Chapter 217: The Geneva Lockdown

The first hint of dawn was a pale, grudging smear in the east, doing little to dispel the gloom. The mist had thickened into a proper rain again, washing the blood from Anton’s knuckles and turning the city into a grayscale dreamscape. They were close now. The Tour Genève, a defiant slash of light against the dark sky, was visible above the rooflines, its observation deck dark but its communications spire a constellation of red aircraft warnings.

But the city around it was waking to a new, grim reality.

It started with the helicopters. Not the sporadic media or police choppers from the earlier crisis, but a pair of sleek, unmarked black Aerospatiales that appeared low over the lake, their searchlights carving white blades through the drizzle as they began a slow, methodical grid pattern over the western districts.

“That’s not police,” Sabatine muttered, pulling Anton into the cover of a bus shelter. He watched the choppers through cracked, grimy plexiglass. “That’s federal. Possibly INTERPOL air support. The narrative is slipping from Kaine’s grasp.”

Next came the roadblocks. As they navigated the final few blocks, they saw them being assembled at major intersections: heavy police vans parked diagonally, officers in high-visibility vests unrolling spools of checkered tape, setting up portable barriers with flashing orange lights. The initial, chaotic lockdown following the power cut and explosion was being formalized, hardened.

A loudspeaker announcement, distorted and echoing, boomed from a patrol car slowly cruising a parallel street. “...état d’urgence local... Tous les résidents doivent rester à l’intérieur... un couvre-feu est en vigueur... toute personne trouvée dans la rue sera détenue pour interrogatoire...”

Local state of emergency. Curfew. Detention for questioning. The Swiss authorities, methodical and thorough, were sealing the leak. The ‘terrorist incident’ in the old town had given them the mandate. For Anton and Sabatine, it was a double-edged sword: it would hinder Kaine’s movements, but it also made them two more rats in a rapidly shrinking cage.

“They’re locking the city down for the day,” Sabatine said, his voice low. “No one in or out without intense scrutiny. The auction’s buyers, Durand’s guests… they’ll be trapped here too. Kaine’s clean exit strategy just evaporated.”

Anton leaned against the bus shelter, exhaustion and pain making his thoughts slow, but the strategist in him saw the opportunity. “It forces his hand. He can’t wait for us out. He can’t stage another ‘accident’ with this many official eyes. He has to move now. Fast. Direct. Before the net closes so tight not even he can slip through.”

Sabatine nodded, a grim satisfaction in his eyes. “Recklessness. That’s our opening. A careful hunter is deadly. A desperate, cornered hunter makes mistakes.”

They pressed on, moving from doorway to alley, avoiding the growing pools of official light. The sound of the city changed. The normal early-morning murmur of delivery trucks and commuters was absent, replaced by the static buzz of police radios, the rumble of armored vehicles, and the ever-present whup-whup-whup of the helicopters.

As they turned onto the wide, deserted Avenue de la Tour, the final approach to the skyscraper, they saw the most telling sign of the consortium’s panic.

A long, black sedan with diplomatic plates was parked haphazardly, its front bumper kissing the base of a lamppost, its driver’s door hanging open. A man in a rumpled suit—Alistair Finch’s aide, from the villa—was arguing frantically with two stone-faced Swiss police officers, waving credentials that were being examined with glacial skepticism. The polished facade of diplomatic immunity was cracking under the pressure of a city-wide emergency.

Further down, a delivery van identical to the one that had bombed the alley sat silent, but its side door was ajar. As they slipped past, Anton glimpsed the interior: it was empty of weapons or men, but littered with discarded food wrappers and energy drink cans—the detritus of a hasty, prolonged stakeout that had just been abandoned. Kaine’s perimeter was collapsing inward.

“They’re pulling back to core assets,” Sabatine observed. “Consolidating. He’s sacrificing his outer layers to preserve his centre.”

“The centre being us, and the prototype,” Anton said. “And the Tour. He knows it’s where we’ll go. It’s the only play left.”

They reached the plaza at the base of the tower. Normally bustling with tourists and businesspeople, it was eerily empty, patrolled by a pair of private security guards in long coats, their eyes nervously scanning the sky and the approaching police cordons. The tower’s management, facing a city lockdown, had likely sent non-essential staff home. The guards were there to protect the asset, not to manage crowds.

