Chapter 6

Adelia swerved the Escalade violently, cutting off a yellow cab as she tore through Manhattan's congested midday traffic.

She tapped the Bluetooth earpiece in her ear. "Leo, are you on the terminal?"

Back in the clinic's dark security room, Leo sat bathed in the blue glow of three massive monitors. "I'm in, Mom."

"Hack into Mount Sinai's internal network," Adelia ordered, slamming her palm against the horn. "Find my grandmother's room number. Now."

Leo's small fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard. Code cascaded down the center screen. "Give me a minute, Mom. I've done penetration testing on their servers for fun before, but they updated their security," Leo reported, his voice devoid of panic. For the next agonizing sixty seconds, Adelia weaved through traffic while Leo bypassed multiple authentication protocols. Finally, a green access granted prompt flashed. "I found a backdoor in their maintenance port. I'm in," Leo said.

"VIP floor, room 802... I'm looking at the internal cameras. Grandpa's legal team is standing by the nurses' station. They are printing the DNR agreement right now."

"Damn it!" Adelia punched the steering wheel. "Leo, delay that printer!"

"Their firewall is aggressive... okay, got it," Leo hit the enter key. "I'm deploying a localized script into the administrative subnet. It's going to trigger their internal alarms, but it will work." Instantly, every printer on the 8th floor jammed, spitting out endless pages of black ink.

"Done. But they'll trace the glitch and reboot the system soon. You have three minutes," Leo said.

He minimized the hospital window and brought up the internal security feed of the clinic's VIP room. He watched the man-the one who looked like him-speaking into his watch.

Protective instinct flared in Leo's chest. He opened a backdoor terminal and ran a facial recognition scan of the man against the FBI and Wall Street public databases.

A massive file popped up. Hilliard Hays. CEO, Hays Capital.

Leo's eyes widened slightly. The financial data scrolling past showed a net worth that could buy the Compton family ten times over.

Meanwhile, inside the VIP room, Hilliard was losing his patience.

"Alistair, where the hell is my intel?" Hilliard demanded into his watch, his jaw clenched in pain.

On the other end, Alistair sounded frantic. "Sir, I'm trying! I'm deploying the Blackwater security teams to your grid, but-"

"Cancel the teams," Hilliard snapped. "Do not spook her. Just give me the name of the clinic owner. She's a surgeon. Fast, aggressive, highly skilled."

"Sir," Alistair's voice dropped in shock. "I ran the GPS coordinates. The property registry is buried behind a Department of Defense-level encryption wall. Whoever owns that building doesn't exist on paper."

Hilliard's gray-blue eyes narrowed. A dangerous thrill shot through his veins. She wasn't just a private doctor. She was a ghost.

"Stop the brute-force hack," Hilliard ordered. "If she has DOD-level walls, you'll trigger a counter-trace. I'll handle her myself."

In the security room, Leo saw the ping of Alistair's attempted breach on his firewall monitor.

Leo's lips curled into a dark, mocking smirk that looked terrifyingly identical to the man lying in the bed downstairs.

"Nice try," Leo whispered.

His fingers danced across the keys. He grabbed Alistair's tracking ping and aggressively rerouted it, bouncing the IP address through a dozen servers before anchoring it to an abandoned dental clinic in Brooklyn.

Hilliard looked down at his watch as the coordinates updated. Brooklyn? He frowned, his jaw ticking. The location felt completely wrong. His sharp senses analyzed the subtle environmental cues around him. The air filtering through the state-of-the-art vents was far too clean, and the absolute, pristine silence of the building was impossible for an industrial borough. Someone was feeding his security team false information, actively playing with him.

The father and son, separated by a few floors and completely unaware of their blood tie, had just completed their first silent war in cyberspace.

Outside Mount Sinai, the Escalade slammed onto the curb. Adelia threw the door open and sprinted toward the glass entrance.