Chapter 236: Kaine Tries to Flee

The terrace led to a sweeping lawn, which sloped down to a secluded, tree-ringed clearing at the southern edge of the Rothschild estate. As Sabatine and Anton emerged from the mansion’s shadow, the sound they heard wasn’t the lap of the lake or the cry of a gull. It was the escalating, rhythmic whump-whump-whump of rotor blades biting into the cold morning air.

A helicopter. Not the police or media choppers from the city, but a sleek, black, twin-engine Agusta, its skids clearing the mist as it rose from behind a screen of ancient cedars.

The stable block, the aide had said. But the stables were a ruse, or a secondary option. Kaine’s true final exfil was from a private helipad, hidden from prying eyes and, more importantly, from the roadblocks choking the city.

He was twenty feet off the ground and climbing, the nose beginning to dip as it prepared to swing out over the lake.

Anton’s heart, already labouring, sank. “He’s getting away.”

Sabatine didn’t answer. He was already moving, a streak of dark motion across the dew-silvered grass. The fury that had carried him through the security detail crystallized into a single, laser-focused imperative: stop that aircraft.

He wasn’t running toward the helicopter; he was running to intercept its projected path. The Agusta would need to gain altitude and turn to avoid the mansion and the taller trees. Its pilot would take the clearest route: straight out over the lawn before banking over the water.

Sabatine angled his sprint, his eyes fixed on the rising machine. His mind calculated vectors, speed, the sluggish response of his own battered body. The pistol he’d taken was in his hand. Shooting at a moving helicopter with a handgun was a fool’s errand, a cinematic fantasy. He needed to get closer. He needed a better shot.

The helicopter gained height, its engine note deepening. It began its turn, presenting its side profile. Through the smoked glass of the cabin, Sabatine could just make out a single figure in the rear seat—a pale, composed face looking down, not with triumph, but with detached observation. Elias Kaine, surveying the ruin of his plans from a rising throne of rotor wash.

He was going to vanish. Again.

“SABATINE!” Anton’s shout was ripped away by the growing roar.

Sabatine skidded to a halt at the edge of the tree line, directly in the helicopter’s new path. He was two hundred yards away, an impossible distance. He raised the pistol, a gesture of pure defiance, and fired.

The shot was meaningless. A tiny spark against the canopy.

The helicopter continued its turn, unbothered.

Then, from the mansion behind them, a new sound—a deep, guttural roar of a powerful engine coming to life. Not a car. Something heavier.

Leon’s florist van, battered and streaked with soot, burst from a side alley of topiary, its suspension bottoming out as it hit the lawn. The side door was already sliding open.

Leon, his face a grimace of concentration, didn’t stop. He drove straight for Sabatine, the van’s tires tearing great divots in the immaculate grass.

Sabatine didn’t hesitate. He turned and ran toward the oncoming van. As it reached him, Leon swung the wheel, putting the vehicle into a controlled, sliding turn that presented the open side door to Sabatine like a moving platform.

Sabatine leaped, catching the door frame, and hauled himself inside. “GO! CUT HIM OFF!”

Leon floored it. The van, a workhorse not built for this, shuddered and roared, aiming for a point on the lawn ahead of the helicopter’s trajectory.

Inside, bouncing violently, Sabatine scrambled past Anton, who had pulled himself in after him. He went to the back of the van, yanking aside stacks of empty flower buckets. There, nestled in a custom bracket, was the captured submachine gun from the bank guards, along with two spare magazines. Leon had thought of everything.

Sabatine grabbed it, checked the load, and slapped in a fresh magazine. He moved back to the open side door, bracing himself against the frame as Leon weaved across the uneven ground.

The helicopter was almost overhead now, the downblast from its rotors flattening the grass, whipping Anton’s hair into a frenzy. The noise was deafening, a physical pressure.

Sabatine raised the submachine gun, aiming not at the armoured cabin, but at the rotor mast, the engines, the delicate mechanics that kept the machine in the air. He fired.

A controlled, chattering burst. Sparks flew from the aircraft’s underbelly near the engine housing. A lucky shot? A warning.

The helicopter jinked, a sudden, violent sideways lurch. The pilot had felt the impact, seen the sparks. He wasn’t a combat pilot; he was a charter hire. He’d break off. He’d land.

But the aircraft steadied. And continued its turn. Kaine’s will, transmitted through a headset, was stronger than the pilot’s fear.

They were running out of lawn. Ahead was a low stone wall, then a drop to a rocky shoreline. The helicopter was pulling ahead, beginning its acceleration out over the water.

