Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [140]
I hustled back to the lunch meeting, apologizing for running out, saying some food had gone down the wrong pipe. When Howard looked at me, I said, “I’m sorry, what did you ask me before?”
He repeated his earlier question.
“Ah, about two hours without a lot of traffic,” I answered. I smiled and asked if he had ever been to Seattle. For the rest of the lunch meeting, no other pointed questions were directed toward me.
Other than my concerns about my cover, the job had been going relatively smoothly for more than a year. And then I got blindsided. While looking for some paperwork on Elaine’s desk one evening, I ran across an open folder containing the layout for a Help Wanted ad for an IT professional. The description of duties was a perfect match for Darren’s job. Or mine.
That was a real wakeup call. Elaine had never mentioned that the firm was looking to add another person, which could mean only one thing: she and her bosses were getting ready to fire one of us. But which of us was headed for the guillotine?
I immediately started digging for the answer. The more I uncovered, the more complex the backstabbing became. I already knew that Elaine had a huge issue with Darren, having to do with his being overheard consulting with an outside client on company time. And then I discovered another smoking gun in a Ginger-to-Elaine email that read in part, “Eric is here all the time, working intently on something but I don’t know what.”
I needed more info. After business hours, I went down to the HR manager’s office on the 41st floor. I had scoped it out days earlier. The janitors were in the habit of starting their rounds by opening up all the doors: perfect. I waltzed in, hoping I could still count on my lock-picking skills.
The wafer lock on the manager’s file cabinet sprung open on my second try—great. I pulled my personnel file and found out that the decision had already been made: when everyone returned to work after the Memorial Day weekend, I was to be told I was being fired.
The reason? Elaine’s belief that I was doing freelance consulting with clients on company time. What was ironic here was that this was possibly the only questionable activity I wasn’t engaging in at the time. She must have been basing her conclusions on my cell phone use during lunch or office breaks, and she was totally wrong.
While I was at it, I pulled out Darren’s file, as well, and discovered he was also going to be fired. Except that in his case they had hard evidence that he really had been doing consulting work for other clients. Worse, he had been doing it on law firm time. It seemed like I had been painted with the same brush. They knew he had been breaking the rules, and apparently assumed, even without any hard evidence, that I probably had been, too.
The next day, fishing for information, I hit Ginger with, “I hear they’re looking for a new IT person. So who’s getting fired?” Within minutes she had laid my question on Elaine, and it wasn’t more than an hour before I was told that Howard Jenkins wanted to see me in the office of the HR lady, Maggie Lane, right away. That was stupid, I thought. Opening my big mouth.
If I had known it was coming, I would have spent the entire weekend covering up my trail, wiping everything from my computer (and there were a lot of files on it) that could possibly incriminate me. Now it was Crunch Time. I tossed tapes, floppy disks, and anything else I could think of into a black plastic garbage bag, which I lugged down and threw in the Dumpster in the parking area across the street.
When I came back in, Elaine was furious. “They’re waiting for you!” she said. I told her that I had gotten sick to my stomach and would be on my way ASAP.
My attempts at playing dumb when I was charged with consulting on company time didn’t cut it. I tried an “I’m not consulting, what evidence is there?” approach, but they weren’t buying. I was summarily fired.