Chapter 227: Kaine’s Voice on the Intercom

The hush in the vault command centre was absolute, a tangible presence pushing in after the metallic creak of the door. The air, thick with the smell of old money and newfound panic, crackled with unresolved violence.

Eight pairs of eyes were fixed on them—Kaine’s pale, assessing interest, and the seven others varying from shock to hunting intensity. They were not guards—analysts, communications people, a pale-faced man with the look of a forger, a woman with quick eyes scanning a row of computer servers. Kaine’s think tank, marooned in his head.

Sabatine’s gun was up, scanning the room, a shield of flesh in front of Anton. But he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Engaging a crowd in a small space was a last resort. The standoff was a soap bubble poised on a knife edge.

Kaine did not budge from where he sat. His fingers interlaced in front of him in a gesture of a very disappointed CEO. "You two have managed to make a lot of noise for a pair of ghosts. A car bomb, a sniper nest, an exaggerated motorcade. and now you've dragged mud into my inner sanctum. 'Tis. inelegant," he sighed.

Anton moved forward, just a half pace, positioning himself next to Sabatine rather than behind. His massive wrench weighed heavily in his grasp. "It’s over, Kaine. Your auction is ash. Your buyers are warehoused. Your stronghold lacks power, lacks comms. The authorities have your villa, have your Finch. The narrative begins writing itself without you."

A light, glacial smile danced on Kaine’s lips. "Stories can be rewritten, Mr. Rogers. Plausible deniability is an old friend of mine. A tragic sequence of unlucky events. A deranged British diplomat operating on his own initiative. A distraught, mentally unstable tech tycoon with a deranged mistress on a mission." His glance transferred to Sabatine. "The latter has the advantage of being partly true."

A muscle flickered in Sabatine’s jaw. But he did not speak, his eyes scanning the room, weighing dangers, arcs of gunfire, cover. The hand of the waitress was moving toward a console. The forger’s hand was inching into his jacket.

‘You have nothing to trade,’ Anton insisted, his voice growing in power, echoing in the room. ‘We have a prototype. And you have a hole in the ground, which is soon going to become your grave.’

"Do I?" Kaine inquired innocently. He leaned forward, and with a gentle click, a small red light on the old table in front of them flickered alive. An independent intercom system, not connected to any power grid, not reliant on electricity. His voice, when it next spoke, took on a slightly amplified quality, echoing in the quiet. "You see, Mr. Rogers, you work on the premise that this," Kaine swept a hand through the vault, "or your tiny shard of silicon, is the payoff. You think like a businessman. Assets and liabilities."

He got up very slowly, pushing his chair backwards with some deliberation. The slightest movement of his hands affected Sabatine’s focus on him greatly. "I am not a businessman. I am a narrative architect. And the most interesting stories have nothing to do with ownership. They have to do with legacies. Legacies and their destruction."

His pale eyes locked upon Anton with a sudden, frightening intensity. “Your father, Roland. He knew the burden of a name soured with guilt. It broke him. A good, if long-overdue, end.”

    

    He deliberately moved a slow step around the table. The finger pressing the trigger tightened. “But you. you have sought to erase the stain. To construct something clean from your father’s ashes. A commendable, if misguided, goal.”

He stopped, his hands resting on the back of a chair. The intercom heard the gentle tap of his ring on the wood. “But some bloodlines are just too tainted to go on. Some legacies are weeds that need to be pulled out at the root.”

    

     His voice went lower, dropping the inflection of a man chatting with a friend and falling flat and deadly. “I wasn’t just recruited to steal a toy, Anton. I was recruited to complete your father’s failure. To put an end to the Rogers bloodline. To make sure that name, that empire, the mere thought of it, is a byword for tragedy, madness, and destruction. Evelyn knew this. And in his own small way, so did Marcus.”

The words hit him like punches. This wasn’t corporate spying. This was a vendetta, endorsed by a salary. Anton felt the blood leave his face, the chill of comprehension freeze his veins. His father’s foe—the man on the board who had undercut him, whose avarice had led to the drone disaster—had not simply sought gain. He had sought annihilation. And he had chosen the perfect tool for this purpose, years after his own passing.

"Evelyn…,"

"A very useful tool with a personal vendetta and access," Kaine affirmed. "But the directive did not come from her. Nor from her handlers. But from old money that does not take kindly to messy, guilty consciences attached to their investments. Your father's 'redemption project,' with this Aegis chip, a complete embarrassment. A reminder. You, attempting to see it through, an intolerable sequel."

He stood up straight, his eyes scanning both of them, making him all-present in this airtight room through the intercom system. "But you see, this prototype is simply a detail. Your survival this evening is but a trivial complication in your story. The end is already set in motion. Anton Rogers, son of a flawed inheritance, tainted by a deceitful mistress, meets a final, brutal end in a fit of hopelessness, destroying with him the last chance of his corporation. The Rogers lineage is thus extinguished. The story. is clean."

The final word hung in the air, a death sentence.

