Chapter 211: Kaine’s Trap

The service elevator descended with a low, steady hum, a steel cocoon plunging them into the villa's bowels. The frantic energy of the library, the searing confession, was now encased in a grim, shared focus. They had their truth. Now they needed the prototype.

The doors opened onto a stark, climate-controlled corridor. The air was several degrees cooler, humming with the distinctive, low-frequency drone of server banks. Exposed conduit lines ran along the ceiling, and the floor was anti-static tile. This was Durand’s—and now Kaine’s—digital heart.

According to the blueprints, the secure server room was twenty meters ahead, behind a biometric lock. Sabatine had a bypass—a digital skeleton key derived from Durand’s own network schematics—loaded on a modified tablet. It was their best shot.

They moved swiftly, silently. The corridor was deserted. The chaos upstairs seemed a world away, muffled by layers of concrete and steel.

“Leon, status,” Sabatine whispered into the comms.

“Police have the main floor and grounds. Kaine’s people have vanished from sight, likely falling back to pre-set internal strongpoints. I’m pinned near the east service entrance—two of his guys are playing statue. They’re not engaging, just… containing. Something’s off.” Leon’s voice was tight with frustration.

“Just keep them busy,” Anton said, his eyes scanning the blank doors they passed. “We’re at the target.”

They reached the server room door—a featureless slab of grey metal with a keypad and a retinal scanner. Sabatine connected his tablet to a service port beside it. Lines of code scrolled. He was exploiting a maintenance backdoor, a route left open for technicians that he’d found buried in the villa’s network logs.

“Thirty seconds,” he murmured.

Anton stood guard, his back to Sabatine, his senses straining. The silence down here was oppressive. Too quiet. Kaine was a strategist. He would have protected his prize. The ease of their descent felt… intentional.

The keypad beeped, and the door’s magnetic lock disengaged with a heavy thunk. Sabatine pushed it open.

The room beyond was a cathedral of data. Racks of servers formed silent, blinking aisles, their LED lights casting a cool, blue glow. In the centre of the room, on a pedestal under a clear blast case, sat the Aegis prototype. It was smaller than Anton remembered—a sleek, black sliver of carbon composite and embedded silicon, no larger than a credit card. The culmination of his father’s failed dream and his own life’s work. The object that had cost blood and trust.

“There,” Anton breathed, a surge of fierce vindication cutting through the tension.

They moved toward it. Sabatine produced a small, frequency-jamming device from his pack and placed it against the blast case’s control panel. The case’s electronic lock deactivated with a soft hiss, and the armored glass lid slid open.

Anton reached in. His fingers closed around the cool, impossibly light rectangle. It felt inert, harmless. Yet holding it, he felt the weight of everything—his father’s ghost, Evelyn’s betrayal, Marcus’s hatred, the bullet in his shoulder, Sabatine’s hand in his. It was all contained in this silent sliver of technology.

“Got it,” he said, slipping it into a shielded inner pocket of his jacket.

At that exact moment, the world went dark.

Every LED on the server racks blinked out. The hum of cooling systems died, plunging them into a silence so absolute it was deafening. The emergency lighting, a sickly yellow, flickered on along the baseboards, casting long, monstrous shadows.

“Sabatine?” Anton’s voice was sharp in the sudden void.

“Total power cut. Not just here. Everywhere.” Sabatine was already at his tablet, its screen a lone pool of light in the gloom. He pulled up a city grid map. A cascade of red ‘OUTAGE’ icons was blooming across Geneva’s western districts, including the entire Quartier de la Villa where they stood. “He’s cut the power. Not to stop us. To trap us.”

Leon’s voice crackled in, strained. “Lights are out across the whole neighbourhood. Police comms are going berserk. My two statues just… melted away. They’re falling back to a new position. This is coordinated.”

Kaine’s plan snapped into a chilling focus. He hadn’t tried to stop them from reaching the prototype. He’d herded them. The unmasking of Finch, the police raid—it had all forced a timeline, made them predictable. He’d let them take the prize, and then he’d dropped the cage.

A citywide power failure in a key district would trigger an automatic lockdown. Municipal protocols would seal off the area—automated bollards rising from streets, security gates on bridges descending, public transport halting. It would be justified as a grid-stability measure or a terrorism precaution. No one in, no one out. The police already on site would be overwhelmed, switching from raid mode to crisis management.

They were in a locked-down district, in the dark, with the prototype. And Kaine’s people, who knew the terrain and had planned for this, were now the hunters in a darkened maze.

“He’s turning the whole neighbourhood into a kill box,” Sabatine said, his voice cold with realization. “The police are now part of the containment. They’ll be stopping everyone, checking papers. Our forged IDs won’t hold up to a full forensic check in a crisis. And Kaine’s men will be moving in the chaos, under the cover of the same emergency.”

Anton’s mind raced, adapting. The prototype was a beacon now. Every second it was in his pocket, it drew Kaine’s focus. “We can’t stay here. This room will be the first place they come.”

