Chapter 203: A New Target Identified

The safe house itself was not a house but a data farm. It buzzed, a humming, almost sub-audible vibration that reverberated through the concrete floor and into Sabatine’s marrow. It was a windowless bunker dug deep on the periphery of an industrial estate just north of London, pretending to be a telecom relay. The air was arid, cool, with a tang of ozone and dust.

Anton, propped on a medical cot with a new dose of broad-spectrum antibiotics and pain medication coursing through his veins, looked terribly incongruous. The grey wool blanket clinging to his legs and chest would have made an Egyptian cotton set look like a bad joke. But with the light of three large monitors surrounding it, there was a grim and concentrated determination on his face. The shock had metabolized into fuel.

“ ‘Durand’, ” Anton said, still tight but with perfect enunciation. “He’s the conduit, not the conductor. The guy who supplies the venue, the credibility, and the shell corporation. But he doesn’t have what it takes operationally. Evelyn needed a tactician. Someone with the skills and experience with the prototype. Someone who could get it done and. smooth out problems.” His eyes flickered toward his own bandaged shoulder.

Sabatine nodded, fingers flying across a separate keyboard, weaving threads from a dozen dark-web intercepts and encrypts. His own body hurt with a fatigue more substantial than mere muscle, but the search was on, and he knew exactly what to do with it. “Right. She was the mastermind at Rogers Industries. The ruthless gun was Marcus. But as for actual fieldwork, actual n.tasks.they contracted it out.”

The word ‘wetwork’ lingered within the chilled air. Leon, who had been scanning the perimeter feeds on a tablet without making a sound, looked up, his face a mask.

“Find the payment,” Anton ordered, fully switching back into CEO mode, yet a bit more paled and leaning against some server stacks for support. “Payments that large, for services that outrageous, leave a burn scar. Even for Durand’s money laundering.”

‘I am not seeking payment.. I am seeking a signature,’' murmured Sabatine, scanning rows of code.

For an hour, there was just the humming of the machines, the clacking of keyboards, and Anton’s occasionally hissed breath as he shifted. But then Sabatine entered the zone, and the cyberworld opened before him. He evaded firewalls, danced around intrusion detection systems, and entered the cyber-back alleys of offshore corporations with names like “Prometheus Holdings” and “St. Gabriel Trust.”

He sought a ghost. But ghosts leave shadows in the data.

It began as an anomaly. A pattern of security overwrites communications from the Durand shell to a receiver with no more specific address than “Kestrel Solutions.” The coding was military-grade, but with an added level of redundant coding—it bordered on paranoia, like a man checking an unlocked door three times because he’s home.

“There,” he pointed out, pausing the screen. The message contained an obscure set of metadata linked with a removed set of instructions. “Notice the checksum algorithm. It's antiquated. It had been removed from all NATO-secured systems five years ago because a fault had been discovered within its randomizing seed. But some guys were crazy about it. Said its fault was an advantage—to truly know its beat, you alone had to make it sing.”

Anton leaned forward. “You know it.”

“I know the man who taught it to me,” Sabatine said. His voice was dull. A chill began to form in his stomach. He brought up another window and entered a memory he kept vaulted with a digital padlock, encrypted and loathed. It was personnel records from an old unit. He skipped around the formal photos and service records and went instead for the field reports.

And there it was. A passing mention in a mission log entry from a mission a decade before, written by his then-CO, Major Vance: ‘Kaine insisted on using ‘Old Reliable’ for the exfil coordinates. Says it’s his lucky charm. Superstitious bastard. But you can’t argue with the results.’

“Elias Kaine,” Sabatine spoke the words into the thrumming silence.

It seemed as though the room chilled. Leon froze.

“You have a file?" Anton asked.

“Not one you’ll find anywhere official. He was scrubbed. A ghost with a government-issued eraser.” The fingers stroked, calling up images from secret shelves of memory, the mementos of a life he had once tried to leave behind. A grainy, long-distance shot popped up on the third screen. It depicted a man whose age couldn’t be determined, perhaps mid-to late-fifties, with a granite-like mane and the angular, planar face of someone who had been shaped by an incessant-and-all-but-visceral wind. His coat and position on a fog-shrouded pier on some Baltic shore were unremarkable, but it took a moment to absorb the full import of eyes so colorless and devoid of life. It took an eye blink. Those eyes were made for someone who had stared so hard at so much darkness that he had become dark.

