Chapter 164. A Dangerous Plan

London in the rain was a bruise-coloured smear from the air. They landed at a private military airfield outside the city, bypassing all commercial channels. Leon had a convoy waiting—not the sleek black cars of corporate royalty, but modified, armoured SUVs with smoked glass and run-flat tires. The drive to the new command post was a circuitous, paranoid route through industrial estates and forgotten service roads.

The "war room" was not in the city's glittering core. Jessica had secured a decommissioned, fortified Bank of England bullion storage facility in the Docklands, a relic of a more physical era of wealth. It was a bunker of reinforced concrete and cold steel, accessible only through a series of biometric and physical locks. The air inside was still and dry, smelling of old metal and ozone from the banks of new servers lining one wall.

Cho’s family was still missing. The financial haemorrhage continued, a silent, digital scream on the monitors. The board was in perpetual, panicked session, their votes now a formality awaiting the inevitable collapse. Time was a luxury they’d spent.

In the centre of the bunker, under the stark glow of industrial LEDs, Anton, Sabatine, Jessica, and Leon stood around a tactical table. Digital maps and financial flow charts glowed on its surface, a depiction of an empire in its death throes.

“Standard defences are useless,” Sabatine said, his voice echoing faintly in the cavernous space. He pointed to the cascading numbers representing the draining accounts. “They’re inside the walls. They have the keys. We can’t out-run the transfers. We can’t plead with the banks fast enough. Cho is compromised, and any other executive could be next. We’re playing a defensive game on a board they’ve already taken.”

Anton’s face was etched with a cold, clean fury. “So we stop playing defence. We give them a new target. Something so big, so tempting, it makes pilfering liquidity reserves look like picking pockets.”

Sabatine met his gaze. “We make them greedy. We make them overreach.”

Jessica frowned. “What target could possibly be bigger than bankrupting Rogers Industries?”

“The thing that comes after,” Sabatine said. He tapped the table, pulling up a global map. “Roland Cross isn’t just a mouthpiece. He’s a broker. He trades in influence and information. His clients at Volkov, and whoever else he’s fronting for, don’t just want you broke, Anton. They want what you have—the global infrastructure, the client list, the tech IP. They want to inherit the empire, not just bury it. So we dangle the keys to the kingdom.”

He zoomed the map in on a region—Southeast Asia, a tangle of emerging markets and ambitious tech hubs. “We create a phantom. A secret, global acquisition plan. ‘Project Chimera.’ A hostile takeover bid, orchestrated by you, Anton, to merge Rogers Industries with three major Asian semiconductor and data farm conglomerates. A deal worth… two hundred billion. A deal that would create a digital sovereign entity, a private tech superpower.”

Leon let out a low whistle. Jessica’s eyes widened. “That’s not just bait, that’s a whole whale.”

“It has to be,” Sabatine said. “It has to be audacious enough to explain why you’d be liquidating your own reserves—to fund the clandestine first-stage purchases. It has to be secret enough that only someone with Cross’s level of access would believe they’ve uncovered the crown jewel of insider information. We feed it to him. Through a backchannel he thinks he owns.”

Anton was staring at the map, his mind racing ahead. “We seed falsified board minutes. Encrypted communications between me and fictitious advisors in Singapore and Taipei. Shell company purchase agreements. A whole shadow narrative of the deal of the century, hidden beneath the public collapse.”

“Exactly,” Sabatine said. “We make it the most valuable secret in the world. And we make sure Roland Cross ‘discovers’ it.”

“It’s brilliant,” Jessica admitted, her legal mind already grappling with the implications. “And it’s borderline illegal. Fabricating financial documents, conspiracy to commit market manipulation… if this gets traced back to us, it’s not just the company that falls. It's a prison.”

“The documents won’t be traceable,” Sabatine said. “They’ll exist only in the digital pockets we let Cross pick. They’ll be phantoms. And the ‘manipulation’ is aimed at criminals who are already engaged in kidnapping and grand theft. It’s a counter-intelligence sting.”

“A sting with no official backing,” Leon rumbled. “If it goes wrong, we’re rogue actors. Terrorists in the financial markets.”

