Chapter 167. Roland Bites

The snare was set, the bait lay glistening, and the forest held its breath. In the bunker, the air grew thick with a suspended, metallic tension. They had done all they could. The phantom ‘Chimera’ files were a banquet. Sabatine’s performance as the desperate, turncoat confidant was an engraved invitation. Now, they waited to see if the guest of honour would arrive with the appetite they predicted.

The first sign was not a roar, but a rustle. Leon’s monitoring programs, woven into the financial data streams like gossamer tripwires, picked up anomalous movement. A series of large, coordinated capital flows, originating from a network of Baltic and Cypriot banks historically linked to Volkov Consortium front operations, began pooling in a newly created investment vehicle registered in the Cayman Islands. The name of the shell corporation was ‘Prometheus Holdings.’ The irony was not lost on them.

“They’re assembling a war chest,” Leon reported, his voice a low hum in the quiet. “Three hundred million, initial tranche. Consistent with positioning for a hostile intercept of a major asset acquisition. They’re not just believing it; they’re betting on it.”

Anton stood before the main tactical screen, arms crossed, watching the numbers coalesce. A grim satisfaction hardened his features. “They see a fire sale. They think I’m so over-leveraged on ‘Chimera’ that when it collapses, I’ll be forced to surrender control of core assets at a discount to cover my personal debts. They’re positioning themselves to be the buyer of last resort.”

“Greed,” Sabatine murmured from his station, his eyes fixed on a separate feed tracking communications metadata. “It makes them predictable.”

The rustle became footsteps. Roland Cross, emboldened by his “exclusive” intelligence, went nuclear in the media. He didn’t just leak rumours; he hosted a prime-time special on a major cable network. The set was sombre, the graphics ominous. He presented “findings” from a “patriotic whistleblower” within Rogers Industries.

He didn’t reveal ‘Chimera’ outright—that was his crown jewel, to be used at the optimal moment for maximum profit and destruction. Instead, he wove a broader, more damning tapestry. He displayed doctored internal emails (forged by his own team, a fact Sabatine’s digital forensics could now trace) showing Anton authorizing technology transfers to “entities of concern.” He played new, more sophisticated audio deepfakes, this time of Anton discussing “regulatory arbitrage” and “sovereign data havens” with a synthetic Chinese accent.

But the masterstroke was the narrative shift. He pivoted from painting Anton as a mere traitor to portraying him as a would-be tech oligarch, a digital warlord building a private empire beyond the reach of nations. The personal relationship with Sabatine was framed as the cornerstone of this rogue operation—the ruthless spymaster and the lovestruck, pliable billionaire.

“This isn’t about espionage for a foreign power,” Cross intoned, his face a mask of grave revelation. “This is about the birth of a new, unaccountable power. A corporate sovereign state. Anton Rogers isn’t selling secrets; he’s building a kingdom. And he’s using Rogers Industries, a venerable pillar of our economic security, as the sacrificial foundation.”

It was brilliant, apocalyptic propaganda. It played on every modern anxiety about tech giants, data, and unchecked power. The reaction was instantaneous and seismic. Government inquiries were announced. Key institutional investors, already spooked by the liquidity drain, began issuing statements of “grave concern” and “strategic review.” Rogers Industries stock, which had been clinging to life, went into freefall, triggering automatic circuit-breakers on multiple exchanges.

In the bunker, Jessica watched the market carnage with a professional’s detached horror. “He’s not just biting the bait. He’s swallowing the hook, the line, and the rod. He’s creating the very crisis he predicted.”

“He’s overplaying his hand,” Anton said, his voice cold. The sight of his life’s work being publicly disemboweled should have felled him. But instead, a terrifying calm had settled over him. He was watching an opponent charge headlong into a trap they themselves had built. “He’s creating panic so severe that when he ‘reveals’ Chimera, the collapse will be total, and his clients can sweep in. But panic creates chaos. And chaos has loose ends.”