ELIAS KAINE. Field Command, ‘Kestrel Solutions’ Front. Former MI6, DGSE, and FSB Consultant.  

     Sabatine typed the header.  

     Current Status:  

     MERCENARY FACILITATOR.  

     Specializes at:  

     ‘

"A triple agent?" Anton's brow furrowed.

“Worse,” Leon spoke for the first time, and his voice was no more than a low gravel. “A free agent. It’s not about nations and ideologies. It’s about learning methods and making connections and then selling them to the highest bidder. It’s not a spy. It’s a secret curator and a silent violence conductor. The intelligence sector nicknames him ‘the Librarian.’ That’s because he knows all about the bodies because he’s put some there himself.”

“You’ve crossed paths.”  

     A look from Sabatine.

“No. Not directly. Thank God. He was a legend among the circles I once traveled. A campfire tale meant to chill newbloods. But they claim he engineered ‘the sailing accident’ that took out billionaire Aris Thorne for failing to sell his routes to a Russian tycoon. That he stage-managed ‘the psychotic break’ that caused visionary maverick Linh Dao to stroll into the Pacific, leaving her AI research firm vulnerable and ready for poaching. The man kills, but he also creates chaos. And billionaires.he reduces them to shadows. Their fortunes, mere smoke drifting toward his cronies.”

Anton listened with a mask on his face. But he could see the beat pulsating in his throat. That’s a whole different level. It’s a knife fight in a boardroom compared to Evelyn and her corporate backstabbing. It’s a thermobaric bomb in a cathedral compared to Elias Kaine.

“Why him?” Anton asked, and the question was very pragmatic. “Why would Evelyn hire a… a myth?”

“Because you are not just a billionaire, Anton,” Sabatine said softly, turning to him. “You are Anton Rogers of Rogers Industries. Your security is a fortress. Your death couldn’t look like murder; it had to be a tragedy, an unavoidable misfortune, or the result of your own tragic flaws. It had to be a story so convincing the markets would believe it. Kaine writes those stories. He was the insurance policy. If Marcus’s emotional manipulation and my framing failed to break you or get you killed, Kaine was the clean-up crew. He’s the field commander for the Geneva auction because he ensures the sale occurs in a vacuum. Not some scheming enemies with delusions of heroism. Just smooth, silent transfer of world-shaping wealth.”

Sabatine pulled up the auction intercept protocol. It was a work of chilling sophistication. The Villa des Cygnes was more than just an event location. It was a locked room mystery. Guests would arrive under complete electronic darkness. All personal security would be supplied by Kestrel personnel. The prototype would be shown in a dedicated server room, its coding sent as a single burst, one-time, and completely encrypted. And then.

“Notice the exit strategy,” Sabatine indicated. “It isn’t specific. It just says ‘Kestrel Standard Sanitization.’ That’s who he is. That's ghost-making. After the sale, anyone at that villa who isn’t a client becomes a liability. Durand, all his employees… maybe even Evelyn and Marcus if he considers them loose ends.”

“He’s going to kill everyone,” Anton said, and then he understood, not as a flare of fear but as a terrible calculation.

“He’s going to make them never exist,” Leon corrected grimly. “Fire, gas leak, a sudden, violent raid by ‘unidentified militants’… a story that wraps everything up in a bow of chaos.”

Anton straightened up, defiance flashing in his grey eyes. “Then we don’t just disrupt an auction. We have to go after him. Specifically. Because without Kaine, they’re exposed. Durand’s a banker. Evelyn’s some rich woman with a penthouse. They can’t make a move without their on-the-ground man.”

A shiver ran down Sabatine’s spine, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the air conditioning unit humming within the server room. “Anton, no. You don’t get it. We steer clear of Elias Kaine. That’s rule number one. We disrupt the auction, steal the prototype, blow the whistle on the conspiracy. But we do not harm Kaine. You don’t hunt a man like Kaine. You learn to dodge a force of nature.”

