Chapter 113: The Burning Warehouse

The new, paranoid peace was shattered not by a digital whisper, but by a physical roar. The call came at 4:17 a.m. London time. Anton’s secure phone, now a simple, hardened device with minimal functions, buzzed like an angry hornet on the nightstand.

Sabatine was awake instantly, hand going to the knife he kept under his pillow before his mind had fully processed the sound. Anton, who had finally been sleeping deeply, jerked upright, fumbling for the phone. He listened, his face in the gloom going from sleep-softened to granite in three seconds.

“How many?” he asked, his voice a sleep-rasped blade. A pause. “And the cause?” Another, longer pause. “I see. Initiate Phoenix Protocol. I want our team on the ground before the local authorities seal it. No, not the corporate team. The forensic team. The one Stalker vetted.”

He ended the call. For a moment, he just sat there, the phone a dark silhouette in his hand. Then he turned on the bedside lamp. The warm light felt obscene against the news he was about to deliver.

“Shanghai,” he said, the word flat. “The Longhua logistics hub. Warehouse Seven. It’s gone.”

Sabatine sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist. “Gone?”

“Fire. A very specific, very hot fire. The kind that melts steel shelving and leaves concrete powder. They’re calling it an electrical fault.” Anton’s laugh was a dry, brittle thing. “Warehouse Seven held the consolidated inventory for our new luxury retail expansion into East Asia. Six months of curated stock. The entire launch strategy was built around its contents. It was also,he added, his gaze meeting Sabatine’s, “the physical node for a new, secure distribution network Finch knew nothing about. A network I designed after Geneva. A clean line.”

The chill that had started in Sabatine’s spine spread outwards. “A clean line you personally designed. And Silas knew to hit it.”

“Not just hit it,” Anton said, throwing back the covers and standing. He paced to the window, a restless panther in silk pajamas. “Obliterate it. The fire was too complete, too forensic. This wasn’t sabotage for insurance or competition. This was a message. A demonstration of reach. They’re not just on my servers. They’re in my plans. My personal, post-breach contingency plans.”

Sabatine got up, pulling on a pair of sweatpants. His mind, colder and more operational than Anton’s at this moment, began mapping the implications. “Who had access to the warehouse specs? The security protocols? The inventory manifests?”

“A handful of people. Myself. Jessica. The head of the Asia launch, Lin Feng. The security director for the region, a man named Viktor Croft, ex-MI6. And the architect of the physical security system.” Anton stopped pacing. He turned, and the look on his face was one of dawning, horrified comprehension. “Which was a boutique firm called Aegis Solutions. Hired on the recommendation of… Alistair Finch. Six months ago.”

Finch. The turned asset. The man with a knife at his throat, dancing on Anton’s string. Had he been dancing a double-agent’s jig all along?

“We have to bring him in,” Sabatine said, already moving towards the door to get dressed. “Now. Before he hears about Shanghai and bolts.”

“He won’t bolt,” Anton said, his voice chillingly calm. “He’s too smart for that. He’ll be in his office at 8 a.m., full of concern, ready to offer his ‘full support.’” He walked to his closet, movements precise, controlled. The volcanic fury of the Finch confrontation was gone, replaced by something colder, more lethal. “This isn’t just about Finch. This is about the pattern.”

Sabatine paused at the door. “What pattern?”

Anton pulled a stark white shirt from a hanger. “The Argentina deal Finch sabotaged. That was a blow to my expansion strategy in South America. The Rotterdam port ‘failure’ that used our servers—that disrupted a key European supply chain I’d just consolidated. And now Shanghai. The crown jewel of the East Asian launch.” He buttoned the shirt with swift, efficient motions. “They’re not just attacking Rogers Industries. They’re systematically dismantling my vision. The growth plans I championed, the projects I personally shepherded. The ones that would have defined my legacy beyond my father’s shadow.”

He turned to face Sabatine, and the naked vulnerability there was more frightening than any rage. “They’re not trying to bankrupt the company. They’re trying to erase me. To prove that Anton Rogers, the man, is a failure. That his judgment is flawed, his strategies vulnerable, his personal touch a curse. They’re making it… personal.”

Sabatine understood. This was the evolution of the war. Silas had failed to take the company through a frontal assault in Geneva. Now he was waging a campaign of psychological and professional annihilation. He was targeting Anton’s pride, his competence, his very identity as a builder. The warehouse wasn’t just a building; it was a piece of Anton’s future, set ablaze.

“And you think they have a mole close enough to know which plans were yours personally?” Sabatine asked.

“They have Finch,” Anton said. “But this feels… intimate. The choice of target. The timing, right before the launch. It feels like someone who understands not just the corporate flowcharts, but the… the passion behind them.” He ran a hand through his hair, a rare gesture of disarray. “Jessica has access to everything. Lin Feng lives and breathes the Asia launch. Croft designed the counter-surveillance. Any of them could be compromised. Or it could be a system, a way Silas has of identifying my pet projects.”

Sabatine walked back into the room, stopping in front of Anton. He put his hands on Anton’s shoulders, feeling the tension corded there. “Listen to me. This is personal. That’s their mistake. When it’s personal, people get emotional. They make errors. Finch’s error was his eye-aversion. The mole who gave up Shanghai will have one too. We’ll find it.”

