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Sincerely yours,

Kathleen Carson

Special Agent

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Rereading this now, I’m struck by how frustrated Special Agent Carson sounds about not being able to catch me—and how willing she was to admit that in writing.

In my job-hunting efforts in Seattle, I found a newspaper ad for a Help Desk analyst at the Virginia Mason Medical Center. I went in for an interview, which lasted for a couple of hours and led, a few days later, to a job offer. It didn’t sound like something that was going to present the same challenges that my job in the law firm in Denver had. But my apartment was depressing, and I didn’t want to commit to a better place until I was set with an income and knew which part of town I’d be working in, so I took the job despite the drawbacks.

When I picked up the new-employee package from Human Resources, I found that the application form asked for a print of my index finger.

Bad news. Did those prints get sent out to be checked against FBI records? I made another of my pretext calls, this one to the Washington State Patrol, claiming I was with the Oregon State Police Identification Division.

“Our department is setting up a program to aid city and county organizations by screening their job applicants for criminal records,” I said. “So I’m looking for some guidance. Do you ask for fingerprints?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Do you just run the prints against state files, or do you send them to the FBI?”

“We don’t submit to any outside agencies,” the guy on the other end of the line told me. “We check state records only.”

Excellent! I didn’t have any criminal record in Washington State, so I knew it’d be safe for me to hand in the application with my fingerprint on it.

I started work a few days later, sharing an office with a tall, very detail-oriented guy named Charlie Hudson and one other coworker. The job wasn’t even moderately interesting; my work consisted mostly of answering Help Desk questions from doctors and other hospital staff members who brought to mind those jokes about users so numskulled about technology that they attempted to copy floppy disks on a Xerox machine.

Practically all the employees in the place, for example, were using their Social Security number as the secret question for resetting their computer passwords. I tried to talk to my boss about how unsafe that was, but he blew me off. I thought for a minute about giving him a little demonstration of how easy it was to obtain anyone’s Social Security number, but then realized that would be a very bad idea. When I started writing scripts on the VMS system to solve some technical support problems, I was told that the project was beyond my job responsibilities, and I should quit working on it.

My mental attitude was in pretty good shape. In all the time I had been on the run, I had never had any alarming events that made me fear for my security. But I could never let my guard down completely. One day I walked out of my apartment building and saw a Jeep Cherokee parked across the street. What caught my attention was that there were almost no cars parked on the street at that hour, yet this one was stopped at a place that wasn’t convenient to any house or apartment building entrance. And there was a man sitting in it. As a kind of challenge, I stared straight at him. We made eye contact briefly and then he glanced away, showing no interest. It made sense to be cautious but I decided I was being a little paranoid, and continued on my way.

About two months after I moved to Seattle, Lewis put me in touch with Ron Austin, Poulsen’s one-time hacking buddy, a guy I knew about but had never talked to. My main topic of conversation with Ron was Justin Petersen, who had touched all three of our lives by snitching on us. Austin and I started communicating frequently. He had provided me with a list of pay-phone numbers in the West Los Angeles area, and I would let him know which phone number I’d be calling him on and at what time.

I was routing all my calls from Seattle to switches in Denver, Portland, Sioux