Chapter 228: Sabatine’s Flashback

The lull following this aural blitz was a ringing in their ears. The sparking console threw erratic strobes across the vault command centre, highlighting Kaine’s men lying on the deck, out, and the pale faces of those who had surrendered. The air reeked of ozone, vomit, and fear.

"East tunnel," Sabatine reiterated, echoing Jessica’s voice in his buzzing head. He grabbed Anton’s arm. "We have to move. Now," he urged.

They emerged awkwardly from the vault room, leaving the taken analysts in their wake. The panic exit Kaine had used consisted of a blank steel door embedded in the concrete wall, which now stood ajar. Behind it, a tight staircase curved deep into the earth, lighted by poor, caged batteries. The temperature increased in dampness with each step, with the sound of water echoing distantly in time. The lake.

Anton followed, a thrashing mass of protesting flesh, but his mind stayed focused on the receding spine of Elias Kaine. The discovery of the ultimate plot—the destruction of his lineage—had sparked a burning hatred amidst the pain. He would not allow this specter to claim victory.

"Sabatine led, his movements precise but tight with a new, strange tension Anton hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t just focus; it was a coiled, inward struggle," Anton read.

The spiral stairs led into another corridor. But this one was different. Older. The walls were of rough-hewn stone, slick with condensation. Conduit pipes and heavy, insulated cables ran along the ceiling, humming with leftover current. It was a utility tunnel, a hidden passage from the vault in the bank to the lakeside mansion.

And it was a perfect replica.

Not in detail, but in essence. The dampness of the stones, the thrum of the concealed machines, the closeness of the tunnels, the way a single light string had produced troughs of bright light and pockets of blackest darkness. His mind remembered it all—the way this tunnel outside of Tarin Kowt. The very one he'd been told to protect. Where the "high-value target" had proved to be a family rather than an individual. Where crossfire had ripped through civilians hiding in the dark. Where the crying had not ended in hours.

A cold sweat burst forth on Sabatine’s back, unaffected by the dampness in the air. His breath caught in his throat. The buzzing in his head from the disruptors changed, morphing into the sound of rounds impacting, the voice of jumbled communications, and the eternal wails of the wounded. Ozone gave way to cordite and blood.

He stopped in his tracks,his hand flashing out to grip the cold stone wall. The walls seemed to thrum, and were closing in. The shadowy area at the end of the passage wasn't dark – it was alive with the presence of movement, of figures shifting and falling.

"Sabe?" Anton’s voice was distant, a muffled echo in her memory.

"Sabatine didn't respond. He is back there. The feel of the rifle in his hands wasn't right—not heavier, but slippery with sweat. The parameters of their mission flashing before him. Confirm HVTs. Neutralize the threat. The hot spots on the screen, bunched together. Finch's voice, cool and definite in his ear. 'Clear the tunnel. Assets are known hostile.'"

He'd led the charge. He'd seen the movement, called out first. Then the world slid into a hell of injustice. The "hostiles" dropping their guns, raising hands in surrender, and the smaller figures—children—wailing.

No. No, no, no—

"Sabatine!" Anton's grip on his shoulder was real and solid, but it was as if he were touching him through thick glass.

Sabatine jerked in shock, nearly dislodging him. His eyes were wide and blank, locked on a point in space at the end of the tunnel. "They're in the crossfire," he gasped, the sounds ripped from a deep well of primal fear. "The orders were wrong. the signatures. they're not combatants."

Anton fixed him with a look, saw the mask of the impassive operative slip, and a core riddled with guilt and pain. He knew the synopsis—Finch, the changed ops, the losses. But knowing it was one thing, witnessing it happening to this man, in this benighted corridor, was quite another.

He didn't try to talk to him rationally. He didn't tell him it wasn't real. He knew, with a sudden and deep sense of conviction, that it was every bit as real as the rock beneath their feet. Instead, he stepped in front of Sabatine, blocking his view of the triggering tunnel, compelling him to look at him.

He cupped both hands around Sabatine's face, his grip strong and grounding. "Look at me," Anton growled, his voice deep but very strong. "Sabatine. Look at my eyes."

His eyes were wild and searching, flickering with a struggle to focus. He saw Anton’s face, black with grime and blood, but with a light in his grey eyes that did not mirror the horror of the tunnels.

‘You are here,’ Anton said, each word measured. ‘With me. In Geneva. That was then. This is now.’ He pressed his forehead against Sabatine’s in a gesture of complete connection. ‘The man who gave those orders is disgraced. The ghosts in that tunnel are not here. I am here. Feel me.’

He took Sabatine’s hand—the one grasping the gun with such intensity his knuckles were white—and laid it flat over his own burgeoning heartbeat. "This is real. This heartbeat. Our struggle. Now. Kaine is leading. He wants to complete the destruction of my father. He wants to efface me. Us."

He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whispering instruction for Sabatine’s battered soul. "You are not the man who obeyed those orders. You are the man who burns warning signs for me. Who fights side by side with me. Who loves me. That man is right here, and he is very much needed."

The words were a lifeline tossed into a stormy sea. His breath grew shallower, the harsh gasps troubling in intensity becoming deep, rasping draughts of air. The spectral screams receded into an echo of liquid trickling into a small, dark cave of sound: their labored gasps. The cold stone beneath his palm simply existed, no longer a wall of a mass grave.

He blinked, and reality re-focused—the damp tunnel, the thrum of the generators, the warm, solid presence of Anton beneath his hands. Fear remained, a knotted presence in his belly, but it was controlled, relegated to a distant corner of his mind by the hard, bright reality in Anton’s eyes.

He was here. Anton was here. And Kaine was getting away.

He took a deep, shaky breath, his brow still pressed to Anton’s face. “Sorry,” he whispered, the word thick in his throat.

"Don't," Anton said, his thumb stroking Sabatine’s face. "You pulled me back from the edge in a storage closet. Let me return the favor."

    

    Anton attempted a smile. "We're even."

    

    "No, you're not an idiot," Anton said. "Despite your ridiculous behavior,

His own smile had been a fragile, fractured thing, but it was authentic. He drew back, his eyes clearing, the operative’s acuity returning. He squeezed Anton’s shoulder in silent acknowledgment, a thanks which would never be able to be put into words.

"Alright," Sabatine answered, his voice regaining strength and his gravelly tones. He turned, his eyes focused now on the reality of this passage—the pathway to their enemy, not a pathway to his own remembrances. "He does have a head start, but he’s not with anyone else. And he's heading towards a boat, which he does not know we have anticipated."

They moved again, and Sabatine’s steps were sure this time. But a change had occurred. The flashback had presented a chink in his armor. But Anton had not hesitated; he had placed himself in the chink and cemented it with his own power. Their bond of trust did not simply speak to safety or tactical maneuvering. They were no longer simply talking in terms of shields to cover each other with and masks to hide behind. They were talking in terms of mendable fractures in each other’s souls.

They sprinted through the ancient tunnel, hearing all the time the sound of the lake grow louder. The ghosts of Tarin Kowt remained silent, left in the damp stone, exiled by a touch and a heartbeat in darkness. The future beckoned, and reckoned with a man who dealt in endings.

And they would face it, not as a bodyguard and his charge, not as a strategist and his weapon, but as two men who had seen each other’s darkest moments and had deliberately chosen to be each other’s light.