Chapter 52. Evelyn's Intercept

The G6's cabin was a sanctuary of whispered luxury, all cream leather and polished burl wood, humming at 40,000 feet. Yet to Anton Rogers, it felt no more substantial than rice paper-a fragile shell suspended in a hostile sky. He stared out the window at the endless carpet of clouds below, lit by a cold, setting sun. Geneva. The epicentre of the coming storm.

Sabatine 'Sabe' Stalker watched him from the opposite seat, his gaze a physical weight. Anton's profile was a study in controlled tension-the sharp line of his jaw, the faint pulse at his temple. He'd been like this since they'd lifted off from London City Airport, a man encased in steel, feeling the walls of his own empire closing in.

"The pilot has the flight plan," Anton said, not turning from the window. His voice was low, meant only for Sabe. "A direct, unremarkable hop. Just another billionaire on a business trip."

“There’s no such thing as unremarkable for you anymore,” Sabe replied, his voice quiet yet firm. He had one long leg stretched out, his body deceptively relaxed while his mind worked overtime, cataloging every possible threat vector. The cabin crew, the air traffic control chatter, the private frequency of the jet-all were possible vulnerabilities. “Especially not for this trip.”

This trip was their endgame. The encrypted files Sabe had painstakingly recovered pointed to a final transaction—the sale of the stolen Aethelred prototype—scheduled for tomorrow night at a secluded villa on the outskirts of Geneva. The buyer was a shadowy consortium with ties to three separate intelligence agencies. The seller, according to all the digital breadcrumbs, was someone so deeply embedded in Anton's life that the betrayal was a constant, cold knot in Sabe's gut.

Anton finally turned from the window, his grey eyes meeting Sabe's. "Tell me you're sure about this."

"I'm sure about the data. The money trail, the communications… it all leads to the Villa du Lac. I'm not sure about walking into what is very obviously a trap."

“It’s the only move left,” Anton said, a flicker of the old, imperious CEO surfacing. “We can’t defend against a ghost. We have to force them into the light.”

"What if the light blinds us?" Sabe challenged softly.

Anton’s eyes fell to the crystal tumbler of untouched whisky in his hand. “Then at least we’ll see it coming.”

The unspoken words hung between them, thicker than the jet's pressurized air. We. It was a word that had become a lifeline and a complication. It had started as a transaction, a billionaire hiring an investigator. It had become… this. A tangled web of need, suspicion, and a terrifying, burgeoning trust that felt like stepping off a cliff.

Sabe’s heavily encrypted satellite phone vibrated silently on the table between them. He picked it up, his brow furrowing as he read the alert from a custom monitoring program he’d been running.

"What is it?" Anton asked, instantly alert.

"A ping. On the corporate jet tracking network." Sabe's fingers flew across the screen, pulling up data. "A query from a terminal not associated with your flight crew, your offices, or air traffic control. It's asking for our real-time positional data."

Anton went very still. “Who?”

“It's a scrambled access ID, but the origin server is registered to a shell company I've seen before. It traces back to one of Evelyn's 'pet projects'.” He looked up, his eyes hard. “She's looking for us. Right now.”

Evelyn Voss. Anton’s CFO. The architect of his financial successes and, from the increasingly concrete evidence, the architect of his downfall. The only person, along with the two of them and the pilot, who knew their exact departure time and destination.

“She's checking we're en route,” Anton whispered, his face frozen in a mask of cold betrayal. “Making sure her prize is being delivered.”

“It’s more than that,” Sabe said, getting up. The casual grace was gone and in its place was a predator’s readiness. “If she knows we’re coming and if she knows we suspect her, this is no longer reconnaissance. This is confirmation for an intercept.

"An intercept? In international airspace?" The idea was so brazen it hardly seemed possible.

"Not a missile, Anton. Something cleaner. Something that looks like an accident." Sabe was already moving toward the aft compartment where their luggage was stored. "She's a numbers woman. She'd want a predictable outcome. A mechanical failure, perhaps. Triggered remotely."

Anton followed him, his mind reeling. "You think she planted something on the plane?"

“I swept it myself before we boarded. It was clean.” Sabe unzipped his own tactical duffel, retrieving a handheld device that looked like a cross between a tablet and a geiger counter. It was a non-linear junction detector, capable of finding hidden electronics. “But we loaded our bags last. In the open hangar.”

He turned the device on, and it emitted a low hum. He moved it in slow, measured sweeps over his own bag, then Anton's sleek, titanium-alloy suitcase. The readout didn't waver.

"Maybe you're wrong," Anton said with a desperate hope in his voice.

Sabe didn't answer. He moved to Anton's leather briefcase, the one he never let out of his sight, containing the very files that incriminated Evelyn. The device's hum pitched higher, and the screen lit up with a cascade of data. A sharp, insistent beeping broke the tense silence.

“There,” Sabe said; his voice was grim.

