Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [171]
When Mark and his dad returned to the hotel from playing golf, I showed them the news story. Both looked shocked. I was worried I had done the wrong thing in showing it to them, afraid they would tell me I had to leave because my presence could put them at risk. Fortunately, they never mentioned the subject but my paranoia had been driven up a few notches. The heat was being turned up on finding me. Did the Feds suspect I was the one who had hacked Shimmy?
On January 29, Super Bowl Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers were playing the San Diego Chargers. Mark and his dad were excited about watching the game, but I couldn’t have cared less. I had a lot on my mind and just wanted to relax. Rather than going back to the room for some more online activities, I decided to take a walk on the beach to get a breath of fresh air.
I decided to give Jon Littman a call. “I’m walking on the beach here and relaxing,” I told him.
“On the beach? Are you really on the beach?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re getting ready to watch the game.”
Littman told me the game hadn’t started yet. He asked, “What do the waves look like?”
Why would he ask me such a stupid question? I wasn’t going to tell him the surf conditions and give him a clue to my current location.
I said, “I can’t tell you, but you can listen to them,” and held the cell phone up in the air.
I asked if he’d heard about the U.S. Marshals’ UPI press release asking for the public’s help in finding me. I complained that there was a lot of bullshit in the article, including the same old Markoff myth that I had hacked NORAD.
Littman asked if I’d read Markoff’s story of the previous day. When I said I hadn’t, he read it to me over the phone, I suppose listening to gauge my reaction. I pointed out that the U.S. Marshals’ plea for help had been published the day after Markoff broke the story about Shimmy’s Christmas Day attack. It didn’t feel like a coincidence to me. “It felt like part of a planned strategy to leverage the public’s fears about cyberspace against me,” I told him.
“Markoff has been asking questions about you,” Littman said. “And he thinks he knows where you’re hiding.” I pressed him to tell me more, but he wouldn’t budge. I changed tactics and asked him to take his own guess about where I might be.
“Are you living somewhere in the Midwest?”
Happily, he was way off. Yet it appeared that Markoff had some information that was important to me, and I needed to think about finding out how much he knew.
A few days later, it occurred to me that if the Feds were trying that hard to track me down, they might have tapped my grandmother’s phone in Las Vegas. That was what I would’ve done.
Centel’s Line Assignment Group had information about every phone line in Las Vegas. I knew the number off the top of my head. Posing as a technician in the field, I asked one of the clerks to pull up my grandmother’s telephone number on her computer. I asked her to read me the “cabling information,” and as I’d suspected, there was “special equipment” recently connected to her line.
The clerk said the order had been placed a few days earlier by a Centel security agent named Sal Luca. I felt like turning the tables on Luca by tapping his line, but I knew it wouldn’t yield any valuable information. My next thought was to feed my pursuers disinformation by calling my grandmother with some cock-and-bull story that I was in the Great White North. But I didn’t want to put her under any more stress than she was already dealing with.
While I was thinking over my next move, I had to continue building my new identity. On February 2, I had an appointment to take the driving test to upgrade my learner’s permit to a driver’s license under my G. Thomas Case identity. To do that, though, I would