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I had now traced the call all the way to its origin. This was the phone number dialing out to one of the boxes in the Calabasas CO that was wiretapping Teltec.

I still wanted to know if that thousand-cycle tone would ever change. If it did, what would happen? Would I hear a data signal? Would I hear a phone conversation?

I called Omar back. “Hey, has anything changed with that tone?”

He answered that he had listened to it for about fifteen minutes and never heard any change.

I asked, “Is it possible to put the handset near the speaker so I can hear the tone? I want to run some tests.” He said he’d put the phone down next to the speaker and I could just hang up when I was done.

This was awesome—with that tone coming through to my cell phone, it was almost like the time I’d eavesdropped on the eavesdroppers at the NSA. I was wiretapping the wiretap—how ironic was that?

By now I was feeling nervous and excited at the same time. But holding the phone to my ear throughout this hours-long social-engineering session had given me an earache, and my arm was getting pretty sore as well.

As I was entering the stretch of desert leading into Barstow, the halfway point to Las Vegas, where the cell coverage was crappy, the call dropped. Damn!

I called Omar back, and he set up the connection again so I could keep listening to that thousand-cycle tone over his loudspeakers. I was hoping the tone would end at some point and I would hear something that would give me some clue to what was going on, what the tone signified.

Coming into view was a complex that served all the good-buddy truckers who drove eighteen-wheelers all day and all night. I pulled in to fill the gas tank of the car and then decided to check up on my dad, who was still suffering over Adam’s death.

With my cell phone tied up with the intercept, I found a pay phone to make the call to my dad. I dialed his number and held on while the phone rang. The high-pitched tone from the cell phone suddenly stopped.

What the hell?!

I grab the cell phone and hold it to my other ear.

My dad’s voice comes over the pay phone receiver as he answers:

“Hello.”

I hear him over the pay phone and at the same time over the cell phone!

Fuck!

I can’t believe this.

This intercept isn’t on Teltec anymore… it’s on my dad’s phone. The tap has been moved.

They’re intercepting us!

Oh, shit.

I try to sound calm but assertive, insistent. “Dad, I need you to go over to the pay phone at the Village Market across the street. I have some important news about Adam,” I tell him.

My wording has to be innocuous, something that won’t tip off the intercept listener.

“Kevin, what’s going on?” Dad says, angry at me. “I’m tired of these stupid James Bond games.”

I insist and finally manage to convince him.

I’m sweating. How long have they been intercepting my calls without my knowing? A thousand questions are running through my mind. Was Teltec really a target or was it an elaborate scheme concocted by Pacific Bell Security to trick me—a way of social-engineering the hacker? My heart is racing as I try to recall everything I said and did on the phone from my dad’s house. What did they hear? How much do they know?

After five minutes, I call the pay phone at the market. “Dad,” I tell him, “get the fucking computer out of the house. You need to do it now! Don’t wait! Those wiretaps, they’re not on Teltec anymore, those guys are listening to us! You gotta get the computer out right away—please!”

He agrees but sounds really pissed.

My next call is to Lewis, with the same message: “We gotta go into cleanup mode.” We agree we’ll each stash our notes and floppy disks in places where no one will be able to find them.

Let the government try to prosecute: no evidence, no case.

I arrived at my mom’s place in Las Vegas with my nerves shot. I kept obsessively playing over and over in my mind all the conversations they might have intercepted.

What if they’d heard me discussing SAS with Lewis? What if