Spy Thriller: The Fourteenth Protocol: A Story of Espionage and Counter-terrorism (The Special Agent Jana Baker Book Series 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

is going on up here? The only time he’d ever seen a system collapse was when it was done on purpose. The year he started working at Thoughtstorm, Cade watched with a group of e-mail system admins as the chief technology officer entered the control room and announced he was going to perform the “mother of all system tests.” In the e-mail world, e-mail servers were supposed to never go down. Otherwise, you’d have lots of pissed off customers. Every piece of equipment is supposed to have a redundant backup, a second e-mail server paired with the first. During normal operation, the pair would work together as if they were one. In the event that one of them failed, which was certainly possible, the other would take up the slack. The customer would not know the difference because they wouldn’t even be aware of the outage.
    This was also how software upgrades on the e-mail servers were possible. One of the pair would be shut down and upgraded while the other took the full load. Then the process would be repeated on the other server. On the rare occasions when a server actually did fail, an alert would be sent to the admins on duty who could literally swap out the downed server for another waiting in reserve.
    The chief technology officer, Tim Wright, was never satisfied with that though. He kept asking the question, “Well, suppose we have an entire facility that goes down all at once? What’s going to take over the slack in that case?” The company had several server farms across the globe. Eventually, Wright convinced the execs to fund the development of a system that would allow one server farm to back up another. So if the facility in Atlanta went down, the one in Reno would instantly pick up all the slack. That was the theory anyway.
    Well, on this particular day, Wright announced that “Today was D-day.” He was going to take the entire Atlanta facility offline. This was, in fact, the mother of all system tests. To do a live shutdown on real equipment that was sending out real e-mail for real customers took balls. So Wright tripped the system. People who had spent their entire careers dreading just such an event held their breath as one was performed right in front of their eyes. All the servers in the entire Atlanta facility went dark. On the phone with Reno, Wright listened intently. You could tell the guy was about to pee himself. The Reno center was talking nonstop, giving updates. Within a few seconds, the Reno facility picked up all the slack of the e-mail sending. It had worked, and it had worked perfectly. Wright made his career that day; the guy was like a legend.
    William Macy looked at Johnston above the stupid glasses hanging from his nose. There was a protracted silence that felt like it went on for at least a minute. He nodded his consent, which apparently meant Cade was cleared to be on the elusive seventeenth floor.
    “It’s about damn time,” said Johnston, motioning to Cade. “Williams, get your ass over here.”
    Cade wasn’t used to being called by his last name, but he wasn’t about to tell Johnston that. Johnston was walking at high speed back to the work station that contained all the monitors displaying server status.
    “Look,” continued Johnston, “don’t pay attention to them assholes. They don’t add up to a pile of dried grits.” Cade wasn’t so sure about that. “Take a look at these logs. The e-mail being sent across these servers can’t be stopped, understand me? We gotta figure out what in the Sam Hill is the matter. For some reason, we’re seeing a power spike every thirty-nine seconds. It’s sending the server past its max load, and it’s really starting to piss me off.”
    Johnston’s description of the problem was bizarre. Cade had never seen something like this. His head swirled with questions. What would make the server load spike like that? Why was it happening every thirty-nine seconds? Who were the guys in suits, and why was one of them carrying a