Anton searched his face, the storm in his eyes seeking a harbor. “How do you stay so calm?”

“Because I’m not the target,” Sabatine said, the truth stark. “You are. That gives me clarity. My only objective is to stop what’s aimed at you. So we start with Finch. We lean on him, hard. We use Shanghai as the lever. We make him so terrified of what you’ll do to him that he gives up everything—the mole, the method, the next target.”

A spark of the old, calculating Anton returned. “We turn the personal against them.”

“Exactly,” Sabatine said. “They want you to be emotional, reactive. So we’ll be ice. We’ll use their attack as intel. A burning warehouse is a signal. We just have to learn to read the frequency.”

He felt Anton’s shoulders relax a fraction under his hands. The anchor was holding, not by being immovable, but by offering a direction in the storm.

An hour later, they were in the secure study, the sky outside shifting from black to bruised grey. Anton had summoned Finch with a terse, undeniable message. While they waited, Sabatine pulled up everything on the Shanghai hub, on Lin Feng, on Viktor Croft. He was looking for the unforced error, the tell.

As he scanned Croft’s MI6 service record, a detail snagged his attention. A two-year gap after his discharge, vaguely attributed to “private security consultancy.” During that gap, a private military contractor called ‘Pallas Group’ had been active in several geopolitical grey zones. Pallas Group was a subsidiary, three layers down, of a holding company recently linked to the Macau shell corporation they’d traced from Singapore.

Sabatine leaned back, a cold certainty settling in his gut. It wasn’t Finch giving up targets based on boardroom presentations. It was Croft, the security director, the man tasked with protecting the assets. He would have the blueprints, the schedules, the vulnerability assessments. He would know which projects Anton was most invested in because he was paid to know their weak points. And his ‘private consultancy’ gap was a pipeline straight to Silas.

He didn’t say anything yet. He needed Finch’s confession to confirm it.

At 7:58 a.m., Alistair Finch was shown in. He looked like he hadn’t slept, his patrician facade cracked, his eyes bloodshot. He didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Anton. Shanghai is a tragedy. A devastating blow. How can Operations assist?”

Anton didn’t offer a seat. He stood behind his desk, a monument of cold fury. “You can assist, Alistair, by telling me why you recommended a security firm for a project so sensitive that its compromise would now point directly back to your treason.”

Finch blanched. “Aegis Solutions? They came highly recommended! Their work in Dubai was impeccable! I had no idea—”

“You had every idea!” Anton’s voice cracked like a whip, but it was controlled, a scalpel, not a bludgeon. “Because the burning of Warehouse Seven wasn’t a random accident. It was a surgical strike on a project I designed, using access you facilitated. Now, you will tell me who else you fed to your masters. Who is the inside pair of eyes? Lin Feng? Croft? Or have you turned someone even closer?”

Sabatine watched from the shadows by the window, seeing the panic truly seize Finch. This was beyond the fear of prison. This was the fear of being the fall guy for an operation that had just escalated to arson on an international scale.

“I… I don’t know anything about Shanghai!” Finch sputtered, his hands shaking. “I gave them broad strokes, Anton! Market expansions, acquisition targets! Not… not warehouses! That’s too granular! That would require someone with real-time, on-the-ground access!”

Real-time, on-the-ground access.

Sabatine’s suspicion hardened to certainty.

Anton saw it too. He leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk. “Give me a name, Alistair. Or I will not send you to prison. I will send you to Shanghai, to explain to the Chinese authorities, and to the families of the two night watchmen who didn’t make it out, exactly how the ‘electrical fault’ was arranged.”

It was a bluff. They had no evidence Finch knew about the casualties. But the guilt and terror on Finch’s face confirmed he hadn’t known, and the horror of it broke him.

“Croft!” he gasped, slumping as if the word had punctured him. “Viktor Croft. He was the pipeline for the… the physical side. He had a history with Pallas. He filtered the sensitive projects. I just… I just confirmed which ones you were emotionally invested in.”

There it was. The personal, weaponized.

Anton straightened, his face a mask of icy triumph and profound disgust. “Get out of my sight. You are now on administrative leave. You will speak to no one. You will wait for my instructions. Your continued freedom hinges on your silence and your obedience. Now. Get. Out.”

Finch stumbled from the room, a broken man.

When the door closed, Anton let out a long, shaky breath. He looked at Sabatine. “Croft.”

Sabatine nodded. “We have the mole. And we know the method. Now we use the bait they’ve left us.”

“The bait?”

“Shanghai was a message,” Sabatine said, a hunter’s glint in his eye. “They’ve shown us they can hit your personal projects. So we give them another one. One we control. One with Viktor Croft all over its security plans. And we wait for them to take the shot.”

The burning warehouse was a tragedy and a declaration of war. But in its ashes, Sabatine saw the first clear blueprint of the enemy’s heart. And for a man who had spent his life in the shadows, a blueprint was all he needed to start drafting a counter-attack. The war had just gotten personal. And for the first time, they had a name for the enemy within.

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