Chapter 182. Sabatine Takes Command

The decision was a pivot on a knife's edge. They wouldn't cower, and they wouldn't blindly charge. They would counter-punch in a direction the enemy had left unguarded: the physical world.

But to do that, they needed a target. And to find a target in a global digital blackout, they needed to see in the dark. The Eyrie was a tomb; they had to get to a place where the echoes of the attack could still be heard, where the digital corpse still twitched with forensic evidence.

"The Zurich auxiliary hub," Anton said, the plan solidifying as he spoke. "It's a backup data centre, hardened, low-profile. It's not on the main grid they'd have targeted for the primary blackout. It has a standalone satellite uplink for catastrophic recovery. If anything in our network is still whispering, it'll be there."

"It'll also be a trap," Sabatine stated, not as an objection, but as a parameter to factor. "They'll expect us to go for a recovery node."

"Then we don't go for recovery," Anton said, his eyes meeting Sabatine's with a grim understanding. "We will go for an autopsy. We don't try to restart the heart; we perform the biopsy to find the poison. We get in, we grab the forensic logs of the attack's origin, we get out. We don't touch the main systems."

It was a surgical strike. A data heist in the heart of the blackout. To pull it off, they needed to be on the ground, and they needed a team that could operate in the digital and physical realms simultaneously.

Getting out of the Eyrie undetected was the first operation. Henrik had a way—an old, disused maintenance tunnel that ran through the mountain, emerging in a remote valley a mile away. From there, a hidden garage held a pair of rugged, unmarked snowmobiles and winter gear. They became ghosts in the alpine landscape, two dark figures cutting across moonlit snowfields towards a distant village where Leon had contact with a private helicopter.

Thirty-six hours after the blackout began, they were in Zurich, entering through a service entrance of a nondescript industrial building on the city's outskirts. The Rogers Industries Auxiliary Data Hub was a windowless concrete cube, its only identifying feature a small, discreet logo beside a reinforced steel door. The air around it hummed with the suppressed tension of a facility in lockdown.

Inside, it was a cathedral of silent machinery. The main server hall was dark, the endless racks of blades sleeping under the emergency glow of red exit signs. But in a sealed, isolated compartment at the rear, a single terminal glowed—the forensic and recovery suite, powered by its own shielded grid.

Waiting for them were three people. A wiry, anxious-looking man in his forties—Klaus, the site's head of infrastructure, who had been vetted by Leon years ago and whose loyalty was to the company's survival, not any individual. A young woman with fierce eyes and a sleeve of intricate code tattoos—Maya, a cybersecurity prodigy Jessica had quietly recruited and sequestered here for just such a catastrophe. And Leon himself, a monolithic, calming presence, having arrived via his own labyrinthine route.

All eyes went to Anton as he entered. The CEO, back from the dead, ready to lead. But Anton stopped just inside the door and turned to Sabatine. He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.

You.

It wasn't an abdication. It was a delegation to the right tool for the task. This wasn't a boardroom or a press conference. This was a digital crime scene, and the hunter was Sabatine.

Sabatine didn't hesitate. He strode past Anton to the central console where Maya was already working, her fingers a blur over a custom keyboard. Klaus hovered, wringing his hands.

"Report," Sabatine said, his voice cutting through the low hum of the isolated systems. It was not the voice of a bodyguard or a lover. It was the voice of an intelligence field commander, cold, flat, and expecting immediate compliance.

Maya didn't look up. "The blackout was a cascade. Started at the core trading platforms in London and New York, using admin credentials we thought were burned after the Voss breach. It then propagated through every connected system—logistics, HR, R&D archives—using a worm with a zero-day payload that targeted our proprietary encryption. Total digital paralysis in under six minutes."

"Origin point tracking?" Sabatine asked, leaning over her shoulder, his eyes scanning the lines of code scrolling on her screen.

"Obfuscated. They used a peer-to-peer botnet of hijacked industrial controllers as bounce points. A ghost chain." She finally glanced up at him, her respect evident. "It's beautiful. And horrifying."

"Beauty is a pattern. Find the pattern they couldn't hide." He turned to Klaus. "The isolated forensic logs. The system's internal watchdog. It records all anomalous access attempts, even during a core failure. Where is it stored?"

