Chapter 39: Evidence in Ashes

The new safe house was a stark, modern loft in a converted warehouse on the Thames’ south bank. Its industrial chic—exposed brick, polished concrete floors, floor-to-ceiling windows—felt like a cruel parody of Anton’s former life. There were no soft edges, no places to hide. The vast, open space echoed with their failure.

Anton stood at the window, watching the sluggish brown water of the river slide past. He’d swapped the blood-stained tuxedo for a simple black sweater and trousers from a pre-stocked wardrobe. The clothes felt like a costume. Everything felt like a costume now. The gala had been a disaster. They had been flushed out, hunted, and had barely escaped with their lives. Eleanor Shaw was a ghost, the board’s vote was imminent, and they were back to square one, nursing their wounds and their shattered nerves.

Behind him, Sabe was a whirlwind of quiet, furious activity. He had commandeered the large, raw-edged oak dining table, covering it with laptops, cables, and his own custom hardware. The elegant waltz partner was gone, replaced by the digital berserker, his fingers a blur on the keyboards, his eyes scanning lines of code as if they held the secret to salvation.

“She’s spooked,” Sabe said, his voice flat and hard. He didn’t look up from his screens. “The attack at the gala was a message, but our escape was a counter-message. She knows we’re not just hiding. We’re fighting back. And she’s scrubbing the trail.”

Anton turned from the window. “What trail?”

“The one I found. The shell companies. Orpheus, Chimera, Sphinx. The financial DNA linking Marcus to the hitman and to Janus.” Sabe’s jaw was a tight line. “I had backdoor access to the Rogers legal department’s external server. It’s where they store due diligence files on all corporate entities they interact with, including the shells used for Marcus’s trusts. I found the initial incorporation documents. They were sloppy, and used a law firm in Zurich with a digital signature I could trace.”

He typed a furious command, and a string of server addresses flashed across a secondary screen. “I was building a case. A proper, admissible chain of evidence. I had copies of the original contracts, the bank authorization forms, everything. It was all stored on a partitioned sector of that server.”

He paused, his fingers hovering over the keys. On the primary screen, a connection-status indicator flickered from green to red. A dialogue box popped up: CONNECTION TERMINATED. HOST UNREACHABLE.

Sabe stared at the screen, his body going very still. “She found it.”

He began typing again, faster now, his movements sharp with desperation. He launched a series of diagnostic tools, attempting to force a reconnection, to find an alternative pathway. Alerts bloomed across the screens like digital bruises.

> FIREWALL ACTIVE. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT LOGGED.

> DATA STREAM CORRUPTED.

> REMOTE HOST INITIATING PURGE PROTOCOL.

“She’s not just locking me out,” Sabe whispered, a dawning horror in his voice. “She’s burning it. She’s triggering a full data purification cycle on that server sector.”

On the main screen, a progress bar appeared, cold and merciless.

PURGE IN PROGRESS: 15%

“No,” Anton breathed, crossing the room to stand behind Sabe. He watched the percentage tick upward, each point a piece of his future turning to digital ash. The proof. The meticulously gathered evidence that could clear his name and implicate his brother was being systematically erased in real-time. It was the server room fire all over again, but this was colder, quieter, and somehow more final.

42%

“Can you stop it?” Anton asked, his voice tight.

“I can’t get past her firewall. Not in time.” Sabe’s hands were fists on the table now, his knuckles white. He was a master of the shadows, but Evelyn controlled the light, and she was turning it up to a blinding, sterilizing intensity.

78%

“Then save something,” Anton urged, a raw plea in his voice. “Anything.”

The command broke Sabe’s paralysis. His hands flew back to the keyboard. He abandoned the main data stream, the one carrying the bulk of the documents. Instead, he began targeting the metadata—the server logs, the cache files, the tiny, forgotten fragments of data that were often overlooked in a purge. It was like trying to catch smoke with his bare hands.

He wrote a frantic, jerky script, a digital net to trawl through the disintegrating data stream for any solid fragment. Lines of code scrolled faster than the eye could follow. Warning messages flashed and were dismissed.

PURGE COMPLETE.

The progress bar vanished. The server address they had been connected to now returned a single, mocking message: 404 - FILE NOT FOUND.

It was gone. Everything. The contracts, the signatures, the bank records. All of it, ash.

Sabe slumped back in his chair, his face a mask of defeat. He ran a hand over his face, his shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry, Anton. I… I lost it.”

Anton felt the hope drain out of him, leaving a cold, hollow emptiness. This was it. The end of the road. Without that evidence, they had nothing but a video that could be dismissed as a fake and a fugitive’s word against a pillar of the financial community.

But then, Sabe’s head snapped up. His eyes, which had been dull with failure, sharpened. He leaned forward, staring at one of the secondary screens. A command line interface was still running, spitting out a final, fragmented data dump from his last-second salvage attempt.

It was a mess. Corrupted file names, hexadecimal code, bits of administrative text.

“Wait,” Sabe murmured, his fingers moving the cursor, highlighting a broken string of text amidst the digital debris.

It was a fragment of a server log, a record of a user login. Most of it was garbled, but a few words were clear.

…USER: VALE_M…

…ACCESSING: CONTRACT_ARCHIVE…

…ENTITY: VALE HOLDINGS AG…

Sabe’s breath caught. He isolated the string, cleaning it up, cross-referencing it with the shattered metadata.

“Vale Holdings AG,” he read aloud, his voice gaining strength with each word. “It’s a new one. Not Aethelred. Not Orpheus. It’s cleaner. More professional.” He typed furiously, pulling up the Swiss commercial registry. The search returned a result. A company registered just six months ago. The listed director was a lawyer, a front. But the name…

“The naming convention,” Sabe said, a triumphant, grim light in his eyes. “It’s him. It’s Marcus. He got arrogant. He used a variation of his own name. ‘Vale.’ He didn’t hide behind a classical myth this time.”

He had done it. From the ashes of a total purge, he had salvaged a single, glowing ember. It wasn’t the bonfire of proof they needed, but it was a thread. A direct link between Marcus and a new, active corporate entity they hadn’t known about.

“Vale Holdings AG,” Anton repeated, the name a key turning in a lock deep within his mind. “I’ve seen that. Not the name, but the pattern. The board authorization for the ‘Aegis Resurrection’ fund transfer… it was routed through a newly approved corporate partner. The name was redacted in my copy, but the file reference was VH-AG.” He looked at Sabe, a spark re-igniting in his own eyes. “That’s it. That’s the conduit. He’s not just a bitter brother anymore. He’s the paymaster. He’s moving the money for the takeover.”

They stood there, in the silent loft, the vast emptiness of their failure now filled with the fierce, focused energy of a new quarry. The main evidence was gone, erased by Evelyn’s ruthless hand.

But she had missed a spot.

Sabe looked from the screen to Anton, his expression a complex mix of professional satisfaction and profound, personal relief. He hadn’t failed. He had, against all odds, given them a fighting chance.

“It’s not everything,” Sabe said quietly. “But it’s a start.”

“It’s more than a start,” Anton replied, his gaze holding Sabe’s. “It’s a name. And now, we know where to look.”

The evidence was in ashes. But from the ashes, they had pulled a single, sharpened blade. The name ‘Vale Holdings AG’ was now etched into their minds, a target. The game was still on. And for the first time since the blackout, Anton felt not like prey, but like a hunter.

----