The Amazing Doctor Sterling

Chapter 9

At five o'clock the next morning, long before the sun had touched the glass towers of the financial district, George slipped out of the penthouse service exit wearing a dark, raincoat and a plain baseball cap.

He didn't take his car from the underground garage,Tiffany had access to the vehicle’s GPS logs through their insurance app. Instead, he walked four blocks through the gray, drizzling dawn and hailed a passing city taxi.

"Where to, buddy?" the driver asked, eyeing George’s soaked coat in the rearview mirror.

"South Harbor," George said, pulling his cap down. "402 Waterfront Way."

The driver raised an eyebrow. "Waterfront Way? That’s the old industrial piers, man. Nothing down there but empty warehouses and the shipping yards."

"Just drive," George said quietly.

Thirty-five minutes later, the taxi dropped him off on a cracked asphalt street smelling of salt water, diesel exhaust, and rotting kelp. The towering glass buildings of City Hospital felt like a different planet. Here, the buildings were corrugated steel and weathered brick, surrounded by chain-link fences and shipping containers.

George walked down a narrow alley between two brick warehouses until he reached an unmarked iron door with a small, rusted intercom box. He pressed the button three times,two short buzzes, one long.

The door clicked open.

George stepped inside and descended a flight of concrete stairs into a warm, brightly lit basement floor.

It didn't look like a basement. It looked like a state-of-the-art biomedical research laboratory. Rows of stainless-steel server racks hummed against the wall, their blue and green indicator lights blinking rapidly. In the center of the room sat three long diagnostic tables wired with high-resolution cardiac monitors.

Sitting at a multi-screen workstation in the corner, her hair tied back with a mechanical pencil and a mug of black coffee in her hand, was Dr. Aris Thorne.

Aris was twenty-nine,a brilliant, sharp-tongued software architect who had been George’s primary coding collaborator when he first built the PulseTech algorithm three years ago. She was also the only person in the city who hated the Vance corporate family more than George currently did; her father’s small medical supply firm had been bankrupted by Richard Vance’s predatory pricing schemes five years prior.

Aris spun her ergonomic chair around as George walked in, her dark eyes narrowing at his wet raincoat.

"You look like a harbor bum, George," she said, taking a sip of her coffee. "Did your fancy wife finally kick you out of the penthouse?"

"I need your offline servers, Aris," George said, pulling off his cap and coat and tossing them onto a metal chair. "Is the air-gapped network active?"

Aris’s sarcastic expression vanished immediately. She sat up straight, setting her mug down on the console. "Air-gapped? George, why would we take PulseTech offline? The hospital clinical trials start at nine o'clock. We’re supposed to be streaming the patient diagnostics directly to the City Hospital cloud so the ethics committee can review the data."

"If we stream to the hospital cloud today, Richard Vance will own our source code by noon," George said. He pulled a small, encrypted USB drive from his pocket and laid it on her keyboard. "Plug that in. But don't open it until I explain."

Aris looked at the drive, then up at George’s pale, exhausted face. She had known him for three years; she had never seen him look this grim. "What did you find, George?"

"Tiffany and her uncle have spent the last six months quietly leveraging twelve million dollars in commercial loans against PulseTech’s corporate name," George said calmly, pulling a stool over and sitting beside her. "They used Vance Biotech as the guarantor. Last night, she tried to get me to sign an indemnity transfer that would make me personally liable for the entire debt while stripping my voting shares."

Aris gasped, her jaw dropping. "Twelve million? George, our entire seed valuation is only fifteen! If those loans default,"

"The bank seizes the algorithm," George finished. "And Richard Vance buys the patents out of receivership for pennies on the dollar. That’s why he’s calling an emergency ethics committee audit this afternoon. He doesn't want to suspend me over Vincent Dean; he wants to delay our FDA clinical trials just long enough to trigger a technical default on the loans."

Aris cursed softly, her fingers hovering over her keyboard. "That bastard. So what is on the drive?"

"A mirror image of PulseTech’s core diagnostic engine," George said. "But I spent three hours in the study last night writing a secondary subroutine,an administrative loop."

"What kind of loop?"

"Richard has bribed three members of the hospital’s IT oversight committee," George explained, pointing to the server diagrams on her monitor. "When we begin the clinical trials at nine o'clock, their technicians are going to attempt a remote data scrape from the hospital server. They’re going to try to copy our diagnostic weightings under the guise of an 'independent safety audit.'"

Aris’s eyes lit up with sudden, sharp understanding. "You want me to let them scrape the server."

"I want you to let them scrape the loop," George corrected. "The subroutine on that drive looks identical to our primary diagnostic code. But it contains a subtle, progressive mathematical drift. It works flawlessly for standard resting EKGs. But the moment it encounters a high-pressure cardiovascular stress test, the algorithm over-calculates arterial resistance by fourteen percent."

Aris stared at him, her mouth curving into a slow, amazed smile. "It’s a dummy engine. If Richard Vance steals that code and tries to patent it under Vance Biotech’s name,"

"Any clinical trial he runs will produce false-positive arrhythmia warnings," George said. "The FDA will reject his patent application within forty-eight hours of filing, and his twelve-million-dollar collateral will be entirely worthless."

"George," Aris breathed, shaking her head. "This is... this is ruthless. What happens when the hospital ethics committee asks to see our real data this afternoon?"

"We don't show the committee," George said, checking his watch. It was 6:15 AM. "We show the patient."

"Which patient?"

"Raymond Maxwell," George said. "His daughter, Elena, is currently sitting on the hospital’s financial board. And she has a very low tolerance for people who play politics with her father’s heart."