“The service elevator will be dead,” Sabatine said, already moving towards the door. “Stairs. We go up, not out. Get to the roof. Maybe Leon can…”

A burst of static, then Leon’s voice, urgent. “The roof is no good. I’ve got visual on two drones, military-grade quadcopters, taking up station. Thermal imaging. They’re sweeping.”

Trapped below, surveilled from above. The walls of the trap were solidifying.

They slipped back into the corridor. The emergency lights created a grim, jaundiced pathway. The stairwell door was at the far end. They ran for it, their footsteps echoing too loudly in the sterile silence.

Sabatine shoved the door open. The concrete stairwell was a shaft of echoing darkness, lit only by the occasional weak emergency bulb. They took the steps two at a time, heading up, back towards the main levels. The air grew warmer, and the distant, chaotic sounds of the villa—shouts, the crackle of police radios—began to filter down.

They emerged on the ground floor, into a scene of organized panic. Police officers with flashlights were corralling confused delegates in the grand salon. The elegant gathering had devolved into a shadowy tableau of fear and frustration. In the erratic beams of light, Anton saw General Vogel, standing like an island of grim authority, directing her own aides.

They couldn’t go that way. They ducked into a side hallway—a gallery of modern art, the paintings now just dark shapes on the walls.

“We need to get off the villa grounds,” Anton panted, leaning against the wall. His shoulder was a throbbing knot of pain. “The lockdown is perimeter-wide. Our only chance is to get lost in the streets before the police cordon solidifies.”

“And do what?” Sabatine asked, his eyes scanning the dark gallery for exits. “Hide in a dark apartment until the power comes back and they do door-to-door? Kaine will own the streets. His men will have night-vision, comms.”

“Then we split up,” Anton said, the idea forming even as he hated it. “You take the prototype. You’re better at moving unseen. Get it to Jessica, to the authorities. I’ll be the distraction. I’ll let them see ‘Anton Rogers’ trying to flee. I’ll draw them off.”

“No.” The word was absolute, a stone dropped between them. Sabatine grabbed his arm, his grip fierce. “We are not splitting up. That’s what he wants. To isolate us. To pick us off. We stay together. The prototype stays with you. It’s yours to protect. I’m here to protect you.”

The old argument—asset versus person—but now it was meaningless. They were a single unit. The objective and its defender were inseparable.

A noise from the far end of the gallery—a soft footfall on a parquet. They froze, melting back into the deeper shadow of a monumental sculpture.

A figure resolved from the gloom. Not the police. Not a panicked delegate. A man in dark tactical gear, moving with a fluid, predatory grace. He held a compact rifle, its outline sleek and deadly. He was sweeping the room, a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up on his forehead. One of Kaine’s.

Sabatine’s hand went to the small of his back, where a silenced pistol was holstered. Anton shook his head minutely. A gunshot would bring the entire world down on them.

The guard paused, his head tilting as if listening. He was ten meters away.

Sabatine’s hand closed around a heavy, abstract bronze paperweight on a nearby plinth. In one smooth, silent motion, he hurled it across the room. It crashed into a glass display case with a spectacular, echoing shatter.

The guard spun, weapon raised, and moved swiftly towards the sound.

“Now,” Sabatine breathed.

They fled in the opposite direction, through a swinging door that led into the villa’s immense, industrial kitchen. It was a cavern of stainless steel and shadows, abandoned by the catering staff. Moonlight from high, narrow windows cast silver puddles on the floor.

There was a delivery entrance—a large rolling shutter. It was sealed tight, undoubtedly monitored.

“There,” Anton pointed to a smaller, human-sized door beside it, marked Fournisseurs—Suppliers.

It was locked. Sabatine went to work again with his picks, his movements hurried now. Seconds stretched.

From the gallery behind them, they heard a sharp call. The guard had found the diversion. He’d be coming.

The lock yielded. They spilled out into a narrow, fetid alleyway lined with dumpsters. The cold night air hit them, a shocking relief after the villa’s trapped heat. But freedom was an illusion.

The alley opened onto a service road, and beyond that, the residential streets of the locked-down district. No streetlights. No lit windows. The city here was a tomb of dark shapes, punctuated by the distant, rotating blue flashes of police vehicles at the main thoroughfares. The only sounds were the far-off wail of more sirens converging, and the faint, insect-like buzz of the drones, somewhere high above.

They were out of the villa. But they were far from free. They stood at the edge of a darkened chessboard, and Elias Kaine, somewhere in the night, had just moved his queen.

“Which way?” Anton whispered.

Sabatine looked left, then right, his face a mask of calculation in the gloom. Every choice was a potential corridor of the trap. “Away from the main roads. Into the residential streets. We need to find a place to think, to get a bearing. And we need to get word to Leon.”

They moved into the darkness, two shadows against deeper shadow, the prototype of a heavy secret in Anton’s pocket, and Kaine’s unseen net drawing tight around the silent, powerless city blocks. The trap was sprung. Now they had to find the one weak seam in the fabric of the dark.

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