BOMB SUSPECT BIDES TIME AS FBI PLODS ON.

Byline: Kevin Sack The New York Times

Shortly after 8 a.m. on Monday, Richard Jewell, the security guard being investigated in the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park, left his apartment, hopped into his blue Toyota pickup and sped off.

By the time Jewell hit the open Interstate, he was being trailed by a white network-television van and by four unmarked cars, presumably driven by agents of the FBI. With Charles Lum, the driver of the television van, trying desperately to keep pace, the convoy of Jewell's pickup and the unmarked cars soon reached speeds that Lum later estimated at 85 or 90 miles an hour. And when Jewell exited the Interstate, some of the unmarked cars surrounded Lum's van and kept him from following.

What had set off the high-speed chase? Jewell had to pick up his Doberman pinscher at a kennel.

``They were driving like maniacs - it was scary,'' said Lum, a college student hired by a consortium of television networks to help stake out Jewell's northeast Atlanta apartment. ``When they blocked me, the FBI agent just looked over and smiled. And to find out it was all for a dog. They must really be bored.''

They are not alone. Although he has not been charged in the bombing, on July 27, Jewell has spent the last three weeks as a virtual prisoner in the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his mother. Since July 30, when he was first publicly identified as a suspect, by The Atlanta Journal, he has ventured out of his apartment only five or six times, usually to visit a member of his ever-expanding team of lawyers.

The lawyers say Jewell fears harassment from reporters and the public. A contract employee who had been hired as a guard only for the duration of the Olympics, he will be unable to find work again if he is not cleared, they say. And so Jewell, who is 33, bides his time by watching television, reading newspapers and magazines, and playing video games.

``He told me he was on level 17 of Mission Commander, whatever that is,'' said G. Watson Bryant Jr., one of the four lawyers retained by Jewell. ``Don't ask me what level he was on before this started. All I know is, he's a lot better at it than he was.''

Meanwhile, on an embankment overlooking the apartment building where Jewell lives, network cameramen and producers while away their days waiting for rare sightings of him. Pooling their resources, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC are paying a tenant in an apartment complex atop the embankment for the right to use her home as a base of operations - $1,000 for every 24 hours they are present.

The tenant is ``the one person that's seen an Olympic windfall,'' said Michael Epstein, a cameraman stationed outside the apartment terrace on Monday.

Epstein and his colleagues have made themselves quite comfortable. On Monday afternoon, five lawn chairs sat in a semicircle on the embankment, while on a tape player Nat King Cole crooned jazz melodies. An electric fan provided a constant breeze, and a small table supported an inventory of cellular telephones, walkie-talkies, newspapers and well-thumbed novels.

It was Jewell who originally alerted the police to the green knapsack that contained the pipe bomb, whose subsequent explosion killed one woman, injured 111 people and contributed to a Turkish cameraman's fatal heart attack. After extensive searches of his current and former residences and places of employment, and dozens of interviews with his friends, the FBI has yet to disclose whether any physical evidence links him to the bombing.

At this point, the FBI, which leads a multi-agency task force investigating the blast, is saying little at all. It prefers to plod along in a style that one law-enforcement official likened to football's ``three yards and a cloud of dust.''

``Frankly, I'm just not commenting on Jewell right now,'' said Jay Spadafore, a bureau spokesman.

But as time passes, Jewell and his lawyers grow more confident that he will not be charged, Bryant said. And they have started to wage a public relations campaign against the FBI.

``It's clear that if they had anything, they'd have arrested him by now,'' Bryant said. ``They don't have squat. They've torn a man's life apart based on a profile, which is the most insidious use of such a thing that you can imagine.''