Victor Seven had returned. "Feeling better, are you, Angie?" he asked,
politely.
Angie scowled, and nodded. "Yes," she said, sharply. "Now
what?"
"Now
you get to work," he said, motioning for her to take a seat in front of
a bank of computers.
Angie caught Rollie's gaze for a moment. He was still sitting at
the table, while Angie was being moved to another seat. "What are
you going to do with Rollie?" she asked, concerned.
Victor Seven scowled. "Nothing. For now."
Realizing she had no choice, Angie reluctantly got up and moved across
the room to the computer. She sat down.
The Loubar manning the computer looked up, and grinned. "Hello, Angela."
Angie sighed. "Which one are you?" she asked, sounding exasperated.
"Victor Eight," he said. "So, are you really as smart as they tell
me?"
Angie groaned. "Just tell me what you need me to do, so Rollie and
I can get out alive."
He grinned. "Don't bet on it."
"What do you mean?" she exclaimed.
Victor Eight grinned. "Oh, nothing. Well, here, as you can
see, is our setup."
Angie examined the equipment. "Fairly state of the art, normal visual
interface, touch responsive graphical pad, keyboard ... looks easy enough."
Victor Eight chuckled. "You need to de-encode the disk, first thing,
then show us how to hack into the different computer mainframes unnoticed."
Angie looked at him, incredulously. "You really expect me
to show you?"
Loubar glanced over his shoulder. Angie followed his gaze.
Victor Seven, standing behind Rollie, was holding a gun. It was pointing
at Rollie's head.
Rollie didn't even know Victor Seven was there.
"That'll be our insurance," said Victor Eight, grinning.
Angie's eyes went wide, and Rollie gave her an odd look. Angie turned
back to face the screen. "Well, I guess I have no choice."
"I thought you'd say that," said Victor Eight. He hit a few keys,
and a menu appeared on the screen. Page after page of gibberish scrolled
downward.
"How big is this file?" Angie asked, amazed.
"Big enough," Victor Eight answered. "It wouldn't fit on your ordinary
floppy. This the decompressed, fifty-two megabyte version."
Angie whistled. She washed the symbols continue to print out.
She was quiet for a moment, then asked, "Have you tried all the common
decoding algorithms?"
He nodded. "All of them."
She frowned. "Then he must have provided a way to decode the file
within
the
file itself."
"But what good does that do us?"
The file finally stopped. Angie scrolled upward, back to the code's
beginning. Then she saw something interesting. "Look," she
said. "Every line in this file has sixty or so characters except
this one. It only has four ... " Her voice trailed off.
Suddenly, her hands went into motion, and she began rapidly hitting keys
on the keyboard.
"What are you doing?" Victor Eight asked, alarmed.
"I'm running this code through the program, see if this is the decoding
algorithm."
The computer worked for a moment. Then a red menu appeared.
ERROR: UNKNOWN PROGRAM LANGUAGE.
Angie sighed. "Well, it was worth a shot." Suddenly, she had
another idea. "This set of four characters is repeated in the code
itself. Let's see what happens if I set the computer to scan for
and remove the code each time it appears." She hit a few more keys,
and then waited.
ERROR: UNKNOWN PROGRAM LANGUAGE.
"Okay," she said, "let's see what happens if we run the common algorithms
again."
It was a long moment until the computer responded.
PROGRAM LANGUAGE RECONIZED. DECODING SUCCESSFUL.
Angie smiled slightly. "Easy."
Victor Eight seemed impressed. "Congratulations," he said, trying
to hide his jealousy. "You're better than I thought."
Angie suddenly realized she was accepting praise from Loubar ... well,
one of the Loubars. "Let's just finish this so you can let
us go, all right?"
Victor Eight threw back his head, and laughed. "Ah, you're funny,"
he said. "Okay, let's continue. Here are the codes to hack
into the CIA, FBI and MI5 mainframes, plus..." He scrolled down the
code, impressed. "Wow. The New York stock exchange. The
Tokyo stock exchange. KGB mainframe. And more ... Jesus."
"You expect me to do this? I don't even know if I can!"
Victor Eight nodded toward Rollie, and Victor Seven. He raised his
eyebrows. "You can," he said. "You must, if he wants to live."