I never considered myself a bad guy. Sure, I was a thief, but I never robbed anyone with a gun. I didn’t tell people I was a Nigerian prince, and I didn’t manipute seniors into stealing their life savings. I almost never hurt anyone who I didn’t think deserved it. Then again, I was no hero either. I made fake IDs for high school and college students. I scammed entitled rich people by promising not to share information about their affairs with their wives, husbands, or lovers. I electronically redirected shipments of high-end perfume and sold them to gray-market street resellers.

  I read once that the average low-level drug dealer would make a better hourly wage at McDonald's. Many of my scams felt like that: a lot of work for little reward. I wanted a real payday; I wanted a game changer. While I paid the rent with my scams and hacks, most of my time was spent looking for bigger fish. So when I got lucky with a spear-phishing attack on a balding, 46-year-old tax attorney, I was sure it was the win I was looking for.

  After wading through his personal emails and his collection of illegally downloaded harem anime videos, I started skimming through his photos. There were thousands of pictures of meals and his greyhound rescues mixed with an occasional one of his 10-year-old daughter. What stood out was the number of broken images. Examining these, I realized they weren’t photos at all, just poorly encrypted files, and one of them, named bertrand.jpg, had the access codes to his w firm’s accounting system. That’s when things started getting juicy.

  Bertrand, Levin and Hoyle was a very naughty company. 95% of its business came from sketchy-looking international clients, and it was clear their real specialty was money undering. They were a full-service crime syndicate support operation. Not just the obvious crypto-investing, shell corporation juggling, and cash-business transfer stuff. They were doing rge transactions with banks in Bahrain, Ghana, Yemen, and a bunch of FATF greylist nations, the kind of money you might use to pay for an illegal arms shipment or to buy a hit on a rival cartel head. Granted, my entire experience with international finance at that point was building a European theme park in Rollercoaster Tycoon, but to me, it seemed pretty obvious they were a company I wouldn’t mind stealing from.

  The best part was the way they did some of the transfers. Each morning, they had an automated transfer agent that would open up and simute a set of people sending lots of medium-sized transactions. They were small enough to avoid notice, but collectively, they were over a hundred thousand dolrs every single day.

  It was so easy to hijack; I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have to compromise the banking code, just the database listing the transfer account numbers. I waited until the program was ready to run, changed the bank routing information to send the money to my own accounts, and watched it do its thing. 30 minutes ter I had eighty grand spread across 30 different bank accounts. Of course, I knew they would figure it out, but by the time they did, that eighty-thousand would be long gone. I reset the account numbers and hid my tracks.

  A smart hacker would have stopped right then. They would know that the pissed-off recipients would wonder where their money was and start an investigation. A smart hacker would have left some very quiet, hard-to-find back doors and not gone back for months. Take the win and try again at some future date.

  I was not a smart hacker. I was a greedy hacker. So, the next day, I rented a car using one of my fake IDs, drove it to a Starbucks, connected to their free Wi-Fi, and sat outside waiting for my next big payday. It took me five minutes to work through a series of hops into the accounting servers. It took another ten to overwrite the transfer codes, and then it was just a waiting game—waiting for the money to roll in.

  I felt giddy and confident as I sat in the car, watching for signs the system had started the transfers. The whole thing would take less than an hour. Could anyone really backtrace the IP to that specific Starbucks and make it there before I was long gone? Not a chance. These guys were wyers, not some FBI anti-hacking task force. They could investigate and try to figure out who was at the Starbucks at 9:25 AM, but I was parked across the street in a mostly anonymous car. I had on a baseball cap and sungsses. Even if they found some surveilnce camera image and got a license pte number off the car, there was nothing to trace it back to me. Honestly, it was genius.

  As I waited for the transfers to complete, the weirdest, most overwhelming sense of dread washed over me. If you’ve ever seen something in the dark that triggered your fear response, you know the feeling. That open-up-your-eyes, tingles-over-your-whole-body sense of utter dread. Your adrenaline spikes, making your heart race and your palms sweat. I felt that intense emotional response, but it was combined with something else. Something far more specific. Somehow, I knew with absolute certainty that there was a man about to pull up who was coming to kill me.

  My logical mind rejected all this. I told myself it was crazy that I was panicking for no reason. As I tried to calm myself down, I spotted a blue te nineties Nissan with dark tinted windows. After the driver stepped out, my brain shouted at me: “Look at that guy. He’s the one. He’s going to shoot you.” I felt like I was going insane. He was not especially big, not especially scary looking, not especially anything. He was wearing khaki pants, a gray henley three-button shirt, and a bck Nike jogging jacket; just a normal te-thirties white dude who wanted his morning Caramel Macchiato.

