Chapter 208: The Decoy Plan

Dawn was a feeble suggestion against the Geneva clouds, a pale, grey smear over the city. In the hotel room, the air was thick with the scent of strong coffee and the electric tang of high-stakes ingenuity. The heart-to-heart had solidified their core; now, their minds had to outmanoeuvre a ghost.

"The problem isn't getting in," Leon stated, spreading a worn, annotated map of Geneva across the small table. His finger traced a path from their hotel to the Villa des Cygnes, nestled on the western shore of the lake. "The villa's security will be a fortress, but Kaine's focus will be external—on preventing your approach, Anton. He'll have choke points watched, vehicles tracked, faces scanned. We walk in as 'Lepp' and 'Kask,' and his algorithms will flag us the moment we deviate from our boring conference attendee pattern."

Anton, sipping his black coffee, studied the map. The pain in his shoulder was a dull, manageable throb, a constant reminder of the cost of predictability. "So we don't deviate. We give him multiple Anton Rogers to chase. We flood his system with noise."

Sabatine, who had been silent and focused on his laptop, looked up, a dangerous glint in his eyes. "A symphony of ghosts. I like it. But we need more than noise. We need credible narratives. Each decoy must have a reason to exist, a backstory Kaine's analysts would waste precious minutes dissecting."

He turned his screen around. On it was a complex, multi-layered digital map of Geneva, overlaid with traffic camera networks, known telecom mast locations, and what looked like shifting probability clouds. "Kaine doesn't just watch people. He watches patterns—financial transactions moving through the city, sudden rentals of fast cars, bursts of encrypted comms, hotel bookings under known aliases. His network is a predator that hunts by anomaly. So we give him a feast of anomalies."

He began to type, his fingers a blur. "We create three distinct decoy itineraries for 'Anton Rogers.' Each must be launched from a different point, using different methods, and with a different apparent goal."

Decoy Alpha: The Desperate Heir.

Sabatine pulled up a fake booking at the luxurious Hotel d'Angleterre,paid for by a dormant shell company linked to Anton's father that Jessica had provided access to. "This Anton is wounded, arrogant, and rushing to confront his brother. He's using old, compromised resources. He hires a private medical team to come to the hotel—a signal of injury. He makes a clumsy, encrypted attempt to access Rogers Industries' Geneva satellite office server. He's emotional, sloppy. Kaine will see this as the most likely—a wounded animal returning to its den to snarl."

Leon nodded. "I can arrange for a man of your general build, with a bandaged shoulder, to be seen being helped into the Hotel d'Angleterre. A car with blacked-out windows, a flurry of activity. It'll draw a significant portion of his visible assets."

Decoy Bravo: The Corporate Shadow.

Sabatine's screens split,showing financial graphs. "This Anton is cold, calculating. He's here to salvage the deal. He uses a cutting-edge, dark-web banking transfer to secure a last-minute private viewing at Galerie du Lac, a high-end auction house known for discreetly selling 'grey market' tech. The gallery is two blocks from the Durand family's private bank. This Anton isn't here for revenge; he's here to outbid everyone and reclaim his property. This plays to Kaine's belief in cold rationality. He'll have to dedicate cyber-intelligence to monitor the financial trails and possibly place assets near the bank."

Anton watched, fascinated, as Sabatine fabricated a complete digital persona: wire transfer records, a fake correspondence with the gallery's head of security inquiring about "exceptional item provenance," even a simulated dark-web chat log discussing "the Rogers situation."

Decoy Charlie: The Fugitive.

"This one is you running,"Sabatine said, his voice grim. "A private charter flight request from a small airfield outside Geneva, filed under a panic-code known only to your former London security chief—who we know is in Evelyn's pocket. The request is denied due to 'engine trouble,' forcing a switch to a fast car rental. The car is tracked heading for the French border, taking back roads. This Anton is scared, fleeing the continent. It's the contingency plan. Kaine would be a fool not to cover it, even if he thinks it's less likely. It forces him to stretch his perimeter."

Leon whistled softly. "Three full-court presses. It'll split his resources, creating confusion in their command chain. But Sabe, launching these simultaneously… coordination. The digital footprint alone is massive. You'll be painting a target on your own back the size of the city."

"That's the point," Sabatine said, a faint, hard smile on his lips. "I want his attention divided. I want his analysts arguing over which signal is real. And while they're distracted by the fireworks, the real us—Martin and Andrus—take a quiet, pre-paid taxi to a café three blocks from the villa, and we walk in through the service entrance during the shift change for the catering staff Leon identified."

Anton leaned forward. "The itineraries need to breathe. They can't just appear. They need to emerge from credible digital silt."

"Exactly." Sabatine was already ahead of him. "I'm back-dating them. The Hotel d'Angleterre inquiry was made yesterday by a 'secretary' from a burner phone in Lausanne. The gallery transfer initiated from a server in Singapore with a historical link to Rogers Industries acquisitions. The flight panic-code was triggered four hours ago. I'm not creating events; I'm revealing a narrative he thinks he's already uncovered."

