Chapter 241: The Helicopter Escape

The aftermath of the garden was a numb, procedural haze. The shot, the body, the screaming—it all dissolved into a swirl of official questions, medics re-checking his torn stitches, and the grim, understanding nods from the Swiss federal police who had seen the hostage, the scalpel, the impossible, bloody determination in Kaine’s eyes. It was a clean shoot, legally and morally. But ‘clean’ felt like a foreign concept as Sabatine sat on the edge of a hospital bed, shivering under a blanket, the phantom recoil of the pistol still vibrating in his bones.

Anton never left his side. He answered the officials in a clipped, authoritative tone, his hand a constant, grounding pressure on Sabatine’s shoulder. He was the public face, the CEO managing the crisis, while Sabatine retreated into a shell of exhausted shock.

Jessica’s voice, when it came through on a secure tablet later that evening, was like a splash of cold water. “The narrative is holding, but it’s fragile. The press has the broad strokes: rogue mercenary, corporate intrigue, a hostage situation neutralized by heroic security. But the details are a hair’s breadth from leaking. The ‘heroic security’ is a former intelligence operative with a contested history who just executed a man in a hospital garden. The optics, if they turn, could be… problematic.”

She didn’t say ‘for you.’ She didn’t need to.

“We need to get you both out of Geneva,” she continued, her image pixelated but her intensity clear. “Out of Switzerland. Somewhere you can disappear until the legal and media storms are fully navigated. Somewhere I can control the story.”

“Where?” Anton asked, his voice flat.

“I have a location. Isolated. Secure. But getting you there without being tracked, photographed, or intercepted…” She paused. “Leon has a proposal. It’s… direct.”

Leon’s proposal, delivered an hour later in a hushed conference with a grim-faced Swiss colonel who owed Jessica a considerable favor, was indeed direct. The clinic had a helipad, used for medical evacuations. At 0400, under the cover of pre-dawn darkness and a conveniently timed weather front, a private medical helicopter would land. Its flight plan would show a transfer to a specialized neurological unit in Zurich. It would instead divert, crossing into Austrian airspace before anyone was the wiser.

It was a risk. But staying was a greater one.

At 0350, they were dressed in borrowed civilian clothes—thick sweaters, waterproof jackets. Sabatine moved like an old man, every step sending lightning through his leg. Anton leaned on his cane, his face tight with pain. They were a pair of broken marionettes, being helped toward an escape they were too weary to fully comprehend.

They reached the roof access door. The wind was stronger up here, biting and damp, carrying the distant, smoky scent of the still-smoldering Rothschild estate. The helipad was a lit circle in the darkness, the red beacon of the waiting Agusta helicopter already flashing, its rotors beginning a slow, lazy turn.

Leon stood by the open cabin door, dressed in a pilot’s jacket, his face unreadable. He gave them a curt nod.

They were halfway across the roof when the world behind them, the city skyline to the west, erupted in a series of deep, concussive whumps. Not thunder. Explosions.

Orange fireballs bloomed against the predawn gloom, one after another, in the district of the old town, near the gutted shell of the Villa des Cygnes, near the compromised safe houses. Secondary devices, planted by Kaine or his fragmented network, triggered by timers or remote signals. A final, spiteful act of entropy from the grave.

Sirens, already a constant drone, redoubled into a screaming chorus. Searchlight beams from police helicopters stabbed through the smoke now beginning to billow into the sky. Geneva was burning, again.

“Go! Now!” Leon shouted over the rising scream of their own helicopter’s engines.

But the fire was not just a spectacle. It was a catalyst. The clinic’s roof access door burst open again. Not a nurse or an orderly. Two men in dark clothing, their faces obscured, charged out. They weren’t police. They moved with a frenzied purpose, their eyes locked on the helicopter. Consortium remnants, true believers, or just hired thugs paid for one last hit—it didn’t matter. Kaine’s death had not ended the war; it had unleashed its final, chaotic skirmish.

One raised a pistol, aiming not at them, but at the helicopter’s cockpit.