Sabatine was already pulling on those ends. “The capital pool in ‘Prometheus Holdings’ just increased to seven hundred million. It’s being funded by a direct wire from a Volkov-owned bank in Zurich. We have the transaction ID, the routing numbers, the authorized signatory.” He looked up, his eyes alight with the hunter’s gleam. “We have a direct, actionable financial link between the propaganda attack and the criminal consortium.”

“And the communications,” Leon added. “The metadata from the servers that hosted Cross’s ‘leaked’ emails shows uplinks from an IP block registered to a media company owned by a Volkov subsidiary. The circle is closing.”

Roland Cross, thinking he was driving Anton into a corner, was instead striding confidently across a field they had salted with forensic evidence. Every move he made—the media blitz, the capital aggregation, the forged documents—was adding another brick to the prison they were building for him.

The final, definitive bite came twenty hours later. An encrypted message, routed through the same compromised channel Sabatine had used with Cho, arrived for “the concerned party.” It was from Roland Cross’s “operational liaison.” It was terse, professional, and utterly damning.

“Verification of Package Chimera-Prime required prior to final resource commitment. Provide Section 7 (Liability Assumptions) and authenticated signature on Singapore annex. Upon confirmation, asset recovery operation for the secondary package (Cho) will be initiated.”

They were demanding the final, conclusive proof of ‘Chimera’ before moving their full financial might. And they were explicitly linking the deal to Cho’s kidnapped family—“asset recovery.” It was a smoking gun, connecting the financial predation to the act of kidnapping.

Anton read the message on the screen, his lips thinning into a blade’s edge. “They want my signature. They want to see me personally condemned by my own hand.”

“We’ll give it to them,” Sabatine said. He had already prepared the final forgeries—the ‘Liability Assumptions’ page, a document of terrifying personal financial risk, and the ‘Singapore annex,’ a map of the illicit deal’s architecture. Anton’s signature, replicated from a thousand scanned documents with inhuman precision, was already in place.

But more importantly, the files were riddled with the digital equivalent of radioactive dye. Unique cryptographic markers, undetectable to the recipient, that would tag any system that opened them, broadcasting a location beacon and a forensic signature back to the bunker.

“Send it,” Anton said, the words a death sentence.

Sabatine executed the command. The final piece of bait, the most delicious and treacherous morsel, was delivered.

The response was almost immediate. The Prometheus Holdings war chest surged to over a billion dollars. On the dark web chatter logs Nadir monitored, there was a burst of celebratory, coded Russian. The translation scrolled across a secondary screen: “The eagle has landed. The orchard is ours for the picking. Prepare the harvest.”

Roland Cross had bitten. He had committed his reputation, his network, and his clients’ vast capital to a fiction. He was all-in on a lie.

In the bunker, the mood shifted from tense anticipation to focused, grim readiness. The trap was sprung. The predator was inside the cage.

Jessica began preparing the legal avalanche: injunctions to freeze the Prometheus Holdings assets based on evidence of criminal provenance, subpoenas for Cross’s communications, Interpol red notices for the Volkov operatives identified in the financial trails.

Leon coordinated with Nadir and a trusted contact in MI6, preparing to move on the location data the tagged files would soon provide—likely the operational headquarters where Cho’s family was being held.

Anton turned to Sabatine. The artificial light cast deep shadows on his face, making him look both exhausted and invincible. “He thinks he’s cornered me. He thinks I’m in a bunker somewhere, trembling as my world ends.”

Sabatine stood, meeting his gaze. “You are in a bunker.”

A faint, dark smile touched Anton’s lips. “Yes. But I’m not trembling. I’m holding the detonator.” He reached out, his hand finding Sabatine’s shoulder, gripping it tightly. “You built a masterpiece, Sabe. A snare of pure imagination.”

Sabatine covered Anton’s hand with his own. The thrill of the hunt was there, but underneath was a colder, more profound relief. The plan, this dangerous, beautiful lie, was working. The man he loved was not broken; he was poised for a counter-strike that would be legendary.

“He took the bait,” Sabatine said softly. “Now we pull the line.”

Outside their concrete womb, Roland Cross was likely toasting his impending victory, unaware that the regulatory and financial snare was already tightening around his throat, its wires tracing back directly to the two men he had tried to destroy. The hunter had just become the hunted.

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