Chapter 17: The News Leak

The safe house was a void, cut off from the world. For twenty-four hours, it was outside of time. The only sounds were the gurgle of the coffee maker, the soft clicking of Sabe's fingers on his laptop as he tried to track the digital ghost of the stolen primary code, and the gentle, insistent pulse of Anton's voice on encrypted video conference calls to his board, a desperate last ditch effort to save his company from the bleeding edge of the abyss.

The silence was a fragile peace, woven from shared survival and the unspoken something that hummed between them. They moved around one another with a new, hesitatory wariness—Anton's gaze on the bandage visible from under Sabe's t-shirt, Sabe's hand lightly, automatically, brushing against Anton's when he handed him a mug.

It couldn't last.

It was Sabe who had destroyed it. He'd had one eye on news feeds on a second screen, a habit as involuntary as breathing. A Swiss finance newsletter had been the first to flash the alert. Then, minutes later, global wires had it as well. Reuters. Bloomberg. And then, naturally enough, the tabloids. 

His blood ran cold.

He clicked. A scandalous British tabloid's homepage appeared, its headline shouting in 72-point type:

INFERNO AT ROGERS INDUSTRIES: BILLIONAIRE'S 'BODYGUARD' CONNECTED TO DATA BLAZE!

Across the top of the page, a grainy close-up from the long lens had the two of them walking out through the service door of the Hôtel des Bergues, accompanied by the Swiss authorities. Anton himself was serene, superior even in chaos. Sabe, trailing behind him, was precisely the kind of thing the headline implied: a hulking, ominous one.

His own face. On a million screens.

"Anton," he told him, his voice unnaturally even, a flatline sound.

Anton, on the phone trying to calm down an hysterical major shareholder, pointed a finger. "James, you must have faith in the process. The initial reports are wildly speculative—"

"Anton," Sabe said again, the calm cracking.

Something in his tone made Anton turn. He saw the pallor of Sabe’s face, the rigid way he held himself. He ended the call abruptly. “What is it?”

Sabe turned the laptop around.

Anton’s eyes scanned the headline. His face, already drawn with fatigue, tightened into a mask of cold fury. “Ridiculous. We’ll issue a statement. My PR team will have this retracted in an hour.”

“Keep reading,” Sabe whispered.

Anton's gaze landed on the article. His lips formed silent words, tracing the so carefully penned words that sought to erase a life.

…Sabatine Stalker, 29, the veteran military intelligence officer who was dismissed in disgrace following the disastrous mission in Eastern Europe that resulted in several civilian casualties. Stalker, a 'private security consultant,' was hired by Rogers a few days prior to the horrifying fire that ravaged the crown jewel of the Rogers technology empire. Verifying that the accident has been deemed "suspicious" by officials in the Geneva fire department investigation and Stalker as being a "person of interest," the linkage between the scandal-prone serviceman and the multi-billion-dollar industrial disaster is now the target of an international investigation.

They knew his name. His age. His discharge. The mission. The one thing he wore around his neck like a shroud, the original shame of his life, on full display for the world to cluck over with their morning coffee. They'd even called him "disgraced.".

There was no leak by accident. This was an attack. Marcus and Evelyn weren't hiding out; they were fighting back. They were going to make Sabe the news headline, the perfect patsy: the volatile, violent mercenary who broke into the noble billionaire's corporation to destroy it from the inside out.

Sabe's phone in his pocket buzzed. Again. And again. Texts flooded in, a tide of vibration against his leg.

A figure he didn't know: IS IT TRUE? DID U BURN IT DOWN?

A near-forgotten, old friend from his service days: Heard about it. Jesus, man. What were you doing?

And then, the knife to the kidney one. His London landlord: Mr. Stalker. Your tenancy is being terminated instantly. The police have called. Pack up your belongings in 24 hours or they will be demolished.

His whole world was falling apart around him in real-time, brick by brick, and he was just standing there, watching.

Anton was on the phone once more, his voice a whip-crack of command. "Eleanor, I don't care if they are in bed with the King of England, I want that story dead. Sue them into the ground. And put me on the head of the Geneva police, NOW."

But Sabe wasn't listening. He pulled up a banking application on his phone. His account, where he had deposited his operating cash, was locked. A red banner blazed at him: ACCOUNT UNDER REVIEW.

Of course. They'd nail him to the "suspicious" fire, mark him as a financial felon. They were cutting him off from everything. Money. Shelter. His reputation.

Another buzz. This one was a call. The caller ID dropped his stomach into a cold chasm. It was his sister.

He'd not heard from her in over a year. His family had shunned him after the incident. The shame was too heavy for their respectable, middle-class lifestyle. He'd become the unperson, the ghost they no longer knew.

He swiped to answer, his hand shaking so vigorously that he almost dropped the phone. "L-Lena?"

