CHAPTER 4 — The Fugitive.
There's one gun, probably more; and the others are pointing at our backdoor.
— from `Knife's Edge', Bird Noises.
When Par failed to show up for his hearing on 10 July 1989 in the Monterey County Juvenile Court in Salinas, he officially became a fugitive. He had, in fact, already been on the run for some weeks. But no-one knew. Not even his lawyer.
Richard Rosen had an idea something was wrong when Par didn't show up for a meeting some ten days before the hearing, but he kept hoping his client would come good. Rosen had negotiated a deal for Par: reparations plus fifteen days or less in juvenile prison in exchange for Par's full cooperation with the Secret Service.
Par had appeared deeply troubled over the matter for weeks. He didn't seem to mind telling the Feds how he had broken into various computers, but that's not what they were really looking for. They wanted him to rat. And to rat on everyone. They knew Par was a kingpin and, as such, he knew all the important players in the underground. The perfect stooge. But Par couldn't bring himself to narc. Even if he did spill his guts, there was still the question of what the authorities would do to him in prison. The question of elimination loomed large in his mind.
So, one morning, Par simply disappeared. He had planned it carefully, packed his bags discreetly and made arrangements with a trusted friend outside the circle which included his room-mates. The friend drove around to pick Par up when the room-mates were out. They never had an inkling that the now eighteen-year-old Par was about to vanish for a very long time.
First, Par headed to San Diego. Then LA. Then he made his way to New
Jersey. After that, he disappeared from the radar screen completely.
Life on the run was hard. For the first few months, Par carried around two prized possessions; an inexpensive laptop computer and photos of Theorem taken during her visit. They were his lifeline to a different world and he clutched them in his bag as he moved from one city to another, often staying with his friends from the computer underground. The loose-knit network of hackers worked a bit like the nineteenth-century American `underground railroad' used by escaped slaves to flee from the South to the safety of the northern states. Except that, for Par, there was never a safe haven.
Par crisscrossed the continent, always on the move. A week in one place. A few nights in another. Sometimes there were breaks in the electronic underground railroad, spaces between the place where one line ended and another began. Those breaks were the hardest. They meant sleeping out in the open, sometimes in the cold, going without food and being without anyone to talk to.
He continued hacking, with new-found frenzy, because he was invincible. What were the law enforcement agencies going to do? Come and arrest him? He was already a fugitive and he figured things couldn't get much worse. He felt as though he would be on the run forever, and as if he had already been on the run for a lifetime, though it was only a few months.
When he was staying with people from the computer underground, Par was careful. But when he was alone in a dingy motel room, or with people completely outside that world, he hacked without fear. Blatant, in-your-face feats. Things he knew the Secret Service would see. Even his illicit voice mailbox had words for his pursuers:
Yeah, this is Par. And to all those faggots from the Secret Service who keep calling and hanging up, well, lots of luck. 'Cause, I mean, you're so fucking stupid, it's not even funny.
I mean, if you had to send my shit to Apple Computers [for analysis], you must be so stupid, it's pitiful. You also thought I had blue-boxing equipment [for phreaking]. I'm just laughing trying to think what you thought was a blue box. You are so lame.
Oh well. And anyone else who needs to leave me a message, go ahead.
And everyone take it easy and leave me some shit. Alright. Later.
Despite the bravado, paranoia took hold of Par as it never had before. If he saw a cop across the street, his breath would quicken and he would turn and walk in the opposite direction. If the cop was heading toward him, Par crossed the street and turned down the nearest alley. Police of any type made him very nervous.
By the autumn of 1989, Par had made his way to a small town in North Carolina. He found a place to stop and rest with a friend who used the handle The Nibbler and whose family owned a motel. A couple of weeks in one place, in one bed, was paradise. It was also free, which meant he didn't have to borrow money from Theorem, who helped him out while he was on the run.
Par slept in whatever room happened to be available that night, but he spent most of his time in one of the motel chalets Nibbler used in the off-season as a computer room. They spent days hacking from Nibbler's computer. The fugitive had been forced to sell off his inexpensive laptop before arriving in North Carolina.
After a few weeks at the motel, however, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being watched. There were too many strangers coming and going. He wondered if the hotel guests waiting in their cars were spying on him, and he soon began jumping at shadows. Perhaps, he thought, the Secret Service had found him after all.
Par thought about how he could investigate the matter in more depth.
