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Most everything washed off Lewis. The shell of arrogance was usually impenetrable.

Not this time. I could hear the news had made him uncomfortable, nervous. If the Feds were targeting me, they had to know he’d been involved in my hacking. It was almost a dead certainty that they wouldn’t want just Mitnick.

I went back to my apartment and went through it thoroughly, inch by inch, rounding up everything I had accumulated since the last cleanup that might help make a case against me. Papers, disks, scraps of anything with writing on it. And the same with my car.

That evening I knocked on Mark Kasden’s door and asked if I could store the stuff in his closet along with the earlier stash I had left with him.

I returned to my apartment and moved my computer back once more to my father’s friend’s place, where I had hidden it once before.

When I was finished, I was satisfied I was thoroughly clean.

I booked into a small motel just down the street, afraid to stay in my own apartment. I didn’t sleep very well and was awake early, tossing and turning.

Tuesday morning I drove to work feeling like a character in a bad spy movie: Any helicopters? Crown Victorias? Suspicious-looking guys in suits and short haircuts?

Nothing.

I felt the other shoe could drop at any moment.

But the day went by peacefully. I actually managed to get some work done.

Driving home, I stopped by a doughnut shop and bought a dozen assorted. On the door of the fridge, I Scotch-taped a note: “FBI doughnuts.”

On the box, in large letters, I wrote:

FBI DOUGHNUTS

I hoped they’d be really upset that I’d known not only that I was going to be raided, but exactly when.

The next morning, September 30, 1992, now back in my own apartment, I was sleeping fitfully, feeling nervous and jumpy, never quite entirely asleep.

Around 6:00 a.m., I woke up, alarmed. Someone was jiggling a key in my apartment door. I was expecting the Feds, but they don’t use a key, they pound. Was this somebody trying to break in? I shouted, “Who’s there?” hoping to scare the intruder away.

“FBI—open up!”

I thought, This is it. I’m going back to jail.

Even though I had known they were coming, I wasn’t emotionally prepared. How could I be? I was petrified of getting arrested.

I answered the door, not even realizing I was stark naked. At the front of the pack was a lady agent, who couldn’t keep herself from glancing down.

Then a whole team stepped into view and pushed their way into the room. They shook down the place while I got dressed, even thoroughly inspecting the contents of the fridge. No one commented or cracked a smile at my “FBI doughnuts” sign, and the entire dozen went untouched.

But I had done a good cleanup job. They didn’t find anything incriminating in the fridge, and they didn’t find anything anywhere else that would help their case.

Of course they didn’t like that, and they didn’t like my naive, playing-dumb attitude.

One agent sat down at the kitchen table and said, “Come over here, let’s talk.” FBI agents are generally very polite, and this guy and I knew each other. He was Special Agent Richard Beasley, an agent who had been involved in my DEC case. He said in a friendly tone and with what sounded like a Texas drawl, “Kevin, this is your second time around. We’re searching De Payne right now. He’s cooperating. Unless you cooperate, you’re going to be sitting on the back of the bus.”

I had never heard the expression before, but the meaning was clear: the first guy to roll over on the other one gets a much better deal. Lewis and I had talked about this many times. “What would you do if the police questioned you?” one of us would ask the other.

The answer always was, “Tell them to talk to my lawyer.”

I wasn’t going to rat on him, and I knew he’d be a stand-up guy for me, as well.

Beasley pulled out a tape cassette. He asked me, “Do you have a cassette player?”

“No!”

I couldn’t figure this. The agency that likes to think it’s the best law enforcement agency in the United States, if not the world,