Chapter 7 - The Digital SiegeWe needed a safe house that didn't exist on any map, and Rafael Corbin had dozens of them.
Within twenty minutes, we were holed up in a subterranean command bunker beneath an abandoned brewery on the outskirts of the city. The room hummed with bank-grade server racks, monitors glowing with real-time surveillance feeds, and satellite communication arrays.
I sat at the primary terminal, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard, entering the complex cryptographic keys to access Alan’s redundant cloud server.
"He's routing his signal through a proxy in Zurich," I said, my eyes glued to the scrolling code on the screen. "He thinks he's invisible."
"Can you trace him?" Rafael asked, standing behind my chair, a cup of black coffee in his hand.
"Not just trace him," I replied, a hard edge in my voice. "I can lock him out of his own financial accounts, broadcast his corporate wire receipts to the SEC, and upload his original confession video directly to every federal server before he finishes packing his bags."
Vincenzo leaned over the console, watching the data streams cascade down the monitors. "Do it."
It took twelve minutes of intense, high-stakes digital warfare. Alan had built heavy firewalls around his personal stash, but I knew his coding habits—we had spent late nights in the St. Mercy lab debugging software together a decade ago. I recognized his lazy variable naming conventions. I exploited a backdoor he had forgotten to close after our fellowship ended.
Access Granted.
The master database opened up on the center screen: millions of dollars in offshore transfers from Caldera-Kline executives, project logs detailing synthetic cardiac toxins, and, most importantly, the unedited video recording of Alan Vance admitting to fabricating the clinical trials.
"Got you," I whispered, hitting the master upload button.
Suddenly, every screen in the bunker flickered red. An automated security alert flashed across the primary monitor.
WARNING: EXTERNAL BREACH DETECTED. SYSTEM OVERRIDE INITIATED BY CALDERA-KLINE SEC-OPS.
"He didn't just leave a backup," I gasped, my fingers freezing over the keys. "He set a dead-man switch. If anyone accesses the root directory from an outside IP, it triggers an automated wipe of all medical databases nationwide—including every patient trial record stored in hospital archives across the country."
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Rafael’s expression darkened into absolute stone. "If those records wipe..."
"Thousands of patients currently taking Caldera-Kline's cardiac medication will lose their baseline safety profiles," I said, horror gripping my chest. "Doctors won't know why their patients are experiencing sudden, catastrophic rhythm failures. Alan is going to wipe out an entire generation of cardiac patients just to cover his tracks."