One of The Atlanta Three hackers, The Prophet, called Nibbler occasionally to exchange hacking information, particularly security bugs in Unix systems. During one of their talks, Prophet told Par about a new security flaw he'd been experimenting with on a network that belonged to the phone company.
The Atlanta Three, a Georgia-based wing of The Legion of Doom, spent a good deal of time weaving their way through BellSouth, the phone company covering the south-eastern US. They knew about phone switching stations the way Par knew about Tymnet. The Secret Service had raided the hackers in July 1989 but had not arrested them yet, so in September The Prophet continued to maintain an interest in his favourite target.
Par thought the flaw in BellSouth's network sounded very cool and began playing around in the company's systems. Dial up the company's computer network, poke around, look at things. The usual stuff.
It occurred to Par that he could check out the phone company's records of the motel to see if there was anything unusual going on. He typed in the motel's main phone number and the system fed back the motel's address, name and some detailed technical information, such as the exact cable and pair attached to the phone number. Then he looked up the phone line of the computer chalet. Things looked odd on that line.
The line which he and Nibbler used for most of their hacking showed a special status: `maintenance unit on line'.
What maintenance unit? Nibbler hadn't mentioned any problems with any of the motel's lines, but Par checked with him. No problems with the telephones.
Par felt nervous. In addition to messing around with the phone company's networks, he had been hacking into a Russian computer network from the computer chalet. The Soviet network was a shiny new toy. It had only been connected to the rest of the world's global packet-switched network for about a month, which made it particularly attractive virgin territory.
Nibbler called in a friend to check the motel's phones. The friend, a former telephone company technician turned freelancer, came over to look at the equipment. He told Nibbler and Par that something weird was happening in the motel's phone system. The line voltages were way off.
Par realised instantly what was going on. The system was being monitored. Every line coming in and going out was probably being tapped, which meant only one thing. Someone—the phone company, the local police, the FBI or the Secret Service—was onto him.
Nibbler and Par quickly packed up all Nibbler's computer gear, along with Par's hacking notes, and moved to another motel across town. They had to shut down all their hacking activities and cover their tracks.
Par had left programs running which sniffed people's passwords and login names on a continual basis as they logged in, then dumped all the information into a file on the hacked machine. He checked that file every day or so. If he didn't shut the programs down, the log file would grow until it was so big the system administrator would become curious and have a look. When he discovered that his system had been hacked he would close the security holes. Par would have problems getting back into that system.
After they finished tidying up the hacked systems, they gathered up all Par's notes and Nibbler's computer equipment once again and stashed them in a rented storage space. Then they drove back to the motel.
Par couldn't afford to move on just yet. Besides, maybe only the telephone company had taken an interest in the motel's phone system. Par had done a lot of poking and prodding of the telecommunications companies' computer systems from the motel phone, but he had done it anonymously. Perhaps BellSouth felt a little curious and just wanted to sniff about for more information. If that was the case, the law enforcement agencies probably didn't know that Par, the fugitive, was hiding in the motel.
The atmosphere was becoming oppressive in the motel. Par became even more watchful of the people coming and going. He glanced out the front window a little more often, and he listened a little more carefully to the footsteps coming and going. How many of the guests were really just tourists? Par went through the guest list and found a man registered as being from New Jersey. He was from one of the AT&T corporations left after the break-up of Bell Systems. Why on earth would an AT&T guy be staying in a tiny hick town in North Carolina? Maybe a few Secret Service agents had snuck into the motel and were watching the chalet.
Par needed to bring the paranoia under control. He needed some fresh air, so he went out for a walk. The weather was bad and the wind blew hard, whipping up small tornadoes of autumn leaves. Soon it began raining and Par sought cover in the pay phone across the street.
Despite having been on the run for a few months, Par still called Theorem almost every day, mostly by phreaking calls through bulk telecommunications companies. He dialled her number and they talked for a bit. He told her about how the voltage was way off on the motel's PABX and how the phone might be tapped. She asked how he was holding up. Then they spoke softly about when they might see each other again.
Outside the phone box, the storm worsened. The rain hammered the roof from one side and then another as the wind jammed it in at strange angles. The darkened street was deserted. Tree branches creaked under the strain of the wind. Rivulets rushed down the leeward side of the booth and formed a wall of water outside the glass. Then a trash bin toppled over and its contents flew onto the road.
