Chapter 132: The Mentor’s Shadow

The dinner had confirmed Maya Li’s guilt, but Anton’s instincts, now razor-sharp with paranoia, refused to settle. The cipher’s sophistication, the sheer breadth of the inside knowledge—Li was brilliant, but was she that intimate with the architecture of his father’s era? The Argentina deal, the original acquisition of the Cerberus code… those were decisions made before her time, in the twilight of his father’s reign, overseen by the old guard.

While Sabatine and his digital ghosts tightened the surveillance net around Li, preparing to catch her in the act of tampering with the Hampshire server audit, Anton turned his gaze backward. He plunged into the archived records of Rogers Industries from five, ten, fifteen years ago. He was looking for a second shadow. A guide who had been there from the beginning.

He worked through the night, the glow of the screen the only light. He cross-referenced the early financial moves of Silas’s known fronts with the board votes and executive recommendations from that era. He looked at who had championed the partnerships that had later turned toxic, who had advocated for the cost-cutting measures that had left certain security systems vulnerable.

And a name, long relegated to the background of respectful memory, began to surface. Not in damning bursts, but in a consistent, supportive pattern.

Executive Roland.

Alistair Roland. Not a board member, but a Senior Executive Vice-President. A title of immense, quiet power. He had been his father’s most trusted lieutenant, the operational mastermind behind the empire’s global logistics network for two decades. When Anton’s father died, Roland had been a steadying hand for the young, grieving CEO. He had counselled patience, strategic acquisitions, consolidation. He had been a mentor. A link to the legacy.

And he had retired, with great fanfare and a generous golden parachute, three years ago. He was now living in quiet luxury in the South of France, occasionally quoted in industry journals as a wise elder statesman.

Anton had sent him a Christmas card every year.

As he dug deeper, the pattern crystallized. Roland had been on the committee that recommended the acquisition of the small, innovative tech firm that had, in its assets, the nascent Cerberus code. He had signed off on the budget for the security overhaul that had included the now-compromised Singapore server. He had been a vocal proponent of the Argentina expansion, calling it “the future of Southern Hemisphere logistics.”

Too many connections. Too many points where the hidden knife had been placed, with the gentle, guiding hand of experience.

A cold, sick feeling settled in Anton’s gut. This wasn’t just betrayal; it was a generational curse. His father’s right hand had been planting the seeds of the company’s—and his—destruction for years, perhaps waiting for the right moment, or the right partner in Silas, to harvest.

He called Sabatine on the secure line. “Li isn’t the only one. She’s the new compass. But there was an old mapmaker.”

He laid out his findings, his voice hollow with the shock of it. “Roland. He set the board. He positioned the pieces. Li is just reading from his playbook.”

Sabatine was silent for a long moment, absorbing the scale of it. “A mentor,” he finally said, the word heavy. “It’s always worse.”

“I need confirmation,” Anton said, the plea raw in his voice. “I need to be sure. I can’t… I can’t face this ghost without being sure.”

“The cipher,” Sabatine said, his mind racing. “You said it was geographic, tied to Greymalkin. But the early attacks, the foundational ones… they were set in motion before Thorne’ country estate was the hub. There must be an older key. A prior location.”

Anton’s mind made the leap instantly. “Roland’s office. His old corner suite on the forty-fourth floor. It had a private, secure line, a direct terminal to the core mainframes. A node.”

“If he was the architect, he would have used his own seat of power as the initial authenticator,” Sabatine agreed. “Can you access the old server logs from that terminal? From before his retirement?”

“The logs were archived,” Anton said, hope and dread warring within him. “As part of a legacy data purge. But the backups… they’re in cold storage. In a vault in Switzerland.”

“We need them,” Sabatine stated. “We need to run the cipher modules from the early breaches—Argentina, the Cerberus acquisition—against the data from that terminal. If we find a match, if we find the same authenticating signal originating from his desk…”

“…then we have the architect,” Anton finished, the weight of it crushing.

It took thirty-six hours of frantic, clandestine effort. Anton used his CEO authority to authorize a “historical tax audit,” a cover story thin but sufficient to have the specific data tapes from Roland’s terminal logs retrieved from the Swiss mountain vault and couriered under armed guard to a secure data lab in London, a facility Sabatine had access to through Leon.

Sabatine worked in a sterile, white room, the only sound the hum of powerful decryption servers. He fed the old, dusty data into his algorithms, alongside the cipher modules he’d already broken. He looked for the handshake, the authenticating ping from a location that shouldn’t be involved.

And he found it.

The command that had authorized the final payment for the Cerberus code acquisition, fifteen years ago, contained a module: R77-F55-G22. Isolated, it meant nothing. But when run through the geographic cipher key, it resolved not to Greymalkin Lodge, but to the precise GPS coordinates of the Rogers Industries headquarters, floor forty-four, the southeast corner office.

Alistair Roland’s office.

The first crack wasn’t in the present; it was in the foundation. The mentor had not just betrayed him; he had poisoned the inheritance. He had built flaws into the legacy Anton had fought so desperately to protect.

When Sabatine sent the decrypted proof, a simple image of the cipher module mapped onto the building’s blueprint, Anton was in his study. He looked at the screen, at the glowing dot over the office where he’d had so many earnest, instructional meetings as a young man. He remembered Roland’s avuncular smile, his fatherly pats on the back, his advice to “trust the system, Anton. Your father and I built it to last.”

A wave of nausea hit him. He gripped the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. The betrayal was so deep it felt geological, a fault line running through the bedrock of his life.

He had been fighting shadows, fighting Thorne, fighting Li. But the true enemy, the one who had made all the others possible, had been smiling at him from a retirement villa in Provence, drinking rosé and thinking himself safe in the past.

The shock was profound, but it hardened into something colder, more absolute than any anger he’d felt before. This was no longer a corporate war. It was a reckoning. A son’s reckoning with the ghost of his father’s most trusted friend.

He picked up the secure line. His voice, when he spoke to Sabatine, was quiet, stripped of all emotion, terrifying in its finality.

“We have them all now. The architect. The banker. The compass. The weapon. We close the net. On all of them. And we start with the one who thought his retirement was a pardon.”

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