Chapter 186. The Maid’s Secret

The Black Forest lodge, with its rustic charm and whispering pines, now felt like a stage set. Every creak of the floorboard, every gust against the window, was scrutinized. The Portraitist’s letter had shattered the illusion of any safe harbour. Paranoia, once a professional tool, became a constant, gnawing companion.

The hunt for the leak began not with broad sweeps, but with surgical precision. Sabatine and Leon worked backwards from the letter’s intimate details. The coffee. The book. The nightmare. They mapped every point of contact with the outside world during their time at the Eyrie.

Henrik was the obvious vector, but his loyalty, tested across decades and now under the harsh light of suspicion, held firm. His background was re-vetted by Nadir in real-time—a former Swiss Guard, his service record impeccable, his connection to Anton’s father rooted in a saved life during a long-ago alpine hiking accident. He had no digital footprint, no unexplained finances. He was a relic of a simpler, more oath-bound time.

That left the supply chain. The Eyrie was stocked via a single, trusted grocer in the nearest village, a man named Fischer, whose family had served the property for generations. Fischer was checked—clean. But his deliveries were not made personally. A young woman, his niece, Elara, often made the run in his van.

Elara was twenty-four, quiet, efficient. She had a pale, serious face and clever hands. She would deliver the boxes of supplies to the secure drop-box at the base of the private road, where Henrik would later retrieve them. She had been doing this for two years, ever since returning to the village from a stint in Geneva, where, according to local gossip, she’d worked as a junior accountant for a private bank.

“Geneva,” Sabatine said, the word a key turning in a lock. “Pull every thread on her time there, Nadir. Cross-reference with any bank even vaguely connected to Janus Holdings.”

While Nadir dug, they observed. Leon, using camouflage and patience worthy of a snow leopard, watched the drop-point on the day of the next scheduled delivery. He saw Elara arrive in the battered van. He saw her unload the crates. And he saw her do something else. As she turned to leave, she paused by the driver’s side door, pretending to check her phone. But her thumb performed a specific, repetitive swipe on the screen—not a natural gesture. A signal.

Leon’s report was terse. “She’s clean. No visible device on her besides the phone. But the gesture was deliberate. A dead-drop activation.”

A dead-drop. A way to pass information without direct contact. She wasn’t transmitting from the Eyrie; she was collecting it. The information was being planted inside the sanctuary, and she was retrieving it during her deliveries.

“The supplies,” Anton realized, horror dawning. “She handles them before they even get to us.”

They intercepted the next delivery. Not at the drop-point, but they tracked the van back to Fischer’s storeroom behind the village grocery. In the dead of night, Sabatine and Leon infiltrated the space. It was a clean, cold room smelling of root vegetables and waxed paper. They examined the crates destined for the Eyrie with forensic care.

It was Sabatine who found it. In a sealed bag of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee beans, nestled among the dark, aromatic kernels, was a tiny, ceramic object no larger than a baby’s tooth. It was smooth, non-metallic, and utterly inert to standard electronic sweeps. A data “pebble.” A passive storage device that could be read by a high-frequency scanner from several feet away—like the one embedded in a smartphone case.

Elara wasn’t just delivering food. She was harvesting intelligence. The pebble would have been planted earlier, by someone else. Someone who had been inside the Eyrie.

The pieces snapped together with a sickening clarity. The consortium hadn’t bribed Henrik. They had inserted a cleaner. Someone with legitimate access to service the remote property between occupants. Someone who could place passive listening devices in book spines, in coffee sacks, in the very wool of the blankets, and then leave their work undetected until the targets arrived and began living their lives, feeding the silent, observant pebbles with their intimate reality.

“We need to take her quietly,” Sabatine said. “She’s a courier, not a decision-maker. She’ll have a handler. We follow her to the source.”

