Chapter 110: The Glass Prison

The penthouse, once a sanctuary of light and space, had become a glass cage. After the confrontation with Finch—a masterful, terrifying display of Anton’s caged fury where the COO had left white-faced and compliant, a turned asset on a razor-thin leash—a new paranoia set in. The victory felt hollow, the air itself suspect.

It was Leon who confirmed the sickness in the walls.

A secure data packet arrived, not with a ping, but as a ghost in the machine, appearing in a partitioned corner of Sabatine’s war room terminal. No message, just raw data streams: a map of electronic surveillance in and around the penthouse tower.

Sabatine called it up on the main holographic table. The building’s own security grid glowed a benign blue—the lobby cameras, the elevator eyes, the garage sensors. But overlaid on it, in a sickly, pulsing amber, were dozens of other signals. Directional microphones trained on their specific windows from adjacent buildings. Laser listeners reading vibrations in the glass. A van with a phased-array antenna, parked three blocks over in a delivery bay, had been quietly siphoning wireless traffic for weeks.

And the most damning layer, rendered in a venomous red: implants within their own system. Two cameras in the service corridors had been subtly re-angled, their feeds spliced and duplicated to an external server. The building’s internal network traffic was being mirrored at the router level.

“They’re not just watching the perimeter,” Sabatine said, his voice flat. “They’re in the bloodstream. They’ve been listening to everything. Planning sessions. Personal conversations.” He didn’t say confessions on the roof, but the implication hung in the air, sour and violated.

Anton stood beside him, still as a statue. He looked not at the holographic invasion, but out the very windows that were being targeted. His reflection in the glass was pale, his eyes dark holes. The betrayal by Finch had been a knife to the ribs. This was a violation of the marrow. His home, his last private space, the one he had opened to Sabatine, was a sieve.

“How long?” Anton’s voice was dangerously quiet.

“The external surveillance spiked after Singapore,” Sabatine said, manipulating the timeline on the display. “The internal compromises… older. Some date back to just after Geneva. They were a contingency. Evelyn’s work, or Finch’s. A backdoor left open in case they needed leverage.”

Anton’s hands clenched at his sides. The urge to smash something, to tear the very walls down, was a physical tremor in his muscles. But the cold CEO was wresting control from the furious man. The anger was still there, white-hot, but it was being forged into a different tool.

“A full purge,” Anton said, the words final. “Internal and external. Total digital and physical sanitization. I want every non-essential signal within a quarter-mile radius identified and neutralized. I want every camera, every microphone, every data line in this building traced, verified, and either secured or physically destroyed. I want the service company that maintains our system investigated and terminated. I want the building’s owners in my office by noon to explain how this happened in their ‘most secure property in Europe.’”

It was an order of immense scope and violence. It wasn’t a defensive move; it was a declaration of internal war. It would create chaos. It would send a deafening signal to Silas that they knew. It would burn resources and bridges.

Sabatine understood the impulse. He felt the same primal need to scrape the eyes off their skin. But he also saw the trap. “Anton, a purge this loud is a broadcast. It tells them exactly what we’ve discovered. It makes us look panicked. It forces their hand.”

Anton turned to him, and the look in his eyes was one Sabatine had never seen before: a kind of serene, focused madness. “Good. Let them know we see them. Let them know their glass prison is now a fishbowl, and I am the piranha. I am done playing spy games in the shadows of my own home. This is my territory. My rules. If they want a war of attrition, of whispers, I will give them a war of annihilation. In the light.”

He moved to his desk, activating a secure line. “Eleanor? Initiate ‘Cicada.’ Yes, now. Full protocol. Authorisation Rogers-Alpha-Zero-Nine. And get me the head of Blacklight Solutions. I want a physical sweep team here in ninety minutes. Tell them to bring hardware. The kind that makes a mess.”

Cicada. Sabatine knew the name. It was a legendary, brutal protocol from the early days of industrial espionage. It didn’t just find bugs; it electronically scoured a location with such overwhelming, disruptive noise that it fried unshielded surveillance and created a temporary ‘dead zone.’ It was the equivalent of setting off an electromagnetic pulse in your own living room. It would also crash every wireless device for blocks, cause millions in disruptions, and be a flashing beacon on every intelligence service’s radar.

“Anton, wait—” Sabatine started.

“No.” Anton cut him off, his gaze locking onto Sabatine’s. The absolute trust was still there, but it was now a command. “This is not a negotiation. They have looked into my home. They have listened to us. That is a line that does not get crossed. We purge. We burn it all out. Then we rebuild the walls ten feet higher, and we wait to see what tries to crawl over them.”

He was a past strategy. This was visceral. This was about sovereignty. Sabatine saw that arguing would only fracture the trust between them. Anton needed to reclaim his domain, by any means necessary. The silent, internal war was no longer silent.

The next twelve hours were a controlled demolition. Blacklight Solutions arrived, a team of grim-faced men and women with equipment cases that hummed with malevolent energy. They swept through the penthouse, their devices screeching as they identified and then brutally disabled the infiltrated cameras, physically tearing them from the walls. In the building’s server room, under the horrified gaze of the building’s management, Anton’s own techs severed and isolated compromised lines, their work lit by the cold blue light of forensic scanners.

At Anton’s command, the ‘Cicada’ pulse was unleashed. A deep, sub-audible thrum vibrated through the structure. Every light flickered. The holographic table in the war room died with a pathetic sizzle. Across the street, the lights in several offices winked out. The van with the antenna three blocks away reportedly emitted a puff of smoke from its vents before going dead.

The cost was astronomical. The disruptions sparked complaints from other billionaires in the building and a terse inquiry from City authorities. The building’s owners were apoplectic. The financial markets, sensitive to any ripple around Rogers, twitched.

But Anton stood in the center of the chaos, a calm in the storm of his own making. He watched as the last corrupted device was bagged and tagged. He had traded secrecy for a demonstration of overwhelming, reckless force. He had told Silas: I know. And I will burn my own house down around me to keep you out.

As night fell, the penthouse was quiet again, but it was a different quiet. The hum of electronics was gone, replaced by the whisper of emergency battery lights and the chill of manually pumped air. It felt sterile, scraped raw.

Sabatine found Anton back on the rooftop. The windbreak glass was now lined with a fine mesh that disrupted laser listeners. The wild garden remained, the only unchanged thing.

“We’re blind now, too,” Sabatine said, joining him. “Our own external surveillance is part of the scorched earth.”

“I know,” Anton said, his voice tired but clear. “But now we know the exact dimensions of our blindness. Before, we thought we could see, but our eyes were lying to us. Now we have no eyes, but we know it.” He looked at Sabatine, the serene madness gone, replaced by a profound exhaustion. “You think it was a mistake.”

“I think it was a message,” Sabatine corrected. “A very expensive, very loud message. The question is, what message does Silas send back?”

Anton gazed out at the city, now lying in a deeper darkness where their purge had caused localized blackouts. “He’ll send something. He’ll have to. I’ve just declared that his quiet, insidious game is over. The next move will be louder. Harder.” He turned, his eyes reflecting the few stubborn lights still burning. “But it will be in the open. Or as open as men like us get. And that is a war I am better equipped to fight.”

The glass prison had been shattered, not to let the captives out, but to shatter the illusions of the captors. They were exposed, their systems in ruins, their location a known, hardened target. Anton had chosen a fortress under open siege over a gilded cage full of hidden snakes. The silent internal war was over. The noisy, dangerous, next phase had begun. And they were standing in the middle of the blasted heath, waiting for the enemy to show his face.

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