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And now the Probation Department had assigned me a new Probation Officer, somebody who seemed to think I had gotten too many breaks and needed to be taught some lessons. He had called up a company that was in the process of hiring me and asked questions like “Will Kevin have access to company funds?” even though I had never made a penny from hacking, despite how easy it would have been. That pissed me off.

I got the job anyway. But every day, before I left, they searched me for external media like floppy disks and mag tapes. Just me, nobody else. I hated that.

After five months, I completed a huge programming assignment and was laid off. I wasn’t sorry to leave.

But finding a new job proved a challenge, since the same Probation Officer kept calling every prospective employer and asking those alarming questions of his: “Will he have access to any financial information?” and so on.

That left me depressed as well as unemployed.

The two or three hours a day that I spent at the gym stretched my muscles but not my mind. I signed up for a computer programming class and a nutrition class (because I was trying to learn more about living a healthy lifestyle) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In my first week there, I powered the workstation off and on while constantly typing “Control-C,” which broke the computer out of its boot-up script and gave me administrative privileges, or “root.” Minutes later an administrator came running into the room, shouting, “What are you doing?!”

I smiled at him. “I found a bug. And look, I got root.”

He ordered me out and told my Probation Officer I had been on the Internet, which wasn’t true but gave them enough of an excuse to force me to pack up and drop out of all programming classes.

Years later I would learn that a system admin at the university had sent a message to a guy by the name of Tsutomu Shimomura under the subject line “About our friend,” describing this incident. Shimomura figures heavily in the final chapters of this story, but I was stunned when I discovered that he had been snooping into what I was up to as early as this, at a time when we had had no contact and I didn’t even know he existed.

Though booted from the programming course at UNLV, I aced the nutrition class, then switched to Clark County Community College, where tuition was cheaper for residents. This time I took courses in advanced electronics, as well as a writing course.

Classes might have been more of an attraction if the girl students had been pretty enough or lively enough to get my juices flowing a little faster, but this was community college night school. If I wanted to meet more showgirls, it wasn’t going to be in a classroom at night.

When depressed, I turn to things that give me pleasure. Doesn’t everyone?

With Eric, something interesting had dropped into my lap. Something that might offer a much greater test of my abilities. Something that might get my adrenaline pumping again.

The hard truth is that there wouldn’t be any story to write if I hadn’t overcome my unhappiness about Lewis and filled him in on my conversation with Eric. He was all for it, eager to sound out this guy and see if he seemed to be on the level.

Lewis phoned me back the next day to say that he had contacted Spiegel and talked to Eric. He seemed surprised to admit he had liked the guy.

Even more, he agreed with me that Eric, as he put it, “seems to know a lot of stuff about Pacific Bell’s internal processes and switches. He could be a valuable resource.” Lewis thought we ought to get together with him.

I was about to play the first move of what would turn into an elaborate cat-and-mouse game—one that would put me at high risk and demand every ounce of my ingenuity.

PART TWO

Eric

ELEVEN

Foul Play

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Early in January 1992, my father called from Los Angeles to say he was worried about my half-brother, Adam, his only other child. I had always been envious of Adam’s relationship with our father,