Chapter 229: The Ascent to the Vault

The tunnel led not to the lake but to another heavy door, this time old and coated in rust and mineral deposits. A little ajar. Through it, Anton saw a hint of pre-dawn sky, a dark mass of trees, and a periodic sound of water against a stone jetty. The grounds of the Rothschild estate. Panicked exit--right on cue.

But there was no boat. No escaping figure. The private marina was deserted, the moorings containing nothing but stormy, black water.

‘He’s not here,’ Anton whispered, a jolt of adrenaline thrusting through his fatigue. Could they have been mistaken? Perhaps Kaine had come a different way?

"Let it all hang out," Sabatine told her, pushing the door wide and stepping out into the night air. He took in everything—the way the scuff marks on the flagstones below them were being smoothed out by a fine rain, the way a heavy gouge in the wood of the jetty indicated a heavy something had recently been pulled off into the darkness below.

"The boat was here," Sabatine whispered. "He launched it. But not to escape." He turned, his eyes wandering back to the looming presence of the Banque Lombard, linked with this dock by the hidden tunnel. "He went back," he added.

"Back?" Anton's mind reeled. "Why? The vault is compromised. His team is neutralized."

“The vault we saw would be a command center,” stated Sabatine, everything falling into place with a terrible clarity. “A very up-to-date addition to an existing structure. But a bank such as this.its core function will not be a server room. The main vault will be a different story. One with gold, with bearer bonds, with tangible secrets. That will need to be impregnable. Fortified. Unbreachable when locked.” He locked eyes with Anton. “He’s not hiding. He’s falling back into the ultimate fortress. With the one bargaining chip he possesses.”

"The prototype is with us," Anton said, patting his pocket.

"Is it?" Sabatine’s question hung in the air. "What if the one we took from the villa was a copy? A high-quality replica to sell at auction? What if the real one was never meant to leave this bank? What if Kaine’s final play, if everything else failed, was to seal himself in a nuclear-hardened box with the real Aegis chip and wait? Wait for the authorities to eventually give up? Wait for a different, quieter buyer to be arranged from an untouchable position?"

The thinking was cruel and crushing. It was Kaine’s mentality—levels of uncertainty, a fallback into pure, calculated control. The auction was a gambit. The vault was the master plan.

"We have to go back in," Anton said, and the taste of ashes. To return to this belly of stone, this climb up into the core of the trap, was repugnant in a way that transcended words. But to leave Kaine trapped with access to a tool capable of recasting all global security? No.

"Yes," Sabatine nodded, already in motion. They slipped through the rusty door and into the damp darkness of the tunnel. But rather than leading them back towards the command centre, Sabatine guided them towards a side tunnel they had passed before—a narrow iron staircase which twisted up into the darkness, each step worn smoothly by a hundred years of surreptitious passage.

"Service access to the upper vault levels," Sabatine hypothesized. "For the bankers who needed to check on the goods without going through the main floors."

The climb was a silent, burning ordeal. The staircase was congested, so they were forced to go in single file. The air thickened, grew colder and drier. The hum of the generators receded into a distant memory, replaced by an utter, deathlike quiet. They passed through small landings with numbered doors—Vault 12, Vault 9—until they reached the top.

In this case, a short staircase led to a small antechamber. Opposite them stood a door unlike any they had encountered before. It wasn't steel, but a dull metal finish with a complexion of sucking in all light available to it. The door had no hinges, no lock, and no handle in the form of a turning wheel. The door presented a seamless sheet, with no markings whatsoever—except for a dark piece of glass in a spot where a man's eyes were level with it. A retina scanner, different from what they saw on the command center door.

And it was slightly ajar.

A hairline crack of light seeped out of the seam, relieving the blackness of the antechamber.

"Shh," Sabatine said, pressing a finger to his lips. He moved towards the door soundlessly, his ear pressed against the cool metal. No noise could be heard inside. He glanced over at Anton before pushing it slowly.

The door, which was ominously heavy, swung soundlessly inwards on perfect hydraulic hinges.

The light which spilled out was a soft, golden glow—not from LEDs but from actual, old-fashioned glass sconced bulbs embedded in the walls of a room which took Anton's breath away.

The main vault room was a church of money. It was a circular room, perhaps with a diameter of thirty feet, with a vaulted ceiling. The walls were not lined with concrete but with polished marble with veins of gold. Decorative safety deposit boxes with a gold finish lined the bottom part of the walls, thousands in all, each with a distinctive intricate keyhole. At the center of the room, on a raised dais of black onyx, stood a solitary pedestal. And on this pedestal, under a crystal dome, rested another prototype of Aegis.

