`So,' a relaxed Par asked his room-mate, `How are things going at home?'
`Fine,' Scott replied. `Nothing much happening here.'
Par looked down at the red bag he was carrying with a momentary expression of horror. He realised he stood out in the San Jose bus terminal like a peacock among the pigeons …
Blissfully ignorant of the raid which had occurred three days before, Par and his mother had flown into San Jose airport. They had gone to the bus terminal to pick up a Greyhound home to the Monterey area. While waiting for the bus, Par called his friend Tammi to say he was back in California.
Any casual bystander waiting to use the pay phones at that moment would have seen a remarkable transformation in the brown-haired boy at the row of phones. The smiling face suddenly dropped in a spasm of shock. His skin turned ash white as the blood fled south. His deep-set chocolate brown eyes, with their long, graceful lashes curving upward and their soft, shy expression, seemed impossibly large.
For at that moment Tammi told Par that his house had been raided by the Secret Service. That Scott and Ed had been pretty upset about having guns shoved in their faces, and had made statements about him to the police. That they thought their phone was tapped. That the Secret Service guys were still hunting for Par, they knew his real name, and she thought there was an all points bulletin out for him. Scott had told the Secret Service about Par's red bag, the one with all his hacking notes that he always carried around. The one with the print-out of all the Citibank credit card numbers.
And so it was that Par came to gaze down at his bag with a look of alarm. He realised instantly that the Secret Service would be looking for that red bag. If they didn't know what he looked like, they would simply watch for the bag.
That bag was not something Par could hide easily. The Citibank print-out was the size of a phone book. He also had dozens of disks loaded with the cards and other sensitive hacking information.
Par had used the cards to make a few free calls, but he hadn't been charging up any jet skis. He fought temptation valiantly, and in the end he had won, but others might not have been so victorious in the same battle. Par figured that some less scrupulous hackers had probably been charging up a storm. He was right. Someone had, for example, tried to send a $367 bouquet of flowers to a woman in El Paso using one of the stolen cards. The carder had unwittingly chosen a debit card belonging to a senior Saudi bank executive who happened to be in his office at the time the flower order was placed. Citibank investigator Larry Wallace added notes on that incident to his growing file.
Par figured that Citibank would probably try to pin every single attempt at carding on him. Why not? What kind of credibility would a seventeen-year-old hacker have in denying those sorts of allegations? Zero. Par made a snap decision. He sidled up to a trash bin in a dark corner. Scanning the scene warily, Par casually reached into the red bag, pulled out the thick wad of Citibank card print-outs and stuffed it into the bin. He fluffed a few stray pieces of garbage over the top.