Leon saw it. He didn’t have a weapon. He acted on instinct, shoving Anton and Sabatine toward the open cabin door and throwing himself in front of the cockpit glass.

The gunshot was lost in the rotor wash and the distant booms. The helicopter’s windscreen spider-webbed but held. Leon grunted, spinning with the impact, clutching his upper arm. Blood welled between his fingers.

“LEON!” Anton yelled.

“GET IN!” Leon roared, staggering but staying on his feet, putting his body between the shooters and the aircraft.

Sabatine’s body moved before his mind could engage. The numbness shattered. He pushed Anton toward the cabin. “GO! GET STRAPPED IN!”

He turned back. The second assailant was almost on them, a knife in his hand. The first was reloading. Leon was wounded, unarmed.

Sabatine had nothing. No gun, no knife. Just a body held together by stitches and will.

As the knifeman lunged for Anton’s back, Sabatine stepped into the path. He caught the man’s wrist, his own wounded arm screaming in protest. He twisted, using the man’s momentum, and drove his forehead into the attacker’s face. Bone crunched. The man howled, dropping the knife.

The first gunman had reloaded. He took aim again, this time at Sabatine.

From the helicopter cabin, a single shot rang out.

Not from Leon. From Anton.

He was half-hanging out of the cabin door, Leon’s spare pistol—the one from the van—held in a two-handed grip, his face a mask of terrified concentration. The shot went wide, hitting the roof parapet, but it made the gunman flinch, spoiling his aim.

It was the opening Sabatine needed. He scooped up the fallen knife and threw it, not with precision, but with desperate force. It wasn’t a killing throw. It sank into the gunman’s thigh. He cried out, stumbling.

“SABATINE, NOW!” Anton screamed.

Sabatine turned and ran for the helicopter, his bad leg buckling. Anton reached out, grabbing his jacket, hauling him bodily into the cabin as Leon, bleeding profusely, stumbled into the pilot’s seat.

The rotors reached a fever pitch. The helicopter shuddered, lightened its skids.

The gunman with the knife in his leg was raising his pistol again, his face contorted in rage and pain.

Leon didn’t wait for a clear shot. He pulled up on the collective. The Agusta leaped skyward just as a final bullet sparked off its rising skid.

They were airborne. The roof, the clinic, the two wounded assailants, and the spreading fires of Geneva shrank away beneath them, swallowed by the mist and the dark.

Inside the shuddering cabin, Anton collapsed back into his seat, the pistol falling from his trembling hands. He fumbled for the seatbelt, his eyes wild. Sabatine, lying on the floor where he’d fallen, reached up and grabbed his hand, anchoring him.

Leon’s voice came through the intercom, strained but steady. “Everyone alive back there?”

“Alive,” Anton gasped. “You’re hit.”

“Flesh wound. I’ll live. Hold on. This is gonna be a rough ride out of here.”

The helicopter banked sharply, turning east, away from the glowing firestorms of the city, climbing into the low, scudding clouds. The noise was overwhelming, a cocoon of vibration and roar.

Sabatine managed to pull himself onto the seat beside Anton. They strapped in together, their hands still clasped. Below them, through occasional breaks in the cloud, Geneva was a tapestry of chaos—rivers of emergency lights converging on the new fires, the lake a sheet of black glass reflecting the hellish glow.

They had escaped the fire. They had escaped the ghosts. They were bruised, bleeding, and traumatized, but they were together, and they were moving, however violently, toward a horizon that was finally, truly their own.

As the helicopter pierced the cloud layer and broke into the clear, star-dusted sky above the storm, Anton leaned his head against Sabatine’s, his eyes closed. “The cabin,” he murmured, the words lost to all but Sabatine. “Just get us to the cabin.”

Sabatine pressed his lips to Anton’s temple, a promise sealed in the roar of their escape. The helicopter carried them away from the world of silk and steel, of blood and fire, and into the uncertain, terrifying, beautiful dawn of their ‘after’.