“We already are, in their eyes,” Anton said quietly. He looked from the draining accounts back to Sabatine’s determined face. The risk was astronomical. But the alternative was a slow, guaranteed death. “What’s the endgame? Cross gets the ‘intel.’ Then what?”

“Then he does what he always does,” Sabatine said. “He monetizes it. He’ll take it to his Volkov masters. But a deal this big… they can’t act on it alone. They’ll need to move vast sums, make contact with the fictitious sellers, verify the intel. They’ll have to come out of the shadows and onto a digital battlefield we have wired. When they move their money to position themselves to intercept ‘Project Chimera,’ we’ll be waiting. We’ll capture the transaction chains, identify the ultimate beneficiaries, and we’ll have undeniable proof of their conspiracy and their connection to Cross. We’ll also,” he added, a grim smile touching his lips, “be able to redirect or freeze those funds. Use their own war chest to replenish what they stole from you.”

It was a dizzying, high-wire act of fraud and counter-fraud. A hall of mirrors built to trap the architects of the original lies.

The silence in the bunker was profound. The hum of the servers was the sound of the future being calculated.

“It could work,” Anton said finally, the words a commitment. “If the fabrication is flawless. If the channel to Cross is perfectly controlled. If they bite.”

“They’ll bite,” Sabatine said with cold certainty. “Greed is a more reliable motivator than fear. And this is the biggest score of their lives.”

Jessica massaged her temples. “The legal risk…”

“Is mine to bear,” Anton cut in. “Sabatine and I will be the architects. You and Leon maintain operational distance. If this collapses, you can claim ignorance.”

“That’s not how this works anymore,” Sabatine said, his gaze locking with Anton’s. “We’re in this together. All the way. No fall guys. If the wall falls, it falls on all of us.”

The declaration hung in the air. It was the final, irrevocable step past employer and employee, past client and protector. They were co-conspirators in every sense, their fates legally and morally welded together.

Anton held his gaze, a flicker of that terrifying, beautiful pride in his eyes. He gave a single, sharp nod. “Then we build the phantom. Jessica, you’ll need to ghost-write the board minutes with just the right mix of strategic genius and desperate arrogance. Leon, we’ll need a secure, ‘compromised’ channel—a server belonging to one of Evelyn’s old, un-sanitized contacts that Cross’s people would logically uncover.”

He turned back to Sabatine. “And you… you’ll have to become a ghostwriter of a different kind. You’ll have to think like me, write like me, dream this insane deal like I would. Can you do that?”

Sabatine’s answer was simple. “I’ve been inside your head for weeks, Anton. I know what you think. I know what you want. I’ll build you a masterpiece.”

For the next 36 hours, the bunker became a forge for a magnificent lie. Sabatine and Anton worked in a locked side-room, their minds merging in a way that felt more intimate than any physical act. Sabatine would propose a strategic rationale for acquiring a Vietnamese data farm conglomerate; Anton would refine it, adding the financial nuance, the geopolitical angle. Anton would draft a terse, coded message to a fictitious Singaporean intermediary; Sabatine would layer in the operational security concerns, the paranoia of a man conducting the deal of his life under the world’s hostile gaze.

They built ‘Project Chimera’ from the ground up—a dragon made of light and greed. It was a work of dark art, a fictional empire more compelling than the real one that was crumbling.

Jessica, with a novelist’s eye for corporate drama, crafted the board minutes, the tension-filled debates, the clandestine votes. Leon, with Rico Nadir’s help, constructed the digital honey-pot—a server in Macau that had once been part of Evelyn’s shadow network, now carefully “left vulnerable” with a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Chimera files.

When it was done, they stood back and looked at their creation glowing on the screens. It was audacious. It was terrifyingly plausible. It was a trap woven from the very silk of Anton’s ambition and the steel of Sabatine’s cunning.

“Now,” Anton said, his voice hushed with a kind of reverent dread, “we release the phantom.”

Sabatine executed the final sequence, planting the data in the Macau server and subtly alerting the monitoring algorithms he knew Cross’s people used. A digital bell, ringing in a silent room.

He looked at Anton. The man’s eyes were alight not with fear, but with the fierce thrill of the ultimate gamble. They had just crossed a line from which there was no return. They were no longer just fighting for survival.

They were playing the game at its highest, most dangerous level. And they were playing it together.

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