Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [97]
From then on, whenever someone from the FBI (or anyone else) paged Eric or sent him a pager text, I would see the message on my cloned pager, exactly as it appeared on his.
What were the odds of my intercepting two telephone conversations in close succession and hearing about myself both times? Not long after listening to the crew from Pacific Bell Security worrying over how to booby-trap me, I got another earful.
I hadn’t tried wiretapping Eric because he knew we had access to SAS, and I was worried that the frame techs might have been instructed to call Pacific Bell Security or the FBI if anyone tried to attach equipment to his line. Eric thought he had a safeguard against my listening to his phone calls. He had played with SAS enough to know that you hear a very distinct click when somebody used it to drop in on your line. But he didn’t know about making a connection with a SAS shoe, which, as I’ve explained, was a direct connection, using a cable that the frame technician placed directly on the customer’s cable-and-pair, and so produced no audible click on the line.
By chance I went up on Eric’s line one day using a SAS shoe, and heard him in conversation with someone he was calling “Ken.”
I didn’t have to wonder who Ken was: FBI Special Agent Ken McGuire.
They were talking about what evidence Ken needed for getting a search warrant on Mitnick.
The call threw me into an intense panic. I began to wonder if they were following me or even preparing to arrest me. Eric didn’t sound like an undercover informant; instead, his calling McGuire “Ken” sounded like one agent talking to another, with McGuire, the older, more experienced agent, leading the more junior agent to a better understanding of what they needed to get a search warrant.
Search warrant! Evidence against Mitnick!
Holy shit, I thought. Again I would have to get rid of every scrap of evidence that could be used against me.
As soon as they hung up, I immediately reprogrammed my phone, cloning it to a different phone number, one I had never used before.
Then I called Lewis at work. “Emergency!” I told him. “You’ve got to go to the pay phone outside your office building right now”—just in case the Feds were monitoring cell phone transmissions near his workplace.
I got in my car and drove to a place that I knew would be covered by a different cell phone tower—again, in case agents were monitoring the one serving the Teltec area.
As soon as Lewis answered the pay phone, I told him, “The government has been building a case against us, and Eric is part of it! It’s one-hundred-percent confirmation that we are the targets. Change your number right now.”
“Oh, shit.” That was his only response.
“We need to go into cleanup mode,” I said.
He sounded dejected and scared. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I know what to do.”
All the time I had been laboring over my research on Eric, I’d expected to find out he was an FBI snitch, if not an agent. But now that it was certain, I knew this was no game anymore. This was for real. I could almost feel the cold steel of the prison bars, I could almost taste the bland, barely edible prison food.
I was waiting at Kasden’s door when he got home from work, with boxes of disks that I asked him to store for me. That same evening I drove over to the home of another friend of my dad’s who had agreed to let me park my computer and all my notes with him.
De Payne’s cleanup wasn’t so easy. Something of a pack rat, he had swarms of mess all over his apartment. Digging through the piles to find the items that could help the government build a case against him had to be a huge challenge. And it wasn’t something anybody could help him with: he was the only one who knew which hard drives and floppy disks were safe and which could land him in prison. The task took him a couple of full days, the whole time under pressure of what would happen if federal agents showed up before he was finished.
I should have been using every