Chapter 209: Unmasking a Spy

Le Petit Lac was an exercise in studying mediocrity. The coffee was weak, the croissants slightly stale, and the atmosphere thick with the quiet boredom of mid-morning. It was perfect. Anton and Sabatine, as Martin and Andrus, sat at a small table by the rain-streaked window, nursing their cups and speaking in low, fabricated Estonian about “market volatility in Tallinn.” They were two more grey faces in a grey café.

Leon was a shadow at the bus stop across the street, a newspaper obscuring his face, his body a live sensor for any ripple in the mundane flow of pedestrians and traffic. So far, the decoys were holding. Sabatine’s silent earpiece, tuned to a police scanner frequency he’d hijacked, carried the faint, crackling confirmation: increased activity reported at the Hotel d’Angleterre; a traffic stop involving a speeding Mercedes on the Route de Meyrin near the border.

The villa was a fifteen-minute walk away, a looming presence of old money and new menace just beyond the veil of drizzle. Their entry window—the catering shift change—was in forty-seven minutes.

Then Sabatine’s phone, the one linked to Jessica’s secure feed, vibrated with a pattern that meant urgent, non-verbal. He excused himself to the cramped, faintly sour-smelling restroom and opened the encrypted messaging app.

Jessica had sent a compressed data packet. Not about London. It was a live intercept, tagged from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. It was a guest list, finalized just an hour ago, for a “private technology and security colloquium” being hosted at the Villa des Cygnes that afternoon. The auction, it seemed, was masquerading as a diplomatic salon.

Sabatine’s blood ran cold. He scrolled. Names from European parliaments, NATO liaison officers, tech giants from Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. And nestled among them, a name that made his breath catch: Dr. Alistair Finch, Senior Advisor, UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Finch. A man Sabatine had last seen seven years ago in a debriefing room in Kabul, his face slick with sweat not from the heat, but from the lies he was weaving about a failed extraction. Finch had been the political officer who’d signed off on the mission parameters, then altered the coordinates at the last minute to target a “high-value militant” who turned out to be a local elder and his family. The “collateral damage” that had ended Sabatine’s career and haunted his soul.

Finch had never been held accountable. He’d been promoted. And now he was here, in Geneva, at Kaine’s auction.

It wasn’t a coincidence. It was a key piece of the puzzle snapping into place with a soundless, devastating click. The consortium wasn’t just selling to the highest bidder; they were selling to governments. Or rather, to compromised individuals within them. Finch wasn’t a bidder. He was a plant. A guarantor. His presence would lend legitimacy, would ensure the UK—or at least a corrupted strand of it—would look the other way, would even facilitate the prototype’s “peaceful integration” into global systems. He was the silken glove over Kaine’s steel fist.

Sabatine stared at the name, the old, buried fury erupting like a volcano in his chest. This man was the architect of his ruin, and now he was here, enabling the theft of Anton’s life’s work, profiting from the same brand of silent, sanitized violence.

He returned to the table, his face a carefully neutral mask, but Anton saw it—the minute tightening around his eyes, the new, grim set of his jaw.

“What is it?” Anton murmured in Estonian, his hand casually covering Sabatine’s on the table.

“The guest list. There’s a snake in the garden. A British diplomat named Alistair Finch. He’s not just attending. He’s… aligned.” Sabatine kept his voice barely above a whisper, the words freighted with a history of pain. “He’s the reason I left military intelligence. He changed the parameters of my last mission. Got civilians killed. Covered it up.”

Anton’s fingers tightened around his. The understanding was immediate, profound. This wasn’t just an enemy; this was Sabatine’s personal ghost, resurrected. “He works for the consortium?”

“Or they own him. Same difference. His presence means this is bigger than corporate espionage. This is state-level subversion. And he’s here to smooth the way.”

Anton was silent for a long moment, his gaze turning inward, calculating. Then he looked back at Sabatine, his grey eyes sharp. “He’s a vulnerability. For them. A man with a secret, sitting in a room full of powerful people who don’t know they’re being played.”

