Chapter 102: Someone’s Listening

Chapter 102: Chapter 102: Someone’s Listening

Keira noticed Derrick scanning the room with sharp, calculating eyes and raised an eyebrow.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking for bugs and spying devices," Derrick replied smoothly, not breaking his scan of the room. "Just in case."

Keira rolled her eyes, convinced he was being completely paranoid. "Derrick, this is my private residence. The security systems here are high-grade—"

She cut herself off when Derrick suddenly froze, his eyes locked onto a decorative painting hanging near the corner of the wall.

Her lips thinned into a tight, tense line.

"You’ve got to be kidding me," she spat, her voice laced with immediate irritation.

She stomped past him directly toward the artwork.

Flicking her wrist, she pulled a compact scanning device from her storage ring and passed it over the frame.

BEEP! BEEP!

A sharp, persistent beep echoed through the silent office as the scanner flagged a hidden frequency right inside the canvas.

Keira stared at the glowing indicator, her eyes darkening as she confirmed the presence of a hidden listening device planted right in her own apartment.

"How many others?" she muttered through gritted teeth.

Derrick didn’t answer with words.

Instead, his eyes slowly swept across the whole apartment, guided by his All-Seeing Eyes.

He pointed out small, unassuming spots—the edge of a bookshelf, inside a lamp or under a sink, the mahogany desk, and hidden behind a decorative wall panel.

Keira followed his lead, sweeping her scanner over every location he indicated.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The scanner chirped repeatedly in the quiet room.

By the time they finished sweeping the office, ten small, state-of-the-art surveillance bugs sat in a neat pile on the desk.

Keira’s face was colder than ice, her usual arrogant demeanor replaced by an absolute, freezing fury.

"Who else has access to this place?" Derrick asked, leaning against the edge of the desk.

"No one," Keira replied, her voice dropping an octave. "Or at least... that’s how it was supposed to be."

She stared down at the pile of micro-transmitters, her knuckles turning white as she clenched her fists.

"Whoever did this are absolute professionals," she added, her tone dark. "High-end military-grade gear. If they weren’t, I would have caught any changed in this room or even the lingering spatial fluctuations if they had broke in like that."

"What do you want to do with them?" Derrick asked. "We could feed them fake info."

"No point in doing that," Keira said, her eyes flashing dangerously. "The moment we stopped talking and swept the room, they already realized their bugs were found."

With a single, heavy step forward, she brought her boot down on the pile of listening devices, stomping them into fine metal powder and shattered microchips.

"Useless trash," she spat.

Derrick watched her destroy the evidence without a word, giving a simple nod of agreement.

Wasting no more time on the compromised devices, he turned on his heel and walked straight toward the massive wall of liquid-cooled supercomputers glowing in the corner.

Derrick pulled out his phone, lighting up the screen to review the detailed file he had saved earlier.

Attorney Profile

Name: Vance Sterling

Designation: Senior Managing Partner & Chief Defense Counsel

Firm: Aegis Legal Group (Capital Division)

He stared at the sleek digital card for a moment, reviewing Sterling’s record of handling high-profile corporate disputes and federal regulatory cases.

The man had a knack for numbers.

His best work was handling the financials of the big corporations and filing returns in a way that his clients had to pay the least amount of tax.

Unlocking the supercomputer’s terminal screen, Derrick selected the wireless transfer protocol on his phone.

He hovered his thumb right over the send button, ready to share Vance Sterling’s encrypted profile on the supercomputer’s localized network to initiate a deep dive in his background.

Derrick’s task was to find dirt on the man.

Anything that would allow him to make the man work for him without asking much questions and staying loyal to him.

It was better than finding someone trustworthy all of a sudden.

His thumb hung an inch above the glass panel.

Then, before he even pressed send, Derrick froze dead in his tracks.

What if...

The thought suddenly flashed through his mind like a strike of lightning.

Derrick pulled his thumb back from the screen without sending a single byte.

He immediately backed out of the transfer menu, wiped his phone’s active cache, and pulled up the supercomputer’s direct interface manually on the terminal keyboard.

His fingers flew across the keys, firing off deep system commands as he dug straight into the root mainframe.

Keira noticed his sudden shift and got curious.

She dragged a chair over and sat right next to him, leaning in to watch the code scroll down the monitor.

Derrick didn’t say a word out loud.

Instead, he quickly typed something on his phone and turned the screen toward her.

{There is a virus on this computer.}

Keira leaned back slightly as her eyes scanned the short note.

Derrick almost expected her to lose her mind and start cursing up a storm after everything else they’d just found in the apartment.

Instead, she stayed totally calm.

Her expression didn’t even break, but the cold look in her eyes meant bad news for whoever was behind this.

Keira took his phone back and typed out another message.

{Can we track it?}

Derrick took the device from her hands and began typing his response.

{It’s pretty advanced and complicated, but yeah. Might take me about fifteen minutes.}

He passed the phone back to her.

Keira stared at the screen, then looked up and deadpanned at him.

Most top-tier cybersecurity experts would take days to even isolate a virus this sophisticated, and he was casually brushing it off like a fifteen-minute fix.

After a silent beat, she typed a quick reply.

{Do it.}

Derrick leaned forward, his fingers blurring across the mechanical keyboard as he began untangling the intricate mesh of rogue code.

For a few minutes, everything seemed to be going smoothly.

The virus was complex, but his advanced hacking skills made peeling back the encryption layers child’s play.

Then, right as he reached the core node, the virus suddenly 1snapped.

Without warning, the corrupted strings of code flared bright red across the monitor, executing an immediate counter-attack that locked up the local terminal commands.

Derrick’s eyes widened.

Before he could even register the threat or input a counter-protocol, the virus triggered a total purge.

It self-destructed instantly, wiping its own footprint, logs, and registry keys in a fraction of a second, vanishing into thin air without leaving behind a single trace.

The screens returned to their default idle state.

Derrick stared at the monitor, his face finally turning solemn.

"I underestimated it," he admitted out loud, dropping the silence. "It looked straightforward on the surface, but it had a self-destruct failsafe hidden beneath several deep layers."

Keira looked over at him, her brows furrowed in silent question. "Did we just loose another lead?

I’m still way too inexperienced at this, Derrick thought to himself, a grim realization settling in.

He had the raw data, the vast knowledge, and the ultimate visual ability, but he lacked practical, real-world execution.

It was just like having immense battle power, completely useless if you didn’t know how to deploy it smoothly under pressure.

"No, I still managed to get a bit of information. Whoever bugged your place, this computer, they are in here, in this very city."