Chapter 108: The Unforced Error

Singapore had been a success. A silent, surgical extraction of data that now glowed on Anton’s war room table, revealing a clearer, more sinister map. The listener program had been a trove, and Sabatine had followed the digital breadcrumbs to a shell corporation in Macau with ties to a private military contractor Silas had used before. The enemy had a name, a face, and a bank account. It was progress. Cold, hard progress.

But Anton’s world was not just digital shadows and server farms. It was also a world of handshakes and crystal flutes, of power whispered over canapés. To root out Silas’s influence completely, they needed to understand the human vectors—the willing or unwitting accomplices still inside the fortress walls.

Which was why Sabatine found himself at the Annual Rogers Industries Strategic Board Dinner, an event of breathtaking opulence held in the gilded ballroom of a Mayfair hotel. He was not there as a guest, not officially. Anton had listed him as a “Special Security Consultant,” a title vague enough to grant access, specific enough to explain his presence at the periphery. He wore a suit Anton had chosen—midnight blue, impeccably tailored, a uniform of silk that still felt like a disguise. The glasses, his modified ones, were perched on his nose, scanning the room not just for threats, but for tells.

The air thrummed with a different kind of tension than the alpine wind. It was the quiet hum of immense wealth and soft power. Laughter was measured, conversations were negotiations in miniature. Anton moved through it like a shark through calm water—graceful, unmistakably the apex predator, exchanging greetings that were thinly veiled status updates.

Sabatine watched from a shadowed alcove near a colossal floral arrangement. He tracked Anton’s movements, but his focus was on the others. The board members, the C-suite executives, their spouses. Who lingered too long near Anton? Who avoided him? Whose eyes flickered with a nervousness that couldn’t be explained by stock options?

His gaze settled on Alistair Finch, the Chief Operations Officer. A man in his late fifties, with a patrician bearing and a smile that never quite warmed his pale blue eyes. He had been Evelyn Voss’s counterpart, the yin to her yang—she handled the money, he handled the global machinery that made it. Since Evelyn’s very public fall, Finch had been the model of subdued competence, stepping smoothly into the vacuum. Too smoothly.

Finch was holding court with a cluster of regional directors, talking about supply chain resilience. His voice was a confident baritone, his anecdotes polished. But Sabatine, trained to hear the breath before a lie, the micro-pause of calculation, heard something else. A faint, metallic edge of stress beneath the polish.

Anton’s plan for the evening was subtle pressure. He was to engage Finch in casual conversation, probe gently about the post-Evelyn transition, and observe. Sabatine’s role was remote observation and analysis. But as he watched Finch laugh a little too heartily at a subordinate’s joke, a more direct approach crystallized in his mind. An elegant trap required an unforced error.

He waited for his moment. It came when Finch detached himself from the group, making a beeline for the bar, perhaps for a fortifying drink. Sabatine intercepted him, appearing as if by chance as Finch collected a neat Scotch.

“Mr. Finch,” Sabatine said, his voice neutral, polite. “Sabatine Stalker. We haven’t officially met.”

Finch turned, his eyes doing a quick, professional appraisal. The “Security Consultant.” A faint, dismissive wrinkle appeared at the corner of his eye. “Ah, yes. Anton’s new… specialist. How are you finding the world of legitimate commerce?” The question was barbed with the implication that Sabatine’s world was anything but.

“Fascinating,” Sabatine replied, ignoring the jab. He took a sip of the mineral water in his hand. “The scale of coordination is impressive. Especially after a disruption. Like the Argentina port deal falling through last quarter. That must have required some agile recalibration on your end.”

He chose Argentina deliberately. It was a Finch-led initiative, a major infrastructure play that had collapsed at the eleventh hour due to “unforeseen regulatory hurdles.” Publicly, it was a shrug for a company of Rogers’ size. A minor loss. In the war room, Sabatine had seen curious digital traffic around the Argentine partners’ servers in the weeks before the collapse. Traffic that had bounced through a node in Belize.

Finch’s expression didn’t flicker. He took a slow sip of his Scotch. “Indeed. A disappointment, but not unforeseen in such a… volatile market. We pivoted resources to Southeast Asia. A more stable bet.”

Standard corporate deflection. But Sabatine didn’t move. He let the silence stretch for a beat too long, his gaze steady behind the lenses of his glasses. He wasn’t looking for a grand confession. He was looking for a crack. A micro-expression, a shift in posture, a tell in the rhythm of his breathing.

