Chapter 306
Chapter 306
Stanley finally turned away from the screen.
His face was unreadable, but his eyes were ice cold.
"Contact every tech team member," he said, rising from his chair and moving to K's side to survey the wreckage displayed on the tablet. "Cancel all leave. I need everyone online now."
"Restore the system. Use the highest-level encryption keys to rebuild the firewall."
"Trace the data packets. I want to know exactly which volunteers' information was pulled, and I want their offline protection protocols activated immediately."
"Pull the attacker's entry path from the base-level data cache. No matter how clean he wiped it, there will still be traces on the disk sectors."
Stanley issued each directive in sequence, calm as a man reviewing a quarterly report — not someone whose operation had just been gutted.
K and the rest of the tech team watched him. The panic that had gripped them minutes ago quietly dissolved.
Their boss wasn't much for words. On any given day, he looked like nothing in the world could touch him.
But they knew. When Stanley was truly focused, the entire internet trembled.
K gave a firm nod. "Understood."
"One more thing," Stanley added. "Send a message to the captain of the police cyber security unit. Tell him my nonprofit foundation has been targeted by extortion — foreign hackers."
K blinked. "Extortion? They didn't ask for money."
"I say it's extortion, it's extortion." Stanley's tone didn't shift. "We're the victims. We follow proper channels."
K understood immediately.
They were calling in the government. Whoever was behind this had operated with too much boldness — that kind of confidence didn't come without serious backing. A purely technical counterstrike could drag them into a war of attrition. But the moment this went public and law enforcement stepped in, their adversary would have to think twice before making another move in the shadows.
Stanley was pulling in backup.
And not just any backup — the biggest guns available.
The entire tech team shifted into high gear. Keyboard clicks swallowed every other sound, and lines of code cascaded down the screens.
Stanley worked the room himself. His fingers flew across his keyboard so fast they blurred. He didn't bother patching the broken system. Instead, he wrote an entirely new tracking program from scratch and slipped it like a ghost into the hollow shell of the gutted server's base-level data.
The minutes ticked by.
---
The Russell Group. Executive suite.
Owen walked in with a report and a barely contained smile.
"Mr. Russell, the press release for our new charitable foundation has been extremely well received. Several of Wall Street's major publications picked it up for their front pages and gave it high praise. We've also been contacted by over a dozen leading medical research institutions expressing interest in partnership."
James stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, a long-cold cup of coffee in his hand.
He stared out at the city below and said nothing.
Owen waited, then pressed on. "Also... regarding the art therapy initiative, I had someone look into it. Ms. Grey's community studio appears to be... running quite well. They've recently upgraded their security systems and air filtration. The funding seems very healthy. They may not... require our support at this time."
The hand holding the coffee cup tightened.
Not required.
He had dropped five billion dollars — enough to send shockwaves through the entire financial world — because he needed her to see it.
He wanted it to say what he couldn't: that he had been wrong, that he was trying to make it right. That he would do anything, if she would only let him.
And she didn't need it.
The helplessness of that hit harder than losing a billion-dollar lawsuit ever had.
"Keep pushing." James's voice came out rough. "Find a way to get the money to them."
"Yes, sir." Owen dropped his gaze.
He couldn't help thinking that James looked exactly like a man who'd tried to buy his way back into a woman's heart with designer gifts — only to find out she was the one with the family fortune.
Money solved most problems.
But the problem now was that she had more of it than he did.
That was a tough spot to be in.
---
4:00 a.m.
Every light in the top floor of the building blazed.
K came up behind Stanley carrying a cup of coffee, his eyes shot through with red — but wired with something close to electric excitement.
"Stanley. We've got it."
"Three layers of proxy hops. The last jump bounced off an abandoned weather station server somewhere in northern Europe. But buried in the base-level cache, we found a data fragment that had been missed — an incomplete IP address prefix."
Stanley said nothing. His gaze stayed fixed on the reconstructed address on the screen.
"The physical location tied to that prefix," K continued, "is South America. Colombia."
"And we ran the attack methodology through behavioral pattern analysis, cross-referenced it against the global hacker database, and came up with a high-confidence match."
K paused, as though double-checking what he was reading.
"The alias is 'Shade.' Supposed to be a ghost — dropped off the grid over ten years ago. The rumor is he was the personal hacker for a major South American cartel boss. Later... he was brought in from the cold."
Stanley stared at the alias on the screen. His expression didn't flicker.
He picked up his phone and dialed.
The call connected fast.
"Soph."
"Yeah." Sophia's voice on the other end was steady — no trace of someone pulled from sleep.
"Found the fly," Stanley said. "He's got thorns. Not someone Delta can touch."
"Location."
"Colombia." Stanley paused. "I pulled Caleb's old escape route. The last place he disappeared to was also Colombia."
Silence on the other end of the line.
Everything was connecting.
"I've packaged the evidence and sent it anonymously to Interpol and the Colombian National Intelligence Directorate," Stanley continued. "His 'official' cover won't protect him."
"Okay."
"One more thing." Stanley's eyes landed on a second piece of data on the screen. His fingers tapped slowly against the desk. "When 'Shade' ran the attack, he hit over a hundred targets globally as cover. Standard smokescreen tactic. One of those targets was the Russell Group's overseas servers."
Sophia listened without a word.
"Looks like he helped himself to something while he was in there."
"What file?"
Stanley enlarged the document title on the screen and read it out, word by word.
"Donor Compatibility Registry... Subject S001... Sophia."
Sophia's fingertip traced an absent line across the cold glass of the window.
Donor.
Compatibility registry.
S001.
Her own name.
Those words, assembled together, felt like a rusted key — pointing to a door she'd never known existed.
Her cancer was an open secret. But the name of this file told a different story entirely. Not patient. Donor.
Caleb — or whoever was pulling his strings — had gone through all of this not for her gastric cancer records, but for a donor compatibility file that had no obvious connection to any of it.
Why?
"Soph." Stanley's voice cut through her thoughts. "Does James know about this?"
"Him?" Sophia pulled her hand from the glass. Her voice was flat. "He only ever knows what he's chosen to know."
He lived inside the version of reality he'd built for himself. Any signal from the outside world that didn't fit had long since been shut out.
"Got it," Stanley said. "I'll scrub it."
"Don't."
A beat of silence.
"Let them dig." Sophia looked out at the city streets below, the headlights of early morning traffic flowing like a slow river. "I want to know what I 'donated,' too."
---
After hanging up, Stanley didn't throw himself back into the wreckage of the system rebuild.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. That was how he always thought.
K came in carrying two steaming cups of coffee, set one on Stanley's desk, and kept the other. He didn't say a word. Just stood there.
Something was off with Stanley.
The expression on his face hadn't changed — it never did — but the energy surrounding him was colder now than it had been when the servers were first breached.
"Stanley." K tread carefully, hoping good news might crack the silence. "Interpol just posted a notice on their official site. The Colombian National Intelligence Directorate ran a joint operation and raided a private estate on the outskirts of Bogotá. They arrested a thirteen-person group, including the hacker known as 'Shade.' Caught them with everything."
From the moment Stanley sent the evidence package to the moment the entire crew was taken down — less than six hours.