Alexa - Legionnaire : Training an Assassin: Prequel to Alexa - The Series (6 page)

“Where will we go?” she asked, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.

“I have a game farm; you will be safe there.”

Sarah held her hands to her face and sobbed. She stood like this for a minute, her shoulders jerking, crying without making a sound. Then she pulled herself together and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “OK, I understand,” she said, sniffing. “This is the best for Becky.”
 

Bruce squeezed her shoulder. “This is the best for both of you. Who knows? Things could change, but now we need to get you two to safety.” He stuck out his hand. “Deal?”

Sarah nodded and they shook on it. “Deal.”

CHAPTER TWO

May, 2009

Camps Bay, Cape Town

Jordan held the spoon with the vile concoction out towards Natalie. “Come on, Nats, this Jell-O shot has your name on it.”

Natalie Bryden smiled at her twenty friends in front of her. The sun shone brightly on a glorious Cape Town afternoon. She was celebrating her twenty-second birthday, and her boyfriend, Jordan Harris, had arranged a pool party at his parents’ luxurious villa in Camps Bay, Cape Town. Reggae music blared from outdoor speakers and people splashed around in the pool, tossing a Frisbee and having fun. The crowd had become raucous as an alcoholic buzz fueled the frenzy.
 

Her friends stood in a semi-circle around her, chanting her name.

Natalie folded her arms. “You know I can't handle the heavy stuff. Couldn't I down a cider or something?"
 

“You have to celebrate, girl,” Jordan said, wiggling a spoonful of Jell-O in front of her nose.

She groaned and grabbed the spoon. The chanting became louder and Natalie swallowed a mouthful of the Jell-O.

“Hip hip hooray! One more, just one,” Jordan shouted.

“Ugh. Thanks, but no; the stuff is horrible,” Natalie said, pulling her face in disgust. “Gimme a cider.”
 

Her friends laughed and directed some friendly jibes her way. Jordan handed her a light beer, which she gratefully accepted, taking a large slug to get rid of the taste. She pulled him closer and gave him a hug. “Thanks for the party.”

“Speech, speech!” someone shouted, and the partygoers clapped their hands rhythmically.

"OK, enough already.” Natalie brushed her jet-black hair back with her hand. "Guys, thank you all for coming to my party, and a special thanks to Jordan for persuading his parents to allow this bad girl and her friends into their lovely home.” She giggled. “Oh, and please leave everything as you found it."
 

"Not going to happen,” someone chimed from the crowd and everyone laughed.

"There's meat in the fridge and salads and rolls on the table. Could some of you handsome gentleman start the barbecues? I'm starving.” She winked at the men in the crowd. “A kiss to the best cook.”

Fires were lit, and a friendly squabble broke out between the men and Jordan over who would win the competition. Natalie ambled to the kitchen to help with the preparations when her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She dug it out of her jeans pocket and read the message.

“Happy Birthday, baby. You're a grownup now and you need to know you're in grave danger. Perreira and Callahan have been located. Phone conversation intercepted, 11:37 AM GMT+3. Map data at https://mos.isly.com. Love you, Becky. ZC.”

Natalie reread the message. She clicked the link and was directed to a Google map with a drop pin labeled “Perreira.” It zoomed into a location somewhere in Mozambique. The world tilted on its axis, forcing her to sit down on a wooden deck chair. She pulled her knees to her chin, and hugged her legs. Memories flooded back. She was overwhelmed, nauseous, and scared. “How is this even possible?”
 

She dialed a number on her phone, but it went straight to voice mail. “Dad, when you hear this message, please phone me. I've received a text from Zachary.” She hesitated. “You said he was dead.” She blinked and swallowed hard. “Why would you lie to me?" she asked softly. She disconnected the call, closed her eyes, and rested her brow on the palm of her hand. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she felt the bile rise in her throat.

Jordan ambled towards her, a concerned look on his face.

Natalie took a few deep breaths and rocked on her heels. Her phone vibrated in her hand, and she read the new text message from Bruce.
 

“We need to talk.”

Jordan sat down by her side. “Are you OK, Nats?” he asked, concern etched on his face. He wrapped a protective arm around her shoulder.

