Chapter 12 - The Digital Forensics WarBy Thursday morning, a team of high-priced cybersecurity experts had set up camp in a conference room at County General. Led by a brilliant, sharp-tongued specialist named Marcus Vance (no relation to Victoria, much to his relief), they began tearing through the hospital's internal network architecture.
I stood beside Marcus as he tapped away at his dual monitors, scrolling through cascading lines of code and encrypted server packets.
"Whoever planted those fake transaction logs wasn't just a regular user," Marcus muttered, adjusting his glasses. "They had deep system knowledge. They knew how to spoof a MAC address and mimic an internal IP footprint."
"Can you trace where the original command came from?" Elias asked, stepping into the room with a cup of black coffee for me.
"That's the interesting part," Marcus smiled grimly, tapping a key. "The traffic didn't originate from your hospital's internal network at all, Dr. Brooks. It came from an external routerâregistered to a private penthouse owned by Vance Holdings."
My breath hitched. "Victoria's penthouse."
"Bingo," Marcus nodded. "Victoria and Harrison didn't just plan a hit on the highway. They set up a digital contingency plan months in advance, anticipating a fallout and preparing to frame whoever stood in their way. The logs you saw were remotely injected using Harrison's stolen credentials from Victoria's private server."
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Elias slammed his hand onto the conference table, the sound echoing sharply off the glass walls. "She tried to ruin you twice. First on the highway, and then in a courtroom."
"Not anymore," I said, a cold, clinical calm washing over me. I wasn't just a victim anymore. I was a survivor, a mother, and Chief Resident of this hospital. "Let's package these findings directly to the federal prosecutor before the judge's hearing tomorrow morning."
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