Chapter 10: Under Surveillance

 The stillness of the penthouse elevator was a welcome respite from the strain of the dinner. Sabatine leaned back against the chilly metal wall, the ghost of Anton's naked, unfettered suffering suspended in the air between them. 'You make me feel it all over again.' The admission had been a crack in the billionaire's armor, a glimpse of the man behind the steel and silicon.

It was a vulnerability, and in their world, vulnerability was a target.

The elevator doors opened into the chilly, marble-faced private residential floor lobby. It was deserted, the night security detail probably at the main entrances to the building. A single big screen was on the wall opposite the elevators and displayed a grid of images from security cameras around the penthouse floor. It was a standard setup, a final glance for the residents to see that their world was secure before retiring.

Sabatine's stride slowed. His eyes, trained by years of selecting out the deviant from seas of information, swept the grid. Living room, kitchen, hallway, study, the interior terrace. All was still, in the sleek, ambient glow of Anton's minimalist decor. 

Then his eyes locked on the feed from the private gym, a small space hidden toward the penthouse interior.

It showed Anton, as Sabatine had last seen him, standing before the big window in the living room, a solitary figure against the city lights. He was fixing himself another drink, his shoulders slumped in a weariness that no sum of money could cure.

Sabatine's eyebrows furrowed. He looked at the timestamp in the corner of the gym feed. 22:17:04. Then he looked at the live feed from the living room. There was Anton, in real time, bringing the glass to his mouth. The timestamp on that feed was 22:17:04.

A perfect sync.

He stiffened, all his focus narrowing to the two screens. He watched for a full minute, his mind a cold, calculating computer. On the gym feed, Anton took a sip of his wine. On the living room feed, Anton took a sip of his wine. The actions were identical, the timing perfect. It was a loop. A high-definition, seamlessly edited segment of video, playing on a continuous loop on the gym camera.

There was somebody in Anton's network. Not just poking around in R&D servers or financials. They were in his home. They had eyes on his most private sanctuary, and they were masking their presence by replacing the recorded feed with the live one. They could be watching him right now, and he would never even know.

The implications unraveled in Sabatine's mind with icy clarity. This was not just industrial espionage. This was near, this was a personal invasion. It was the electronic equivalent of a stalker in the closet. They could hear his conversations, track his routines, and find out his weaknesses. They had turned his fortress into a fishbowl.

His first instinct was to return, to ride the elevator upstairs and tell Anton. But he stopped himself, his hand reaching halfway to the call button.

Think.

If he alerted Anton now, the billionaire's reaction would be immediate and violent. He could shut down the entire system, execute a sweep, and in doing so, alert the intruder that they were compromised. The mole, whoever they were - Evelyn, Marcus, or someone else - would go to ground, and the trail to the prototype would be lost.

This was an opportunity. A dangerous, razor-edge opportunity, but an opportunity. The enemy had revealed a segment of their infrastructure. They felt secure enough to maintain a live surveillance feed in the penthouse of the CEO. That was arrogance. And arrogance bred mistakes.

He needed to gain a feel for how much of it there was. He pulled out his custom comms device, the matte black device shimmering to life in his palm. He made no effort to interface with the building's network; that was suicidal. He utilized the device to actively scan the surrounding electromagnetic landscape for the unique signature of the data feed that had taken over the compromised camera.

It was there—a faint, encrypted data stream, piggybacking on the building's primary broadband connection. It was sophisticated, using a frequency-hopping protocol that would be invisible to standard diagnostics. But to his gear, it stood out like a beacon in the fog. He couldn't decrypt it in real time, but he could trace where it went.

The signal wasn't just being directed to a server in Rogers Industries. It was being bifurcated. One branch was heading to the internal security servers, as it should have been. The other was being tunneled out, encrypted in a cascade of innocuous, outbound data packets—weather reports, stock ticker feeds, news bulletins—and transmitted to an external IP address.

He ran a quick, stealthy trace on the IP. It bounced through a series of proxies in Zurich to Singapore to Moscow and vanished into a black hole. A ghost trail. But the origin point, the physical location where the signal had been received and copied first, was obvious. It was coming from a hardware device physically connected to the network node in the penthouse itself.

A physical tap. This was no remote hack. Someone had been in. They had planted something.

He looked again at the screen. On the looped gym feed, Anton still stood at the window, a monument to solo supremacy. Sabatine felt a chill knot tighten in his belly. He was leaving a man standing in a cage, unaware that the locks were controlled by his jailers.

This changed everything. The fight, dinner, the uneasy peace—it all seemed irrelevant now. The threat was no longer abstract. It was here, in the walls, in the very air Anton breathed.

He reached a decision. He couldn't tell Anton. Not yet. The man was a brilliant strategist in the boardroom, but in this war in the shadows, he was inexperienced. His anger, his fear, his need for control—they were liabilities. He would compromise the investigation.

Sabatine would have to become Anton's unseen protector. He would have to monitor the screens, keep the man protected from the truth until the truth could be used as a weapon.

He gave the grid a last look. The looped feed was a perfect, silent lie. He committed the details to memory—the loop's length, Anton's exact position, the level of liquid in the glass. He'd need to know what 'normal' was if he was going to be able to spot any deviations, any changes the surveyor would make.

He turned and walked out of the lobby, into the private courtyard's cool night air. The city hummed around him, indifferent. He established a secure channel on his comms unit, his fingers moving with dark purpose.

"Rico. It's me."

There was an acknowledging grunt from the other end. "Sabe. You sound tense.

I need a blind package. Top-shelf, non-lethal counter-surveillance gear. Signal jammers, RF scanners, the works. Delivered to a dead drop in Mayfair by 06:00." 

Rico whistled low. "That's a tall order. Who's the target?" 

"The principal's residence has been compromised. Physical and electronic surveillance. I need to map their network without their knowledge." 

"Got it. It'll cost you.".

Bill the client," Sabatine commanded, the irony not lost. "And Rico… one more thing. I need you to run a deep background on a new name. Lena Petrova. I need to know whether her connection to Marcus Vale is recent, or whether it predates the theft. See if you can uncover any hidden links to Evelyn Voss."

"You think the art curator is a player?

"In this game, everybody's a player," Sabatine said, looking up at the monolith tower, at the single lighted penthouse at its summit. "Even those who think they're just spectators." He ended the call and merged with the London night, a shadow once more. But his purpose had altered. He was no longer just a hunter tracking a stolen prototype. He was a sentinel, watching over a man who believed himself to be alone in his fortress, unaware that the walls were not just cracked, but lined with eyes. The feast of half-truths was complete. Now the real silence began—the silence of the hunt, and the more ponderous silence of the secret he now carried.

Anton Rogers was living in a glass house, and Sabatine was the only one who could see the cracks from the outside.

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