Agent 21: Codebreaker by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan [Ryan, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 1849410097
Publisher: RHCP Digital
Published: 2013-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

13

LIQUID LUNCH

FOUR PEOPLE STOOD silently in the lift as he descended – three men, one woman. None of them spoke, to Zak or to each other, and they all stepped out on the ground floor, leaving Zak to get to the basement alone.

The doors slid open onto a deserted corridor. To his right, a mop leaning against the bare wall and, ten metres beyond that, a green door marked FIRE EXIT. Someone had taped a piece of paper onto the wall opposite him. The letters ‘IT’ were scrawled on it, and an arrow to the left. Zak followed the corridor along and to the right. He reached an open door that led into a large, windowless room. There was one man in here in his early twenties. He appeared to be playing Call of Duty on one of the eight large terminals dotted around the room. A heavy, metallic drilling sound of gunfire came from his machine, and because it was gloomy down here in the basement, his face glowed with the light of the screen.

Zak coughed to announce his presence. The guy looked up from his game.

‘Yeah?’

Zak stepped into the room. ‘I’ve got a problem with my computer,’ he said.

‘Tried turning it off and on again?’ the guy said in a bored voice, all his attention back on his computer game.

‘Yes,’ Zak replied. ‘I tried that. No luck.’

The Call of Duty boy sighed – he obviously considered Zak to be an unwelcome interruption to his gaming session – pressed a button on his screen to pause the game and stood up. With obvious reluctance, he stomped over to another terminal.

Zak stepped further into the room. ‘I didn’t get your name,’ he said.

‘Darren.’ The IT guy was sitting at a second terminal directly opposite the one on which he was playing his game. ‘What computer you using?’ he asked.

‘Rodney Hendricks’s.’

Darren’s eyes rolled as if to say, not him again. ‘Quite sure he switched it on in the first place, are you?’

Zak forced a smile at the IT man’s little joke, then indicated the chair he’d just vacated. ‘Mind if I sit down.’

‘S’long as you don’t touch anything. Getting a high score on that thing. Got a high score last week and all . . .’

Zak sat down in front of the Call of Duty screen. It showed an assault rifle aimed in the direction of three Taliban fighters, their heads wrapped in keffiyahs, and a snow-topped mountain range in the background. As Darren’s fingers flew over the keyboard of his new terminal, however, Zak nonchalantly pressed the ESC key and the game screen shrank to a normal-sized window, which he quickly minimized.

‘I’ve got remote access,’ Darren announced. ‘What’s wrong then?’

‘Excel,’ Zak said. ‘Not loading.’ He clicked the remote access icon on his own screen. A window popped up with a list of names. He scanned down until he found ‘Ludgrove, J’. He double-clicked on the name. A password-entry box appeared.

‘Hey!’

Zak started. He looked up at Darren.

‘You been messing with the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.