Chapter 196. Reunion Under Fire

The Vert de Gris was a mausoleum of polished granite and silent alarms. Anton had been deposited in a suite on the third floor, a spacious, elegant prison with bulletproof windows overlooking a sealed interior courtyard. His Swiss police escorts took up positions outside the door, their professionalism absolute, their faces blank. They were human walls, and Anton felt the walls closing in.

He knew the play. Isolate. Disorient. Strike. Sabatine was out there, drawn into the delegate chaos, exactly where Reinhart wanted him. And Anton was here, in a “secure” location that felt increasingly like a velvet-lined coffin.

He paced, his mind a whirlwind. The biometric logs Leon had mentioned. Weird patterns. They were moving him on paper, making it look like he was being escorted to a safe room within the safe house. But he hadn't moved. Which meant the system was being fed false data. A prelude to a “tragic incident” where he’d supposedly been in the wrong place at the wrong time during a “security breach.”

He couldn't wait for Leon. He couldn't trust the systems. He had one advantage the Portraitist might have discounted: he was not a passive asset. He was Anton Rogers, and he had spent a lifetime learning how to break out of gilded cages.

He went to the suite’s bathroom, the one room without a visible camera. He pried the faceplate off the sleek, modern climate control vent. It was small, but he was not a large man. It was a risk, a desperate gamble. But staying was a guaranteed loss.

He squeezed into the duct, the cold metal scraping his shoulders. He crawled, guided by memory of the building’s public floor plans he’d studied years ago. The ducts branched. He followed the airflow, towards what he hoped was a service corridor.

He emerged, dusty and bleeding from a scrape on his temple, into a linen closet. Peering out, he saw a deserted hallway. The police detail was still at his suite door, believing him inside. The false biometric trail was buying him time.

He moved silently, using the skills Sabatine had unintentionally taught him—mindful of sightlines, of reflective surfaces. He found a service stairwell and descended, not to the ground floor, but to the basement—the mechanical heart of the building.

Here, among the humming generators and water pipes, he found what he was looking for: the building’s internal fibre-optic nexus. A rat’s nest of cables connecting every security camera, every door lock, every sensor. And a lone technician, wearing the uniform of the safe house’s maintenance contractor, working at a terminal.

The man looked up, startled. “Sir! You shouldn’t be—”

Anton didn't let him finish. He crossed the space in three strides. He wasn't a fighter, but he was desperate, and he had the element of surprise. A sharp, well-placed strike to the man’s clavicle, learned in a long-ago self-defence class, made the technician gasp and stagger back. Anton grabbed the stun gun from the man’s belt and pressed it to his neck. The man convulsed and went still.

Anton dragged him behind a generator and turned to the terminal. The screen showed the security dashboard. He saw his own suite, marked as occupied. He saw the false movement log—a ghost of himself walking to a non-existent sub-level armoury. And he saw the real-time feed from the Hotel President’s security office. It was a mosaic of chaos: dark lobbies, panicked heat signatures in the ballroom.

He couldn't access the systems; they were hardened. But he could see the source of the lockdown. A single, external IP address was feeding override commands, holding the hotel in a digital stranglehold. An IP with a familiar signature—the same encryption watermark from the Vilnius server, from The Vault. The Curators’ signature.

He couldn't free the hotel. But he could send a message.

He typed on the technician’s keyboard, using his own executive override codes—codes that should have been revoked but which, in the chaos, might still work on this local, isolated node. He wasn't trying to unlock doors. He was sending a priority ping to the internal network of the Hotel President, to any device that might still have a shred of connectivity.

The message was one word, repeated, on every screen, every PA channel he could temporarily hijack: STALKER.

Then, he located the building’s vehicle pool on the schematic. An armoured police van was listed in the underground garage. He memorized the code for the garage door and the van’s ignition fob location.

He abandoned the terminal and ran for the garage. Alarms began to blare—his tampering had triggered something. He didn't care. He found the van, used the code to open the driver’s door, and found the wireless fob in the magnetic box under the dash.

