CH8. THE INTERNATIONAL SUBVERSIVES

Prime Suspect rang Mendax, offering an adventure. He had discovered a strange system called NMELH1 (pronounced N-Melly-H-1) and it was time to go exploring. He read off the dial-up numbers, found in a list of modem phone numbers on another hacked system.

Mendax looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, thinking about the name of the computer system.

The ‘N’ stood for Northern Telecom, a Canadian company with annual sales of $8 billion. NorTel, as the company was known, sold thousands of highly sophisticated switches and other telephone exchange equipment to some of the world's largest phone companies. The ‘Melly’ undoubtedly referred to the fact that the system was in Melbourne. As for the ‘H-1’, well, that was anyone’s guess, but Mendax figured it probably stood for ‘host-1’ – meaning computer site number one.

Prime Suspect had stirred Mendax’s interest. Mendax had spent hours experimenting with commands inside the com- puters which controlled telephone exchanges. In the end, those

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