Sabatine assessed the entrance. The main glass doors were sealed, a chain and padlock visible through the glass. A smaller service entrance to the side was a possibility, but it would be monitored.

Then his eyes caught a flicker of movement on a high floor—a brief flash of light, like a torch beam sweeping an office. Not security. Security would have steady, predictable patterns. This was searching.

“They’re already inside,” Sabatine breathed. “Clearing it. Making it their own battlefield. They got here before the lockdown solidified.”

The plan to use the public space was evaporating. The tower was being turned into a private trap.

Anton followed his gaze, a cold knot forming in his stomach. “So we don’t go in the front door. We go in the back. The way they won’t expect.”

“What back?”

Anton pointed upwards, past the soaring glass facade, to the complex lattice of the tower’s external maintenance scaffolding and window-cleaning rigs, barely visible in the gloom. “There’s always access for servicing. A ladder system, service elevators for the exterior units. The blueprints I reviewed years ago for a potential security contract showed an external maintenance hatch on the north side, at ground level, leading to a dedicated utility shaft.”

Sabatine stared at him, then at the sheer, rain-slicked face of the building. “You want to climb the outside of a skyscraper. In the rain. With a bullet wound.”

“I want to use the access no one thinks about,” Anton corrected, a spark of his old, arrogant fire in his eyes. “Kaine will have the lobby, the internal stairs, and the elevators covered. He’ll own the inside. So we don’t give him the inside. We take the skin.”

It was insane. But in a city sealed shut, with hunters consolidating in the obvious places, insanity had a certain logic. The sheer audacity of it might be their only cloak.

They circled the building’s base, keeping to the deep shadows of ornamental hedges and concrete planters. On the north side, shielded from the main plaza by a protruding conference wing, they found it: a sleek, brushed-metal panel, flush with the wall, marked with universal symbols for hazard and electrical access. It was secured with a heavy, industrial lock.

Sabatine produced the set of keys taken from the unconscious knifeman. The third one slid home and turned with a smooth, well-oiled click. The panel swung open silently, revealing a dark, vertical shaft with rungs set into the wall, smelling of ozone and cold metal. A faint, green emergency glow emanated from far below.

“Servant’s entrance,” Anton murmured.

Sabatine went first, climbing down into the darkness. Anton followed, each movement a fresh agony, his injured arm useless for gripping. He descended mostly with his legs and his good hand, his teeth gritted against the pain. The shaft was narrow, claustrophobic, the hum of the building’s internal machinery a constant vibration in the metal.

They climbed down past sub-levels marked P1, P2, then started ascending a parallel ladder system that Sabatine identified as leading up the internal spine of the building’s curtain wall. It was a secret highway within the tower’s double skin, used by engineers to access cabling and external fixtures.

They climbed in silence, the only sounds their laboured breathing and the distant, echoing sounds of the city in crisis filtering through the building’s layers. After what felt like an eternity, Sabatine stopped at a service platform marked Niveau 40. He peered through a small, wire-reinforced observation port.

“Clear,” he whispered. “This opens onto a mechanical room. From there, we can access the internal stairs for the final floors to the observation deck.”

He eased the door open. The room beyond was a forest of humming electrical cabinets and HVAC ducts. It was warm, dry, and, for the moment, deserted.

They slipped inside, closing the hatch behind them. For the first time in hours, they were out of the rain, in a space of relative quiet. The relentless pressure of the chase eased a fraction.

Anton slumped against a cold metal cabinet, his body trembling with fatigue. The climb had taken the last of his reserves. Sabatine leaned beside him, checking the bandage on his neck, his touch gentle.

“The lockdown is our ally now,” Sabatine said quietly. “Kaine can’t exfiltrate. He can’t call in unlimited reinforcements. He’s stuck in here with us, in a tower that’s becoming a fortress. His window is slamming shut.”

Anton nodded, his eyes closed. “And a man with a closing window either flees,” he said, opening his eyes to meet Sabatine’s, “or he smashes it and reaches for what he wants with bloody hands.”

He knew which kind of man Elias Kaine was. The reckless, final move was coming. The Geneva lockdown hadn’t ended the game. It had simply moved it to the highest, most exposed board on the chess table, with no way for any of the pieces to retreat. The next move would be checkmate, for someone.

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