Chapter 106: The Second Front

The fragile peace of the rooftop treaty lasted nine days.

It was a precious, suspended time. Sabatine began to venture into the main living areas of the penthouse not as a ghost, but as a tentative resident. He started a small, messy pile of books on the coffee table—technical manuals, histories of espionage, a battered poetry anthology—a territorial claim Anton observed with a quiet, profound joy. They shared meals that weren’t sent up by the French place, but clumsily assembled by Anton himself, experiments in sustenance that were often inedible but always accompanied by laughter.

They were learning the architecture of their truce. Anton practiced not scheduling Sabatine’s time. Sabatine practiced staying in the room when Anton took a business call, not fleeing from the reminders of the world that threatened to swallow him.

Then, on the tenth morning, the outside world punched through the glass.

Sabatine was in the study, using a secure, anonymized terminal Anton had set up for him—a gesture of trust that meant more than any title. He was following a few digital threads of his own, old contacts from the grey world, not out of paranoia, but out of habit. A familiar alias flickered to life in an encrypted chat room he’d once called home.

Leon. His old colleague, the one who handled signals intelligence, the human sieve who caught whispers no one else could hear.

The message was brief, a pulse of digital Morse code: >>Lunch? The usual spot. Urgent.<<

The ' usual spot’ was a dead-drop server, a virtual park bench. Sabatine’s fingers hovered over the keys. This was the border of his old life. Crossing it felt like a betrayal of the new, fragile peace. But ignoring Leon was unthinkable. The man didn’t use ‘urgent’ for gossip.

He created a secure tunnel and accessed the drop. There were no files, just a string of raw, intercepted metadata, time-stamped from the last 72 hours. It was a list of encrypted communications—pings between servers in data havens in the Caymans, Belize, and Moscow. Routine enough. But Leon had highlighted the destination tags for the traffic.

Every packet was addressed to, or routed through, digital infrastructure owned by shell companies. Shell companies that were, after three layers of obfuscation, wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Rogers Industries Holdings Group.

Sabatine’s blood went cold. It wasn’t the content—that was still locked behind military-grade encryption Leon couldn’t crack. It was the vector. The traffic was using Anton’s own empire, the very nerves and sinews of his company, as a covert transit route. For what?

He cross-referenced the timing with the public news feeds. A small, innovative maritime logistics firm in Rotterdam had suffered a catastrophic “software failure” losing control of its automated port cranes. A green energy start-up in Calgary saw its entire intellectual property vault inexplicably corrupted. Minor, unrelated tragedies in the global business pageant.

But the digital fingerprints—the method of the attack—whispered to Sabatine. It was elegant, surgical, and undeniable. It wasn’t the brute-force ransomware of common criminals. It was the style of a state-level actor, or a private firm with those capabilities. The style of Silas.

He sat back, the cozy warmth of the past days evaporating. The enemy wasn’t gone. They’d just opened a second front. And they were using Anton’s own roads to march their armies.

He found Anton not in his study, but on the rooftop, on a hands-free call, pacing the gravel path. “…understand the due diligence was flawless, Eleanor. The acquisition was clean. If there’s a vulnerability in their legacy system, we’ll patch it. Just get me the audit report before the markets open in Sydney.”

Anton’s tone was the corporate commander’s again, but Sabatine heard the undercurrent of tension. He was already fighting brushfires.

Anton ended the call, pinching the bridge of his nose. He saw Sabatine and forced a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “The Rotterdam thing. One of our recent acquisitions. A PR nightmare, but contained.” He sighed. “This is the ‘clean-up operation.’ It’s endless.”

“It’s not a clean-up,” Sabatine said, his voice cutting through the spring air. He held up his secured tablet. “It’s a new infection. And the virus is using your bloodstream to spread.”

Anton’s smile vanished. He took the tablet, his eyes scanning the data. He wasn’t a digital forensics expert, but he was a master of corporate structure. He recognized the subsidiary naming conventions, the acquisition codes. His face paled. “These are our pipes. Our private, secured pipes.”

