Chapter 20: The Underground Contact

Time lost all meaning in the cellular concrete. It was not a matter of hours, but the slow creep of a shadow across the floor, the distant, muffled boom of other doors, the random echo of a guard's footsteps. Sabe was huddled in wild, hyper-vigilant immobility, his mind whirling in wild, frantic loops. Evelyn's visit had been an exercise in psychology. She hadn't simply threatened Anton; she had saddled Sabe with the choking burden of his own powerlessness. He was a gun, locked in a drawer while the war raged outside.

The only break in the gloomy drear was the presence of his court-appointed lawyer, a flustered young man named Moreau who smelled of stale cigarette smoke and hopelessness. He'd browsed the folder of evidence with growing eyes, his shoulders dropping farther with each page.

"Case is. substantial, Monsieur Stalker," he'd grunted, avoiding Sabe's gaze. "The fingerprints, the emails… it will be very hard."

Substantial. A synonym for hangman's noose.

After Moreau departed, the silence carried more weight. Sabe weighed each move, each shred of proof, each connection. He was trapped in a story woven of digital phantasms and real impossibilities. To vanquish it, he would need a miracle. Or a specter of his own.

The door lock clattered again, much later. Sabe did not look up, expecting a meal tray or Moreau with bad news.

But the individual who entered wasn't the lawyer, and he wasn't a guard.

He was lean and tall, in the dark, working uniform of a city man—a jacket, cargo pants, scuffed work boots. He carried a toolbox in one hand. His face was etched, his hair trimmed close, and his eyes, pale, piercing blue, held a familiar, weary intelligence. He stood as motionless as an animal and as unseen as a ghost.

Sabe's own breath caught in his throat. He hadn't set eyes on that face in five years, in the period after a dust-ridden extraction site in a country that was no longer.

Rico Nadir.

His former partner in military intelligence. The man who had been with him in the room when the bad news came. The man who had carried the bodies out.

Rico did not utter a sound. He set the toolbox down softly on the ground and put on an air of examining the light fixture in the ceiling, his movements loose, practiced. He was performing for the security camera.

Sabe still sat on his bunk, his heart thudding against his ribcage. Rico's presence here was impossible. And therefore, it was a message. A message of emergency.

Then, after a moment, Rico moved in close, pretending to inspect the wall by Sabe's bunk. His back was to the camera, his voice a barely audible whisper on the edge of being subvocal, something they'd done in crowded bazaars and unfriendly enclosures.

"You look like crap, Sabe."

"Prison style," Sabe muttered in a whisper, long-established habits of procedure automatically taking over without thought. "What are you doing here, Rico?

"Saw your pretty face on the news," Rico grumbled, his fingers fiddling with an imaginary wire in the wall. "Knew that was Marcus Vale's work. He always did like his frames neat."

"You know Marcus?"

"I know the people who hired him. Or at least, the people who hired her. Evelyn Voss. She's the broker, not the brain."

This was new. This was a crack. "What people?"

Rico's gaze, still fixed on the wall, was obstinate. "The type who can make us people disappear. The type who needed that prototype. They paid Voss to acquire it. She recruited Vale for the inside job. It was a neat, corporate-sanctioned con until you started meddling."

He rapped the wall twice, a code for listening up. "The fire, the setup. That was their backup plan. You prodded them into it. You ought to be proud."

"I'm delighted," Sabe dead-whispered. "Why are you here, Rico? A nostalgia trip?"

Finally, Rico risked a fleeting, direct glance at him. The pain and guilt Sabe saw there was a reflection of his own. “Because you’re being set up, Sabe. But not just by them.”

The words landed like a physical blow, colder than the cell’s concrete. Not just by them.

“What does that mean?”

Rico’s voice dropped even lower, fraught with a new, urgent fear. “The evidence. It’s too good. The fingerprint was easy. The financial trail was clever. But the encrypted emails… that’s the work of a specific signature. A cipher I’ve only ever seen used by one other entity. Our old friends in Section Seven.”

Section Seven. The most covert department of their former spy agency. The infamous "ghost department." The people who had provided them with the disastrous intel on their previous operation. The people who had then thrown them under the bus in an effort to protect themselves.

A shivering fear, deeper than anything he'd felt in this cell, ran into Sabe's bones. This was not corporate espionage anymore. This was a hydra. Marcus and Evelyn were one head. The other elusive buyer was another. And now, another third, far more deadly head had emerged out of the shadows: the same specters that had destroyed his life last time.

Why?" Sabe gasped, the question a question. "Why would they be involved?

"The prototype," Rico snarled, teeth gritted. "It's not a matter of firewalls and stock fluctuations. That 'unhackable' AI core? The potential for mass monitoring, for black ops… it's a wet dream come true for them. They wanted it. They probably paid for the theft. When you closed in, they activated the burn protocol. They're burying the entire operation, and you're the scrubber of the day."

The scale of it was staggering. He wasn't just fighting a vengeful brother and an astute CFO. He was fighting a nameless, state-level apparatus that had the power to bend reality itself. No wonder the evidence was so perfect. It had been built with the tools of an invisible government.

"I can't fight them, Rico," Sabe breathed, a true instance of despair taking hold of him. "No one can."

"Fighting them is suicide," Rico agreed, his gaze darting towards the entrance, the clock ticking away against him. "You have to outrun them. You have to reach the truth before they bury it completely." He shoved his hand into his pocket, his movements hidden by his size. "The purchaser. The individual Voss sold the master code to. That's your only lead.". It's the portion of this Section Seven can't handle, because it's out of their jurisdiction. It's a commercial transaction. Follow the money. Find the buyer, you find the proof that the code was stolen and sold. It's the only thing that could break this frame.

His hand emerged from his pocket. Between his fingers was a tiny, black micro-SD card, smaller than a fingernail clip.

"Now that's a ghost," Rico breathed. "Untraceable. It has a partial financial path I was able to access before they were able to plug it shut. It goes east. To Singapore's Got Bank. The account name is 'Janus Holdings.' Not a lot, but it's something. It's all I was able to access."

He faked adjusting the loose screw on the side nearest to Sabe's bunk. When his hand moved across the thin mattress, the micro-SD card fell into a fold in the material.

"They're watching you, Sabe," Rico stood up straight and told the camera in a slightly more forceful, normal voice. "They're watching Rogers. They have eyes all over. Trust no one. The walls have ears, and some of those ears belong to people who don't exist."

He picked up his toolbox, his performance as the repairman complete. He gave Sabe one last, long look, a universe of shared history and unspoken apology in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Rico mouthed, silent this time. For the failed mission. For the years of silence. For this.

Then he was gone. The door closed, the lock turned, and Sabe was alone again.

But he was not the same man.

The cell was no longer captivity; it was the hub of a conspiracy that ran from the boardrooms of Geneva to the shadows of power. The foe had a new, terrible name. Section Seven. The men who had engineered his last defeat, now engineering his present one.

He carefully, without looking, retrieved the micro-SD card from the mattress, palming it in his sweaty hand. It was an insignificant weight, yet it felt heavier than the handcuffs. It was a key. A key handed to him by a ghost from his past, a man who had every reason to leave him to his fate.

You’re being set up. But not just by them.

Rico's warning echoed in the quiet. Don't trust anyone.

But the moment Sabe wrapped his fingers around the tiny piece of plastic, a seed of a desperate plan was sown. He was in a cage, but Rico had just handed him the tools to open the lock. The war wasn't lost. It had just been transported, and the stakes raised to one for his very soul, and for the man he now knew he could not exist without.

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