Klaus jumped, pointing to a standalone server rack in the corner, connected by a single, thick, air-gapped cable. "There. It's a write-only, physical tape backup that spins up during a Category-5 event. It's been running since the onset. But the data is raw, unparsed. Terabytes of gibberish without the decryption key, which was stored on the… on the main servers that are now dark."

Sabatine processed this. The evidence was there, but locked in a safe to which they'd just melted the key. He looked at the isolated server, then at Maya. "The worm's encryption signature. Do you have a sample?"

She nodded, pulling up a window of chaotic hexadecimal code. "It's a variant of the Volkov watermark, but upgraded. Sophisticated."

"Run it against the raw tape data. Not for decryption. For correlation. Look for the same signature in the watchdog's metadata—the attempt to access the encryption key, not the key itself. The moment the worm tried to burn the bridge behind it. That attempt will have a digital fingerprint. A location."

Maya's eyes widened. She understood instantly. While everyone else was looking at the locked door, Sabatine was looking for the mark the lock-pick left on the doorframe. "On it." Her fingers flew, writing a new query script.

Sabatine turned to Leon. "The moment she gets a location, even a fragment, I need you to cross-referencing it with every piece of physical intelligence Nadir has on Janus Holdings and Curator-linked properties. We're not looking for a server farm. We're looking for a command centre. Likely urban, high-security, with independent power and a diplomatic or corporate cover."

Leon gave a sharp nod and moved to a separate terminal, activating a secure satellite link to Rico Nadir's shadow network.

Anton watched from the periphery. He saw the transformation. Sabatine was no longer at his side; he was at the centre of the room, the axis around which all action turned. His commands were not suggestions. They were clear, executable orders, delivered with an absolute authority that brooked no question. Klaus, the nervous engineer, stopped wringing his hands and began fetching specific hardware at Sabatine's request. Maya worked with focused fury, calling out technical questions that Sabatine answered with a concise, almost preternatural understanding of the very systems he was supposed to only be guarding.

This was Sabatine Stalker, former military cyber-intelligence, unleashed. Not as a consultant, but as a commander. And the team, professionals in their own right, obeyed him instantly. They saw what Anton saw: a man who spoke the language of the crisis with a native's fluency.

After an hour of intense, silent work broken only by the clack of keys and the whir of tape drives, Maya let out a sharp breath. "Got it. A metadata spike. Forty-seven milliseconds after the core encryption servers went dark, there was a prioritized access attempt from an external IP to the watchdog's own admin protocol. It's buried under ten thousand false flags, but the signature fragment matches the worm's tail code."

She spun her monitor. A string of numbers and a geolocation tag glowed on the screen. The IP resolved to a building in Geneva's Quartier des Banques. Not a bank, but a private, members-only club for commodity traders and arbitrage specialists called "The Vault."

"Diplomatic immunity adjacent. Private security. Owns its own fibre optic trunk line directly to the SWIFT network hub," Leon reported, reading from Nadir's incoming feed. "The building has independent power, water, and according to city plans, a sub-basement two levels deeper than the official blueprints show. It's a perfect nest."

Sabatine stared at the address. The enemy's command centre. The brain of the blackout. He straightened, turning to face the room. His gaze swept over Maya, Klaus, Leon, and finally landed on Anton.

"The target is The Vault, Geneva. Objective: infiltrate, physically isolate and capture the primary server orchestrating the blackout. Secondary objective: obtain any data linking the operation directly to The Curators and Janus Holdings." His voice was calm, final. "Leon, you're on point for the breach. Maya, you're with us—we'll need you to identify the core server on-site. Klaus, you stay here and be ready to receive the data packet and initiate a localised counter-pulse the moment we give the signal."

He looked at Anton. "You're with me. We provide cover and extraction."

It was no longer Anton's war room. It was Sabatine's. And as he laid out the plan for a physical assault on the heart of a digital empire, every person in the room, including the billionaire who owned it all, followed his lead without a word of doubt. The protector had taken command. And the enemy, sipping champagne in their Geneva vault, had no idea the storm that was coming for them.

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