Chapter 159. The Avalanche of Lies

The non-descript van didn’t return to the city. It wound through pre-dawn country lanes before merging onto the motorway, heading not east towards London, but west, towards the rugged, remote coast of Cornwall. Gaspard drove with a preternatural calm, the events at Stonehaven just another entry in a long log of close calls. In the back, wrapped in foil survival blankets that crinkled with every bump, Anton and Sabatine sat in a silence that was neither comfortable nor charged, but hollowed out by shared shock.

They had escaped with their lives, but the sanctity of safety was obliterated. The country estate—a place of history, of privacy, of legacy—had been violated with tactical precision. It was a message more potent than any drone strike: There is no sanctuary.

Leon, communicating via a secure satellite link, directed them to a “listening post”—a cliffside cottage owned by a shell corporation so deep even Anton had forgotten about it. It was weathered stone and salt-bleached wood, lashed by Atlantic gales. It had no smart systems, no digital footprint, just a fireplace, a radio, and a view of a raging, indifferent sea.

They arrived as a grey, stormy dawn broke over the water. The cottage was cold, musty. Sabatine built a fire while Anton stood at the window, his back to the room, watching the waves hurl themselves against the rocks below. The cut on his forehead was a dark, accusing line.

The silence stretched, filled only by the crackle of kindling and the roar of the wind. Sabatine knew what Anton was thinking. He was calculating the cost—not just of the breached perimeter, but of the new, permanent reality. The cost of loving him.

Sabatine stood, brushing sawdust from his hands. “Coffee,” he said, his voice rough from the cold and disuse.

Anton didn’t turn. “They’ll come here eventually. If they’re this determined, they’ll trace the shell, the purchase. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Then we have until then to plan,” Sabatine said, moving to the small kitchen area. “The honeypot didn’t work. They’re not interested in subtle weaknesses. They want a spectacle. A public burn.”

“They want me broken,” Anton corrected, finally turning. His face was gaunt in the weak light. “And you are the lever.”

Before Sabatine could answer, the ancient, battery-powered radio on the mantle, tuned to the BBC World Service, crackled to life. The morning news bulletin began. The lead story wasn’t the mysterious explosion at a Cotswolds estate. It was financial.

“…in a stunning new development in the Rogers Industries saga, a series of audio recordings have been provided to this network, allegedly featuring the voice of CEO Anton Rogers in conversation with known figures from the sanctioned Volkov Consortium. In the recordings, Mr. Rogers appears to be negotiating the sale of sensitive data and discussing methods of bypassing international trade embargoes…”

Sabatine froze, the tin of coffee in his hand forgotten.

Anton went utterly still, his eyes locked on the radio as if it were a venomous snake.

The broadcaster played a clip. The audio was scratchy, full of ambient noise, but the voice… The voice was perfect. The cadence, the slight, arrogant drawl, the very particular way Anton aspirated his ‘t’s’. It was a masterful forgery, a voice-cloning deepfake of terrifying quality.

“…the Belarus pipeline is the key. My people can make the regulatory obstacles vanish, for a ten percent consideration on the gross. The Aegis protocols can be delivered in fragments, as discussed, to avoid detection…”

It was Anton’s voice selling out everything he’d built, everything he was. The lies were specific, damning, and woven with just enough insider jargon to sound plausible to the untrained ear.

The bulletin continued, a detached voice listing the ramifications: the London Stock Exchange had again halted trading in RI shares. The UK government was issuing a statement. Interpol was “re-evaluating” its cooperation.

It was an avalanche. A torrent of fabricated guilt designed to bury him alive.

The radio cut to a live press conference. Roland Cross, again. His tone was no longer that of a concerned patriot, but of a sorrowful judge passing sentence. “These recordings, if verified, paint a picture of betrayal that is both profound and heartbreaking. It suggests the entire Geneva episode was not a heroic defence, but a ruthless consolidation of power and profit. The personal relationship with Mr. Stalker now appears in an even more sinister light—a potential conduit for this illicit exchange. We must ask: who is really pulling the strings?”

Sabatine smashed the power button on the radio, silencing the stream of poison. The sudden quiet was deafening.

He looked at Anton.

Anton hadn’t moved. He was staring at the spot where the voice had emanated, his face a mask of utter, devastated stillness. But his eyes… his eyes were ruined. The icy blue was clouded, not with rage, but with a deep, drowning despair. It was the look of a man watching his life’s work—not just the company, but his name, his father’s name, the very meaning of his struggle—being erased in real-time by a flawless lie.

He had faced financial ruin, armed assault, betrayal. But this… this was different. This was the destruction of his narrative, his truth. They were making him the villain of his own story.

“They’re… they’re using my own voice,” he whispered, the words barely audible over the wind and fire. He sounded lost. A boy in the ruins of his own castle.

Sabatine crossed the room in two strides. He didn’t offer platitudes. He didn’t say ‘it will be okay.’ He took Anton’s face in his hands, forcing him to look away from the dead radio, to look at him.

“Listen to me,” Sabatine said, his voice low and fierce, a lifeline thrown into the abyss he saw in Anton’s eyes. “That is not you. It’s a recording. A file. Ones and zeros arranged to sound like you. It’s a thing. It has no heart. It has no memory of your father’s face. It has never stood in your library. It is not you.”

Anton’s gaze clung to his, a drowning man finding a rock. “The world will believe it,” he breathed. “It’s too perfect. They’ll want to believe it. The fallen billionaire… it’s a better story.”

“Then we give them a better one,” Sabatine insisted, his thumbs stroking Anton’s cold cheeks. “We don’t fight the lie. We prove it’s a lie. Forensically. Digitally. We take that audio file apart frame by frame. Every deepfake has a digital fingerprint, an artefact, a rhythm that isn’t quite human. We found it. We expose it. We show them the wires.”

He could see the monumental weight of it pressing down on Anton—the exhaustion, the betrayal, the sheer scale of the malice arrayed against him. For a man who valued control above all, this loss of his very voice was the ultimate violation.

“I’m so tired, Sabe,” Anton admitted, the confession a fracture in his armour so profound it made Sabatine’s heart clench. “I’m tired of building walls just to watch them be torn down. I’m tired of fighting ghosts who can become my own voice.”

Sabatine pulled him closer, until their foreheads touched. He could feel the fine tremor running through Anton’s body. “Then rest,” he whispered. “For one hour. Let me carry it. Let me be the wall. You built an empire. Let me be your fortress. Just for now.”

He felt Anton’s breath hitch. Then, a slow, shuddering collapse as the iron will finally, momentarily, bend. Anton’s head dropped to Sabatine’s shoulder, his body leaning into him, not in passion, but in absolute, surrendered need. He was letting Sabatine hold him up.

Sabatine wrapped his arms around him, holding him tight there in the cold cottage, with the fake voice of his betrayal still echoing in the air and the real, living truth of him shaking in his arms. He looked over Anton’s shoulder at the wild, untamable sea. The despair in Anton’s eyes had mirrored his own from the terrace, but now the roles were reversed. This was his vow to answer.

The avalanche of lies was tumbling down the mountain. But Sabatine Stalker was no longer a ghost to be buried. He was a man, standing with the man he loved, and he had spent his life digging for truth in deeper graves than this.

“We’ll start with the audio,” he murmured into Anton’s hair, his mind already plotting, dissecting, hunting. “We’ll find the seam. And then, my love, we will tear the whole fucking lie apart with our bare hands.”

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