"No more," Sabatine had heard. The goading, the exposure of this other, darker agenda—that had crystallized his intent into a hardness worthy of a gemstone. Kaine wasn't simply a thief or an assassin. He was malignant, and he had to be excised.

"The only thing ending here is you," Sabatine growled, his voice low and rough, slicing through the echo in the intercom.

He moved.

But Kaine was ready. He didn’t bat an eyelid. He just said, “Now.”

The quick-witted female in front of the server banks smacked her finger onto a key.

"Not an alarm. A switch."

Panels slid back with a hydraulic hiss from above. No sprinkler systems. The four cylindrical objects lowered, each with a low-pitched, piercing hum that resonated in your bones.

Sonic disruptors. Non-lethals, but totally debilitating

A wave of blinding sound enveloped them. It was not sound, but a pressure, a nausea-inducing vibration that short-circuited the listening center and reduced sight to a liquid. Anton shouted, dropping the wrench, covering his ears with his hands as his knees suddenly weakened. The world lurched into a nightmare.

Sabatine, trained in resistance against such weapons, battled through these attacks of dizziness. He took a shot at a disruptor in front of him. His bullet glanced off a metal exterior with no effect. His shots faltered, and everything swirled in front of him.

Amid this aural fog, he saw Kaine’s followers shifting, sticking earplugs into their pockets. They were ready for this. In this final trap, no weapons would be used, just a field in which guns were nearly useless.

Kaine’s voice thundered over the intercom, twisted by the sound waves into a hellish babble. “.finish it. cleanly.”

Two of the larger men, with ear protection in place, approached the startled Sabatine, their stun batons crackling with electricity. The forger had a pistol drawn, wobbling in his grip as he pointed it at Anton, who knelt on all fours, gagging onto the highly polished concrete floor.

The sound degenerated into a wave, into a sea, into a deluge. He fired again, wildly. The bullet went wide, ringing against the mahogany table. He strained to spot Kaine, to take a bead on him, but Kaine had already given the vault a wide berth in favor of a concealed door at the rear.

The story is playing out exactly as Kaine had written it: the desperate, chaotic end.

However, Kaine had one false move. He had misunderstood the bond existing between these two men in the middle of his storm.

Anton, through the pain in his head and the rebellion in his stomach, saw Sabatine on the brink of being overwhelmed. He saw Kaine getting away. The temper that had spared Sabatine in the square—the temper at the knife at his throat—flared up again, slicing through the sound shock like a hot knife through fog.

He didn’t have a wrench with him. He had a prototype.

With a guttural shout that was lost in the din, he lurched to his feet and launched not at the men with batons, but at the bank of servers where the woman had activated the disruptors. He didn't know what he was doing. He simply knew it was the source of the nightmare.

He thrust himself into the console, his hands scrambling over lights and switches. The woman attempted to push him back, but he was a man possessed. His fingers closed over a large standalone uninterruptible power supply unit, a battery backup device, and with a strength that came only from complete and utter despair, he ripped its cables loose from the wall and used it as a battering ram on the servers.

Sparks flashed. A burst of electrical snaps and pops. One of the cylindrical sonic disrupters flickered, its hum building to a whine, then ceasing.

The pressure in the room eased a quarter. Quick as a flash, with a breath of relief, Sabatine ducked under a swinging baton and struck the man in the throat with an elbow. He took hold of a stun baton when he saw a man crumpling and thrust it into an attacker’s ribs. The man jolted and collapsed.

"The sound field was fragmenting, becoming patchy," Tom noted. "The other disruptors were warbling in an unordered

Anton stood gasping over the faulty console, his hands scorched, his ears ringing in the sudden, relative quiet. His eyes met Sabatine’s across the room.

Kaine stood at the panic door, his hand on the handle. He glanced back, not with fear, but with a flicker of something, perhaps irritation. A messy beat in a clean story.

The intercom buzzed one last time, and his voice rang out clearly in the fading static. "Until the next draft, gentlemen."

He opened the door and disappeared into the darkness.

The other think tank, noticing their leaders were missing and their disrupting field weakening, lost control. Some laid down their hands in surrender. Others ran after Kaine.

The command centre in the vault was all theirs. But their architect had escaped, with a last, mocking threat ringing in their ears like cordite.

"Are you hurt?" 

    The sight of the wires pushed all other thoughts out of her mind. "My car," she screamed.

Anton shook his head, staring at the empty panic door. "He's getting away," he said.

"He's not," Sabatine growled, his voice a deadly promise. He touched his earpiece, a faint but definite hum manifesting now that the disrupters were disabled. "Leon. Jessica. Kaine is moving. Panic exit from central vault. Where does it go?"

The strained voice of Jessica, saturated with tension, rushed into his ear. "Satellite thermal imaging. a lone heat signature, moving fast. via what appears to be a private tunnel. heading towards the lake. The old drainage conduit from the Rothschild estate!"

The main exfil point. He was heading for his boat.

Sabatine glanced at Anton, at the blood on his hands, at the defiance in his eyes. The labyrinth was behind them. The chase is on again. But this time, they knew where the rabbit ran.

Then we finish it at the lake," added Sabatine.

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