He opened the briefcase with great care. Under the false bottom where Anton kept the most sensitive documents—a compartment Sabe himself had recommended he have installed—lay a small matte-black disk, no larger than a coin. It was attached with a magnetic strip, its surface featureless except for a tiny, almost invisible seam.

"What is it?" Anton breathed, his blood running cold.

"Tracker. And more," Sabe said, using a pair of ceramic tweezers from his kit to gently pry it loose. He placed it on a shielded mat. "It's a beacon. It's been broadcasting our location. But see that micro-venting port? It's also a data spike. On a remote signal, it can release a concentrated EMP burst. Not enough to fry the whole plane's systems, but more than enough to scramble the fly-by-wire controls on this specific model. It would look like a catastrophic avionics failure. The black box would show a cascade of system errors. Unsurvivable."

The clinical description made the horror of it even more profound. Anton stared at the tiny device-a monument to Evelyn's cold, calculating hatred. She hadn't wanted him dead; she'd wanted him erased, his investigation silenced forever, and his death a tidy, explicable tragedy.

“She was in my office this morning,” Anton whispered, the memory clicking into place with dreadful clarity. “She brought me the final merger papers for the Zurich deal. She… she patted my briefcase. Said ‘safe travels, Anton’. I thought it was just a figure of speech.

"It was confirmation," Sabe said, his jaw taut. A wave of protective fury swept through him, so strong it took his breath. He had seen betrayal in his time; he had been accused of it, but this intimate, patient cruelty was another thing altogether. "She was making sure her weapon was in place."

With a careful application of current from a pocket tool, he shut the device down. It went dark, its constant, silent shriek of their location into the ether ceasing. The immediate threat was neutralized.

But the damage was done.

Anton sank onto a nearby seat, the strength gone from his legs. He put his head in his hands as his shoulders slumped. The billionaire façade, the impenetrable armor of control, shattered. Sabe saw not a tycoon but a man who had just learned that the person he trusted to manage his fortune had been meticulously planning his murder.

"All these years…." Anton's voice was ragged, muffled by his hands. "She sat across from me at every board meeting. She helped me plan my father's memorial. She knew about me. my insomnia. My fear of flying in thunderstorms. She knew everything. And she used all of it."

Sabe stood over him, the disabled tracker in his shielded pouch. He wanted to reach out, to put a hand on that bowed shoulder, to offer some anchor in the sudden, violent unraveling of Anton’s world. But he hesitated. He was the hired help. The investigator. The man with his own ledger full of red.

"Why?" The word was a broken thing.

"The prototype's worth billions, Anton. But to someone like Evelyn, it's more than money. It's about power. Absolute, untraceable power. With that chip, you don't just own a company; you can own governments, markets, lives. You offered her a kingdom. This offered her a godhood."

Anton looked up; his eyes shone bright with unshed tears and a simmering rage. "And my brother? Is Marcus in on this? Was cutting him out of the will worth my life, too?"

"I don't know," Sabe said, "the communications were only with Evelyn, but he's in Geneva. The pieces fit a little too well for it to be a coincidence."

He finally gave in to the impulse, crouching down so he was level with Anton. The space between them was electric, charged with shared peril and a connection that had been forged in this very fire.

"Listen to me," Sabe said, his voice low and intense, cutting through Anton's spiraling thoughts. "She thinks we're still broadcasting. She thinks we're a sitting duck, minutes from a tragic, accidental end. She's not preparing for a fight because she thinks she's already won."

He held Anton’s gaze, forcing the man to focus on him, only him.

"This is our advantage. Her arrogance. Her belief that she's the smartest person in the room." A slow, dangerous smile touched Sabe's lips, the first true sign of the formidable intelligence operative he had once been. "We're not the prey in this scenario, Anton. Not anymore. We just became hunters. We're going to walk into that villa, and we're going to use her own trap against her."

Anton stared at him, the storm in his grey eyes slowly clearing, replaced by a hard determined light. He saw the absolute conviction in Sabe's face, the raw unshakeable competence. This was no longer just about protecting a client or solving a case. This was personal. For both of them.

He reached out, his fingers brushing against Sabe's wrist. The touch was fleeting, but it sent an electric thrill through them both-a transfer of resolve, a silent vow.

“Okay,” Anton said, his voice steady once more. He straightened his back, the vulnerability sealed away behind a new, sharper mask. The grieving friend was gone; the warrior CEO was back. “Okay, Sabe. Then we hunt.”

Outside the window, the Alps began to pierce the blanket of clouds beneath, their peaks sharp and unforgiving as knives. Geneva awaited, a beautiful, deadly jewel box of secrets. And at its heart, Evelyn Voss, poised for a victory that had just been snatched from her grasp. The game had changed midflight. The shadows were shifting, and from within them, two men, bound by secrets and a love forged in fire, prepared to strike back.