‘He shot me,’ Anton said. ‘He ordered that shot. He is using my life’s work for his own end. He plans on cleansing a house full of people. He has cancer. You don’t treat the symptoms, you cut it out.’

The two men looked at each other, a gap of understanding separating them. To Anton, there was a target and an obstacle that had to be eliminated with accuracy. To Sabatine, there was a black hole that sucked in light and reason.

“Sabatine,” Leon said, drawing his attention. He pointed at the grainy photo of Kaine. On the screen, there was a geopolitical tracking algorithm initiated by Sabatine. It created a map of Kaine sightings and financial leads. A trail formed, not on where he was, but on where he was going. It swirled, like ice tendrils, from Paris, Zurich, and then Milan.

“He’s already in Geneva,” he confirmed, fearing hardening. “He’s laying the groundwork. Cleaning it.”

Anton’s jaw clenched. “Good. That makes things easier.”

“It doesn’t simplify anything!” Sabatine exclaimed, pushing back from the desk. It was a violent motion in an otherwise tranquil space. “This isn’t a corporate buyout. This is a man who once cornered a Chechen warlord in his own panic room and administered a neurotoxin that caused fatal paranoia. The coroner ruled it ‘heart failure due to extreme agitation.’ The man doesn’t have a moral compass. He has an aesthetics of violence. He wants clean stories, Anton. And today, the story goes like this: Anton Rogers, betrayed and grieving, escaped London following a shooting trauma—and tragically died in an accident unrelated to London, in Geneva. A closed loop. A clean narrative.”

Sabatine walked towards the cot and knelt so he could be at eye level with Anton, who couldn't help but be confronted with the fear. “You are, as of today, a prime target of the most efficient killer I have ever heard of. Not because of the prototype, but because you are a loose thread. You lived. You disrupted the narrative. And trust me, Elias Kaine doesn’t like an untidy tale.”

Anton just looked at him for a moment, at the fear lurking within Sabatine’s eyes. Not a bodyguard. Not a PI. A man who was scared he might lose him. Very slowly, Anton raised his good side and cupped Sabatine’s cheek. His thumb trailed against the stubble.

“Then we’ll have to write a better one,” whispered Anton. “A story where the billionaire isn’t a victim. Where the bodyguard isn’t just a shield.”

 He leaned forward, forehead almost brushing against Sabatine’s. “You taught me that hiding behind walls is just a slower form of dying. So we don’t hide. We identify the target. And then, Sabe, we dismantle him. 

Together. Not you protecting me. Us protecting each other.” Sabatine closed his eyes, leaning into it. The warmth of Anton’s touch was an anchor against the cold taste of digital fear. Anton was right, and he was terrifyingly wrong. But the old mission parameters were no longer an option. This was no longer a contract. It was a covenant. 

His eyes snapped open as he looked at Leon, who nodded once and very slowly. It was not an endorsement nor an approval, but an acceptance. “Okay,” Sabatine whispered, the words an admission and a promise. And he stood back among the screens, the memory of Anton’s touch still riding against his skin. His fingers put themselves on the keyboard. 

“Elias Kaine. Let’s make him an underworld.” He began to type, not just as an operative but as someone who had once worked with these monsters and understood how they thought. He began tracing not Kaine’s actions but his mind. His habits, his supposed passions (clean decor, Mozart, Swiss watches), his supposed weaknesses—a deep, secret fear of uncontrolled fire, sparked after an incident in Grozny; an obsessive compulsion to personally check every detail of a plan.

 “We can’t out-shoot him. We can’t out-spy him,” Sabatine thought aloud. “But we can corrupt his narrative. We introduce a character he didn’t write. An element of chaos he can’t control.” A faint, grim smile flickered across Anton’s lips. “Chaos,” he repeated. “I believe I have a great deal of that on offer at the present moment.” The ghostly figure of Elias Kaine glared back at them on screen.

 A new target had been detected. But back in the dark thrumming heart of the server farm, a more sinister truth had been recognized: they had just entered the world of an active player because they had opted to hunt the hunter. And chapter two would be penned with blood an

d microchips.

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