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At that point, I confided in him. “Hey, it’s not really a friend. I’ve found out they have intercepts on all my dad’s lines, and I’m scared because I don’t know how much they know. I don’t know who it is or when it started.”

He asked how I knew, and I told him how I’d social-engineered the Calabasas frame tech into telling me. I tried to tell him he could trust me. I was pleading with him and trying to convey a sense of urgency because I needed to do it now. I really wanted to get him to go get the key for me while I waited.

“Eric,” I said, “if I find out they have enough evidence to send me back to jail, I’m going to disappear.” The three of us talked for a while about what countries had no extradition treaties with the United States.

I pressed him again about the break-in, but Eric wouldn’t commit himself, saying he’d let me know. We spent a long time discussing how the phone company wiretapped people. He even told me that he went into the central office himself every week to make sure there was no dial number recorder (DNR) attached to his own line.

He still wasn’t willing to give me the key, but he said he would be happy to take me to the central office and go in with me. Since I didn’t completely trust him, I gave him only one of the three monitor numbers I had and didn’t let him know I had the other ones. It was a kind of a test, to see if he was trustworthy or not.

Finally Lewis and I said good night and walked away.

Whoever had put Pacific Bell up to installing those intercepts could by now have had enough evidence to send me back to prison, so not knowing what the wiretappers had overheard, I was really freaking out, my gut continually nagging at me. Sometimes, afraid to sleep at home, I’d check into a budget motel to relieve my anxiety.

We were going to go in together, but over the next several days, Eric kept giving me excuses about why he couldn’t go tonight, why he couldn’t tomorrow, how he had to work over the weekend. Meanwhile I grew more cautious. His behavior seemed suspicious; I was growing anxious about the risk. I told him, “I won’t go inside, but I’ll act as a lookout.” Finally we picked a date; it was all settled that we would go in the following night.

But the next morning, he called, saying, “I went in last night,” and gave me the monitor numbers—and I could tell he was giving me the correct ones. He told me he’d looked up the numbers in COSMOS. The numbers had been established on January 27, so the boxes had been hooked up sometime after that.

I asked him how he’d gotten past the padlock on the outside gate. He said there wasn’t any when he got there. But every day, as I drove from my dad’s apartment, I passed that CO, and every day I saw that padlock. This was a huge red flag. Now I was really nervous. Why would he bullshit me about a thing like this, something he knew was so important to me?

I’d have to be even more on my guard with this guy. I just couldn’t trust him.

But the secret of where he lived wasn’t a secret anymore, and he was shaken. The whole episode had only added to the mystery… but I was on the verge of unraveling the puzzle.

SEVENTEEN

Pulling Back the Curtain

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Now that we had access to SAS, Lewis and I wanted to get the dial-up numbers for all the central offices, so we would have the ability to monitor any phone in Pacific Bell’s coverage area. Rather than having to social-engineer a Pacific Bell employee to give us the dial-up number every time we wanted access, we would have them all.

I had learned from the employee in Pasadena, the guy who read the copyright line for me, how they used SAS. The tester had to manually enter the dial-up number for the RATP for the central office of the line to be tested. The testers had a list of dial-up numbers for the RATPs in all the central offices they managed.

Small problem: How could I get a copy of the SAS dial-up numbers for all the central offices when I didn’t know what the damned list was called? Then I realized there might