Two days later, under a slate-grey sky threatening snow, they watched Elara make her drop. As she performed the odd phone-swipe by her van, a black sedan with tinted windows, previously parked at the village inn, pulled out and drove slowly past the grocery store. No stop. No exchange. But as it passed, Sabatine, watching through high-powered binoculars from a concealed perch in the forest, saw the brief, tell-tale flicker of an infrared beam from the sedan’s window, washing over Elara’s van.

A drive-by data harvest. The pebble’s contents, collected over weeks of their private life, were sucked into the sedan in a milliseconds-long burst as it drove past. Elegant. Low-risk. Almost invisible.

The sedan didn’t return to the inn. It took the winding road south, towards the Arlberg Pass and the Austrian border.

They couldn’t follow without burning their own cover. But they had the license plate, captured by a hidden camera Leon had placed. Nadir worked his magic. The plate was registered to a leasing company in Vaduz, Liechtenstein—a shell within a shell. But the car’s GPS data, illicitly accessed, showed its regular destinations: not to grand banks or consulates, but to a modest, modern apartment building in Zurich, and, once a week, to the private clinic of a Dr. Silvia Reinhart.

A name Sabatine recognized from his own intelligence days. Dr. Reinhart wasn’t a medical doctor. She was a psychologist, a pioneer in applied behavioural analysis for corporate negotiation and “influence scenarios.” A Portraitist.

The maid’s secret was revealed. Elara was the rustic, unsuspected courier in a high-tech spy ring. She wasn’t working for Roland Cross; his blunt propaganda tools were beneath this. She wasn’t even directly for Volkov. She was a tiny, vital cog in The Curators’ sophisticated human intelligence apparatus, feeding the Portraitist the raw, daily bread of their lives so she could bake the perfect, poisonous threat.

They brought Elara in that evening, as she closed up the grocery for her uncle. One moment she was turning the key in the lock, the next she was in the back of a soundproofed van, Leon’s hand over her mouth, Sabatine’s calm, implacable gaze telling her resistance was futile.

In the lodge’s cellar, under a single bare bulb, she broke quickly. She wasn’t a trained field agent; she was a scared, clever young woman who had been recruited in Geneva with a story about “market research” and a salary that could erase her family’s debts. She believed she was gathering data on consumer habits for a luxury brand. The pebbles were described as “environmental sensors.” The drive-bys were “data synchronization.” She had compartmentalized the strangeness, soothed by the money and the mundane cover story.

She gave them everything: the frequency of the pick-ups, the description of the sedan’s usual driver (a bland-faced man in a chauffeur’s uniform), the fact that she’d once seen the car idling outside Dr. Reinhart’s clinic.

“They know… everything,” Elara whispered, tears cutting tracks through the flour dust on her cheeks. “The woman, the doctor… she asked me once, after a delivery, if the two men in the house seemed ‘in sync’ or ‘strained.’ She asked about trash—what was thrown away, if there were empty bottles, torn papers. She asked about the music, if any was ever played.”

It was the chilling, banal detail of it. The consortium wasn’t just watching their battles; they were auditing their emotional trash.

Anton listened from the doorway, his face a mask of disgust and a profound, violated sadness. The last shred of privacy, the sanctity of the mountain refuge he’d shared with Sabatine, had been a curated exhibit for their enemies.

Sabatine dismissed Elara to be held securely, her fate to be decided later. She was a pawn. The real target was the Portraitist.

He turned to Anton. “Dr. Silvia Reinhart. She’s the architect of the threat. She’s the one who turned our coffee and our nightmares into a weapon.”

Anton’s eyes were cold, the warmth that had begun to return to them after the blackout break now frozen over. “Then we return the favour. We don’t just shut her down. We use her. We feed her a new portrait. One of our own designs.”

A grim, understanding smile touched Sabatine’s lips. The hunter and the strategist were back, united against a new, intimate foe. The maid’s secret was out. Now, it was time to paint a masterpiece of their own—a portrait of two lovers on the brink of collapse, designed to lure the Portraitist and her masters into a final, fatal error. The war had just gotten personal. And they were ready to fight fire with a far more clever flame.