Chapter 12: Lines Crossed

The Gulfstream pierced the cloud cover, out of the gloomy, dawn-before-the-dawn filth of London into an existence of endless, blinding sun. Here, aloft, the world simplified itself into two elements: burning white and infinite blue. Within the cabin, though, the air was still complex and tense, an internal system of unspoken questions and fluid allegiances.

Anton sat still, hands folded together under his chin, watching the clouds fly by like a time-lapse of his own weakening faith. The initial, gut-busting shock of Marcus's betrayal was ebbing away, becoming cold and obsessively fixated. But below that, a more cunning distrust wriggled. How did Sabatine—Sabe—find this thread when his entire multi-billion-dollar security system had picked up nothing?

He moved his head. Sabe was resting, but he wasn't relaxing. His eyes were shut, his breathing steady, but Anton could sense the tension in the line of his jaw, the tremble in his resting fingers. He was running through scenarios, considering contingencies. He was a weapon, coiled and ready. And Anton, for the first time, acutely aware, realized that he didn't fully understand the role of his own weapon.

"Mmmh?" Anton's tone came across over the whine of the jets' engines, lower than he intended.

Sabe's eyes opened. They were the colour of a stormy sea, and inscrutable. "The login signature? I said. They reused a code module."

No, Anton leaned forward, elbows on knees. The movement was deliberately intrusive, spanning the physical distance between their seats. "Not the 'what.' The 'how.' My entire cyber-division, with gear and budgets beyond your wildest dreams, spent a week burrowing through our systems. They came up empty. You, alone, in my penthouse, with one laptop, found a ghost in three days. How?

Sabe watched me for a moment, then turned away, out into the sun-bathed oblivion. "It's not the tools. It's the method. Your people are looking for intrusions. I am looking for the story the system is trying to hide."

"That is a philosophical bumper sticker, Sabe. Not a response." Anton's tone became razor-edged, the CEO who demanded minute detail returning. "I must have the information. I must have the man's methodology. I'm entrusting my life and my business into his care."

The words hung there, the raw admission of the stakes. I'm trusting you. It was a challenge and a plea.

Sabe looked away from him, his face closing up. The flash of vulnerability in the car was gone, replaced by the shut-down mask of the operative. "The technique is mine. The details are. proprietary."

A rush of angry, irrational anger coursed through Anton. All this, and this resistance was a fresh betrayal. "Proprietary?" You are my client. I am paying you a fortune. There is no 'proprietary' here. Not now."

There always is," Sabe answered, his voice low but firm. "Especially now. The less you know of me. sources and methods, the cleaner your hands stay. Plausible deniability isn't a doctrine of law, Anton. It's an act of survival.".

Don't analyze it for me," Anton snarled, his temper thinning. "This is my survival we're discussing. My brother is trying to kill me; I have to know what I'm dealing with; with him; and with you." He gestured indistinctly at Sabe's laptop. "Did you hack into a sovereign database? Use some hidden backdoor the intel community doesn't know about? What limits did you push to locate that trace?" 

Sabe's jaw set. "The ones required.".

"Not good enough!" Anton's voice burst out, ringing in the tiny cabin. The flight attendant, who had been quietly making coffee in the galley, came to a halt for a moment before going about her duties with carefully maintained equanimity. Anton spoke softly but with venom-filled intensity. "I have spent my whole life constructing an empire on rules, on order, on knowing every variable.". You are a variable we don't know who just became the most critical.

I won't be led around.

Then maybe you hired the wrong man," Sabe snapped back, his own temper rising. "You hired someone who works in the shadows, Anton. You can't then expect them to perform under a light bulb. You demanded outcomes. You got them. The 'how' is the price you don't get to pay."

They were locked in a struggle of wills, the air between them electric with the tension of crossed wires. Anton saw the flat determination in Sabe's face. This was a hill he would die on. It wasn't professional secrecy, but something more, something deeper. A line drawn around part of himself he wouldn't share.

And with a blinding, whirling change of perspective, Anton realized it. He was doing to Sabe what the world had been doing to him all along. Demanding to be open and honest to the nth degree, demanding to open the black box and observe how it functioned, to have control. He was handling Sabe's talent, his unique and merciless effectiveness, as just another commodity to be dealt with.

The anger leaked out of him as quickly as it had come, and behind it left a strange, hollow feeling of shame. He'd judged Sabe to be a traitor based on false evidence. Now he was judging him to be untrustworthy for being too capable at the one thing he'd been hired to perform.

He leaned back in the chair, the fight gone out of him. He looked at Sabe—really looked at him. Shadows under his eyes, hunched on his shoulders, the absolute loneliness of a man who carried weights too heavy to speak. He wasn't a contractor. He was a man, battered and strong, and Anton had just tried to bludgeon away his last defenses in sheer, scared reflex.

"True enough," Anton shot back, hard and foreign on his lips. Concessions didn't come naturally to him.

Sabe blinked in shock at the sudden capitulation. "What?"

