Chapter 4 - The Ghost in the Machine
It was 2:00 a.m. when the chaos broke out in the hospital’s basement.
I was watching the monitor in my room. A small, secondary feed I had set up on the hospital’s internal server—the one Michael’s friend had given me access to—showed the holding area where Daniel was being kept.
Two men in hospital security uniforms were entering the room. They weren't the guards I had seen earlier. They were moving with a surgical precision that screamed professional.
“Michael,” I whispered into the phone. “They’re there.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, his voice tense.
I watched on the screen as the men spoke to Daniel. He looked up, his expression shifting from desperation to a smug, terrifying confidence. He stood up, and they didn't put handcuffs on him. They signaled for him to follow.
He’s leaving, I thought, my heart hammering against my ribs. They’re breaking him out.
But Daniel didn't know about the 'final piece.'
As they moved toward the service elevator, the hospital’s PA system flared to life. It wasn't an announcement. It was an audio recording.
“I’ve already moved the funds, Martin. She’s too broken to notice the audit. By the time she realizes the money is gone, she’ll be in the ground.”
Daniel stopped dead in his tracks in the hallway. The recording echoed through the entire ward, clear and damning.
The two "guards" hesitated. They looked at each other. They knew they had been caught in the act of aiding a criminal who had just confessed to murder over the hospital’s speaker system.
The police, alerted by the system trigger I had embedded in the audio file, swarmed the hallway. They didn't just arrest Daniel; they arrested the men trying to facilitate his escape.
I felt a wave of relief so intense it made my vision blur.
But then, the monitor in my room flickered. The hospital’s system was being attacked. A bright, neon-green screen appeared with a single word: ‘DELETE’.
He was trying to wipe the server.
I didn't panic. I tapped a series of keys on my laptop. I had expected this. I had built a "dead-end" file—a folder that looked like the master archive but was actually a script designed to trace the IP address of any device that tried to access it.
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As he tapped DELETE, his current location began to stream onto my screen. He wasn't in the holding area anymore. He was in the server room, two floors below me.
“He’s in the basement,” I said, my voice echoing in the empty room. “Michael, stop him!”
