Chapter 109: The Scorched Earth Protocol

The Mayfair ballroom’s opulence felt like a sick joke. The crystal, the laughter, the scent of gardenias—it was a stage set for a play whose true script was written in treachery. Anton maintained the performance flawlessly. He smiled, he shook hands, he delivered a brief, inspiring speech about resilience and integrity that now tasted like ash on his tongue. All the while, his mind was a silent, screaming siren.

Finch. Alistair Finch.

The man who had overseen the loading docks where Anton, as a teenager, had learned the weight of a shipping manifest. The man who had patiently explained just-in-time logistics over a shared whiskey after Anton’s father’s funeral. A pillar. A supposed fortress wall.

And he was riddled with termites.

They didn’t speak again until the black town car was gliding through the rain-slicked streets of London, the glow of the party a receding jewel in the rearview. The partition was up, sealing them in a pressurized capsule of quiet fury.

Sabatine broke the silence. “He’ll be spooked now. He’ll check his comms, contact his handler. We should monitor his digital and physical movements. Rico could—”

“No.”

The word was a shard of ice. Anton stared out the window, his profile sharp as a blade against the passing lights. The calm CEO was gone. In his place was something raw and tectonic.

“No monitoring. No surveillance.” He turned his head, and the look in his eyes made Sabatine’s breath catch. It wasn’t just anger. It was a cold, annihilating rage, honed to a pinpoint focus. “He used my ports. My ships. My trust. He turned my operations into a weapons platform for that… cancer, Silas.” His voice was low, each syllable precise and deadly. “He doesn’t get to run. He doesn’t get to whisper to his masters. He gets erased.”

Sabatine had seen Anton angry before—the controlled fury of the boardroom, the cold wrath in Geneva. This was different. This was personal in a way the betrayals of Evelyn and Marcus, outsiders in the end, had not been. This was the desecration of a legacy he’d built with his own hands, from the ground up, with people he’d thought were part of its foundation.

“Anton,” Sabatine said, keeping his voice level. “Erasing him carelessly could trigger failsafes. We still don’t know the full extent of the implants in your systems. If he’s a primary node and we just cut him out…”

“I am not talking about carelessly,” Anton interrupted, his gaze burning. “I am talking about a scorched earth protocol. For him, and for anything he has touched.” He pulled a sleek tablet from the seat pocket, his fingers flying over the screen with violent purpose. He was accessing something, bypassing normal channels.

“What are you doing?”

“Initiating ‘Project Janus,’” Anton said, his tone clinical now, the fury channeled into pure, destructive action. “A corporate self-destruct sequence for Finch’s entire division. Every server under his purview will begin a cascading data corruption routine in twelve hours. Mimics a catastrophic, systemic failure. All his personnel are being notified of an immediate, mandatory ‘security audit’—they’ll be locked out of all systems. His physical assets—warehouse leases, shipping contracts, port authorizations—are being flagged for legal review and temporary injunction.”

Sabatine watched, a cold dread seeping through him. This was Anton in his ultimate element: not the strategist, but the god of his own universe, passing judgment. It was breathtaking in its scope and its ruthlessness. And it was dangerously blind.

“And Finch himself?” Sabatine asked quietly.

“He will be in my office at 7 a.m.,” Anton said, not looking up from the tablet. “Summoned by a priority-one directive. He will think it’s about Argentina. He will walk in expecting to manage a concerned CEO. He will instead be presented with a dossier of his treason, followed by a choice: immediate, silent resignation citing health reasons, accompanied by a legally-binding confession sealed in my vault, or I will personally hand every piece of evidence to the SFO, Interpol, and the Wall Street Journal and watch him spend the rest of his life in a concrete box.”

“He’ll run. Or Silas will extract him.”

Anton finally looked up, a smile that held no warmth touching his lips. “He won’t run. Because by 7 a.m., his passports will be electronically voided. His bank accounts, including the ones in the Caymans he thinks I don’t know about, will be frozen. His wife’s, his children’s. Every door he could run through will have just been welded shut. He will have exactly one door left open: the one into my office.”

The car was pulling into the underground garage of the penthouse. The engine died, leaving a ringing silence.

