Read Chapter 16: — THE CLEAN HACKER

The digital trail went cold quickly.

Police contacted software engineers and cybersecurity specialists. Most told them the same thing: the video’s route was too fragmented, the infrastructure too deliberately obscured, the surviving metadata too weak for a dramatic answer.

Chenxi remembered a white-hat security researcher known to the cybercrime unit, a gifted specialist with a reputation for refusing criminal work even when the money was absurd.

Old Zhao called him “a clean freak in a dirty business.”

“Cybersecurity is not a dirty business,” Chenxi said.

“I meant the criminals.”

“Your phrasing needs treatment.”

The specialist did not produce a magical address on a glowing map. He reconstructed habits.

Accounts reused at the wrong moment.

A payment route that overlapped with an older transaction.

A device that had touched an adjacent service months earlier.

A recurring timing pattern.

Human error layered beneath technical sophistication.

Li watched the process with fascination.

“So cyber forensics is differential diagnosis.”

“And medicine is incident response with worse documentation,” the specialist replied.

Chenxi closed her eyes.

“I regret introducing you.”

The work produced a practical result. A repeated digital habit connected the ransom infrastructure to an intermediary already known to investigators.

That intermediary led to Jiang Haozhe.

Jiang was detained.

His statements complicated the case rather than solving it. He described a network of technical contractors, private security, wealthy intermediaries and people who had been paid to watch Professor Zou’s movements. Gao Xingchen’s name appeared repeatedly, but always at a distance protected by other people.

“Did Gao order the kidnapping?” Old Zhao asked.

“I never heard him say that.”

“Did you work for him?”

“I worked for people who worked for people who wanted him pleased.”

“That sentence alone should be illegal.”

Jiang also spoke of another group surrounding Zou, one not entirely controlled by Gao.

People who seemed to monitor the professor for reasons that were personal rather than commercial.

Among the scattered names and aliases, one appeared more than once.

Susan Merlin.

No one knew who she was.

Chenxi searched databases and found fragments: a woman with overseas connections, a Chinese name that had changed with family circumstances, periods of depression in her medical history, links to people around the Zou family.

Old Zhao leaned toward motive too quickly.

“Abandoned daughter? Family death? Depression? Secret surveillance?”

Chenxi’s expression hardened.

“Grief is not evidence. Depression is not evidence. A difficult childhood is not evidence.”

The room went quiet.

Li nodded.

They had already been misled by assumptions about doctors, radiation, patients and money.

They would not turn a woman into a villain because her biography sounded convenient.