Chapter 223: Leon Maps the Lair

The switch took a blur of controlled mayhem. The black BMW glided to a stop, with the passenger door already swinging open in slow motion. Anton burst out with a speed that defied exhaustion, his coat flying behind him. He did not glance at the van but simply ran head-down towards the open side door, whichSabatine held ajar. The van was in motion before Anton’s feet left the blacktop, with Leon accelerating smoothly from the curb.

Behind them, the BMW accelerated again, with the driver continuing their frantic lone quest for the French border, a phantom car leading Kaine’s wolves on a wild goose chase. The sniper’s nest was quiet, its menace nullified.

Inside the van, in the dim light, Anton slumped against Sabatine, gasping for air. His lips were blue, and his face pale. His whole body ached. "We have to get out of here," he whispered through teeth chattering with cold. The van screeched into a stop, and a pair of scuffed doors slid open. A dark-haired man hollered from inside, "

"You're hit," Anton gasped, feeling the warm stickiness on Sabatine's coat sleeve, seeing the blood.

"Sniper's spotter. It's nothing," Sabatine said curtly. He pushed Anton into a sitting position against the wall of the van and focused on scanning in front of them. "Leon? Tailing status?"

Leon's eyes darted from the road to the rearview mirror. "The sedans were tailing the BMW. They took it good and hard. We're clean.for now." He turned into a deserted side street, but rather than heading back towards the Tour Genève, he veered into the financial district. "The tower is compromised now. They'll sweep it when they figure out our motorcade trick. A new hole is in order."

Anton, still gasping for air, glanced from Sabatine’s tight jaw to Leon’s concentrated face. The decoy had worked, but this was a desperate ploy. They had scared off some of Kaine’s men, perhaps disrupted his direct line of attack, but Kaine himself remained an apparition, and they were all shut up in a locked box of a city. “We can’t just lay low. We have to locate him. Finish this.”

"I’ve been on it," Leon murmured. He nodded towards a battered tablet mounted on the dashboard, where a kaleidoscope of maps, accounts, and blurred Pestering shots hung side by side on the screen. "While you two were engaged in your aerial game of cat and mouse, I’ve been tracking the money. Not Durand’s front companies—those were just a screen. I’ve been tracking the money used to operate. Money for safe houses, for weapons buys, for the level of specialized logistics Kaine operates with."

"The Consortium’s field expenses. Untraceable by design," Sabatine commented, leaning forward in interest.

"Almost," he says. "But each man has a blind spot. Kaine's is a blind spot when it comes to professionalism. He contracts a short list of established providers for high-end, deniable ops in Europe. An armorer in Odessa. A medical specialist in Cyprus. I traced a series of large payments from a Durand subsidiary to these providers. They were routed, but dates suggest a pattern. And a pattern leads to a point in Geneva requiring such heavy-end support over the last 72 hours,"

He tapped at the screen. A part of the city centered in a sector below a lake swam into relief on the screen. It wasn't a villa or an apartment reared in a way to keep it from notice. A five-story building of grey granite loomed over a city block. The very essence of this construction shaded less on a building and more on a bunker with a façade in Belle Epoch style.

"The old Banque Lombard et Odier private vault building," Leon announced. "Decommissioned eight years ago when the new digital transparency regulations rendered it. discreet operations unnecessary. Two years ago, it was bought by a Panamanian conglomerate named ‘Phoenix Trust.’ The building has never been reopened or repurposed. Current status: ‘under planning review.’”

He studied the image. The architecture was ominous. No doors on the bottom floor other than a heavily sealed carriage door. The windows on upper levels were barred and mirrored. “A bank designed to survive riots and revolution. Vault storage beneath, heavy floors, self-contained power and water, minimal access points. A perfect spider hole.”

"Exactly," Leon replied. "My sources have reported strange activity: delivery trucks for commercial-grade food, not construction materials. Generator fuel trucks entering and leaving at strange hours. No construction employees entering or leaving. And," he pinpointed a thermal image overlay he seemed to have obtained, "it is definitely emitting a strong thermal signature, in the sub-level and core regions. Very much alive," he concluded, "especially for a 'vacant' building in lockdown."

