The server racks hummed like a mechanical choir in the frigid darkness, their blinking LEDs casting red and green shadows across Detective Sarah Chen's weathered face as she stepped between the towering monoliths of silicon and steel. The body lay crumpled beneath Terminal 7, blood pooling around Marcus Delacroix's shattered skull while his laptop screen still glowed with lines of encrypted code—the same code that three other programmers had died trying to decode this month. The air conditioning whispered secrets through the raised floor tiles, and somewhere in the maze of fiber optic cables and backup generators, a killer who understood that in this digital age, information was deadlier than any gun, and the real crimes weren't committed in dark alleys anymore, but in the cathedral-quiet halls where humanity's secrets were stored in ones and zeros.