Sabatine understood the implication immediately. It was a deviation from the plan. A massive risk. To expose Finch was to light a match in a room full of gas. It would trigger chaos, and would almost certainly lock down the villa before they could get near the prototype server room.

“If we unmask him, the whole summit goes into lockdown,” Sabatine whispered. “Kaine will scorch the earth. We lost our shot at the prototype.”

“Maybe,” Anton conceded. “Or maybe we turn their weapon against them. You said Kaine deals in clean narratives. What’s cleaner than a rogue British diplomat being caught red-handed at an illegal tech auction? The scandal would implode the event. Every legitimate guest would flee, dragging their security details with them. The villa would be surrounded by real police, real intelligence agencies. In that chaos, Kaine’s control fractures. His ‘sanitization’ becomes impossible. The prototype becomes a hot potato nobody can move.”

It was a breathtakingly audacious pivot. Instead of a stealth extraction, they would engineer a very public, very diplomatic meltdown.

“We’d be in the middle of it,” Sabatine said. “Exposed.”

“We’re already exposed. We’re walking into the lion’s den. This way, we let the other lions in, too.” Anton’s gaze was fierce. “And you get your justice. Publicly. Now.”

The offer, the understanding, was a gift that stole Sabatine’s breath. Anton was willing to risk their primary objective to give him a chance at closure. To weaponize Sabatine’s past trauma for their present battle.

He thought of Finch’s smug, untouchable face. He thought of the dust and the screams that still echoed in his nightmares. Then he thought of the prototype in the hands of men like Finch and Kaine. The two objectives weren’t separate; they were the same cancer.

“Okay,” Sabatine breathed, the word a vow. “But we do it smart. We can’t just accuse. We need proof, delivered in a way he can’t spin, in a forum he can’t control.”

He reopened the secure channel to Jessica. His fingers flew, typing instructions. He needed everything: Finch’s bank records for the last five years, any unexplained wealth, his travel logs, his encrypted communications from the Kabul period. He needed it woven into a damning, succinct dossier. And he needed a delivery system.

Jessica’s response was immediate: “Accessing Whitehall backend. Stand by. Delivery?”

Sabatine’s mind raced. They couldn’t walk in and hand out flyers. The signal had to come from inside the house, from someone with credibility. His eyes scanned the guest list again, landing on another name: General Cosima Vogel, Swiss Intelligence Liaison to NATO. Known for her integrity, her impatience with political games. A soldier.

“We send it to General Vogel,” Sabatine typed. “To her private, secure NATO inbox. From a ghost server with a fingerprint that traces back to… MI6 internal audit. Make it look like a leak from within his own house.”

“Psychological warfare. I’ll fabricate the digital provenance. Give me twenty minutes.”

The wait was agony. They paid their bill, left the café, and began a slow, meandering walk towards the villa’s general vicinity, just another pair of men killing time. Sabatine’s heart hammered against his ribs. He was about to tear open his oldest wound in the most dangerous room on the continent.

The dossier arrived. Sabatine scanned it on his phone. It was a masterpiece. Jessica had constructed a timeline of Finch’s corrupt dealings, starting with the altered mission orders in Kabul (with Sabatine’s identity scrubbed, listed as “Asset Gamma”), leading to offshore payments, and culminating with a recent, massive transfer from a Durand holding company into a Liechtenstein trust. It was a snake, fully uncoiled.

“It’s ready,” he said to Anton.

“Do it.”

Sabatine hit send. The digital packet, wrapped in layers of deceptive code that screamed “Whitehall whistleblower,” shot into the secure channels of NATO’s Geneva communications hub, addressed directly to General Vogel’s eyes only.

Now, they had to be inside to witness the fallout.

They reached the service lane behind the Villa des Cygnes. It was time. Leon melted from the shadows, giving a curt nod. The catering van was there, and the two regular staff were being subtly delayed by a “flat tire” Leon had arranged three blocks away. Dressed in the plain black trousers and white shirts they’d carried in a bag, Anton and Sabatine took their places, hoisting insulated carriers. They fell into step with the other arriving staff, their heads down, their Estonian passports and conference badges for “Lepp” and “Kask” hidden in inner pockets.

