Chapter 192. The Sniper's Miss

The green room monitor showed the vast, hushed auditorium. The stage was a minimalist island under a cone of stark white light. Anton walked to the podium, his footsteps echoing in the profound silence of five hundred of the world's most powerful people. He looked calm. He looked in control. Sabatine, watching from his sterile cage, felt a surge of fierce pride so potent it was a physical ache.

Anton began to speak. His voice, amplified and clear, filled the room and the green room speaker. He didn't start with the blackout or the recovery. He started with betrayal. With a mother who sold secrets, with a consortium that treated human legacy as inventory. He was named The Curators. He named Janus Holdings. He displayed, on the giant screen behind him, the very psychological threat letter Sabatine had received, the portrait of their private lives weaponized.

It was a declaration of war, delivered with the cool, forensic precision of a prosecutor. The audience was utterly still, a sea of stunned, expensive suits.

Sabatine’s focus, however, was split. His eyes were on Anton, but his mind was a radar dish, tuned to the frequency of threat. He listened to the cadence of Anton’s speech, but he also listened to the silence in his earpiece, waiting for Leon or Maya’s signal. He watched the confident set of Anton’s shoulders, but his peripheral vision was locked on the monitor’s edges, on the shadowy wings of the stage, on the distant balconies.

Anton was reaching his crescendo, pointing to the evidence of the blackout code, the architecture of the financial kill-switch. “This is not competition,” his voice rang out. “This is predation. And it ends today—”

The shot was not a loud crack. It was a soft, wet pfft—the sound of a high-grade, suppressed rifle from extreme range. It was the sound Sabatine’s nightmares were made of.

It didn't come from the auditorium. It came from outside. The bullet punched through the triple-glazed, ballistic-rated window of the green room with a sound like a stone hitting thick ice. A perfect, small hole appeared in the glass, webbed with fractures. The round itself buried into the soundproofed wall six inches to the left of Sabatine’s head, spraying a puff of acoustic foam into the air.

They hadn't been targeting Anton on stage.

They’d been targeting him. In the green room. Isolated. Predictable.

The Portraitist hadn't just predicted their moves; she had predicted Sabatine’s fixation. She knew he would be watching Anton on the monitor, his attention funneled. She knew the exact angle from the only adjacent building tall enough to have a sightline into the speaker suites—the old Radio Suisse tower, a decommissioned relic four hundred meters away. She had known he’d be standing right there.

The shock was instantaneous, but it was the shock of validation, not surprise. They’re here. The move is now.

He didn't hit the deck. He was already moving before the glass finished splintering. He was a blur of motion, snatching the tactical earpiece he’d hidden in a potted plant and jamming it in his ear as he lunged for the door.

“Sniper! Radio Suisse tower! Anton, get down!” he barked into the mic, exploding into the corridor.

Chaos was a beat behind him. In the auditorium, the sound of the distant shot hadn't carried, but the sudden, violent movement in the wings as Sabatine’s warning hit Anton’s own concealed earpiece did. Anton didn't flinch. He dropped behind the solid steel podium in a controlled crouch, his voice cutting off mid-sentence.

On the monitor, Sabatine saw security details surge to their feet, forming human shields around their principals. Confused shouts echoed. But his world had narrowed to the corridor, to the exit, to the tower.

“Leon, converge on the tower! Maya, jam all frequencies in a half-mile radius! Now!” he yelled, sprinting past stunned summit security who were only now reacting to the breach alert blaring over the PA system.

He hit the main entrance doors, shoving them open into the cold plaza. Sirens were beginning to wail in the distance. He ignored the prescribed protocols, the secure zones. He had one vector: the old, grim tower looming over the southern edge of the complex, its top floors a grid of dark, empty windows.

He ran, not with the frantic energy of panic, but with the terrible, focused velocity of a missile locked on target. His mind was clear, cold. The shot had been for him. To remove Anton’s protector. To unbalance him before the final kill. Which meant the hit on Anton was still coming, now, in the chaos.

He slammed through a service gate, startling a maintenance worker. “Palexpo security!” he snarred, flashing his badge, not breaking stride. “Sniper in the tower! Clear the area!”

He reached the base of the Radio Suisse tower—a locked, rusted door. He didn't bother with picks. He fired two rounds from the compact backup pistol he’d secreted in an ankle holster into the lock mechanism and kicked it in.

The stairwell was dark, smelling of damp and pigeon droppings. He took the steps three at a time, his breath burning in his lungs, his senses screaming. Eight flights. Ten. The sound of a helicopter thrummed somewhere nearby—Leon, moving in.

He burst onto the rooftop access door. It was padlocked from the inside. Fresh. They’re still here.

He shot the padlock, shouldered the door open, and rolled out onto the gravel-strewn roof, pistol up.

The sniper was already packing up. A figure in grey urban camouflage, kneeling beside a long, sleek rifle on a bipod, pointed towards the Palexpo. A spotter with binoculars was at his side. They weren't mercenaries; they were professionals, clean, efficient. And they were startled. They hadn't expected pursuit this fast.

The spotter saw him first, yelled a warning. The sniper turned, going for a sidearm.

Sabatine didn't give him the chance. Two shots. Center mass. The sniper crumpled over his expensive rifle.

The spotter dropped the binoculars and raised his hands, his face pale under his paint. “Don’t shoot! I’m just the eyes!”

Sabatine crossed the roof in four strides, kicked the sniper’s weapon away, and pressed his pistol to the spotter’s forehead. “The secondary target. The principal on stage. What’s the play?”

The spotter’s eyes were wide with terror. “I don’t know! He was the trigger! My job was the protector, the guy in the green room! Once he was down, the principal was next, but I don’t know how!”

He was telling the truth. He was a cog.

Sabatine’s earpiece crackled. Leon’s voice, strained. “Sabe! Stage area! We have a situation—a medical emergency. Someone’s down. It’s not Anton. But he’s trapped in the lockdown.”

Medical emergency. The Portraitist’s plan. Not a second shooter. A poisoning. A heart attack induced in the crowd, causing panic, a stampede, a convenient, chaotic death in the crush.

Sabatine pistol-whipped the spotter, knocking him unconscious. He didn't have time for prisoners. He turned and ran for the stairs, his heart a hammer against his ribs.

“Anton! Stay behind the podium! Do not move into the crowd! It’s a bio or chem trigger!” he shouted into his mic, leaping down the stairwell, his voice raw.

The sniper’s miss had been a feint. A distraction to pull the security focus, to create panic. The real kill was quieter, more insidious, perfectly suited to a psychologist who understood crowd dynamics and fear.

He hit the ground floor and sprinted back towards the Palexpo, the sirens now a deafening wall of sound. The assassination attempt wasn't over. It had just changed shape. And Anton was still in the lion’s den, surrounded by five hundred people, one of whom was a walking weapon.

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