Trying to ignore to the havoc around him, Par curled the phone handset into a small protected space, cupped between his hand, his chest and a corner of the phone booth. He reminded Theorem of their time together in California, of two and a half weeks, and they laughed gently over intimate secrets.
A tree branch groaned and then broke under the force of the wind. When it crashed on the pavement near the phone booth, Theorem asked Par what the noise was.
`There's a hurricane coming,' he told her. `Hurricane Hugo. It was supposed to hit tonight. I guess it's arrived.'
Theorem sounded horrified and insisted Par go back to the safety of the motel immediately.
When Par opened the booth door, he was deluged by water. He dashed across the road, fighting the wind of the hurricane, staggered into his motel room and jumped into bed to warm up. He fell asleep listening to the storm, and he dreamed of Theorem.
Hurricane Hugo lasted more than three days, but they felt like the safest three days Par had spent in weeks. It was a good bet that the Secret Service wouldn't be conducting any raids during a hurricane. South Carolina took the brunt of Hugo but North Carolina also suffered massive damage. It was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the area in decades. Winds near its centre reached more than 240 kilometres per hour, causing 60 deaths and $7 billion in damages as it made its way up the coast from the West Indies to the Carolinas.
When Par stepped outside his motel room one afternoon a few days after the storm, the air was fresh and clean. He walked to the railing outside his second-storey perch and found himself looking down on a hive of activity in the car park. There were cars. There was a van. There was a collection of spectators.
And there was the Secret Service.
At least eight agents wearing blue jackets with the Secret Service emblem on the back.
Par froze. He stopped breathing. Everything began to move in slow motion. A few of the agents formed a circle around one of the guys from the motel, a maintenance worker named John, who looked vaguely like Par. They seemed to be hauling John over the coals, searching his wallet for identification and quizzing him. Then they escorted him to the van, presumably to run his prints.
Par's mind began moving again. He tried to think clearly. What was the best way out? He had to get back into his room. It would give him some cover while he figured out what to do next. The photos of Theorem flashed through his mind. No way was he going to let the Secret Service get hold of those. He needed to stash them and fast.
He could see the Secret Service agents searching the computer chalet. Thank God he and Nibbler had moved all the equipment. At least there was nothing incriminating in there and they wouldn't be able to seize all their gear.
Par breathed deeply, deliberately, and forced himself to back away from the railing toward the door to his room. He resisted the urge to dash into his room, to recoil from the scene being played out below him. Abrupt movements would draw the agents' attention.
Just as Par began to move, one of the agents turned around. He scanned the two-storey motel complex and his gaze quickly came to rest on Par. He looked Par dead in the eye.
This is it, Par thought. I'm screwed. No way out of here now. Months on the run only to get done in a hick town in North Carolina. These guys are gonna haul my ass away for good. I'll never see the light of day again. Elimination is the only option.
While these thoughts raced through Par's mind, he stood rigid, his feet glued to the cement floor, his face locked into the probing gaze of the Secret Service agent. He felt like they were the only two people who existed in the universe.
Then, inexplicably, the agent looked away. He swivelled around to finish his conversation with another agent. It was as if he had never even seen the fugitive.
Par stood, suspended and unbelieving. Somehow it seemed impossible. He began to edge the rest of the way to his motel room. Slowly, casually, he slid inside and shut the door behind him.
His mind raced back to the photos of Theorem and he searched the room for a safe hiding place. There wasn't one. The best option was something above eye-level. He pulled a chair across the room, climbed on it and pressed on the ceiling. The rectangular panel of plasterboard lifted easily and Par slipped the photos in the space, then replaced the panel. If the agents tore the room apart, they would likely find the pictures. But the photos would probably escape a quick search, which was the best he could hope for at this stage.
Next, he turned his mind to escaping. The locals were pretty cool about everything, and Par thought he could count on the staff not to mention his presence to the Secret Service. That bought him some time, but he couldn't get out of the room without being seen. Besides, if he was spotted walking off the property, he would certainly be stopped and questioned.
Even if he did manage to get out of the motel grounds, it wouldn't help much. The town wasn't big enough to shield him from a thorough search and there was no-one there he trusted enough to hide him. It might look a little suspicious, this young man running away from the motel on foot in a part of the world where everyone travelled by car. Hitchhiking was out of the question. With his luck, he'd probably get picked up by one of the agents leaving the raid. No, he wanted a more viable plan. What he really needed was to get out of the area altogether, to flee the state.