Anton studied the picture, his analytical side working to connect the dots. "He didn't come to Geneva solely for the auction. He set up a command center. A stronghold in the city. Where he could control the operation, where he could base his team, where he could hole up forever if things didn't go well." His eyes locked with Sabatine's. "This is it. This is his lair. Where he'd go after the tower, after the motorcade went sour. Where he'd go with the prototype if he got it. Where he's planning on exiling from."

His eyes were locked on the fortress bank. The tiredness seemed to seep out of him, replaced by a hunting intensity. The prey had just discovered the hunter’s lair. “A fortress has strengths,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But weaknesses too. A fortress is static. It leaves a fixed footprint. It takes power, air, and communications. And all those people inside? They’re all by definition trapped.”

"You're not considering an attack on it," Leon shouted, a touch of shock in his voice. "You have two men. One of them is hardly operational. That facility will have a skeleton staff at best, but they'll be experts, dug in, with all the elements in their favor."

“We’re not going to attack it,” Sabatine continued, a slow, wicked smile creeping up his grime-smeared face. It was the first genuinely bright smile Anton had seen on him since London. It was the smile of a man who had just discovered a vulnerability in a solid wall. "We’re going to besiege it," he concluded.

He grabbed the tablet and worked with the image. "Leon, you said it's a drawing card. Let me see where it gets utilities. Water, electricity, communications."

Leon pointed out the city schematics. The thick black lines indicated building feeds from the city power grid, which all converged in a utility room below grade accessible from a service alley on the north side of the building.

"He'll have backup generators," Sabatine thought, tracing a finger over a path in the grime. "But he'll need fuel for them. And they'll make sound, heat. He’ll have communications satellites," but they'll need an uninterrupted dish, probably mounted on the roof. His eyes narrowed at Anton, and the smirk grew into a plan. "We don't take on the army inside. We attack the fortress walls. We'll turn his strength into a weakness."

Anton nodded in complete understanding, his own mind racing with the same thinking. "Interfere with power. Not in the building itself, but tamper with city power to make him have to reactivate with backups. That leaves a signature, a fuel suck. Then interfere with communications—not just a shut-down, but fill them with noise. Make him blind and deaf in his own walls,"

"And then," Sabatine continued with a glint in his eyes, "we announce our presence. Not with a battering ram. With a message. 'We tell him,'” he explained, ‘we know where you are. We know that your exfil points are compromised, and we are sitting on your power and your communications. We offer him a trade.’” "The prototype," Anton breathed. "For his life," Sabatine finished. "A clean walk-away. No arrest, no exposure. He leaves Geneva with nothing, but he leaves. 

We get the prototype, and the guarantee he disappears forever," It was an amazingly brazen move. To attack a master strategist on his own turf, not with force, but with mind games and pressure. They were able to capitalize on their vulnerability in numbers and make it an asset. They were ghosts, targeting the support systems, while Kaine is stuck with a five-story stone albatross. 

Leon hummed a soft whistle and shook his head. "Craziness. Like it might work. But the utility shut-off and communication disruption. That takes skill and time. Which we don't have." "We have me," Sabatine stated matter-of-factly. "And we have one thing Kaine does not have at this moment: freedom of movement. He'll be locked in that building, or soon will be. While we are in a van, in a city where a police search is underway for a fleeing billionaire, not two maintenance men." 

He glanced at Anton. "You're bait one last time. But this time, the bait gets to pick the trap. We went to the service alley. You and Leon keep looking out. I'll go inside and seed the idea. We'll weaken the stronghold. Then we'll give the spider an eviction notice." Anton’s eyes shifted from the granite fortress on the screen to the determined face of Sabatine. 

Fear was still present, a cold rock in his stomach. But it was balanced against a soaring, awful hope. They were no longer simply surviving. They were winning. He took a step forward, his hands covering Sabatine’s on the tablet. Then we take the fortress, he repeated, echoing what Sabatine had told him before. His smirk relaxed into a real, if tired, smile. He turned his hand, interlacing fingers with Anton’s. "Together." 

Leon glanced at them in the rearview mirror, a glimmer of something akin to respect in his eyes. He didn't notice the entwined hands. He just nodded, checked his mirrors, and turned the van towards Parc de la Grange. "Alright then," he growled. "Let's go bankrupt." 

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