Elias cracked his knuckles and began the hunt. Most people thought a JPG was just a picture—pixels arranged in a grid. But in the underbelly of the web, a file extension could be a mask. He bypassed three firewalls and tunneled through a ghost network used by defunct intelligence agencies.

The image finally opened. It wasn't a photo of an animal or a landscape. It was a high-resolution satellite capture of his own apartment building, taken exactly three seconds ago. In the window of his study, he could see the silhouette of a man sitting at a computer.

(e.g., a hacker, a detective, a confused teenager) I can rewrite the draft to better fit your vision.