Chapter 193. Who Pulled the Trigger

The scene at the Palexpo was controlled by pandemonium. The "medical emergency" had been a severe, sudden anaphylactic shock in a Dutch finance minister's aide, triggered by a nearly undetectable aerosolized allergen released from a modified pen in the third row. It had caused the intended panic, a surging, terrified rush for the exits. But Anton, glued to Sabatine’s command, had remained barricaded behind the steel podium until Leon’s team fought through the chaos and extracted him in a crush of body armour.

Now, they were in the ultimate safe room—a Swiss Federal Police command post deep beneath the city, a sterile, buzzing cube of light and data. Anton sat on a hard plastic chair, his keynote suit rumpled, his face pale but composed. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind a cold, clear fury.

Sabatine stood over a terminal where Leon and a stone-faced Swiss inspector were reviewing footage. His side ached from the rooftop sprint, his knuckles were raw, but his focus was absolute. The sniper was dead. The spotter was in a holding cell, singing about a blind email drop and cash payments, but nothing that led upstream. The poisoned pen had been recovered, a custom-made device with no forensic traces.

They had stopped the immediate attack. But they hadn't found the architect in the building. Dr. Reinhart, if she was here, had vanished into the institutional woodwork.

“The shot came from the Radio Suisse tower,” the Swiss inspector, a man named Gauer, said in precise English. “A professional. No identification. The rifle is untraceable, a ghost gun. The spotter claims they were hired through three cut-outs. A dead end.”

“Not a dead end,” Leon rumbled. He had been working a separate angle, cross-referencing every piece of data with the forensic haul from The Vault. “The timing. The sniper took his shot the exact moment Anton reached the climax of his speech, when all security eyes would be on the stage or the crowd for a reaction. Not a minute earlier, not a minute later. He knew the schedule down to the second.”

“The summit agenda was public,” Gauer countered.

“The speech wasn’t,” Sabatine said quietly, his eyes fixed on the frozen image of the sniper on the roof, time-stamped. “Anton deviated from his submitted text. He improvised the section about the threat letter. The sniper fired during that improvisation. He wasn't working off a public schedule. He was working off a private one. Someone was feeding him real-time cues.”

A chill settled over the room. Real-time cues meant someone inside the secure perimeter, with eyes on the stage, communicating out.

“Access to the private speaker schedule and green room locations is severely restricted,” Gauer admitted, his expression grim. “A handful of summit organizers, the stage manager, and… the principal’s own security detail.”

All eyes turned to Leon and Sabatine. The implication hung in the air, toxic and unavoidable.

“My team is vetted,” Leon said, his voice devoid of emotion, but his eyes were chips of flint. “But the circle around Mr. Rogers has been compromised before.”

“Evelyn Voss had access to everything,” Anton said, his voice hollow. “But she’s in custody. My mother… she’s orchestrated from afar, but she wouldn't have the real-time operational knowledge here.”

“Unless she has another instrument,” Sabatine said. His mind was racing, replaying the last weeks. The intimate details in the threat letter. The knowledge of their mountain refuge. The pinpoint timing of the sniper. This wasn't just a Portraitist’s profile; this was inside information. The kind that didn't come from surveillance alone, but from trust.

He looked at Leon. “The secure comms channel we set up after the blackout. The one only you, me, Jessica, and Maya use. And Nadir, on his end.”

Leon nodded. “Encrypted, frequency-hopping. It’s clean.”

“Is it?” Sabatine asked. “Or did we build it on a foundation someone else poured?”

He turned to Gauer. “I need to see all access logs for the Palexpo’s internal security network for the past 48 hours. Every badge swipe, every login, especially for the systems controlling the speaker suite assignments and the private schedule.”

It took an hour of tense, silent work, the Swiss police reluctantly cooperating under the sheer weight of the crime and Anton’s remaining, formidable influence. Maya, patched in from a remote location, ran parallel analytics.

The answer, when it came, was a line of code in a system log, so small it was almost invisible. An administrative override, executed twenty minutes before Anton took the stage. It had granted temporary, high-level access to the speaker management system to a user whose credentials were supposed to have been revoked after the London bombings: David Cho.

The former CFO. The broken man whose family they had saved.

“Cho?” Anton breathed, the betrayal a fresh, sickening blow. “He’s in New Zealand under protection…”

“His credentials were used,” Maya’s voice came through the speaker, tight with anger. “But the IP address isn't from New Zealand. It’s a VPN bounce, but the origin point is… Geneva. The login was local.”

“Someone stole his credentials,” Leon said. “Or he gave them.”

Sabatine’s mind made the connection, a horrible, logical click. “The medical team we sent with Cho’s family to New Zealand. Who vetted them?”

Leon’s face went blank, then hardened into a mask of pure rage. “Jessica arranged it. Through a medical evacuation service we’ve used before. I approved the personnel files myself. They were clean.”

“They were compromised,” Sabatine stated. “Or one of them was. The consortium didn't just threaten Cho’s family to make him steal money. They kept a hook on him. A doctor, a nurse—someone with constant access. They could have coerced him for his login details, or taken them by force. Or he might have given them willingly, if they threatened his girls again.”

He turned to Anton. “They didn't just have a Portraitist. They had a pipeline straight into the heart of your mercy. You tried to protect him, and they used that protection as a weapon.”

The room was silent, the hum of servers the only sound. The betrayal was not from a jealous sibling or a greedy executive. It was from the very act of decency Anton had shown. They had weaponized his compassion.

“So the real-time cue,” Gauer said, piecing it together. “Someone with stolen CFO-level access could see the live, internal tracking of the speech—the teleprompter feed, the stage manager’s cues. They could have relayed the exact moment to the sniper.”

“And they knew I’d be in the green room, because that’s on the speaker schedule too,” Sabatine finished. The perfection of the trap was appalling. They had used Anton’s own corporate infrastructure, accessed through the trauma of a man he’d tried to save, to orchestrate a kill-shot at the man he loved.

“Find the medical team in New Zealand,” Anton said, his voice now stripped of all emotion, a command of pure ice. “Detain them. Quietly. I want to know who they answer to.”

“Already on it,” Nadir’s voice, rarely heard on group channels, crackled through. He’d been listening. “The nurse. Her background is fiction. A very good one. She vanished from the safe house six hours ago. Local time.”

The trigger had been pulled by a faceless sniper on a roof. But the finger on that trigger had been guided by a chain of betrayal that led back to a weeping man in a London safe room, and the ruthless predators who had never let him go.

Sabatine looked at Anton, seeing the devastation behind the icy mask. This was the cost of his world. Every act of loyalty could be twisted, every mercy exploited. The consortium didn't just attack empires; they corrupted the very bonds that held them together.

Anton met his gaze. The fury in his eyes had crystallized into something harder, more determined. “They think mercy is a flaw,” he said, the words dropping into the quiet room like vows. “They think compassion is a backdoor. They’re wrong. It’s what they’ll never have. And that's why they’ll lose.”

He stood, straightening his jacket, a king reassembling himself in the bowels of a police bunker. “We know their move. We know their access point. Now we use it. We feed Cho’s compromised credentials back to them. We give them a new target. Not me on a stage. Not Sabatine in a room. Something they want even more.”

He looked at Sabatine, a silent question passing between them. Sabatine gave a slow, grim nod. The hunter and the strategist were back. The sniper had missed. But the war was far from over. And now, they knew exactly which shadow to chase.

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