Arjun Khanna had been a senior systems architect at HDFC Bank’s data core for eleven years. He knew the labyrinth of servers, firewalls, and legacy code better than the back of his hand. At 2:13 AM, while patching a routine security update, his terminal flickered. A red box appeared, stark against the black command line:
His fingers flew across the keyboard. Client codes. Authorization limits. OTPs that arrived with a heart-stopping buzz. Each step was a gate, and he had the key.