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I walked away, opened a drawer, shoved it closed again, came back to the phone, and started shuffling papers.

“Okay, here it is… you used the password ‘mary.’ ”

“Yeah, right,” he said, satisfied. After a slight hesitation, he blurted out, “Okay, my password is ‘bebop1.’ ”

Hook, line, and sinker.

I immediately connected to the server that Alisa had told me about, lc16, and logged on with “steveu” and “bebop1.” I was in!

It didn’t take much hunting to find several versions of the MicroTAC Ultra Lite source code; I archived and compressed them with tar and gzip, and transferred them to Colorado Supernet. Then I took the time to delete Alisa’s history file, which showed the trail of what I had asked her to do. Always a good idea to cover up your tracks.

I spent the rest of the weekend poking around. On Monday morning I stopped calling the NOC for the SecurID passcode. It had been a great run, and there was no sense tempting fate.

I think I had a smile on my face the whole time. Once again I couldn’t believe how easy it was, with no roadblocks being thrown up in front of me. I felt a great sense of accomplishment and the kind of satisfaction I had known as a kid in Little League when I hit a home run.

But later that day, I realized, Damn! I had never thought to grab the compiler—the program that translates the source code written by a programmer into “machine-readable” code, the ones and zeros that a computer, or the processor in a cell phone, can understand.

So that became my next challenge. Did Motorola develop their own compiler for the 68HC11 processor used in the MicroTac, or did they purchase it from another software vendor? And how was I going to get it?

In late October, my regular scanning of Westlaw and LexisNexis yielded an article about Justin Petersen’s most recent adventure. Sometimes the FBI will look the other way when a confidential informant doesn’t live by the book, but there are limits. It turned out that Kevin Poulsen’s associate Ron Austin, who’d been set up by Justin Petersen, was on a personal crusade to get even with the snitch and get his ass thrown back in jail. Austin found out where Justin was living—at the same Laurel Canyon Boulevard address that McGuire’s cell phone records had led me to. Justin was careless: he didn’t shred his notes before throwing them in the trash. Austin went Dumpster-diving at the house and uncovered evidence that Justin was still committing credit card fraud. He informed the FBI of his discovery.

Once he had enough evidence in hand, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Schindler summoned Justin and his lawyer to a meeting at the Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles. When confronted by his FBI handlers and the prosecutor, Justin knew his days were numbered.

At one point during the meeting, Justin said he wanted to have a private conversation with his attorney. The two of them stepped out of the room. A few minutes later, the attorney came back in and sheepishly announced that his client had disappeared. The judge issued a no-bail warrant for Justin’s arrest.

So the snitch who tried to help send me to prison was now in the same boat I was. He was now walking in my shoes. Or rather, running.

I had a big smile on my face. The government’s chief hacking informant had vanished. And even if they found him again, his credibility would be worthless. The government would never be able to use him to testify against me.

Later on I would read of Justin’s attempt to rip off a bank while he was a fugitive. He had hacked into the computers of Heller Financial and obtained the codes necessary to execute a wire transfer from that bank to another bank account. He then telephoned in a bomb threat to Heller Financial. While the building was being evacuated, Petersen executed a $150,000 wire transfer from Heller Financial to Union Bank, routed through Mellon Bank. Fortunately for Heller Financial, the transfer was discovered before Petersen could withdraw the money from Union.

I was amused to hear about his getting