PART 3: The Ghost in the Server
Leaving Chloe safely in the recovery lounge under the watchful eye of a trusted, long-time nurse who owed her career to my family, I made my way down to the sub-basement of the administrative wing.
Julian had spent the last five years digitalizing the hospital's entire infrastructure, boasting to the media that he had created an unhackable, state-of-the-art medical network. What he failed to realize was that old buildings possess old secrets. Before the digital servers were installed, St. Jude’s relied on a physical pneumatic tube system and a backup hard-wired mainframe designed during the Cold War—a system that could bypass any modern firewall because it didn't run on the internet.
I unlocked the door to the disused archive room using a heavy brass key I had kept on my keychain for thirty years. Dust danced in the beam of my phone's flashlight as I navigated past rows of old paper files until I reached a grey steel terminal in the back.
I booted up the ancient monitor. The green cursor blinked rhythmically against the black screen. I typed in a command override sequence that only three people alive still knew.
Access Granted: Level 0 Administrator.
Within seconds, the ancient terminal tapped into the modern network's blind spot. Because Julian’s modern security protocols only looked for external cyber-attacks, it completely ignored requests coming from the internal, hard-wired root directory.
I began downloading his private ledgers.
What I found was far worse than simple corporate greed. Julian wasn't just a tyrant at home; he was a monster at work. To fund his lavish lifestyle, his offshore accounts, and his bid for a political seat, he had been manipulating the hospital’s pharmacy logs. He was skimming high-end experimental oncology drugs, replacing them with saline placebos, and selling the real medication on the black market to private overseas buyers.
More horrifyingly, I found the scheduling logs for the upcoming week. There it was, marked in red text: Patient: Chloe Thorne. Procedure: Scheduled Cesarean Section. Attending Surgeon: Dr. J. Thorne. Note: Prepare standard post-partum hemorrhage protocol.
He was already setting the stage. He was going to intentionally induce a hemorrhage during the surgery, blame it on a pre-existing condition, and let her bleed out on the table. He had already written the preliminary report, leaving the time of death blank.
A shadow fell across the doorway of the archive room.
"I wondered where you had wandered off to, Evelyn."
May you like
I didn't panic. I calmly pressed the sequence to transmit the files directly to Arthur Pendelton's secure personal server, then turned around.
Julian stood in the doorway, his hands in his lab coat pockets, a look of amused condescension on his face. "Looking at old memories? I'm afraid this room is scheduled to be demolished next month. It’s obsolete. Just like the people who built it."