Sabatine understood the plan’s brutal elegance. It was total war. It addressed the immediate threat with overwhelming, decisive force. It was the ultimate expression of control.

And it was a mistake.

“Anton,” Sabatine said, his voice firmer now. “You’re looking at this as an infection to be cut out. But Finch isn’t the disease. He’s a symptom. He’s a pressure point. If you crush him publicly, even in a ‘silent’ way, you lose all leverage to trace the connections upwards. You burn the bridge back to Silas. You satisfy your fury, but you leave the head of the snake intact, and now it’s warned, and angry.”

Anton’s eyes flashed. “My fury is justified. He betrayed my company. My people. Me.”

“I know!” Sabatine’s own temper flared, meeting Anton’s fire. “But since when is justice your only objective? You’re a strategist! Use him! Turn him! You have him by the throat—use that to make him dance for you, to lead you to the next link in the chain. What you’re planning is a spectacular, satisfying bomb. But it leaves you standing in the rubble with no map of the rest of the minefield.”

They stared at each other in the shadowed backseat of the car, the air crackling. Anton’s rage was a visible aura, a distortion in the space between them. He saw betrayal everywhere—in the smiling faces at the dinner, in the data streams, in the very infrastructure of his life. But Sabatine realized with a jolt that Anton’s gaze, sweeping this scorched-earth panorama of deceit, never landed on him. The trust between them, forged in confession and fire, was the one fixed point in his crumbling universe. That absolute, unshakable faith was both a gift and, in this moment, a profound danger. It made Anton deaf to his counsel.

“You want me to negotiate with a traitor?” Anton’s voice was dangerously soft. “To bargain with the man who helped sabotage my life’s work?”

“I want you to win the war,” Sabatine shot back. “Not just this battle. Silas is still out there. He has other Finches. In other companies. He’ll just start again. If you annihilate Finch, you gain a corpse. If you flip him, you gain an asset. A path.”

The driver, sensing the tension, had discreetly exited the car. They were alone in the concrete vault.

Anton looked away, his chest rising and falling with the effort of containing the volcano inside. He was a man programmed for decisive, final action. Retribution was a cleaner calculus than the messy, uncertain game of espionage Sabatine was proposing.

“He doesn’t deserve a path,” Anton finally growled, the words torn from him.

“This isn’t about what he deserves,” Sabatine said, reaching out, his hand closing over Anton’s wrist where it lay clenched on the leather seat. The touch was an anchor. “This is about what you need. You need Silas gone. Not just inconvenienced. Gone. Finch can help you do that. Your anger… It's a weapon. But point it at the right target.”

Anton looked down at Sabatine’s hand on his wrist, the contact a stark contrast to the icy fury in his veins. He was poised to unleash hell, to cleanse the betrayal with fire. And here was Sabatine, the one person whose loyalty he never questioned, asking him to stay his hand. To be cunning instead of cruel. To choose strategy over catharsis.

It was the hardest thing he’d ever been asked to do.

He closed his eyes, a muscle leaping in his jaw. The plans for Project Janus glowed on the tablet in his lap, a masterpiece of corporate vengeance. He could almost taste the satisfaction.

He opened his eyes. They were still burning, but the apocalyptic flame had banked, replaced by a harder, colder light.

Slowly, he entered a command into the tablet, cancelling the sequence. The screen went dark.

“Alright,” he said, the word a gravelly concession. “We do it your way. For now.” He looked at Sabatine, the vulnerability beneath the fury stark and terrifying. “But he steps into my office at 7 a.m. And he will understand, in that moment, that his continued breathing is a gift I am choosing to give. And that I can revoke it at any time.”

It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t even mercy. It was a stay of execution, granted not to Finch, but to Sabatine. A testament to the one trust that held firm in the earthquake.

Sabatine nodded, releasing his wrist. “He’ll understand.”

The scorched earth protocol was aborted. The path of the double agent, fraught and ugly, lay ahead. Anton’s fury was not gone; it was merely caged, waiting to be aimed. And as they stepped out of the car into the cool, silent garage, Sabatine knew the most dangerous enemy in the coming hours wouldn’t be Alistair Finch. It would be Anton’s own rage, and his desperate, absolute need to protect the one thing he was certain hadn’t betrayed him: them.

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