The phone had not rung in months. The voice on the phone was not his sister's. It was his mother's, breaking with a pain he hadn't heard in years. "Sabatine." She never used the nickname Sabe. "The press. They're at our door. They're flashing your photo. saying these terrible things. About that. that mission. About you incendiary-s-izing a building." Her voice broke. "Is it true? Have you. Have you done something else?

The words were a punch to the gut. He leaned against the wall, sliding down into it until he was sitting on the floor, the phone pressed hard against his ear. He wished he was sick. He had brought his specter onto their doorstep once again. He had called upon his nightmare to visit them once more.

No, Mum," he was able to whisper, the word feeling odd and juvenile on his lips. "It's not true. I didn't… I would never…"

"They're saying that you're an employee of a criminal. That you're a criminal." The line trembled with her suppressed sobs. "We can't do this again, Sabatine. We can't. Your father… his heart…

The call was finished. Or he had hung up. He didn't know. The phone fell from his frozen fingers and clattered onto the cold, slick concrete floor.

He was there. Amongst the smoke and the shouting. The cordite and the shattered concrete. The weight of the small, dead body in his arms. The look on his commanding officer's face. Not anger. Sympathy. The post-hearing, metal-sounding, legalistic jargon that sanitized the horror, the final, dishonorable discharge that branded him for life.

He had toiled years to build a new life out of the ashes of the past, a solitary life of solitude spent on the way of penance. And in an instant, in one leaked news, Marcus Vale had reduced it all to ashes. He was no longer Sabatine Stalker, PI. He was the Fallen Soldier. The Arsonist. The Billionaire's Fall Guy.

He was nothing.

Anton had finished his calls. The fury was still written on his face, but when he noticed Sabe on the ground, his face transformed into one of out-and-out alarms. He crossed the room in three rapid strides and knelt beside him.

"Sabe? Look at me."

Sabe could not. His gaze was fixed on a joint in the concrete, a tiny, flawed seam in an otherwise perfect floor. A world was killing him. The walls of his self-control, so carefully constructed, had not merely cracked; they had been destroyed.

"They called my mother," he said, his voice hollow, empty. "The press found my parents.".

Anton's face dropped. He understood the significance immediately. He was aware of the outline of Sabe's background, the fractured family. This was a cruelty he hadn't even thought of.

"I will fix this," Anton vowed, his voice dark and urgent. He leaned in, his hand hovering near the base of Sabe's shoulder, unsure if the contact would be tolerated. "This is a smear campaign. It's Marcus. I will destroy him for this.".

"It doesn't matter," Sabe whispered, the battle drained out of him. "It's over. They've frozen my accounts. My landlord evicted me. My name… it's a joke. It's a headline." He finally raised his eyes to Anton, and the naked, stark pain in them was terrifying. "I have nothing. I am nothing."

"It's not true," Anton said to him, his tone not to be disputed. He took hold of Sabe's shoulders with hard hands, anchoring. "Listen. You are the man who pulled me out of a blaze. You are the most competent, the most honorable human being I have ever known. This is trash. This is nonsense."

"Not rubbish to them!" Sabe exclaimed, frantically energy coursing through him. He thrashed his hands about over the laptop. "It's the truth! It's the story! And it's the one that everybody will believe! The loopy ex-soldier who finally broke! It's a sweeter story than the truth! It's neat! It's easy!"

He was panting in ragged breaths, on the verge of hyperventilating. The memories of what had been prior to that and the devastation of what now stood were colliding, and he was shattering in the impact.

Anton did not blink. He held Sabe's shoulders, his gaze unblinking. "I do not believe the simple story," he stated, each word a hammer blow of conviction. "I believe you."

The three words fell in the midst of Sabe's devastation.

I believe you.

Not “I’ll protect you.” Not “I’ll pay you.” But the one thing that no amount of money could ever buy, the one thing he thought he’d lost forever from everyone, including himself.

I believe you.

The frantic energy left him just as quickly as it had come. The battle was lost, and a huge, exhausted emptiness was left behind. He collapsed forward, forehead against Anton's shoulder. It wasn't a hug, not really. It was a collapse. A capitulation.

Anton stiffened for an instant, jolted by the contact. Then his arms were around Sabe, holding him together as he came apart. He could sense the fragile quivers that ran through Sabe's frame, the unsaid, shuddering convulsions of his universe disintegrating.

They stayed this way for hours, on the floor of the simple safe house. The billionaire in his ripped suit, holding the shattered bodyguard. The headlines continue to flash on the screen, the outside world condemning the man in his arms.

But in that frantic, silent clasp, a new deal was struck. The professional fences were down. The bargains were null. Anton Rogers, who had once indicted this man for treason, now knew one thing with a certainty that superseded the collapse of his business: Sabatine Stalker was innocent. And he would burn the world to a cinder to prove it.

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