"You're right," Anton repeated, this time with more force. He waved his hand loosely, a surrender. "I paid you to do what you do, not to be like everyone else. I was telling you to trust me when the evidence was against you. Now I am asking you to lose your professional integrity to feed my need to control. It's… a bad habit of mine."

He lifted his untouched coffee, the ceramic chill on his skin. "I don't have to know how you detected the trace. I only have to know that you can repeat it. And that you're with me.

The silence that followed was different from all the others. It was not tense or angry, but loaded with a profound, unspoken understanding. Sabe regarded him, suspicion falling from his eyes until it relaxed into something like awe. He had steeled himself for a fight, for ultimatums, for selfish pride in a man who was used to getting his own way. He had not steeled himself for this—for humility. It's an old protocol," Sabe whispered, the tone low, almost a whisper. He wasn't looking at Anton anymore; he was staring at his hands, fists clenched in his lap. "From when I was signal intelligence. It was withdrawn from service, deleted from the official records. But the architecture. It's like a ghost limb. You can still feel it. The people who designed this encryption for Marcus, they're good.". But we were taught by the same texts that I was. They used a key derivation function my old system used to adore. It does have. a flavor.

A signature I recognized.

He risked a glance at Anton. “I used an exploit that was developed for that specific protocol. One that was never logged, never filed. It doesn’t exist in any database your cyber-division has access to. Using it is… a violation of about seven treaties and the terms of my discharge. If anyone knew I’d used it, even on your behalf, I’d spend the rest of my life in a black-site prison.”

The confession came between them, cold and terrifying. He had not simply stepped across a line; he had flown over a moral and legal chasm, leaving it smoldering behind him. And he had done it for Anton.

Anton felt the weight of the gift, deep and perilous. Sabe had merely handed him something that might kill him entirely. This was not classified information; this was admission to a felony. It was the most extreme act of faith, held back until Anton had demonstrated he might be trusted not to coerce it.

"Nobody will ever know it from me," Anton promised, his voice absolute. The promise was a cornerstone, anchored between them within this chilly, floating space.

Sabe nodded once, with force, tension in his shoulders easing slightly. "Thank you."

"No," Anton answered, a strange, prickling feeling expanding in his chest, something that had been closed off for a very long time. "Thank you, Sabe."

The use of the nickname, the thanks—it acknowledged the risk, the giving. It acknowledged the man, not just the property.

The flight attendant was breaking in then, carrying a platter of fruit and pastries. The banality of the act was jarring. They accepted the food in silence, the moment of raw intimacy dissolving into a utilitarian, mutual stillness. As they dined, Anton's thoughts were not with Geneva or Marcus but with the man across from him. He pictured the story now, not in detail, but in the flesh wounds. The military discharge, the remorse, and the self-imposed self-incarceration as a PI—it all suggested a man shattered by the secrets that now chained him to silence.

He wasn't just hiding his methods; he was hiding the scarring they had caused.

"This old protocol," Anton began slowly, not looking up from his plate. "The one that got you discharged. Was that…?"

"The botched mission?" Sabe finished for him, his voice flat. He set down his fork. "Yes. We were using it to track a high-priority target. The information was bad. The house we struck. It was not him." He inhaled slowly. "There were civilians. There was a family."

He did not tell him. He did not need to. The bare horror in those three words—A family—vividly painted the fear more than any complete report could. The seriousness of that burden was the incentive for all Sabe did. It was why he was present, why he took these assignments, why he had to discover the truth. It was his penance.

And Anton, who had built his own existence as a bulwark against betrayal which was in his head, valued atonement. He had seen the dungeons men build for themselves. 

He did not offer empty words. He did not reassure her it wasn't his fault. He just sat in the shared silence, recognizing the load. It was the only comfort he could offer which would not be an insult.

When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “We’ll find him, Sabe. We’ll get the prototype back. And we’ll make it right.”

He wasn’t just talking about Marcus and the stolen AI chip. He was talking about redemption. For both of them.

Sabe looked at him, and for the first time, a true, unhidden emotion glowed in his eyes—not gratitude, not professional respect, but a faint, hesitant glimmer of hope. "I know," he replied.

The jet began to drop slowly towards Geneva. The blue outside the window grew dark, and the first sights of the snow-covered Alps were visible on the horizon. They were flying into battle, into a specter of a brother and a conspiracy that threatened to destroy everything.

And as the plane leveled its wings for its final approach, Anton Rogers felt an odd peace. The lines had been crossed. The trust that was shattered had been rebuilt with something more and yet something more naked than before—understanding. He had demanded to see the machinery inside the black box, and in refusing him, Sabe had revealed himself instead to Anton the nature of the man who piloted it.

And Anton knew, with a fearful certainty that chilled and thrilled him in equal proportions, that he would prefer to have that man by his side, with all his deadly secrets, than any quantity of open, rule-bound employees. The variable unknown had become his sole constant.

----