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From the time I first gained access to PacTel Cellular’s call detail records, showing an almost-up-to-the-minute log of calls both to and from every one of the company’s subscribers, I’d been checking them often—targeting the people on the white collar crime unit who were frequently in touch with Eric, focusing in particular on Special Agent McGuire.

That was how I happened to spot an attention-getting series of calls: over a span of a few minutes, McGuire had called Eric’s pager several times. And McGuire’s very next call after his last attempt was to a landline number I hadn’t seen before.

I called the number. Well, hello—I knew that voice well. The person who answered the phone was Eric. At a new landline number, in a different part of Los Angeles. He had moved again.

Hanging up, I had a smile on my face. Eric would know a hang-up had to be me. Probably before he had finished unpacking, I had already found out he had moved.

PacBell’s line-assignment center would be the place to get Eric’s new address.

It was 2270 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which turned out to be in a pricey neighborhood about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard, in the Hollywood Hills, halfway up toward Mulholland Drive.

His fourth address in the several months I had known him. The reason wasn’t hard to figure: the Bureau was trying to protect him. Each time I found his new address, the Feds would move him. I had now found his address three times, and they had moved him each time.

You would think they might have figured out by then that his location was a secret they were not going to be able to keep from me.

In front of a computer in a safe location hacking by night, in front of a computer “investigating” for Teltec by day. The Teltec work mostly involved projects like figuring out where the husband in a divorce case was hiding his assets, helping an attorney decide whether or not to file a lawsuit by finding out whether the potential defendant had enough of a bankroll to make it worthwhile, and tracking down deadbeats. A few cases were gratifying, like locating a parent who had abducted his or her own child and fled to Canada, Europe, or wherever; the satisfaction I got from succeeding in those cases was enormous and left me feeling I was doing a small bit of good in the world.

But doing good deeds for society wasn’t going to earn me any Brownie points with law enforcement. I figured out how to set up an early-warning system to sound an alarm if the Feds were hanging around waiting to follow me when I left work. I bought a RadioShack scanner that had the cellular band unblocked (the FCC had started cracking down on scanner manufacturers to prevent the interception of cell phone traffic). I also bought a device called a “digital-data interpreter,” or DDI—a special box that could decode the signaling information on the cellular network. The scanner signals fed into the DDI, which was connected to my computer.

A cell phone registers with the nearest cell tower and establishes communications with it, so that when a call comes in for you, the system knows which cell tower to relay the call to on its way to your handset. Without this arrangement, the cell phone company would have no way of getting a call routed to you. I programmed the scanner to monitor the frequency of the cell tower nearest to Teltec, so it would pick up information from the tower identifying the phone number of every cell phone in or even just passing through the area.

My scanner fed this constant flow of data to the DDI, which converted the information into separate pieces, like this:

618-1000 (213) Registration

610-2902 (714) Paging

400-8172 (818) Paging

701-1223 (310) Registration

Each line shows the status of a cell phone currently in the area served by this cell site; the first set of digits on the line is the phone number of one cell phone. “Paging” signifies that the site is receiving a call for that cell phone and is signaling the phone to establish a connection. “Registration” indicates that the phone