Private Investigator
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I
t would be the first time I’d ever been completely on my own. Going to
live in Denver without my mom and
Gram seemed strange but also
exhilarating. When my plane took off from Vegas, I would literally
disappear into the ether; once in my new hometown, I’d start hiding in plain
sight.
Can you imagine the freedom of starting your life over again, taking on
a new name and identity? Of course, you’d miss your family and friends,
the comfort of familiar places, but if you could
put that part aside for a
moment, wouldn’t it feel like a great adventure?
During the flight to the “Mile High City,” I felt a growing sense of
anticipation. When the United Airlines plane landed,
it was a bit
anticlimactic: Denver was overcast and gloomy that afternoon. I got into a
cab and asked the driver to take me to a hotel in a good neighborhood
where I could rent a room by the week. The place he picked out was in what
he referred to as “hotel row.”
I would rate the hotel at about two-and-a-half stars, or something on the
order of a Motel 6. It turned out not to offer a weekly rate after all, but with
a little persuasion I managed to negotiate one I could live with.
Because of the way the movies portray it, people assume that living as a
fugitive means always looking over your shoulder,
in constant fear of
discovery. In the years that followed, I would have that experience only
rarely. For the most part, once I’d established
my new identity and
solidified it with verifiable, government-issued ID, I felt secure. Just to be
on the safe side, I always set up early-warning systems so I’d be tipped off
if someone came looking for me. And if I noticed anyone getting close, I
would take immediate action. But from the very start, I would be enjoying
myself the vast majority of the time.
My first order of business in any new city was to compromise the local
phone company so I could prevent anyone from easily tracking me. For
starters, I’d need one of the dial-up phone numbers that field techs used to
call into the phone company switch. I would get the number for the Central
Office that handled the telephone exchanges I wanted to gain control of. I’d
call and say something like, “Hi. This is Jimmy over in Engineering. How
you doin’ today?”
Then I’d follow up with, “What’s the dial-up for the VDU?”—using the
shorthand term for the Visual Display Unit, which gives a tech full access to
the switch from a remote location. The neat part
was that if the switch was a
1AESS, you didn’t even need a password to access it. Whoever made that
decision must have figured that anyone who knew the phone number was
authorized.
Usually the guy I got on the line would give me the phone number for
dialing into the switch of his Central Office. But if a tech challenged me, I
knew enough about the system to make up a plausible excuse on the fly. It
might be something like, “We’re setting up a new dial-out system here and
programming all the dial-up numbers into our outgoing dialer software. So
if any switch engineers have to dial in, they can just instruct the modem to
dial a particular office.”
Once I had the phone number for dialing into the switch, I could do
pretty much anything I liked. If I wanted to have a series of conversations
with someone in, say, Japan, I’d find an unassigned phone number, take it
over, add call forwarding, and then activate it to forward any incoming calls
anywhere I wanted. Then, from my cell phone, I could make a local call to
the previously unassigned phone number and have a clear, direct connection
from the switch straight to the guy in Japan, instead of having to deal with
an unreliable international cell phone connection.
And I would also routinely use the technique called “masking”—setting
up a chain of call-forwarding numbers in switches of several cities in
different parts of the country. Then, calling
the first number in the chain, my
call would be passed along the chain from city to city, ultimately to the
number I wanted—making it extremely time-consuming for anyone to trace
the calls back to me.
My calls weren’t just free, they were virtually untraceable.
My first morning in Denver, I sat down with a local newspaper and began
circling job ads for computer work. I was
looking for any company that
used my favorite operating system, VMS.
I created a separate résumé for each likely-sounding ad, tailored to the
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