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But I couldn’t ditch those documents. I would need them more than ever now. My new “permanent” identity had just flown out the window, forever useless. So I hung on to the briefcase. I was sure that a team of Feds was lurking nearby waiting for me. In one of the parked cars? Behind some trees? In the doorway of an apartment building down the block?

My mouth started to get very dry, as if I hadn’t drunk any water in a few days. I was so nervous I was beginning to feel dizzy. Sweat was dripping down my face.

I reached a bar, huffing and puffing, way out of place among the noisy, laughing people partying, drinking it up, having a good time. I hid in a stall in the men’s room. I wanted to call my mom but didn’t dare use the cell phone, so I just sat there thinking out my options. Call a cab and get the hell out of the area as soon as possible? The Secret Service could be driving around looking for me. I just wanted to disappear into the crowd.

When I had rested long enough to get my breath back, I took to the sidewalk again, looking for a taxi to take me out of the area. A bus rolled past.

A bus! A ticket out of the neighborhood!

I ran my ass off to catch it at the stop in the next block. Where it was going didn’t matter. Just away from here.

I stayed on for an hour, to the end of the line, then got off and walked in the cool air to clear my head.

At a 7-Eleven, I called my mom’s pager from the pay phone, sending her a code 3—“Emergency.” I waited, giving her time to get up, get dressed, drive to a casino, and page me back to let me know where she was. After about forty minutes, my pager buzzed, showing me the phone number for Caesar’s Palace. I called the hotel and had her paged, waiting impatiently until she picked up.

As you might imagine, it wasn’t easy to tell her about my close call, and that I didn’t dare go back to my apartment. I was depressed, but it could have been worse, I pointed out: I could be sitting in some jail cell.

When we hung up, I picked a motel from the Yellow Pages with an address in downtown Seattle near Pike Place Market, where the first Starbucks opened. I called a cab and had the driver stop at an ATM, where I withdrew the maximum amount, $500.

The name I put on the registration form at the motel was Eric Weiss, the old identity that I still had documents for in my briefcase.

The next morning I would be out of there, gone from Seattle without a trace—I hoped.

I went to bed feeling a huge sense of loss. The only possessions I still had were the clothes on my back, a couple of things at the dry cleaners, and the briefcase full of identity documents. Everything else was still in that apartment.

I was an early riser the next morning.

The raid had been at night. I was hoping that the Feds had knocked off after filing the paperwork and logging all the evidence—that they hadn’t bothered to start looking through my computer or papers, where they would have found a receipt from the dry cleaners and a checkbook showing where I kept my stash of cash.

First stop, because it opened early, was the dry cleaners, to pick up the only clothes I would have besides the jeans, black leather jacket, and Hard Rock T-shirt I was wearing.

The bank opened at 9:00 a.m., and guess who was the first customer through the door? I closed out my checking account—it had only about four thousand dollars in it, but I was going to need every penny of that for my next disappearing act.

The local cops had grabbed my laptop, floppy disks, my second radio scanner, computer peripherals, and unencrypted backup tapes. It could be only a matter of days before they figured out that Brian Merrill, the cell phone cloner, was really Kevin Mitnick, the Feds’ most wanted hacker.

Or did they already know?

For any clever social engineer, the answer to a question like that is never hard to come by.

Placing a call to the office of the Seattle district attorney, I asked which DA handled electronic fraud cases.

“Ivan Orton,” I was told.

Calling Orton’s secretary, I told her, “This is Special Agent Robert Terrance, Secret Service.