Par knew that John travelled to Asheville to attend classes and that he left very early. If the authorities had been watching the motel for a while, they would know that his 5 a.m. departure was normal. And there was one other thing about the early departure which seemed promising. It was still dark at that hour.
If Par could get as far as Asheville, he might be able to get a lift to Charlotte, and from there he could fly somewhere far away.
Par considered the options again and again. Hiding out in the motel room seemed the most sensible thing to do. He had been moving rooms around the motel pretty regularly, so he might have appeared to be just another traveller to anyone watching the motel. With any luck the Secret Service would be concentrating their search on the chalet, ripping the place apart in a vain hunt for the computer equipment. As these thoughts went through his head, the phone rang, making Par jump. He stared at it, wondering whether to answer.
He picked it up.
`It's Nibbler,' a voice whispered.
`Yeah,' Par whispered back.
`Par, the Secret Service is here, searching the motel.'
`I know. I saw them.'
`They've already searched the room next to yours.' Par nearly died. The agents had been less than two metres from where he was standing and he hadn't even known it. That room was where John stayed. It was connected to his by an inner door, but both sides were locked.
`Move into John's room and lay low. Gotta go.' Nibbler hung up abruptly.
Par put his ear to the wall and listened. Nothing. He unlocked the connecting inner door, turned the knob and pressed lightly. It gave. Someone had unlocked the other side after the search. Par squinted through the crack in the door. The room was silent and still. He opened it—no-one home. Scooping up his things, he quickly moved into John's room.
Then he waited. Pacing and fidgeting, he strained his ears to catch the sounds outside. Every bang and creak of a door opening and closing set him on edge. Late that night, after the law enforcement officials had left, Nibbler called him on the house phone and told him what had happened.
Nibbler had been inside the computer chalet when the Secret Service showed up with a search warrant. The agents took names, numbers, every detail they could, but they had trouble finding any evidence of hacking. Finally, one of them emerged from the chalet triumphantly waving a single computer disk in the air. The law enforcement entourage hanging around in front of the chalet let out a little cheer, but Nibbler could hardly keep a straight face. His younger brother had been learning the basics of computer graphics with a program called Logo. The United States Secret Service would soon be uncovering the secret drawings of a primary school student.
Par laughed. It helped relieve the stress. Then he told Nibbler his escape plan, and Nibbler agreed to arrange matters. His parents didn't know the whole story, but they liked Par and wanted to help him. Then Nibbler wished his friend well.
Par didn't even try to rest before his big escape. He was as highly strung as a racehorse at the gate. What if the Secret Service was still watching the place? There was no garage attached to the main motel building which he could access from the inside. He would be exposed, even though it would only be for a minute or so. The night would provide reasonable cover, but the escape plan wasn't fool-proof. If agents were keeping the motel under observation from a distance they might miss him taking off from his room. On the other hand, there could be undercover agents posing as guests watching the entire complex from inside their room.
Paranoid thoughts stewed in Par's mind throughout the night. Just before 5 a.m., he heard John's car pull up outside. Par flicked off the light in his room, opened his door a crack and scanned the motel grounds. All quiet, bar the single car, which puffed and grunted in the still, cold air. The windows in most of the buildings were dark. It was now or never.
Par opened the door all the way and slipped down the hallway. As he crept downstairs, the pre-dawn chill sent a shiver down his spine. Glancing quickly from side to side, he hurried toward the waiting car, pulled the back door open and dove onto the seat. Keeping his head down, he twisted around, rolled onto the floor and closed the door with little more than a soft click.
As the car began to move. Par reached for a blanket which had been tossed on the floor and pulled it over himself. After a while, when John told him they were safely out of the town, Par slipped the blanket off his face and he looked up at the early morning sky. He tried to get comfortable on the floor. It was going to be a long ride.
At Asheville, John dropped Par off at an agreed location. Par thanked him and hopped into a waiting car. Someone else from his extensive network of friends and acquaintances took him to Charlotte.
This time Par rode in the front passenger seat. For the first time, he saw the true extent of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Hugo. The small town where he had been staying had been slashed by rain and high winds, but on the way to the Charlotte airport, where he would pick up a flight to New York, Par watched the devastation with amazement. He stared out the car window, unable to take his eyes off the storm's trail of havoc.
