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“You want me to hack into one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world… look for dirt on a dude in one of their most classified departments… and do it without anybody finding out? That’s what you’re asking me to do?”
When he said it like that, it sounded ridiculous.
“…yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Can you do it?”
“Sure!” he said brightly. “I figure it’ll take me… oh… three or four months to do it right, so neither one of us goes to prison for the rest of our lives.”
My shoulders sagged.
“Or,” he said as he turned to the monitor, “I could just ask my MI6 homies if they know about this Alistair dude.”
I stared at him in shock, unsure I’d heard him correctly.
“Wait – what?”
“Oh, yeah, man – I got homies in all the major agencies in the world,” Gunnar said as he banged on the keyboard at a million miles an hour. “They all talk to each other, you know. I met most of ‘em in cannabis chatrooms.”
“…how is that even remotely safe?!”
“What, you mean like if there was a North Korean mole or something? After you work in intel for a while, you kind of learn the secret handshake. You do the little dance, you feel each other out, you doublecheck each other’s bona fides… and if everything’s kosher, you’re all good.”
“But you met them in cannabis chatrooms?!”
He chuckled. “You wouldn’t believe how many potheads there are in the intelligence community. Chills ‘em out enough to deal with all the fucked-up shit.”
I shook my head at the sheer bizarreness of what Gunnar was telling me. Hundreds of people smoking out and acting as back-channels to the most powerful government agencies in the world?
Insane.
…but it was a hell of a lot quicker than three or four months of hacking.
There was just one problem.
“You’ve got to keep this incredibly quiet, though,” I insisted.
“Okay,” Gunnar answered nonchalantly.
“These ‘MI6 homies’ of yours, they can’t let Alistair know that they’re – ”
“I think you need some bong time, dude,” Gunnar said cheerfully. “You want a hit?”
“No.”
“Then drink some beer, because you’re stressing the fuck out over nothing.” Gunnar smiled as he continued to type. “We help each other out on stuff all the time, bro – shit that could start World War III if anybody knew about it. Has World War III started yet?”
“No – ”
“Exactly. So chill out.” Almost as an afterthought, he asked, “What’s the job you’re gonna do for this Alistair guy?”
I hesitated about telling him, then decided he’d seen enough combat not to be shocked. “Assassinations.”
Gunnar stopped typing…
Paused for a couple of seconds…
Then slowly looked over at me.
It was the first time I’d seen true shock on his face in a long, long time.