Natalie pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, I’m not,” she said biting her lip. “Something strange is going on.”

Tel Aviv, Israel

Private First Class Yehudi Schweda opened the evening's operational plan. He was the shift leader at the Israeli Defense Force's computer operating center, also called “OPS.”

The night ahead was uneventful. Backups to be run, a biweekly payroll job for the nursing staff. He looked around at the brightly-lit room.
 

Nice, quiet evening.

He took a joint from his coat pocket and lit up, inhaling deeply.

He pulled open a drawer and took out a headlamp, switched it on, and tested the beam on his hand. He nodded and walked to the electric distribution board. The room went dark as Yehudi flipped off all the breakers. He looked around. Red, green, and yellow lights were flashing on the tape devices, and a faint green glow radiated from the central consoles. Soft buzzing, whirring, and clicking noises emanated from the robotic tape libraries. Against a wall, a 42-inch LCD TV displayed the Israeli Defense Forces’ network diagram, a crisscross pattern of green lines connected to green blipping dots.
 

All green, all OK.

Yehudi took another drag and followed the headlamp beam to his chair. He sat in the chair, moved the public announcement system's mouthpiece closer, and switched the setting to “Ops” before switching off the headlamp.
 

"This is your captain speaking." His voice boomed through the darkened room. Yehudi smiled and took another drag. "We are embarking on a mission of epic proportions to annihilate the home world of the Klingons. Yes, yes, I know. It will be fraught with danger, but if any Starship is capable of completing the mission successfully, it is the Enterprise." He stood up and held the mouthpiece close, gesturing with a waving arm. "And though we may face imminent danger and life-threatening situations, you know you may always count on my sound judgment. Your captain, Yehudi Schweda.”
 

He typed on the console and announced, “Captain's Log, new entry."

Yehudi logged into the Israeli Defense Force’s centralized messaging system called SYSM. He opened his own message box and read the posts. A new message had arrived some time earlier.

“Subject: Nightly Procedure Directive: Batch Job Scheduled

Job Type: Production Update to Backend

Name: Becky22

Scheduled: 23:15

Initiators Required: 2

Assembler: Cobol

Run time: 15 minutes

Media 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 pocket, took out another joint, and lit it. He inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke through his nose. “Weird.”
 

Becky22, Zachary Cohen’s scouting program, had filled one reserve disk pack on the Israeli Defense Force’s mainframe with data. It would store the data on the pack for twenty-four hours and then disseminate it onto various unsecured servers over the following couple of days.
 

The servers would run a piece of code at their next reboot which would install an assembler program into RAM. It would take up a minuscule amount of processing, or footprint, on each server. Each one of the thousands of compromised servers would aid in the processing of enormous amounts of data, sifting through cell phone records, credit card transactions, voice recordings, and closed-circuit television images.
 

Furthermore, the servers would help spread the program on to other computers on their local network. A laptop would plug into the network and become the vector, spreading it on to the next network.
 

The algorithm was complex, but it had reached its primary goal: to locate Bruce and Natalie Bryden.

It had gathered some useful information from cell phone records from Angola Telecom as well. The voice-recognition software matched the names four times during a fifty-two second conversation. It had tracked the coordinates of the conversation to Maputo, at a coffee shop on the corner of Via Sora and Victoria Roads. One hundred and eight bot computers created a map and pinpointed the GPS coordinates. One bot initiated an SMS from Angola Telecom to another number it had scouted out.

Today was the SMS recipient’s birthday: she had turned twenty-two. The program infiltrated Israeli Homeland Security’s photo database. From the information in her passport, the program recognized she was five feet eight inches tall and was the daughter of a man called Bruce Bryden. The facial recognition software calculated a ninety-five percent approximation of how his daughter, Rebecca Cohen, would have looked if she were sixteen years older. Voice recognition software matched the tone and resonance of her voice. A ninety-six percent likelihood. The software calculated Bruce Bryden’s average vicinity and linked it to the probable recipients’ coordinates. They were in the same area for more than eighty percent of the time. The program algorithms concluded a one hundred percent match.