The hurricane had swept up anything loose or fragile and turned it into a missile on a suicide mission. Whatever mangled, broken fragments remained after the turbulent winds had passed would have been almost unrecognisable to those who had seen them before.
Theorem worried about Par as he staggered from corner to corner of the continent. In fact, she had often asked him to consider giving himself up. Moving from town to town was taking its toll on Par, and it wasn't that much easier on Theorem. She hadn't thought going on the lam was such a great idea in the first place, and she offered to pay for his lawyer so he could stop running. Par declined. How could he hand himself in when he believed elimination was a real possibility? Theorem sent him money, since he had no way of earning a living and he needed to eat. The worst parts, though, were the dark thoughts that kept crossing her mind. Anything could happen to Par between phone calls. Was he alive? In prison? Had he been raided, even accidentally shot during a raid?
The Secret Service and the private security people seemed to want him so badly. It was worrying, but hardly surprising. Par had embarrassed them. He had broken into their machines and passed their private information around in the underground. They had raided his home when he wasn't even home. Then he had escaped a second raid, in North Carolina, slipping between their fingers. He was constantly in their face, continuing to hack blatantly and to show them contempt in things such as his voicemail message. He figured they were probably exasperated from chasing all sorts of false leads as well, since he was perpetually spreading fake rumours about his whereabouts. Most of all, he thought they knew what he had seen inside the TRW system. He was a risk.
Par became more and more paranoid, always watching over his shoulder as he moved from city to city. He was always tired. He could never sleep properly, worrying about the knock on the door. Some mornings, after a fitful few hours of rest, he woke with a start, unable to remember where he was. Which house or motel, which friends, which city.
He still hacked all the time, borrowing machines where he could. He posted messages frequently on The Phoenix Project, an exclusive BBS run by The Mentor and Erik Bloodaxe and frequented by LOD members and the Australian hackers. Some well-known computer security people were also invited onto certain, limited areas of the Texas-based board, which immediately elevated the status of The Phoenix Project in the computer underground. Hackers were as curious about the security people as the security people were about their prey. The Phoenix Project was special because it provided neutral ground, where both sides could meet to exchange ideas.
Via the messages, Par continued to improve his hacking skills while also talking with his friends, people like Erik Bloodaxe, from Texas, and Phoenix, from The Realm in Melbourne. Electron also frequented The Phoenix Project. These hackers knew Par was on the run, and sometimes they joked with him about it. The humour made the stark reality of Par's situation bearable. All the hackers on The Phoenix Project had considered the prospect of being caught. But the presence of Par, and his tortured existence on the run, hammered the implications home with some regularity.
As Par's messages became depressed and paranoid, other hackers tried to do what they could to help him. Elite US and foreign hackers who had access to the private sections of The Phoenix Project saw his messages and they felt for him. Yet Par continued to slide deeper and deeper into his own strange world.
Subject: DAMN !!!
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sat Jan 13 08:40:17 1990
Shit, i got drunk last night and went onto that Philippine system…
Stupid Admin comes on and asks who i am …
Next thing i know, i'm booted off and both accounts on the system are gone. Not only this .. but the whole fucking Philippine Net isn't accepting collect calls anymore. (The thing went down completely after i was booted off!) Apparently someone there had enough of me. By the way, kids, never drink and hack!
- Par
Subject: gawd
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sat Jan 13 09:07:06 1990
Those SS boys and NSA boys think i'm a COMRADE .. hehehe i'm just glad i'm still fucking free.
Bahahaha
<Glastnost and all that happy horseshit>
- Par
Subject: The Bottom line.
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sun Jan 21 10:05:38 1990
The bottom line is a crackdown. The phrack boys were just the start, i'm sure of it.
This is the time to watch yourself. No matter what you are into, whether it's just codes, cards, etc.
Apparently the government has seen the last straw. Unfortunately, with all of this in the news now, they will be able to get more government money to combat hackers.
And that's BAD fucking news for us. I think they are going after all the `teachers'—the people who educate others into this sort of thing.
I wonder if they think that maybe these remote cases are linked in any way. The only way they canprobably see is that we are hackers. And so that is where their energies will be put. To stop ALL hackers—and stop them BEFORE they can become a threat. After they wipe out the educators, that is. Just a theory.
- Par
Subject: Connection
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sun Jan 21 10:16:11 1990