Chapter 129: The Narrowing Circle

The single, deciphered coordinate was a seismic shock to Anton’s world. Greymalkin Lodge. The Thorne family estate. Not just a beneficiary’s address, but the geographic heart of the cipher, the authenticating hub for the entire conspiracy. Sabatine’s message was a lance of light, piercing the fog of betrayal and illuminating its cold, calculating centre.

Anton stood in his study, the city’s night-time glitter a mockery beyond the glass. The Kijani withdrawal, the public humiliation, the two-billion-dollar price—it had all been a feint, a painful piece of theatre to buy Sabatine time and the enemy a false sense of security. And it worked. Sabatine had delivered the knife.

But the cipher revealed a deeper, more intimate truth. The attacks weren’t just coordinated by Thorne; they were authenticated through a system that used his home as a lodestone. This wasn’t the work of a disgruntled board member seeking advantage. This was the meticulous, patient work of someone who knew Anton’s empire from the inside, with a depth that went beyond board reports. Someone who could identify not just corporate vulnerabilities, but personal ones—the projects Anton was emotionally invested in, the security protocols he personally designed, the very location of his most secure servers (B01).

Finch had been a tool, a pipe-layer. Croft was a weapon, a trigger-puller. Thorne was the architect, the banker, the figurehead. But there was another. A guide. A compass pointing the architect to the most tender, most destructive targets.

Someone from his closest circle.

The realization was a cold poison in his veins. He had been looking for external enemies, for corrupt outsiders like Silas. He had accepted the betrayal of a distant father-figure like Thorne. But this… this was a violation of a different order.

He walked to the war room table, now cleared of Sabatine’s ghost-making tools. In their place, he placed three personnel files. Not digital, but physical dossiers printed on heavy, cream paper. He needed to touch them, to see the names in ink, to make the treason real.

Three executives. The only three people aside from Jessica and Sabatine who had the access, the insight, and the proximity to be the compass.

Eleanor Vance, Chief Technology Officer. Brilliant, mercurial, fiercely possessive of her digital domains. She had designed the architecture for the new, post-Geneva security protocols. She had overseen the integration of the compromised Singapore server. She had personally advised Anton on the vulnerabilities of the Shanghai warehouse digital locks. She had the knowledge to identify B01 as the crown jewel. Motive? Resentment? Anton had passed her over for the COO role years ago, giving it to Finch. She had never openly complained, but the ambition had been there, banked. Could Silas have promised her the kingdom after the coup?

David Vartan, Head of Strategic Acquisitions. Smooth, charming, a deal-maker without peer. He had championed the Argentina expansion. He had been the lead on the Kijani bid, his reputation tied to its success. He had also, Anton recalled with a chill, been the one to first introduce the boutique security firm Aegis Solutions (the one that failed in Shanghai) into the company’s vendor list. He moved in the same glittering, international circles as Silas. Motive? Greed, pure and simple. Or perhaps a more personal slight—Vartan had been his father’s protégé before Anton took over. Had he never accepted the son’s authority?

Maya Li, General Counsel. Steely, unflappable, the keeper of all corporate secrets. She had drafted the shareholder agreements that gave Thorne his power. She had navigated the legal minefield after Evelyn’s fall. She had access to every sensitive document, every hidden liability, including the early, buried reports on the ‘Cerberus’ code acquisition. She would have known exactly how to weaponize Sabatine’s past. Motive? Ideology? A belief that Anton was destroying his father’s legacy with his reckless, personal projects? Or had Silas simply bought her, the one person who could legally bury them all?

Three faces stared up from the dossiers. Three people he saw weekly, trusted with billions, with his strategic vision, with the legal integrity of his name. One of them was a traitor. A guide who had led the wolf to every lamb in his pasture.

He thought of the attacks. Argentina—Vartan’s project. Shanghai—Vance’s security architecture. The Kijani ultimatum—leverage against Sabatine, whose past Li would have known in detail. The pattern fits each of them.

He needed to move, but he couldn’t spook the compass. A wrong accusation would send the whole conspiracy to ground. He needed proof as undeniable as the Greymalkin cipher.

His secure line chimed—a priority channel. It was Sabatine, using a one-time voice scrambler. The connection was brittle, layered with static.

“The cipher is a routing protocol,” Sabatine’s voice came through, stripped of tone by the encryption. “Each attack module was authenticated by a signal bounced through a physical location. Greymalkin is the primary. But there are secondaries. Waypoints. You need to find the one inside your walls. The one that authenticated the internal breaches—the Singapore server, the B01 access.”

“I have three candidates,” Anton said, his voice low. “Vance, Vartan, Li.”

A pause, filled with digital hiss. “The cipher modules for the internal breaches… run them through the geographic key I sent. It won’t give you a name, but it might give you a pattern. A location they frequent. A place where they feel safe.”

Anton immediately called up the deciphered codes for the Singapore and B01 compromises. He mapped their coordinates. Singapore resolved to a server farm, as expected. But B01… the coordinates were fuzzier, less precise. They pointed to a broad area in Mayfair.

He cross-referenced the Mayfair coordinates with the known addresses and habits of his three suspects.

Eleanor Vance lived in Shoreditch, worked in the tech hub in Canary Wharf. She rarely went to Mayfair.

David Vartan had a pied-à-terre in Mayfair. He was a member of two clubs there.

Maya Li… her profile showed no Mayfair connection. But her husband was a partner at a hedge fund headquartered in Mayfair. She was known to meet him for lunch at a discreet members-only restaurant on a specific street. The street that sat at the centre of the fuzzy coordinates for the B01 breach.

His blood went cold.

Maya Li.

The lawyer. The keeper of secrets. Meeting her husband for lunch in Mayfair, a stone’s throw from a signal waypoint used to authenticate the deepest penetration into his company’s heart. It was circumstantial, but it was a thread. And it led to her.

He thought of her calm, analytical face in board meetings, her careful wording that had subtly steered him away from investigating certain avenues after Evelyn’s arrest. Her insistence on “containment” and “reputational management.” He had seen it as prudent lawyering. Now, it looked like a cover-up.

“It’s Li,” he said into the secure line, the certainty settling into a hard, dark stone in his gut.

Sabatine was silent for a moment. “The compass,” he finally said. “She points them to the targets. She knows where all the bodies are buried because she helped dig the graves. She’s the insider who made it personal.”

“We have to be sure,” Anton said, though he already was. “Absolutely sure.”

“Then we make her point one more time,” Sabatine’s voice crackled. “We create a new target. Something only she would know is precious to you. Something you haven’t told the board, haven’t filed anywhere. We leak it to her, and only her, through a channel she thinks is secure. And we watch where she points the wolf.”

It was a dangerous gambit. They would be offering bait on a hook, with their own hands.

“What target?” Anton asked.

Sabatine’s answer, when it came, was simple, devastating, and perfect. “The renovation plans for your mother’s old music room in the Hampshire house. The one you told me about. The project you’ve kept private, for yourself.”

Anton closed his eyes. Of course. The one purely personal, sentimental project he had in the world. The one thing that had no corporate value, only value to him. If Li was the compass, if she was truly intent on his personal erasure, she would not be able to resist pointing Silas and Thorne towards it. It would be the ultimate proof.

“We do it,” Anton said, opening his eyes, the decision carving itself into him. “We set the trap.”

The enemy within had a name. The narrowing circle was now a noose, and Anton would personally fit it around her neck. The betrayal from within his closest circle was the deepest cut of all, but it was also the final, fatal mistake. Because now he knew where to look. And he had a ghost in the shadows, ready to follow the compass’s needle straight to its treacherous heart.

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