At 6:18am on 15th February 2004, Valve's MD received an email with a blank subject line from sender 'Da Guy'.  "Hello Gabe," the author began, before going on to claim responsibility for infiltrating Valve's network months earlier. Newell was unsure whether to believe the story at first. But two attached documents, both of which could only have been obtained by someone with access to private areas of Valve's server, proved the sender's claims were valid. Five months after Half-Life 2 was released onto the internet, long after all leads had gone cold, Newell's man had turned up on his doorstep.

Why did Gembe send that email? "Because I was sorry for what happened," he says. "I wanted them to know who did this thing, and that my intention was never for things to work out the way they did." But that wasn't all that Gembe was after. The young man saw a way he could create a positive outcome from his crime, both for Valve and himself. In a separate email, he asked if Newell would consider giving him a job. "I was very naïve back then," he says. "It was and still is my dream to work for a game development company, so I just asked. I hoped that they could forgive what I had done, mostly because it wasn't intentional." To Gembe's surprise, Newell wrote back a few days later saying yes, Valve was interested. He asked if Gembe would agree to a phone interview.

The real motivation behind the suggestion was not to discover whether Gembe would be a strong candidate for a position within the company. It was to obtain an on-the-record admission from Gembe that he had been responsible for the leak. It's an old FBI trick, designed to gain a confession by appealing to a person's sense of pride. Gembe had his suspicions but he pushed them to the back of his mind. "I hoped for the best," he says. "I was not the brightest kid back then." He recalls the phone interview being conducted by Alfred Reynolds, developer on Counter-Strike and Steam, and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw, but says he could be wrong. (In fact, Wolpaw says he had yet to join the company at this point.) "At first they wanted to know how I hacked into the network. I told them in full detail. Then they asked me about my experience and skills. I still remember they were surprised that I spoke fluent English without much of an accent."

The trio talked for 40 minutes. Any sense of guilt dissipated for Gembe in the presence of his heroes. But that was nothing compared to the adrenaline rush he felt when he received an invitation to a second interview. This one would be face-to-face at Valve's headquarters in Seattle, on American soil.
Having set the trap, Valve and the FBI needed to obtain a visa for Gembe (and his father and brother, as he had asked if they could accompany him to the US). But there were concerns about the ongoing access Gembe had to Valve's servers and the potential damage he could still cause. So the FBI contacted the German police, alerting them to the plan.