The sound of the hotel shower running echoed through the luxurious suite.
Sitting cross-legged on the plush king-sized bed, five-year-old Leo took a calm sip of his apple juice. He placed the glass down and popped open his heavily modified laptop. His mother was terrified of that man at the airport. That was unacceptable. Nobody terrified Evelyn on Leo's watch.
His small, nimble fingers danced across the mechanical keyboard. First, he needed the airport's closed-circuit security footage to get a clear facial capture.
The airport used an AES-256 encryption protocol. A standard brute-force attack would take a supercomputer a billion years. Leo didn't have a billion years; his mom's shower would be over in fifteen minutes.
Instead of attacking the lock, Leo attacked the hardware's behavior. He deployed a lightweight, custom-built neural network he had trained last month. By monitoring the microscopic fluctuations in the airport server's power consumption and electromagnetic emissions during its decryption cycles—a remote deep learning side-channel analysis—his model predicted the dynamic keys in less than forty seconds.
Bypass successful.
The security footage from Terminal 3 flooded his screen. Leo isolated the frame of the towering man in the black cashmere coat. He extracted the facial data points and fed them into an XGBoost classification model, running a rapid cross-validation against global financial and corporate databases.
The loading bar didn't even have time to reach 100% before the results snapped onto the screen.
Name: Alexander Sterling. Title: CEO, Sterling Empire. Net Worth: Uncalculable. Status: The most dangerous, ruthless, and powerful man in the country's economic sphere.
Leo tilted his head, adjusting his glasses. "Sterling," he muttered. The man possessed an empire, unlimited resources, and a reputation for crushing his enemies without mercy.
Perfect. It was time to test his reflexes.
Leo opened a new terminal window. He didn't just want to look at Alexander Sterling's public profile; he wanted to knock on his front door. He initiated an optimized search algorithm, weaving through the Sterling Empire's multi-layered intrusion detection systems with O(log n) time complexity efficiency. To the corporate firewalls, Leo's code wasn't an attack; it was just a ghost in the machine, entirely invisible until it was already inside the throne room.
Meanwhile, in the glass-walled boardroom of the Sterling Empire headquarters, the atmosphere was freezing.
Alexander Sterling sat at the head of the long mahogany table, radiating a cold, oppressive aura. The city's top executives were sweating through their expensive suits as Alexander coldly dismantled their quarterly reports.
Suddenly, the heavy boardroom doors were thrown open.
The Chief Technology Officer, a veteran in cybersecurity, stood panting in the doorway, his face completely drained of color. "Mr. Sterling! Sir... we've been breached."
The boardroom erupted into panicked whispers. Alexander simply raised a hand, and the room fell into a deathly silence. His ice-blue eyes locked onto the CTO.
"Explain," Alexander commanded, his voice eerily calm.
"Our core mainframe, sir. The firewalls didn't even register an attack. Someone slipped through the backdoors, bypassed the secondary protocols, and..." The CTO swallowed hard. "They are on your personal network right now."
Alexander turned his gaze to the massive presentation screen behind him. The complex financial charts violently flickered, then vanished.
The screen went pitch black. A second later, a line of crisp, white text appeared, typing itself out in real-time.
> Hello, Mr. Sterling. Your security architecture is incredibly inefficient. I fixed a few memory leaks for you. You're welcome.
Below the text, a small, pixelated cartoon of a baby wearing sunglasses popped up, giving a thumbs-up.
The executives gasped in horror. No one dared to breathe. Mocking the Sterling Empire's billion-dollar tech division was suicide. Mocking Alexander Sterling directly? That was inviting annihilation.
Alexander stared at the pixelated baby. The image of the little boy at the airport flashed through his mind—the boy with his exact same eyes. His jaw clenched, a dangerous, predatory smirk slowly playing at the corner of his lips.
"Trace the IP," Alexander ordered, standing up and buttoning his suit jacket. His voice left absolutely no room for failure.
"Sir, they used multiple proxy chains, but... but they made a deliberate mistake at the final node. They wanted us to find them." The CTO's fingers flew across his tablet. "It's a local address. The Grand Plaza Hotel. Suite 4502."
Alexander's eyes narrowed into dark, stormy slits. The Grand Plaza. It was less than ten minutes away.
"Cancel all my meetings," Alexander said, striding toward the door, his four personal bodyguards immediately falling into step behind him. "Lock down the Grand Plaza Hotel. Nobody goes in, and absolutely nobody comes out. I am going to meet our little ghost."