Chapter 133: The Ghost’s Gambit

The revelation of Roland’s betrayal was a tectonic shift, altering the entire landscape of the war. Anton had moved from playing defense to planning a multi-pronged, simultaneous annihilation of every node in the conspiracy. The plans were intricate, brutal, and final. Sabatine, from his hidden perch, was coordinating the digital assault on Thorne’s financial networks, while Anton prepared the legal and corporate guillotines for Li and, through her, Thorne.

Roland, the distant architect, was to be the last piece. A quiet, devastating exposé sent to every major financial regulator and newspaper in the world, using the very cipher he’d created as proof of his long game. They would destroy his reputation, his legacy, and see him extradited to face a maze of charges.

They had anticipated desperation from Li, maybe even a violent last stand from Thorne’s hired tools. They had not anticipated the move from the ghost in Provence.

The attack came not as a bullet or a breach, but as a data dump of such staggering, plausible malevolence that it stole the breath from their lungs.

It arrived on a Thursday morning, not in Anton’s inbox, but in the public domain. A notorious, fringe transparency collective—often a front for state-level disinformation campaigns—published a trove of documents. The headline was a digital scream: ROGERS INDUSTRIES CEO ORCHESTRATED GLOBAL MARKET MANIPULATION, FALSIFIED AI PROTOTYPE.

The documents were a masterpiece of forgery. They contained fabricated email chains between Anton and a shadowy network of hedge fund managers, discussing coordinated short-selling attacks on rival companies coinciding with the “unfortunate” sabotages of his own assets. There were doctored financial statements showing illicit funds flowing from Rogers accounts to offshore entities linked to the very private military contractor Croft worked for. Most damning of all were technical schematics and lab reports “proving” the Aegis prototype was not stolen, but had never worked—a fraudulent product Anton had created to tank his own stock for insurance purposes and to smear his rivals.

Every detail was crafted to exploit a known vulnerability or a past event. The timing of the “market manipulations” aligned perfectly with the Rotterdam and Shanghai incidents. The technical flaws shown in the Aegis schematics were plausible, referencing real engineering challenges the real prototype had faced. The language in the emails was a chilling parody of Anton’s own clipped, strategic tone.

It was expertly crafted. And it was terrifying.

The effect was instantaneous and volcanic. Rogers Industries stock went into freefall, triggering automated trading halts. News channels shifted from business analysis to scandal-mode. The Swiss authorities, already wary from the earlier disruptions, announced a formal inquiry. The board’s private lines to Anton began ringing off the hook, voices thick with panic and betrayal.

In the penthouse, Anton stood before a wall of screens, each showing a different facet of the unfolding catastrophe. His face was pale, but his eyes were burning coals. He wasn’t watching his empire crumble; he was reverse-engineering the attack.

“It’s Roland,” he said to Sabatine over their now-permanently-open secure line. His voice was a study in controlled fury. “This is his counterstrike. He’s using his knowledge of my operations, of every crisis point, to build a narrative where I’m the architect of my own downfall. He’s not just defending himself; he’s trying to erase me completely, to make himself the whistleblower who tried to stop a madman.”

Sabatine was already deep in the data, his fingers flying across a keyboard in a different part of the city. “The forgeries are near-perfect. The digital signatures on the emails… they’re using a leaked key from our Singapore server breach. The financial trails are built on the real shell companies Thorne used. He’s weaving our truth into his lie. It’s genius. And it’s going to be impossible to disprove quickly.”

“We don’t have to disprove it all,” Anton said, his mind racing ahead of the chaos. “We have to discredit the source. We have to prove this” —he gestured at the screaming news tickers— “is part of the same conspiracy. We have to connect this data dump to Roland.”

“How?” Sabatine asked, the pressure evident in his voice. “He’ll have used cut-outs, proxies. The transparency collective is a dead end.”

“The cipher,” Anton said, the idea striking him with the force of a lightning bolt. “He built his forgeries on our reality. He would have had to authenticate his own fabrication work. To keep it consistent with his pattern. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. Look for it. In the metadata of the forged documents, in the timing of the dump. There will be a module. A ghost of his own signature.”

It was a desperate, slender hope. But it was all they had.

Sabatine redirected his efforts, no longer trying to debunk the forgeries line by line, but hunting for the enemy’s own operational fingerprint. He parsed the published data packet, looking for anomalies in timestamps, in file structures, in the encoded information hidden in digital margins.

For an hour, there was nothing. The world outside the penthouse was descending into bedlam. Anton’s lawyers were on the line, advising a public statement of vehement denial. Jessica was managing a mutinous board.

Then, Sabatine found it.

Buried in the code of a fabricated PDF—a falsified internal audit report—was a string of numbers in the document properties that didn’t belong. It was a version identifier, but it followed the familiar alphanumeric structure: P88-C33-R77.

R77.

The module from Roland’s old office. The authenticator for the Cerberus acquisition.

His hands shook as he isolated it. Roland, in his meticulous, arrogant need for consistency, had signed his own forgery with the ghost of his first betrayal. He had left his fingerprint on the weapon meant to destroy Anton.

“I have it,” Sabatine breathed into the line. “Module R77. It’s in the forged audit report. It’s his tag. He authenticated his own lie with the key from his old office.”

Anton felt a surge of savage triumph amidst the ruin. “That’s the crack. We don’t need to prove every email is fake. We just need to prove that this data dump is part of the conspiracy led by the man who used that cipher. We tie Roland to the forgeries, and the whole narrative collapses.”

“We need to publish it,” Sabatine said. “Now. Before the narrative sets.”

“Not us,” Anton said, a ruthless plan forming. “We feed it to someone else. Someone with credibility who hates Roland.”

He knew exactly who. A financial journalist, a pit-bull named Chloe Mendez, whom Roland had publicly humiliated years ago in a libel suit that had ruined her early career. She had a vendetta and a platform. And she would relish tearing him apart.

Anton placed a call, not through official channels, but through a back-channel number Leon provided. He spoke to Mendez for three minutes, giving her the cipher key, the location of the R77 tag, and the evidence linking it to Roland’s historic office. He didn’t ask for favours; he gave her the story of a lifetime.

An hour later, as the markets reeled and the board threatened to convene an emergency session to vote him out, Chloe Mendez published her article. The headline was a surgical strike: ROGERS ‘SCANDAL’ DATA BEARS MARK OF HISTORIC CORPORATE TRAITOR, EXPERT ANALYSIS REVEALS.

The article didn’t try to defend Anton. It simply laid out the forensic evidence: the unique cipher, its historical link to operations overseen by Alistair Roland, and its presence in the newly leaked forgeries. It quoted anonymous cybersecurity experts (Sabatine and Leon) calling it an “unmistakable digital fingerprint.” It painted Roland not as a retired elder, but as a vengeful ghost orchestrating a smear campaign from the grave of his old career.

The effect was not exoneration, but chaos redoubled. Now there were two competing, mutually exclusive narratives screaming from the headlines. The story was no longer “Rogers Guilty”; it was “Who is Lying? A Byzantine Corporate War Erupts into Public View.”

It was enough. Enough to stall the collapse. Enough to give the regulators pause. Enough to make the board hesitate before committing fratricide.

Roland’s counterstrike had been brilliant and terrifying. But in his arrogance, in his lifelong habit of authenticating his work, he had left a single, fatal flaw. The ghost had gambled, using the tools of his past. And Anton, with Sabatine’s eyes in the dark, had found the hidden mark on the blade. The war was now fully public, uglier than ever, but the enemy architect was finally, undeniably, in the crosshairs.

—--