Chapter 25: The Trap

The hush in the hidden apartment was no longer a comfort. It was a suspended breath. Sabe sat at the steel desk, the light of the ancient tablet casting his face in a jaundiced blue glow. He had mapped the web, summoned the players, but the intel hung heavy in his belly like a weight of lead. The scope of the enemy was paralyzing. Section Seven was not a target; it was terrain. You couldn't shoot the air.

His body was a knot of protests. The wound on his arm, infected, throbbed in time with the drumbeat of his own heart, a scalding, insistent rhythm of decay. His muscles all shrieked at the escape, at the strain, at the mere, grating weariness. He yearned for sleep, but he could not shut his eyes without feeling that he was giving in. Behind his eyelids, he saw nothing but the perfect, accusatory evidence, and Anton's face, believing in him contrary to reason.

It was that face that carried him through. That, and the bare, animal need to live.

A sound.

It wasn't the groan of the building's ancient pipes or the scurrying of a rat behind the walls. This was the soft scraping of friction. One individual, barely audible scratch of metal on concrete from the stairs past the barricaded door.

All his nerves were brought to high alert. The surgeon, far down in the PI, the criminal, the broken man, exploded into existence at once, rigid and unyielding.

He was not alone.

He snuffed out the light of the tablet, plunging the room into blackness so complete it was tangible. He rose from the chair unseen, his bare feet not making a sound on the cold concrete floor. The gun that had been stolen was held in his hand, the weight reassuring, a final bitter one. He leaned hard against the wall beside the door, his shallow, quiet breaths.

The lock. They had been attempting the lock. Not with a key, but with picks. He could hear the subtle, metallic probing, the now-and-again clicks as someone, someone skilled, coaxed their way through the seven levers of the Chubb. No police raid. They wouldn't bother with picking. They'd force it. This was a ghost, like him. A pro.

His head reeled. Rico? Followed? Betrayed? Or had the gigantic,wordless engine of Section Seven simply found him, its unceasing algorithms at last charting his being here in this abandoned recess?

The final pin dropped. The noise was a shriek in the quiet.

Sabe was catching his breath. The door creaked open, a slow, deliberate arc of darker black against night. No light on the stairs. They'd smashed the bulb. Professional.

A small, neat figure stood in the doorway. Sabe didn't hang about for his eyes to clear. He responded.

He brought the rim of his pistol down sharply on the wrist of the grasping hand. He could hear a quick, stifled grunt of pain. A long, matte-black knife clattered on the floor. Sabe completed the motion, shoulder-checking the man into the stairwell.

It was a gamble. He was giving up the secure terrain of the room to the chaos of close combat. But in the narrow confines of the stairs, the man's proficiency at knife-fighting would be negated.

They both tumbled into the narrow space, a tangle of bodies and furious intent. Sabe stood taller, but the other man was constructed of tight, knotted muscle, a human pit bull. A flying elbow smashed into Sabe's jaw, casting stars behind his vision. He struck back by driving his knee upward, hitting a hard thigh.

No words. No threats, no ultimatums. Just the brutal melody of combat: grunts of strain, thuds of impacts, scuffs of boots on concrete. This wasn't combat; it was an erasure. The man, his face a white, featureless disk in the night, stood to erase him.

Sabe's injured arm protested with a howl as he parried a blow at his throat. The exposure gave way. The fist struck Sabe's ribcage, and he felt something snap, a sickening, sudden crunch that stole his breath.

Gaspings, he allowed himself to slump, wrapping his arms around the man's legs in a desperate tackle. Down the final flight of steps they tumbled, rolling in a heap at the door to the utility room. Shaken, they both jolted from the impact.

The.man wavered on top of him, his fingers clawing wildly at Sabe's eyes. Sabe brought his head down and gave him a vicious headbutt. Cartilage shattered. The man reeled back.on his heels, a dark trickle of blood now streaming from his nose.

In that moment of disorientation, Sabe discovered what he sought. His fingers closed on the fallen knife. When the man attacked again, a final, killing stab, Sabe did not try to cut or slash. He reversed his grasp and slammed the pommel, firm and straight, into the man's temple.

There was a splashing, dying sound. The man's body jerked, then went limp, falling on top of him.

Silence fell again, broken only by Sabe's ragged, rasping breaths. There was the coppery smell of blood heavy and oppressive in the air. He thrust the dead weight from him, crawling back until he hit the wall, the knife still clutched firmly in his hand.

He crouched there, shuddering with pain and adrenaline, for a long time. He had done it. He had lived. But the victory was ashes. They had found him. There was nowhere left to hide.

He had to go. Now.

Hobbling to his feet, his body a symphony of fresh agony, he began to search the body. No wallet. No phone. No ID. The clothes were plain, mundane. A phantom. But phantoms sometimes carried messages.

In the front pocket of the man's tactical pants, his fingers brushed against something small and rectangular. He pulled it out.

It was a flash drive. Smooth metal, plain except for one word etched in a sharp, modern font:

AEGIS_ZERO

The label meant nothing to him. But it looked. significant. Official. This was not an individual drive. This was something more.

He stumbled back upstairs to the apartment, slamming the door behind him, locking the dead man in the stairwell. He didn't have much time. Whoever had sent him would have an insurance policy, a countdown. When the asset didn't check in, they would send more, or simply clear the area with extreme prejudice.

His hands shook as he connected the tablet and inserted the flash drive. It was encrypted, of course. But he knew the security protocol—a level of encryption used by corporations he had used once before. He worked quickly through it, his mind a crazed blur, using a decryption method he had developed for a corporate client some years before.

There were two folders in the drive.

The first was titled "S. STALKER - TERMINATION PROTOCOL." It included CCTV footage of him entering and leaving the Vauxhall complex, shot from different angles. They had surveilled him for hours. There were also architectural plans of the building, with this same room circled. A psych profile in great detail. It was a hunter's dossier. The bait had been skillfully set.

The second folder sent shivers down his spine. "A. ROGERS - ACQUISITION PARAMETERS."

He opened it. There were excellent pictures of Anton, taken in the last 48 hours. Leaving the Carouge safe house. On an encrypted phone call, his expression strained. There were specifics: the tail numbers of his private planes undergoing service in Geneva, the make and model of his armored car. And then, at the bottom of the file, a single, desolate document.

It was a phony psychiatric report, expertly devised with calculated ruthlessness. It told a tale of Anton's "breakdown" mentally—paranoia, irrational acts, a "pathological obsession" with a convicted criminal (himself). It was attested to by two prominent, and seemingly bribed or coerced, psychiatrists. The treatment suggested was voluntary, private hospitalization to "stabilize" him, putting the board in complete control of Rogers Industries forever.

It was not a frame-up. It was an overthrow. They were not going to break up Anton's business; they were going to put him in prison and dispose of the key, using Sabe as the public reason for his breakdown.

The killing on him wasn't just to silence a loose end. It was Phase One. His "capture" or "death" would be the coup de grâce of evidence used to make Anton insane, to render the psychiatric hold benevolent, expedient.

"He's next, you know." Evelyn's voice echoed in his mind. She hadn't been joking.

Sabe stared at the screen, the cold metal of the flash drive digging into the flesh of his hand. AEGIS_ZERO. Operation name. Operation to purchase Anton Rogers.

He had no more time. No more choices. He was hurt, hunted, and reeling from the sheer, unadorned wickedness of it all.

But he had something now. Aegis Zero.

And he had a new, unyielding directive.

He had to reach Anton before they did.

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