“They were secured against external threats,” Sabatine said, moving to stand beside him at the windbreak. “Not against a backdoor planted during an acquisition, or a sleeper program in a legacy server. Silas didn’t just want to break your company, Anton. He wanted to own its infrastructure. To use it. You stopped him from taking the crown, but he’d already burrowed into the walls.”

Anton stared at the glowing screen, his knuckles white where he gripped the tablet. The realization was a physical blow. He’d been fighting to save the body of his empire, while the enemy had been seeding its nervous system with parasites. Every merger, every acquisition Silas had subtly encouraged, every “strategic partnership” Evelyn had pushed through—they were all potential vectors.

“The Rotterdam failure. The Calgary breach,” Anton murmured, connecting the dots with dreadful clarity. “They’re not random. They’re target practice. Tests. Or… eliminations of companies that could have been future rivals to his interests.” He looked at Sabatine, his eyes haunted. “He’s still playing. And he’s using my board as his chess set.”

The rooftop, their sanctuary, suddenly felt exposed. The wind was no longer gentle; it carried the chill of a new threat. The comfortable fiction that the war was over, that they were in the ‘peace and reconciliation’ phase, dissolved.

Sabatine saw the old reflexes firing in Anton: the desire to lock down, to control, to muster his legal and corporate forces for a sweeping, overwhelming counter-attack. That would be his instinct. To fight the war he knew.

“If you go at this through normal channels,” Sabatine said, pre-empting him, “you’ll tip our hand. He’ll have layers of cut-outs, lawyers, and fabricated paperwork. It’ll be a legal quagmire that drags on for years, while he keeps using your network. You’ll be publicly eviscerating your own company’s integrity to root him out.”

Anton’s jaw tightened. “So what’s the alternative? Let him continue?”

“No.” Sabatine’s voice was firm. “We go at it the way we did in Geneva. But from the inside. We find the nodes, the specific servers, the corrupted code. We map his network within yours. And we dismantle it, silently, surgically. Then, when it’s done, you present the world with a fait accompli: a tragic, but resolved, case of sophisticated corporate espionage, which the vigilant Rogers Industries security team discovered and neutralized.”

We.

The word hung between them. It wasn’t the ‘we’ of the rooftop treaty, the tentative ‘we’ of a possible future. It was the operational ‘we’. The partner ‘we’. It was a return to the trenches.

Anton searched his face. “You said you didn’t want to be my security director. You didn’t want to wear the suit.”

“This isn’t a suit,” Sabatine said, a grim smile touching his lips. “This is a scalpel. And it’s what I’m good at. It’s a mission with a clear objective: protect your kingdom from an invasive species. It’s a job that needs doing, and I’m the best person to do it.” He paused, his gaze unwavering. “But we do it as a team. You provide the blueprints, the corporate architecture, the access. I provide the… fieldcraft. No hierarchy. Just partnership.”

It was a compromise. A bridge between Sabatine’s need for purposeful, independent action and Anton’s need to defend his life’s work. It was a way to fight the enemy without Sabatine having to become a company man.

Anton looked out over the city, his empire laid out before him, silently bleeding data to a phantom. He saw the trap of his own instincts. He saw the offer in Sabatine’s eyes—not of subservience, but of alliance. A chance to fight the second front together, differently.

He took a deep breath, letting go of the urge to command, to control the entire battlefield. He had to trust. Not just Sabatine’s skill, but his method. Their method.

“Alright,” Anton said, turning back to him, his decision solidifying. “A team. For now.” He extended his hand, not for a handshake, but an accord.

Sabatine looked at the offered hand, then up at Anton’s resolute face. He took it. The grip was firm, a pact renewed under a different, greyer sky. “For now.”

The quiet war of their personal peace was over, subsumed by the re-ignited professional one. But this time, they weren’t billionaires and bodyguards, principals and protectors. They were allies stepping back onto the battlefield, side-by-side, each bringing their own weapons to a shared fight. They were not out of the woods. The woods, it turned out, had just grown deeper, and darker, and woven themselves into the very foundations of home.

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