Chapter 175. A Hidden Puppeteer

The garage air, thick with concrete dust and the distant, greasy smell of the bomb’s aftermath, turned to frozen nitrogen. Sabatine’s finger rested on the trigger guard, his aim unwavering on the centre mass of Eleanor Rogers-Voss. But every tactical instinct screamed that pulling the trigger would be the last mistake he ever made. The woman stood with an unnerving calm, her hands visible, yet the darkness of the van behind her felt alive, pregnant with unseen threats.

Anton was a statue beside him, his breath coming in short, ragged pulls. “Mother.” He said the word again, as if testing its reality. “The bomb… the theft… all of it?”

Eleanor’s smile was a thin, wintery thing. “You were always so single-minded, Anton. Like your father. You see a spy, you see a jealous brother, you see a greedy CFO. You never look at the tapestry. Only the threads.” She took a slow, deliberate step forward. The click of her heel echoed like a gunshot in the vast space. “Roland was a useful megaphone. Evelyn was an ambitious fool. Marcus… Well, Marcus is a child playing with matches. But they were all just brushes in the hand of the painter.”

“And you’re the painter,” Anton said, his voice hollow with a betrayal so profound it seemed to have carved him out. “You tried to destroy everything he built.”

“He built it?” Her composure cracked for a second, revealing a fissure of pure, decades-old venom. “I was the architect! The strategy, the European alliances, the political lubrication—that was me. He put his name on the door, but I built the house. And when he died, he left it all to you. His precious son. Not a share, not a seat. The whole empire. And what was my thanks? A generous allowance and a gilded exile.” Her eyes blazed. “I watched you from afar. I watched you turn his legacy into a monument to your own icy perfection. And then… you hired this.” Her disdainful flick of the wrist towards Sabatine was more violent than a shout.

Sabatine didn’t react. His mind was a hyper-clear lens, zooming past the personal drama to the tactical reality. She was stalling. Someone was moving. He could feel it—a subtle shift in the air pressure, a phantom scuff of shoe on grit. The van wasn’t empty.

“So you sold it to Volkov,” Anton said, piecing it together with a terrible, dawning clarity. “You gave them the prototype. You orchestrated the theft from inside, using Evelyn. You had Marcus poison the well. You used Roland to tear down my name. And when that failed… you tried to bury me in the rubble.”

“Volkov?” Eleanor let out a soft, chilling laugh. “Oh, Anton. You still don’t see. Volkov isn’t the patron. They’re a client. A wealthy, nasty client, yes. But they are merely one spoke.”

Her words hung in the dusty air, more terrifying than the bomb’s echo. A consortium above Volkov. A puppeteer above the puppeteer.

In Sabatine’s earpiece, a burst of static, then Leon’s voice, tight with a new, urgent strain. “Sabe, we’ve got a problem. The forensics from the Vilnius server… we traced a layer deeper. The payments to Cross, the Volkov connections… they’re being funded from a clearinghouse in Liechtenstein. ‘Janus Holdings.’ It’s a front. Its board is a ghost list, but the signature on the founding documents… it’s an encrypted signature we’ve seen before. From the original Rogers Industries partnership agreements. Your father, Anton. And… someone else’s.”

Leon’s voice dropped, grim with revelation. “It’s a consortium. They call themselves ‘The Curators.’ Industrialists, ex-intelligence, private capital from regimes we’re not supposed to do business with. They don’t conquer companies; they acquire chaos. They bankrupt targets, sow discord, then sweep in and buy the pieces for pennies, installing their own people. They’ve been linked to three ‘unfortunate’ collapses in the last five years. Rogers Industries wasn’t a theft. It was a hostile acquisition. And the inside man… wasn’t a man at all.”

The hidden puppeteer. The true enemy. It wasn’t a rival or a spy. It was a shadowy investment syndicate that treated global corporations as orchards to be salted and harvested. And Eleanor Rogers-Voss wasn’t just a vengeful widow. She was their Trojan horse, their ‘Curator’ within the very walls they wanted to collapse.