“Stable,” Sabatine echoed, his tone lightly musing. “I suppose that’s the priority now. Stability. After everything.” He didn’t specify ‘everything.’ He let Finch’s mind fill in the blanks: Evelyn, Marcus, the whispers of scandal.

Finch’s thumb rubbed against the side of his crystal glass. A self-soothing gesture. “Precisely. My focus is on operational surety. No more… surprises.”

“Of course,” Sabatine said, nodding as if in agreement. Then, as if struck by a minor, irrelevant thought, he tilted his head. “It’s just, the post-mortem on Argentina I read was curiously vague on the specific regulatory blocker. The usual permitting agencies had all given preliminary nods. Was it something more… niche? A digital compliance issue, perhaps? I only ask because my work sometimes intersects with cybersecurity in critical infrastructure.”

He saw it. The unforced error.

It wasn’t in Finch’s face, which remained a mask of polite attention. It was in his eyes. For a fraction of a second, his gaze darted to the left, towards the grand entrance of the ballroom, as if seeking an exit, or a familiar face. It was the classic ‘eye-aversion’ of someone accessing fabricated information. Then his pupils constricted, just slightly. A stress response.

His voice, when it came, was a hair too smooth, too rehearsed. “Oh, a labyrinth of local digital sovereignty laws. Dreadfully complex. Our local counsel advised that the compliance burden would have eroded all profitability. A simple business decision, in the end.”

Simple business decision. The phrase was a shield. But Sabatine had seen behind it.

He also saw Finch’s left hand, the one not holding the drink, curl slightly into a loose fist, the signet ring on his little finger tapping once, twice, against his thigh. A nervous tic.

“I see,” Sabatine said, his smile benign. “Well, I’m glad the pivot was successful. Stability is everything.” He raised his water glass in a tiny, meaningless salute. “Enjoy your evening, Mr. Finch.”

He melted back into the crowd, leaving Finch standing by the bar, looking slightly unsettled, as if a breeze from an unfamiliar direction had just brushed his neck.

From across the room, Anton had watched the entire exchange. He saw Sabatine’s approach, the measured conversation, the disengagement. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could read the aftermath on Finch’s face. The COO took a larger gulp of his Scotch, his eyes scanning the room now with a new wariness.

A few minutes later, Sabatine materialized at Anton’s side as he was congratulating the head of the Asia-Pacific division. When they were momentarily alone, Anton kept his gaze forward, his smile in place.

“Well?”

“He’s lying about Argentina,” Sabatine murmured, his voice barely audible over the string quartet. “The eye-aversion, the pupil response. The deal was killed, but not by local regulations. And he’s nervous. The way he tapped his ring… it’s a tell. He’s waiting for something, or someone. This wasn’t just Evelyn’s play. He’s still active.”

Anton felt a cold satisfaction amidst the glittering chandeliers. The trap had been elegant in its simplicity: a casual question about a known vulnerability, asked by an unexpected person, in a setting where Finch’s guard was meant to be social, not operational. And he had slipped. Not much. But enough.

“He’s the human relay,” Anton said softly. “Evelyn handled the money and the high-level strategy. Finch handles the pipes, the logistics, the physical and digital infrastructure. He’s the one who could reroute a shipment, delay a permit, or introduce a corrupted code patch into a port’s operating system. He made Argentina go away because Silas, or someone working for him, didn’t want that deal to happen. Probably because the port would have competed with one of their own interests.”

Sabatine nodded, watching Finch now clap someone on the back, the perfect executive once more, but with a stiffness in his shoulders that hadn’t been there before. “Now we have a name, a face, and a pressure point. He’s not an ideologue. He’s a pragmatist. He did it for money, or for security, or for a promise of power after you were gone. That makes him fragile.”

Anton finally glanced at Sabatine, seeing the focused hunter beneath the elegant suit. “You just turned a board dinner into a reconnaissance mission.”

A ghost of Sabatine’s old, wry smile appeared. “You work with the opulence you have, not the opulence you might want.”

The string quartet swelled into a waltz. The dance of power and deception continued around them. But at that moment, Anton and Sabatine stood together on the edge of the gilded floor, having just identified a crack in the enemy’s last line of defense within his own house. The elegant trap had been sprung. The unforced error had been made. The next move was theirs.

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