But this one was different in a subtle way. The carbon composite had a depth of shine, a refracting quality to it. Alongside its edge ran a micro- etched serial number. Anton knew, with a lugubrious certainty, that this was original. This is a masterpiece. His father had touched this piece.

And right beside the pedestal, his back turned to them, stood Elias Kaine.

He wasn't carrying a bag. He wasn't desperately trying to get into boxes. He simply stood, viewing this chip through a dome as if deliberating over a masterpiece in a museum. He grasped a small remote in one of his hands.

‘The silence up here is very deep, don’t you think?’ Kaine said without turning, in a voice that was very calm and conversational, with a muffled echo in this marbled room. ‘Twenty feet of thick, lined concrete between us and reality. That’s where all the really important things were kept. Things that were meant to be forgotten, but remembered for all eternity.’

He finally turned. His pale eyes showed no surprise, only a sigh of acknowledgment. “I knew you'd figure it out. You're more stubborn than I thought. A fault in my analysis.”

Sabatine's weapon rose, pointing right at Kaine's chest. "Stay back from the pedestal," he growled.

Kaine flicked a glance at the gun, nonchalant. "And then what? You’ll shoot me? With a bullet in a hermetically sealed room? The overpressure from a gunshot in this room will burst your eardrums, not to mention damage your hearing irrevocably. And if you do manage to hit me, a bullet will ricochet in this room for a good long time. But this," he gestured with the remote, "is a dead man’s switch with a thermite bomb placed beneath the dais. If my heart ceases to beat or if I press this button, the microchip—and a six million franc investment in historical stocks—is turned to slag in three seconds. While not particularly clean, it’s a definitive end.

Anton’s gut turned cold. A stalemate. They had come all this way to reach this vault, and now they stood face to face with a dragon guarding a lever to wipe out all of this.

"What do you want, Kaine?" Anton's voice interrupted the heavy silence. "You have lost. Your story is falling apart. The cops have your men, your plans. This," he pointed to the chip in his hand, "is all you have left. And you can't very well peddle it from a cell, can you?"

"Sell it?" Kaine cocked an eyebrow. "Maybe not in a conventional way. But ownership, Mr. Rogers, is a special kind of power in and of itself. ‘S because from where I am, I can initiate a dialogue. With regimes eager to see this end up in. less unpredictable channels. The cost is no longer gold, of course. A new name. A guaranteed erasure. For you, Interpol, and the shades of night in Kabul. A clean slate. In return, I'll deliver them the chip and a set of. incriminating files from other operations. A trade, Mr. Rogers." His eyes flicked towards Sabatine.

"He was negotiating from a tomb," she explained. "It was brilliant and it was mad."

    "

"And if we don't agree?" Sabatine asked, his gun steady.

"Then we wait," Kaine stated matter-of-factly. "This air does get recycled, but it won't last an individual for a handful of days. For three. less. It will make for a fascinating study in human physiology. Think your connection can withstand a depletion of oxygen despite an accumulation of carbon dioxide? Which will break first? The tormented soldier or the fallen prince?"

The psychological warfare never ceased, striking at their deepest fears: Sabatine’s traumatic experience in a small space, Anton’s fear of failure. Kaine is working to break them from within, right in this golden cage.

Anton’s eyes fixed on Kaine’s blank expression and then on the actual prototype, the end product of his father’s dream and years of his own life, barely an inch from destruction. Then he focused on Sabatine, who stood tall, a rock against the madness. His mind went to the cabin by the lake. The ‘after’ they had promised each other.

They hadn’t come this far, through fire and blood and fear, to be outmaneuvered in a silent room.

He locked eyes with Sabatine. In them, he saw not a flicker of fear, but a fierce, inquiring intelligence. "What's the play?"

Anton took a deep breath, and the air suddenly seemed invaluable. He had to think like Kaine. He had to spot a hole in this story.

He surveyed the vault. The marble, the gold, the secrets locked away in thousands of boxes. A grave for secrets. And a man with a faith in tidy stories.

Anton took a step forward, with his hands out to the sides. "You're right, Kaine," he said quietly. "This is a perfect full stop. For you. But a full stop ends a sentence. It ends a book." He took another step. "What if I offered you a better option? Not an end. A. continuation. A new chapter."

Kaine’s eyebrow twitched fractionally. He was curious, despite himself.

"What could you possibly offer?" Kaine asked.

Anton smiled, a cold calculated smile he'd employ in countless board meetings to freeze out competition. "A legacy," he said.

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