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“No, you’ll have to call Records,” and she recited the number.

The lady in Records asked me for the address where the search had taken place. When I told her, she said, “Oh, yes, I have it right here.”

“Great. I’m in the field, can you please fax me a copy?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t have a fax machine in Records.”

That didn’t faze me. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

No fax machine in the Records Office? Incredible. We’re talking 1994 here; everybody had a fax. But no—calls to other offices in the building revealed that the City of Seattle apparently didn’t have much of a budget for fax machines.

I finally discovered that the Law Library had one. By the time I’d finished making arrangements, the lady from the Law Library was on her way up to the Records Office to fetch a copy of the affidavit so she could get the fax sent to “the Secret Service agent” who needed it. I had it faxed to a Kinko’s in Bellevue, waited until I thought it would’ve been received, used my standard routine for laundering a fax, and picked it up minutes later from the second Kinko’s location—all done in such a short interval that there was no chance the cops or Secret Service could have shown up in time.

I sat down in a coffee shop and pored over the affidavit, absorbing every word. I learned that two cellular phone fraud investigators had been tailing me for several weeks. I flashed back to a Jeep that had been parked across the street one day with a man sitting in it. Son of a bitch! My gut had been right—he was one of the investigators. The statements in the search warrant showed that these guys had been eavesdropping on my calls for weeks. I thought of the calls I made to my mom several times a week; she would sometimes speak my name when she picked up my call in the casino. Yet evidently they had missed that. They must have known or at least sensed I wasn’t just some kid using a cloned cell phone, yet they were clueless about my real identity. If they had suspected I was the sought-after Kevin Mitnick, they would have staked out my apartment and waited all night for me to come home.

I was worried that they had recorded my calls or perhaps even taken photographs of me. Knowing that they had heard my voice, I called Lewis so he could chew over the situation with me and help assess the damage. I came up with a plan. Lewis would call one of the private investigators and see what information he could find out. I really needed to know if they had any tapes or photos.

I was on the line, listening in, my cell phone muted. Lewis called a private investigator named Kevin Pazaski, and pretended to be prosecutor Ivan Orton.

Pazaski said, “We have a meeting tomorrow at your office.”

Lewis seized the opportunity and replied, “Yes, our meeting is still on, but I have a few urgent questions.” He asked if he had any tape recordings. Pazaski said no—they had monitored conversations and made notes, but no tapes.

Whew! That was a relief! Next, Lewis asked if they had any photos of the suspect. Again, the answer was no. Thank God! Lewis then added the icing to the cake: “Okay, Kevin, I’ll have more questions prepared for our meeting tomorrow. See you then.”

Despite how stressed-out I was, Lewis and I started laughing after he hung up, just imagining those guys’ reaction at the big meeting the next day when they realized they had been conned. But by then it would be too late for them to do anything about it. I had the information I wanted.

It was worth the effort. From the documents, I confirmed that the raid had been intended to nab somebody who had been making lots of unauthorized cell phone calls. Nothing about Kevin Mitnick.

That was why the agents had just left a card saying I should pay the Seattle Police a call. The cops didn’t think it was worth hanging around just to catch some college student who’d figured out how to make free cell phone calls.

Under different circumstances, I might have felt relieved.

I left Seattle on a Greyhound