Leon saw the wall coming. He swore and stood on the brakes. The van slewed sideways, its tires screaming on the wet grass, coming to a shuddering halt just feet from the stone barrier.

It was over. Kaine was clearing the shoreline, the lake opening up before him, freedom a ten-minute flight to French airspace away.

Sabatine stood in the open door, the wind from the rotors howling around him, watching the black shape diminish against the grey sky. The fury was a cold, dead weight in his gut now. He had fought through fire and water, through men and traps, and he had lost. The ghost was escaping.

Then, a new sound. Not from the helicopter, but from the lake itself. A deep, powerful thrum, growing rapidly closer.

A rigid-hull inflatable boat, painted in muted camouflage, shot around the headland to the east. It carried four men in tactical gear. And in the bow, standing steady despite the boat’s violent pitch, was Rico Nadir. He held a long, sinister-looking rifle fitted with a bulky scope.

He’d been monitoring the estate’ perimeter from the water, Jessica’s “Eagle Eye” feeding him data. He’d seen the helicopter rise.

The RIB powered directly into the helicopter’s flight path, cutting across the lake. Rico raised the rifle—an anti-materiel rifle, Sabatine realized, a weapon designed to punch through engine blocks.

He wasn’t aiming at the cabin. He was aiming at the tail rotor.

The shot, when it came, was a flat, concussive CRACK that echoed across the water, distinct from the rotor noise.

A puff of debris exploded from the helicopter’s tail section. The aircraft didn’t explode. It didn’t fall from the sky. It began to spin.

The loss of the tail rotor’s counter-torque sent the Agusta into a violent, uncontrolled rotation. The nose dipped. The pilot fought the controls, a losing battle. The smooth, arrogant ascent became a sickening, descending pirouette.

Kaine’s face, visible for a last, frozen moment in the window, was no longer composed. It was a mask of sheer, stunned disbelief. His clean exit, his final narrative of vanishing into the dawn, was being rewritten into a chaotic, public crash.

The helicopter spun twice more, losing altitude rapidly. It wasn’t going to make the lake. It was coming down on the Rothschild’s own rocky breakwater.

The pilot managed one last, desperate correction, levelling the craft just enough to avoid a nose-first impact. The skids hit the jagged rocks of the breakwater with a shrieking, grinding crash of tearing metal and shattering composite. The rotors, still spinning, disintegrated against the stone, throwing lethal fragments in a whirling cloud. The fuselage crumpled, rolled onto its side, and came to rest in a tortured heap, half on the rocks, half in the water, smoke beginning to curl from its ruptured engine.

Silence, for a heartbeat. Then the hiss of steam, the groan of stressed metal, the lap of water against the wreckage.

Sabatine was already out of the van, running across the lawn, leaping the low wall, and scrambling down the rocky slope toward the shore. Anton and Leon followed, slower, hampered by injury.

Rico’s RIB had already reached the wreck. His men were swarming over the tilted fuselage, weapons raised. One used a hydraulic tool to pry the buckled cabin door open.

Sabatine reached the water’s edge, his boots sinking into the cold mud. He watched as Rico leaned into the open door, then stepped back, his face grim. He gave a sharp shake of his head.

Sabatine waded into the icy shallows, ignoring the cold, his eyes fixed on the shattered cockpit. He saw the pilot first, slumped over the controls, a dark stain spreading across the shattered windshield.

And in the rear, still strapped into his seat, was Elias Kaine. His immaculate grey suit was torn and stained. A piece of twisted cockpit frame had speared through his chest. His head was tilted back, his pale eyes open, staring at the torn roof of the cabin, at the grey sky beyond. There was no fear in them. No pain. Only a faint, final puzzlement, as if he were trying to solve an equation that had, for the first time, yielded an answer he had not anticipated.

The architect of clean narratives had died in a messy, violent, spectacular crash. The ultimate irony. The final, corrupted story.

Sabatine stood in the water, the cold leaching the last of the fury from his bones, leaving behind a hollow, echoing quiet. The storm was over. The ghost was gone.

He turned and looked back at the shore. Anton stood there on the rocks, watching him, his face pale, his hand pressed to his injured side. Alive.

Sabatine waded back to him. He didn’t speak. He simply reached him and pulled him into a tight, desperate embrace, heedless of the blood, the water, the watching men. He held him, feeling the frantic beat of Anton’s heart against his own, the solid, undeniable proof of survival.

Kaine had tried to flee. And the world, in its chaotic, imperfect way, had said no.

—-