Alexa - Legionnaire : Training an Assassin: Prequel to Alexa - The Series by Arno Joubert Read Free Book Online Page A

Required: Data tape ZC0168
    Additional Instructions:   Tape is found in cabinet C1, section 8. Unlock key ZCKalahari979. Run and forget, no need to report back on completion status.”
    Shit. Cabinet C? The tape must be —he made a couple of calculations— more than eighteen years old.
    Yehudi finished the toke and carefully killed it in the dustbin. He put the butt in his pocket. He switched the lights back on, walked to the back of the Ops center, and stood in front of a massive library containing thousands of spools of tape. He moved down the rows, counting from J until he came to cabinet C. It took him another five minutes to hunt down the specific tape. The labels were worn and yellowing. He removed the plastic tape enclosure and mounted it on a spooling device.  
    Yehudi shuffled behind the central console and punched in the necessary parameters for the program to run correctly. The console prompted him for a password and he typed in “ZCKalahari979” as instructed. He initiated the program and switched the lights off again. Lit another joint and continued with his Star Trek parody.  
    He felt a bead of sweat run down his neck. He removed his overcoat and looked up at the aircon's LCD. It should have been set to 18 degrees Celsius, but the room temperature was at 26 degrees. A red warning message flashed on his console.  
    “SYSTEM OVERLOAD. 100% PROCESSOR USAGE.”
    Yehudi’s jaw dropped, the joint sticking to his lower lip. A couple of seconds later, sirens wailed and three phones rang simultaneously. He grabbed the first one and spat the joint to the floor.
    “Captain Yehu—sorry, Yehudi speaking.”
    “Hi, Yehudi, Jasynski here. I noticed my security cam’s video feed has become real jerky. Is something up on your side?”
    Yehudi glanced at the network monitor screen. All the pathways were red and the blips had turned yellow.
    “Yes, yes, there’s a problem. I'll see what I can do,” Yehudi said and fidgeted with his collar. “I’ll phone you back.”
    “OK, thanks,” Jasynski said and hung up.
    Yehudi picked up the other two phones that were ringing and slammed them straight back down.
    Shit, shit, shit. What the hell was happening here?
    He initiated a processing monitor on his console. Job “Becky22” was hogging one-hundred percent of the mainframe’s processing power. It had managed to hijack all the other programs’ CPU time and was sending gigs of data down the broadband links.  
    He feverishly typed in more commands on the console and tried to figure out what the program was busy doing. He opened an editor and looked at the Cobol code, an antiquated programming language not familiar to him at all. As far as he could see, it did a bunch of random searches on all the possible combinations of public IP addresses. Why, he didn’t know.  
    He looked at the network monitor. Some of the orange blips were turning red. The program was manipulating Israeli satellites and pointing their receivers to different locations. The phone on his desk rang again.
    “Yehudi here,” he mumbled.
    “Yehudi, this is Major Frydman. What the hell is going on down there?”  
    Yehudi stiffened. “I don't know sir. A rogue program has hogged all the processes. I'm trying to terminate it.”
    He frantically typed on the console, keeping the phone pinned to his ear. Before he could execute the elaborate command, the sirens stopped and the paths on the monitor changed color from red to yellow to green.  
    “Green is good,” Yehudi whispered under his breath.
    “Well, did you stop it?” Frydman barked.
    “Yes, sir. It stopped. A super ancient Cobol program was running some elaborate data query that froze the system.”
    “Good. I want a full report on my desk in the morning.”
    “Um, yes, sir.” The phone clicked in his ear. Yehudi's finger still hovered over the enter key. He hadn’t initiated the kill command; the program had stopped by itself.  
    Weird.
    He scratched around in his breast