He worked with a terrifying, beautiful precision. He wasn't just a hacker; he was a forger of digital reality. He exploited known vulnerabilities in travel booking APIs, inserted ghost transactions into financial ledgers during off-peak processing minutes, and manipulated GPS logs from city buses and traffic cameras to create plausible movement patterns for the decoys.

Anton watched him, seeing not just the genius, but the toll it took. A vein pulsed in Sabatine's temple, and his shoulders were hunched with a tension that had nothing to do with physical strain. He was personally cracking and re-writing the encrypted pathways of Kaine's entire surveillance domain. It was a silent, brutal duel happening in the ether, a battle of wits and wills between two masters, fought with code instead of bullets.

"Talk to me, Sabe," Anton said quietly, moving to stand behind him, his good hand resting on the tense curve of Sabatine's shoulder. "What are you seeing?"

Sabatine didn't flinch from the touch; he leaned into it slightly, his eyes never leaving the cascading data streams. "He's good. His firewalls are… elegant. Not just strong, but deceptive. He has false layers that mimic being breached, designed to waste an intruder's time and reveal their methods." He pointed to a line of code scrolling past. "See that? That's a signature. He's using a variant of a Mossad encryption roll that was decommissioned in 2017. He likes obsolete, trusted tools. It's a personality trait."

He began to type counter-commands, his movements deliberate. "I'm not trying to break his core. I'm gardening. I'm planting our weeds in his peripheral systems—the traffic management database, the public Wi-Fi logs of the hotels, the rental car agency's reservation server. Places he monitors but doesn't fully control. I'm making our ghosts look like they grew there naturally."

For two hours, the only sounds were the frantic tapping of keys and Leon's occasional low-voiced updates as he coordinated the physical elements of the decoys via untraceable burners. Anton remained a silent anchor, his hand a steadying presence on Sabatine, watching the digital battlefield unfold.

Finally, Sabatine sat back, exhaling a long, weary breath. The screens showed a chaotic, beautiful dance of light—three distinct, glowing paths winding through the map of Geneva, each pulsing with simulated activity. A separate, dimmer, almost invisible thread wound a mundane path from their hotel to a small café called Le Petit Lac.

"It's live," Sabatine said, his voice hoarse. "The Alpha decoy is checking into the Angleterre in eighteen minutes. Bravo's wire transfer is 'pending' at the gallery. Charlie's car is crossing the Pont du Mont-Blanc right now, heading for the border. And we…" he zoomed in on the dim thread, "have a reservation for coffee and croissants at Le Petit Lac in one hour."

Leon checked his watch. "My guy is in a position at Angleterre. The car for Charlie is a drone—remote controlled, with a heat signature in the front seat. The gallery's security chief is a friend of a friend; he'll play along for ten minutes of confusion."

Anton looked from the glowing screens to Sabatine's exhausted, triumphant face, and felt a surge of awe so potent it tightened his chest. This was the man he loved. Not in spite of the darkness he could navigate, but because of it. He was an artist of shadow, using his hard-won, terrible skills to build a ladder out of hell.

"It's brilliant," Anton said, his voice thick.

"It's a gamble," Sabatine corrected, rubbing his eyes. "If Kaine sees through the orchestration, if he recognizes my… style in the code, he'll know it's a misdirection. He'll look for the quietest point. And he'll find us."

"Then we trust that our story is the one he won't write," Anton replied. He squeezed Sabatine's shoulder. "You've given us a chance. That's all we ever needed."

As they gathered their few belongings—the forged passports, clean burner phones, the tiny, non-metallic tools Leon had provided—the digital symphony began its crescendo. On Sabatine's silent monitoring feed, they could see the reaction. Alerts began to pop up in the simulated command centre he'd mirrored. Resources were being re-allocated. A cluster of red dots (representing Kaine's assets) swarmed toward the Hotel d'Angleterre. Another cluster moved to intercept the fleeing car near the border. A third, smaller but more technical, began a deep dive into the gallery's servers.

The noise was perfect. Chaotic, credible, demanding.

"Time to go," Leon said, his hand on the door. "We're tourists now. Bored Estonians looking for a decent pastry."

Sabatine took one last look at his screens, at the beautiful, deceptive chaos he had authored. He had cracked Kaine's encrypted chase routes not by breaking them, but by flooding them with false positives. He had turned the hunter's own network into a hall of mirrors.

He closed the laptop with a soft click, severing the connection. The digital war was launched. Now came the human one.

He stood, meeting Anton's gaze. The fear was still there, in both of them, but it was now a sharp, clean instrument. They had a plan. They had a decoy. They had each other.

"Let's go get our coffee," Sabatine said, and followed Leon out the door, Anton a steady, purposeful presence at his side, walking into the grey Geneva morning, invisible in plain sight.

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