guarded computer in his home near San Diego.
The next day, Koball phoned Markoff, who put him in touch with Shimmy. It didn’t take long to confirm that most of the mysterious files stored in the CFP account were from the Christmas Day attack on Shimmy’s computers. This was his first big break. Now he had a lead to follow.
Around this same time, my cousin Mark Mitnick, whom I had become close to, was going to be vacationing at Hilton Head, South Carolina, with his father. Mark invited me to join them.
Mark was running a company in Sacramento called Ad Works, and had offered to help me get set up on the East Coast using the same business model. He provided businesses like major supermarkets with free cash-register tape, which was printed on the back with ads; Mark earned his money by finding companies that would pay to have their ads on the back of the tape. I needed a steady income, and the idea of having my cousin Mark help me get started in my own business sounded very attractive, even though it wasn’t computer-related.
We met in Raleigh and drove through several cities on our way to Hilton Head so he could make a number of sales calls. He invited me along to teach me the business. I liked the idea of always being on the move because it would make me harder to find.
I would have enjoyed our trip more if it hadn’t been for an item that turned up during one of my routine online checks for any indication that the Feds were getting closer to me. There were stories all over the media about a press release just issued by the U.S. Department of Justice. The title of one story was, “U.S. Hunts Master Computer Cracker.” In part, it read:
WASHINGTON, DC, U.S.A., 1995 JAN 26 (NB)—The U.S. Marshals Service is on the trail of a computer hacker who disappeared after being convicted of one electronic crime and charged with another. Authorities say they are trying to locate Kevin David Mitnick, 31, originally from Sepulveda, California. Deputy U.S. Marshal Kathleen Cunningham told Newsbytes the Marshals Service had a probation violation warrant for Mitnick since November 1992, and almost caught up with him in Seattle last October. Cunningham said Mitnick is a ham radio enthusiast and is believed to use a scanner to keep track of police in the area where he is hiding. “[Local police] didn’t use radio security so as soon as his address was mentioned he was out of there. He just left everything.” Mitnick is considered an expert at gaining control of computers to monitor or use communications systems and knows how to manufacture false identities using computers.
This hit me like a ton of bricks. I was surprised, shocked, and in near panic. The Feds and the media had turned a supervised release violation into a global manhunt. I couldn’t leave the country even if I’d wanted to—I suspected that the Feds must have already asked Interpol to issue a “Red Notice” launching a global watch for me. And my only passport, which I had stashed away, unused, was in the Mitnick name.
When Mark and his dad returned to the hotel from playing golf, I showed them the news story. Both looked shocked. I was worried I had done the wrong thing in showing it to them, afraid they would tell me I had to leave because my presence could put them at risk. Fortunately, they never mentioned the subject but my paranoia had been driven up a few notches. The heat was being turned up on finding me. Did the Feds suspect I was the one who had hacked Shimmy?
On January 29, Super Bowl Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers were playing the San Diego Chargers. Mark and his dad were excited about watching the game, but I couldn’t have cared less. I had a lot on my mind and just wanted to relax. Rather than going back to the room for some more online activities, I decided to take a walk on the beach to get a breath of fresh air.
I decided to give Jon Littman a call. “I’m walking on the beach here and relaxing,” I told him.
“On the beach? Are you really on the beach?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re getting ready to watch the game.”
Littman told me the game hadn’t started yet. He asked, “What do the waves look like?”
Why would he ask me such a stupid question? I wasn’t going to tell him the surf conditions and give him a clue to my current location.
I said, “I can’t tell you, but you can listen to them,” and held the cell phone up in the air.
I asked if he’d heard about the U.S. Marshals’ UPI press release asking for the public’s help in finding me. I complained that there was a lot of bullshit in the article, including the same old Markoff myth that I had hacked NORAD.
Littman asked if I’d read Markoff’s story of the previous day. When I said I hadn’t, he read it to me over the phone, I suppose listening to gauge my reaction. I pointed out that the U.S. Marshals’ plea for help had been published the day after Markoff broke the story about Shimmy’s Christmas Day attack. It didn’t feel like a coincidence to me. “It felt like part of a planned strategy to leverage the public’s fears about cyberspace against me,” I told him.
“Markoff has been asking questions about you,” Littman said. “And he thinks he knows where you’re hiding.” I pressed him to tell me more, but he wouldn’t budge. I changed tactics and asked him to take his own guess about where I might be.
“Are you living somewhere in the Midwest?”
Happily, he was way off. Yet it appeared that Markoff had some information that was important to me, and I needed to think about finding out how much he knew.
A few days later, it occurred to me that if the Feds were trying that hard to track me down, they might have tapped my grandmother’s phone in Las Vegas. That was what I would’ve done.
Centel’s Line Assignment Group had information about every phone line in Las Vegas. I knew the number off the top of my head. Posing as a technician in the field, I asked one of the clerks to pull up my grandmother’s telephone number on her computer. I asked her to read me the “cabling information,” and as I’d suspected, there was “special equipment” recently connected to her line.
The clerk said the order had been placed a few days earlier by a Centel security agent named Sal Luca. I felt like turning the tables on Luca by tapping his line, but I knew it wouldn’t yield any valuable information. My next thought was to feed my pursuers disinformation by calling my grandmother with some cock-and-bull story that I was in the Great White North. But I didn’t want to put her under any more stress than she was already dealing with.
While I was thinking over my next move, I had to continue building my new identity. On February 2, I had an appointment to take the driving test to upgrade my learner’s permit to a driver’s license under my G. Thomas Case identity. To do that, though, I would need to find a car that didn’t have any connection to any of my past names.
I hailed a cab. “Hey, you wanna make an easy hundred bucks?” I asked the driver. He responded with a grin that revealed his missing teeth and answered with something that sounded like “Teek, teekuh” followed by “Sure, okay.” The foreign words turned out to be Hindi for more or less the same thing. (Damn, I should have offered him fifty instead!) We agreed that he would pick me up the next day, and he gave me his pager number.
At the DMV the following day, when the examiner realized I was going to take the test in a cab, he tossed me a suspicious look. We got in and I put down the flag, telling him, “I’m going to have to charge you for the ride.” The expression on his face was priceless. When he saw I was laughing, he laughed, too, and we got off to a great start.