The garage door groaned open. He gunned the engine and shot out into the Geneva twilight, the van’s sirens and lights off. He was a ghost, a runaway principal, breaking every protocol to race towards the one fixed point in his crumbling world: the hotel where Sabatine was making his last stand.

---

In the Grand Ballroom, Sabatine was coordinating the impromptu cyber-team. They had used a delegate’s satellite-linked laptop, its signal weak but piercing the local jamming, to start mapping the attack on the hotel’s network. They had identified the hostile IP, the same one Anton had seen.

Then, every phone in the room that still had a flicker of battery life buzzed or chimed simultaneously. Every screen on the confiscated devices lit up. The single, stark word glowed in the dark:

STALKER.

A heartbeat later, the massive, redundant LED screen on the ballroom’s stage, powered by its own isolated backup battery, flickered to life. The same word, ten feet tall.

STALKER.

It was a signal. A beacon. Anton. He was alive. He was fighting. And he was telling Sabatine he was coming.

The effect on the room was electric. The fear didn't vanish, but it transformed. They were no longer just victims; they were a destination. Rescue was coming.

Five minutes later, the sound of grinding metal and shattering glass echoed from the lobby. Shouts. A brief, sharp exchange of gunfire. Then, running footsteps.

The heavy, bolted ballroom doors shook under a tremendous impact. Then another. They were being struck from the outside.

Laurent raised a fire axe, his face pale. The ad-hoc security detail tensed.

Sabatine held up a hand. “Wait.”

A voice, raw and furious, shouted from the other side. “SABATINE! OPEN THE DOOR!”

Anton.

Sabatine didn't hesitate. He shoved Laurent aside and began heaving at the manual override bar, his muscles straining. The thick steel bolts retracted with a deafening clang.

He pulled the door open.

Anton stood in the wreckage of the lobby, silhouetted by the emergency lights he’d somehow restored. He was dishevelled, his suit torn, a trickle of blood drying on his temple. In his hand was a police-issue submachine gun, smoke curling from its barrel. Behind him lay two figures in maintenance uniforms, not moving. He had fought his way through whatever welcome party had been waiting in the lobby.

Their eyes met across the threshold. Anton’s gaze swept over Sabatine, a frantic, possessive inventory—searching for wounds, for weakness, finding only the steely resolve that had held the room together.

Then Anton dropped the weapon. It clattered on the marble.

He crossed the space in three long strides and grabbed Sabatine, pulling him into a crushing embrace. It was not a hug. It was a claiming, a desperate reaffirmation of existence. His arms locked around Sabatine’s back with a force that stole the air from his lungs. He buried his face in Sabatine’s neck, his whole body trembling—not with fear, but with the aftermath of a terror so profound it had become a physical force.

He held him as if he might break him, or as if he were the only thing keeping himself from shattering into a thousand pieces. His fingers dug into the fabric of Sabatine’s shirt, fisting it tightly.

“You’re here,” Anton choked out, the words muffled against Sabatine’s skin. “You’re alive.”

Sabatine returned the embrace just as fiercely, his own control fracturing. He felt the fine, violent tremors running through Anton, the rapid, panicked beat of his heart. He smelled gunpowder and sweat and the metallic scent of fear on him. He had come. Through hell and protocol, he had come.

“I’m here,” Sabatine murmured into his hair, his own voice rough. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Around them, the ballroom full of delegates watched in stunned silence. The billionaire and his bodyguard, reunited in the heart of the siege, holding onto each other like lifelines in a hurricane. It was a moment of raw, unvarnished humanity that cut through all the power and prestige in the room.

Anton finally pulled back, just enough to cup Sabatine’s face in his hands. His eyes were blazing, wet with unshed tears. “Never again,” he whispered, his voice a vow etched in steel. “Never again do we get separated. Do you hear me? Where I go, you go. Where you are, I will find you.”

Sabatine nodded, unable to speak around the lump in his throat. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Anton’s, a silent promise.

The reunion under fire was over. The siege was not. But as they stood together in the broken lobby, surrounded by the evidence of their mutual, brutal fight to reach each other, one thing was crystal clear: the enemy’s plan to divide them had failed. They are together now. And together, they were about to turn from the hunted into the hunters.

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