Sabatine relayed the essence in a low, urgent murmur to Anton. “It’s not Volkov. It’s a group called The Curators. She’s working for them. You were the target all along.”

Anton’s face went from pale to ashen. He looked at his mother, not with hatred now, but with a kind of horrified pity. “You didn’t just betray your father. You didn’t just betray me. You auctioned our legacy to a cabal of vultures.”

Eleanor’s smile returned, colder than ever. “I am securing its future. A future where it won’t be diluted by sentimentality. By weakness.” Her eyes cut to Sabatine again. “They understand power. They understand that love is a critical system failure. They promised me a seat at their table. The table your father never gave me.”

The pieces were now a complete, monstrous picture. Roland Cross, Evelyn Voss, Marcus, even the Volkov thugs—they were all expendable assets in a cold, corporate extermination plot run by a faceless consortium, with Eleanor as the scorned, perfectly placed executioner. The bomb wasn’t just to kill Anton; it was to create the final, catastrophic collapse of value, allowing ‘The Curators’ to mop up what was left.

“The police will be here in minutes, Mother,” Anton said, rallying, a shred of his command returning. “Your… employers… won’t be able to protect you from attempted murder.”

“The police will find evidence of a Volkov retaliation for your failed sting,” she said smoothly. “A tragic, but predictable, end to a sordid tale of corporate espionage. My alibi is impeccable. I’ve been in Gstaad for a week.” She took another step. The van door was still open. A shape moved within. “As for you… well, you’ll have perished heroically, trying to save your employees from the blast. A fitting end for the narrative.”

She wasn’t stalling. She was waiting for the clean-up crew. The people in the van were here to ensure the story ended the right way.

Sabatine made a decision. He couldn’t shoot her—she was likely wired, and her death might trigger the assault. He had to break the script.

In one fluid motion, he shifted his aim from Eleanor to the front tire of the van and fired twice. The suppressed pfft-pfft was shockingly loud in the enclosed space. The tire exploded with a violent bang.

At the same moment, he grabbed Anton and threw them both behind a different, broader concrete column as gunfire erupted from the van’s interior—not the wild spray of panic, but controlled, professional bursts that chewed into the concrete where they’d been standing.

“Leon! Garage, east sub-level! Heavies in a van! Eleanor Rogers is primarily hostile!” Sabatine yelled into his comms.

“On our way! ETA two minutes! Do not engage!”

Two minutes was a lifetime. The van’s doors flew open. Three figures clad in dark tactical gear, armed with compact submachine guns, spilled out, using the vehicle for cover. They moved with a chilling, synchronized efficiency. Not Volkov muscle. Private military. ‘Curator’ clean-up.

Sabatine returned fire, pinning them for a moment. “The service stair!” he hissed at Anton, pointing to a metal door twenty yards away, across open ground.

Anton nodded, his face set in a mask of grim resolve. The betrayed son was gone. The survivor was back.

“On three,” Sabatine said. “One… two… now!”

He laid down a covering pattern of fire, aiming high to force the PMCs to duck. Anton broke from cover and sprinted for the door. Sabatine followed, walking backwards, still firing.

A round grazed his tactical vest, spinning him halfway around. He stumbled, righted himself. Another shattered the handle of the service door just as Anton reached it. Anton didn’t hesitate. He kicked it open with a brutal force Sabatine didn’t know he possessed.

They plunged into the stairwell, darkness swallowing them. Sabatine slammed the door shut and wedged his knife into the frame, a temporary delay. The sound of boots pounding on concrete echoed from the garage behind them.

“Up or down?” Anton gasped.

“Up leads back into the fire. Down.” They took the stairs two at a time, descending deeper into the building’s bowels. The air grew colder, damper. They were in the forgotten foundations, the realm of pipes and silent machinery.

Behind them, the wedged door shook with a heavy impact. Then another. They were coming.

They had escaped the immediate kill box. But they were wounded, hunted, and the true enemy was no longer a face on a screen or a voice on the radio. It was a hydra-headed consortium with Anton’s mother as its willing avatar, and they had just declared the final, bloody phase of their acquisition. The game had changed. It was no longer about saving a company.

It was about surviving the collectors.

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