The service entrance was a reinforced steel door, manned by one of Kaine’s men—a professional with an earpiece and a watchful, impersonal gaze. He checked their faces against a tablet. Sabatine held his breath. Their forged identities, their boring, pre-loaded profiles as temporary catering staff hired through a local agency, held. The guard waved them through with a grunt.

They were in.

The villa’s underbelly was a maze of stainless steel and polished stone. They deposited their carriers in the bustling kitchen and slipped away, shedding their catering jackets to reveal the dark, nondescript clothing beneath. They became ghosts in the machine, moving through the staff corridors towards the main wing.

The “colloquium” was being held in the grand salon. Through a service door left ajar, they could see the scene: a gathering of about fifty men and women, the air thick with the murmur of polite conversation and the clink of fine china. Sunlight struggled through tall windows, gleaming off chandeliers and the bald head of Dr. Alistair Finch, who was holding court near the fireplace, a glass of champagne in his hand, smiling benignly.

Sabatine’s vision narrowed to that face. The fury was a cold, sharp blade in his gut.

Then, he saw General Vogel. She stood apart, near a console where a discreet military aide had just handed her a secure tablet. She was a tall, severe woman with iron-grey hair. She glanced at the tablet, her expression initially one of bureaucratic annoyance. Then it changed. Her eyes widened a fraction, her jaw tightened. She scanned the contents, her gaze flicking up, spearing across the room directly at Finch.

The temperature in the salon seemed to drop ten degrees. Vogel did not make a scene. She turned to her aide, spoke a few terse words, and then began to move, not towards Finch, but towards the Swiss security detail stationed discreetly at the room’s perimeter.

It was happening.

Finch, sensing a shift in the room’s energy, paused in his anecdote. His smile became slightly fixed.

Vogel reached the head of security, a man in a sharp suit who was undoubtedly one of Kaine’s. She showed him the tablet. The man’s face went blank, then stern. He shook his head slightly, a clear refusal. This was their operation. They wouldn’t let a foreign general arrest their assets.

But Vogel was not a woman to be refused. She raised her voice, just enough to cut through the polite murmur. “This man,” she said, her Swiss-German accent crisp and commanding as she pointed at Finch, “is the subject of a credible allegation of treason, corruption, and conspiracy. You will detain him, or I will have my details done, and we will see whose jurisdiction holds in this room.”

A stunned silence fell. Every eye turned to Finch, whose face had drained of colour. The narrative of genteel diplomacy shattered.

Kaine’s security chief stepped forward, his body language shifting from host to warden. “General, this is a serious allegation. Perhaps we should discuss this privately—”

“The time for private discussion is over,” Vogel snapped. “The evidence is irrefutable. He is a plant. This entire gathering is compromised.” Her eyes swept the room, taking in the other delegates, who were now shifting uneasily, their own security details moving closer. “I advise all of you to consider your positions here very carefully.”

Chaos, beautiful and terrible, erupted. Finch spluttered, “This is an outrage! A fabrication!” but the panic in his eyes was genuine. He looked frantically towards a corner of the room where a man with granite-coloured hair—Elias Kaine—stood observing, his expression as cold and still as a mountain lake. Kaine gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Finch was expendable. The narrative was collapsing.

Swiss federal police, alerted by Vogel’s aide, could be heard at the main entrance, their official demands cutting through the growing din.

Sabatine, watching from the shadows, felt a catharsis so potent it was almost painful. Finch was being unmasked, not in a hidden tribunal, but here, in the glittering court he thought he ruled. His secret, the one that had destroyed Sabatine’s life, was now destroying his own.

But the victory was instantaneously dangerous. Kaine’s pale eyes swept the room, not with panic, but with a chilling recalculation. His gaze passed over the service door, and for a terrifying second, Sabatine felt seen. The quiet infiltration was over. The villa was now a pressurized cage, and they were trapped inside with a predator who had just lost control of his story.

Anton’s hand found his in the darkness of the corridor, a firm, grounding pressure. The plan had worked. They had rattled the diplomatic floor to its foundation.

Now they had to survive the earthquake.

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