Part I
Amsterdam
Chapter 1
Gunnar
I was super happy for my best dude Lars when he got to marry Rachel. She was the girl of his dreams!
And it was a group wedding, too – with, like, ten people getting married at once!
Not one person getting married to the other nine, though. That would be weird.
No, it was just one dude for every chick, but four pairs of them!
There were two girls who got married, too. That’s hot.
The other guys who got married were friends Lars made in his new job –
Maffiabrorsor.
That’s Swedish for ‘mafia bros.’
That’s what I call them. In my head, anyway. Not to their faces. That would be rude.
And probably dangerous, since they’re in the mafia.
That’s one thing I could never understand – why Lars would make friends with a bunch of dudes in the mafia.
But I guess I shouldn’t judge. He and I used to kill people for a living.
Back when we were in Swedish Special Forces, I mean.
‘Used to kill people for a living’ sounds like we were assassins or something. We were just soldiers.
But Rachel actually was an assassin. She was like James Bond for MI6.
Jane Bond, 007!
(Although she told me there wasn’t any such thing as 007 or 008 or any Double-Ohs licensed to kill, so that was disappointing. Kind of like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real.)
Lars told me that getting married was awesome, but everything leading up to it was pretty gnarly. It happened in a little chapel in Sicily with a bunch of other mafia guys, and a real asshole who wanted to kill everybody, and everybody almost got shot until an old granny lady stood up and said she was gay and to cut that shit out.
Good job, granny lady.
I guess that’s the kind of crazy shit that happens when you hang out with mafia bros.
But Lars is the best guy I know. So if he thinks the mafia bros are okay dudes, then that’s good enough for me.
Chapter 2
I was really good at doing soldier stuff when I was in Special Forces. Not nearly as good as Lars – he was the best – but I was pretty badass, if I do say so myself.
But deep down, I hated it.
I don’t like killing people.
It hurts.
I started smoking weed when I was 14, but I did it a whole lot more after I joined Special Forces and killed somebody for the first time.
The guy was a terrorist, so I guess he deserved it…
But it still made me feel like shit.
When I smoked out afterwards, it numbed the pain.
Unfortunately, I killed a lot of people when I was in Special Forces. So even after I got out of the military, I smoked a hell of a lot more than before I went in.
Because the bad things you do…
They don’t leave you alone at night just because you did them a long time ago.
I never wanted to be in the Army. I had to join because I was a computer hacker.
I should probably explain that part.
I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. When I was a kid, I never really fit in. I was, like, socially awkward. My brain seemed to work differently from everybody else’s, and I didn’t understand other people at all. But I was always cheerful.
People didn’t like that. Because I was happy all the time but kind of confused, other kids thought I was dumb and made fun of me.
It also doesn’t help when you’re eight years old and five feet tall with chubby cheeks. The kids in school called me Jätteunge – ‘baby giant.’
So I kept to myself as a kid… which meant I played a lot of video games.
After a while, though, I would get annoyed because I wanted to change stuff in the game. I don’t like doing the same thing over and over, or doing stuff just because someone else says I have to. I thought it would be cool if I could do what I wanted in a video game.
So I looked online and found out you could ‘mod’ the games, which means modify. Like, do some computer code stuff and make the character you were playing into a hot naked lady.
That was pretty funny, watching a hot naked lady blow up monsters in Gears of War.
The more I learned, the more I realized that video games were just giant soups of computer code that got changed into pictures and sounds.
That’s when I got interested in coding.
It was fun at first. Computers made sense to me in a way that people never did.
But then I got bored… so I started hacking into businesses on the internet.
I loved it. It was like a puzzle.
Except little businesses got too easy, so I had to go after bigger and bigger fish to keep it entertaining.
First it was things like bakery websites…
Then auto shop part suppliers…
Doctors and hospitals…
Then corporations… banks… and eventually government websites.
I was good at hacking – really good. And I never did anything bad. I usually just poked around and looked at stuff.
When I was into hacking banks, I paid off a few people’s credit card bills if they had medical problems, but that was about it. I didn’t steal anything for myself.
For years and years, I never got caught –
Until I hacked into the Försvarsmakten.
That’s the Swedish Department of Defense.
They caught me.
I guess they would’ve been pretty bad at their jobs if they didn’t.