  My mind kept screaming: “That man will kill you.” I tried to ignore it, but then I saw something that made my heart skip a beat. His jacket pulled up as he opened the door to the Starbucks, and, right at the small of his back, was a bck gun in a holster. It wasn’t some monster gun, but it was plenty big enough to put a hole in my skull. He immediately pulled his jacket back down and headed in.

  At this point, the panic mostly won. I restarted the app to run without intervention, closed the ptop 90% of the way, hid it under the passenger seat, and abandoned the car. As soon as I was out of the car, I turned and walked directly away from the Starbucks. I kept my pace slow and measured, trying to look like I was just out for a stroll, but my mind still screamed at me to hide.

  My fear had won, so I let myself listen to whatever my lizard brain wanted me to do. I ducked into the next business I saw. I didn’t care what it was. It could have been a nail spa for all I cared. I just had to get out of sight, and it didn’t matter where.

  The room I walked into had a rge desk, and the whole pce was decorated with a light blue aquatic theme. The woman behind the desk was tall, good-looking, and in her te teens or early twenties, with rich, ebony skin. Her hair was in tight box braids and pinned up in a high bun. She gnced at me, sizing me up, her eyes friendly and inquisitive. I felt stupid wearing sungsses and a baseball cap on a cloudy fall day in Seattle.

  “How may I help you on this excellent Tuesday morning?” Her tone was bright and inviting, clearly pleased just to relieve the monotony of standing around in an empty room.

  My mind floundered, trying to figure out what in the hell this pce was. I saw pictures of what looked like hot tubs and supermodels rexing. The giant blue-lettered sign read “Stillpoint,” which told me nothing. I had no idea what these guys sold. Not wanting to stay silent as I worked through it, I bluffed, “I was just wondering, what’s it cost?”

  “For walk-ins, we have a one-time trial float package for just sixty-five dolrs. It lets you have a sixty-minute session. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

  Sixty-five dolrs, I thought. Well, it's definitely not a cruise. I looked around and started to put things together. Some kind of spa or rexation treatment. There were guys in some of the brochure shots, so it wasn’t completely weird for me to be there.

  I took off my sungsses and hat and looked her in the eye. “Could I try it out now? I have some time to kill.”

  She smiled up at me. “That’s what I like, a man of action. Sure, we have some float pods avaible right now. You’re literally the only one here.”

  I got out my wallet and started to give her my credit card, but thought better of it and handed her cash instead. My panic was rising again. I felt like doom was walking up, and when he found me, he would take out his gun and send my brains in a mist of gore all over this pretty young woman. I looked around, terror ringing like an arm in my brain, and then I spotted a blue and white sign with the words “ALL GENDER RESTROOM.”

  “One second,” I said as I walked briskly into the bathroom.

  The moment I was in the restroom, the panic arm inside me receded from a bring truck horn to something more akin to a cell phone on vibrate. I waited, and as I did my panic kept receding until it was nothing more than a mild tickle at the back of my neck. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and went back out.

  When I left the restroom, the attendant was waiting for me, a form ready on the desk for me to fill out. I just filled in a bunch of made-up personal information. As I did, I finally figured out what this pce did. Right at the bottom was a long section about “Sensory Deprivation Do’s and Don’ts.”

  She looked up at me and gestured with an open hand towards a hallway, “Right this way mister... Gdwell.”

  My mind tripped over the “mister” part, and it took me a second to recognize the alias I had given her: “I go by Trey.”

  “Luanda,” she said, giving me a crooked smile and an exaggerated flourish toward her name tag.

  She started to lead me back into the building. “Is this your first time in a sensory deprivation tank?” she asked as she walked me back.

  “Yes, I heard about it on Rogan and thought I’d give it a go.”

  She ughed, “Yes, we get that a lot. Just rex and let your mind wander. When your time is up, a light will come on inside to let you know to get out, but if you get freaked out or anything, just open the door.”

  She gave me the lowdown as we headed back, and right before she turned to go, an idea struck me. I grabbed her arm gently and said, “So, I have a really weird request.”

  Luanda tilted her head to the side. “What’s that?”

  “If anyone comes around looking for me. Can you pretend I’m not here?”

  She narrowed one eye and looked at me sideways, “Why? Are you in some kind of trouble or something?”

  “No, I just... “ I paused, thinking about what to say. “Well, kind of. Maybe a little, but please, can you just do that? I really don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

  “Look, I’m not gonna lie to the cops for you or something.” Her California accent fttened as she took an unconscious backward step.

  “No… No, it’s not like that. It’s this guy. He’s wearing a bck Nike jacket. He’s got it in his head that I’ve been hitting on his girlfriend. He saw me by the Starbucks where she works, and I am pretty sure he is looking for me. I kinda hid in here.”

  She nodded, but her eyes shone with skepticism, and she wrinkled her nose as though smelling something unpleasant. “Look, if a guy like that comes in, I’ll pretend you aren’t here, but if the police show up, forget it.”

  “Thanks. You're a lifesaver.”