Chapter 181. The Enemy’s New Play

The peace was not an illusion, but it was a temporary sanctuary. It existed in the warm sheets, in the shared breath, in the silent understanding over coffee. It could not, however, stop the world from turning, or enemies from moving.

The assault came not with the roar of a bomb or the cold smile of a betrayer, but with a silent, digital suffocation.

It began as a flicker. The soft glow of the satellite-linked monitor in the great room of the Eyrie stuttered, then died. The heating system’s low hum cut off, plunging the room into a deeper, more profound quiet that was instantly ominous. The emergency lights, powered by a separate, hardened system, flickered on with a dull click, casting long, grim shadows.

“Power failure,” Sabatine said, already on his feet, his voice cutting through the sudden stillness. He wasn’t alarmed; the Eyrie had backups. But the timing was suspect.

He moved to the hardened terminal, a military-grade machine isolated from standard networks. It was still on, drawing from a dedicated battery bank. He pulled up the system diagnostics. External power: offline. Primary satellite uplink: offline. Secondary encrypted mesh network: degraded, signal lost.

“This isn’t local,” he said, his fingers flying over the keys, trying to ping the failsafes. “They’re jamming us. Or worse.”

Anton was beside him in an instant, his face set in the cool, analytical mask of the CEO facing a crisis. “The holdings. If they can isolate us here, they can hit the company where it’s vulnerable.”

Before the words were fully out of his mouth, the terminal chimed with a priority alert—a pre-programmed, low-bandwidth distress signal from Jessica, routed through a labyrinth of dead-drops and burn phones, the last-ditch channel they’d established for catastrophic comms loss.

The message was fragmented, horrifying.

JESSICA: COORDINATED… SYSTEMIC… BLACKOUT. RI SERVERS GLOBAL… OFFLINE. TRADING PLATFORMS LOCKED… LIQUIDITY FROZEN. ALL DIGITAL ASSETS… UNRESPONSIVE. MEDIA CALLING IT ‘THE ROGERS GLITCH.’ MARKET IN… FREE FALL. THIS IS… CATASTROPHIC.

A cyber blackout. Not a theft, not a smear. A systemic kill-switch. The Curators weren’t just trying to bankrupt Anton; they were trying to erase Rogers Industries from the digital map, to make it a ghost in the machine, its value evaporating into the static of global finance.

“Billions,” Anton whispered, the word a breath of pure horror. He stared at the screen as if it were reporting the death of a loved one. “They’re not seizing assets. They’re turning them into non-assets. Making the company untouchable, toxic. No one will trade its stock. No bank will honour its credit. It becomes a digital corpse.”

Sabatine’s mind raced, mapping the implications. This was a play of breathtaking, malicious scale. It required deep, pre-placed malware in core systems across dozens of countries, synchronized to activate simultaneously. It required compromising not just Rogers Industries, but the exchanges and clearing houses it interacted with. This was the work of the consortium—a demonstration of power far beyond Volkov’s thuggery or Eleanor’s personal vengeance. This was a statement: We don’t just break empires. We un-write them.

Another fragment from Jessica scrolled across the screen, slower, as if typed with trembling hands.

…TRAFFIC ANALYSIS SUGGESTS ORIGIN POINTS IN… BERN, FRANKFURT, HONG KONG. SIGNATURE MATCHES… ‘JANUS HOLDINGS’ PROTOCOLS. THEY’RE USING THE BACKDOORS FROM… THE INITIAL THEFT. THIS IS… CHIMERA IN REVERSE. THEY’RE USING OUR OWN… ARCHITECTURE AGAINST US.

The brilliance of it was diabolical. They were using the vulnerabilities left behind from Evelyn Voss’s initial theft of the Aegis-Cypher prototype—the digital scars of the first war—to launch the final one. They had turned Anton’s own, now-compromised, security architecture into the weapon of his annihilation.

Anton slammed his fist on the stone table, a rare, violent loss of control. “We have to get back online! We have to issue commands, reassure the markets, initiate counter-measures!”

“We can’t,” Sabatine said flatly, his own frustration a cold knot in his gut. “We’re in a stone box on a mountain. They’ve cut our heads off. Jessica is blinded. Leon’s team is likely scrambling just to maintain physical security at the remaining sites. The company is a brain-dead body on the table, and they’re dissecting it in real-time.”

The helplessness was a new and terrible flavour. They had faced guns and lies and betrayal, but there had always been a move to make, a counter-punch to throw. This was a disemboweling from a thousand miles away. They could only watch, via a dying trickle of data, as the empire Anton had saved from one fire was now consumed by a silent, digital inferno.

Henrik appeared in the doorway, his face grim. “Perimeter sensors are still active on the internal battery. All external comms are dark. The jamming field is comprehensive. We are a ghost.”

Anton began to pace, a caged predator. “We need a signal. A way to broadcast. Something they can’t jam.”

“Anything powerful enough to punch through their field would light us up like a beacon for every missile in the region,” Sabatine countered. “We’d be trading a financial kill for a physical one.”

“Then we go down there!” Anton stopped, his eyes blazing. “We don’t hide here while they erase my father’s life’s work from a server farm in Zurich! We get to a node, any node we can physically access, and we manually shut this down from the source!”

“And walk into the kill zone they’ve undoubtedly set up around every one of those nodes?” Sabatine shot back, rising to face him. The operative and the CEO were on a collision course, both driven by the same desperate need to act. “Anton, this is what they want! They want you to panic. To run out of your hole so they can finish the job. This blackout isn’t just the attack; it’s the bait for the final shot!”

“So we just sit here?!” Anton’s voice cracked.

“We think!” Sabatine roared, the sound shocking in the quiet room. He forced himself to lower his voice, to speak with the cold, lethal clarity of a mission planner. “They’ve played a perfect hand. But perfect hands rely on predictability. They’re predicting you’ll do one of two things: panic and expose yourself, or surrender and watch your company die. They are not predicting a third option.”

Anton stared at him, chest heaving. “What third option? We have no power, no network, no voice!”

Sabatine’s gaze was icy, focused. “We have the one thing they don’t. We have the architect of the original security they’ve now corrupted.” He pointed at Anton. “You. And we have the man who built the phantom that fooled them.” He tapped his own chest. “Me. They think they’re fighting a corporation. They’re not. They’re fighting us. And we don’t need a network to wage a different kind of war.”

He turned to the terminal, to the last, dying fragments of Jessica’s messages. “We can’t stop the blackout from here. But we can use its existence. It’s a weapon, but it’s also a signal. It tells us exactly where they are, what systems they control. It’s a map of their infiltration, painted in the negative space of our own darkness.”

He looked back at Anton, a fierce, calculating light in his eyes. “We don’t try to turn the lights back on. We follow the blackout to its source. We find the physical location of their command hub, the server orchestrating this. And then, Anton, we don’t send a digital counter-attack. We will send Leon.”

Understanding dawned on Anton’s face, slow and terrible. A savage, unwilling smile touched his lips. “A physical strike on a digital weapon.”

“A scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” Sabatine confirmed. “While their eyes are on the crumbling financial data, we hit the hand holding the kill switch. It’s the one move a consortium of bankers and spies won’t expect. They live in the world of proxies and firewalls. We’re going to knock on their server room door.”

The enemy’s new play was a masterpiece of modern financial warfare. But Anton and Sabatine were no longer just a CEO and his guard. They were something older, more primal. They were survivors. And they were about to remind The Curators that some battles are still won not with code, but with courage, cunning, and the willingness to reach into the dark and tear out your enemy’s heart.

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