Chapter 83. The Sleeping Dragon

The wait in the dark boat was an agony of silence and imagined terrors. Every lapping wave against the hull was a footstep, every distant light on the shore a searching beam. Anton’s world had narrowed to the cold plastic seat, the faint green glow of the boat’s console, and the impenetrable black bulk of the Villa Etoile. He held the small, powerful spotlight ready, his thumb resting on the switch, his eyes aching from staring.

Then, a pinprick of emerald light, sharp and clear, blinked once from a second-floor window overlooking the lake. Green flash. I have him, proceeding.

Relief, sharp and dizzying, flooded Anton. But it was followed immediately by a tighter, more anxious coil of tension. The hard part was just beginning for Sabe.

He forced himself to breathe, to count the seconds, to not imagine what was happening in that well-lit room. He was the overwatch. His job was to be still, to be ready, to be the unseen tether.

The encrypted burner phone Leora had given him vibrated in his pocket, a silent, insistent hum. He fumbled for it, his heart lurching. A new message.

LO_Rez_Glitch: Change of plans. The prototype isn't dormant.

Anton stared at the words, the cold of the night seeping deeper into his bones.

Anton: What do you mean?

LO_Rez_Glitch: My worm in the Meridian’s systems picked up a data packet from the Freeport server an hour ago. It wasn't a test. It was a handshake. The Aethelred core, integrated with Stalker’s Cerberus code, has been activated in a closed, test-network environment.

A test network. Anton’s mind, trained in tech, supplied the terrifying implication. “Closed” meant isolated, but “activated” meant it was running, thinking, defending, attacking in a digital sandbox built to mimic the real world.

Anton: What was the target of the test?

The pause before her reply felt eternal.

LO_Rez_Glitch: It wasn't a target. It was an environment simulation. A perfect digital replica of the SWIFT banking messaging network. And the backup nodes for three major European power grids.

Anton’s breath caught. SWIFT. The arteries of global finance. Power grids. The nervous system of modern civilization. They weren't testing the prototype’s ability to defend. They were testing its ability to dominate. To see if Cerberus could identify, isolate, and cripple the core protocols of the modern world.

LO_Rez_Glitch: The test lasted 4.2 seconds. Simulation result: Total systemic paralysis achieved in 3.1. No defensive measures in the simulation were even triggered. It didn't hack the systems. It disowned them. Told them they didn't exist according to its security parameters. A digital god declaring reality invalid.

The words on the screen swam. This was beyond corporate espionage, beyond even geopolitical blackmail. This was a quiet, dry run for apocalypse.

LO_Rez_Glitch: The full deployment authorisation sequence is what’s being exchanged tonight. The Zorya don’t just want a super-weapon. They want the validation that it works. The Meridian is selling them the key to the cage, and they’ve already shown them the dragon inside.

Anton: Can your packet stop it? If it’s already awake?

LO_Rez_Glitch: My packet broadcasts the ledger and dumps the code. It exposes the crime. It doesn’t put the dragon back to sleep. Only the architect of the cage can do that.

The architect. Sabe.

Anton looked desperately towards the villa. The green light was gone. The window was dark. Sabe was in there, facing a treacherous brother, unaware that the stakes had just escalated from saving a company to preventing a silent, global stroke.

He had to warn him. But how? A red flash was the abort signal, the panic button. Using it now would pull Sabe out, leave Marcus unprepared, and possibly doom any chance of stopping the signing tomorrow. But if Sabe didn't know…

His finger hovered over the spotlight’s switch. His mind was a battlefield of protocol and terror.

Then, a new light from the villa. Not a flash. A soft, steady glow from a ground-floor room that had been dark before. A French door opening onto a small, private patio that jutted over the water.

A figure was pushed out onto the patio. Marcus, in a rumpled dressing gown, his hands visible, raised. He looked terrified.

Behind him, silhouetted in the light from the doorway, was Sabe. He held no visible weapon, but his posture was a threat in itself. He said something, low and inaudible across the water. Marcus nodded frantically.

They were coming out. To the water’s edge. Sabe’s extraction plan.

Anton’s decision was made for him. He couldn't signal without alerting Marcus or anyone else watching. He had to trust Sabe to adapt. He started the electric motor, its purr still ghostly quiet, and guided the boat closer, cutting the distance from two hundred meters to fifty, hiding in the deeper shadow of the compound’s boathouse.

He watched as Sabe forced Marcus down a set of stone steps to a small, private dock. He could hear their voices now, carried over the still water.

“—won’t work, they’ll know—” Marcus was whimpering.

“They’ll know you have a conscience,” Sabe’s voice was cold iron. “Or they’ll know you’re a liability. Your choice. But you’re getting in the boat.”

“Evelyn will have me killed!”

“Evelyn,” Sabe said, pulling him to the very edge of the dock, “is about to have problems bigger than you.”

That was Anton’s cue. He nudged the throttle, and the tender glided out of the shadows, coming to rest against the dock with a soft bump.

Marcus saw him and let out a choked sound. “Anton… you don’t understand what they’re—”

“Get in the boat, Marcus,” Anton said, his voice devoid of any brotherly feeling. It was a command.

As Marcus stumbled aboard, Sabe leaped lightly in after him, his eyes immediately scanning the shoreline. “Go. Now.”

Anton pushed the throttle. The boat slid away from the dock, back into the embracing dark of the lake. Only when they were a hundred meters out did he dare to speak, his eyes on Sabe.

“The prototype,” he said, the words tumbling out. “It’s not just code. It’s active. Leora says they ran a test. On SWIFT and power grids. It can paralyze them.”

In the dim reflection from the water, he saw Sabe’s face go utterly still. Not with shock, but with a dreadful, deepening understanding. He was the architect. He knew what his Cerberus could do.

“A test environment,” Sabe repeated softly. “A proof of concept for the buyers.” He looked from Anton to the cowering Marcus. “You knew. You saw the reports.”

Marcus shrunk back. “I didn’t understand half of it! They just said it was a stress test! Evelyn said it was about protecting financial networks!”

“By owning the off switch,” Sabe snarled. He leaned close to Marcus, his presence suddenly overwhelming in the small boat. “The exchange tonight. It’s not for a prototype. It’s for the launch codes. The key we stole is one half. The Zorya have the other. When they combine, the dragon gets unleashed on the real world, doesn’t it?”

Marcus nodded, a jerky, terrified movement. “They… they call it ‘The Quiet Hour.’ An hour where everything stops, and they can make their demands.”

An hour of global paralysis. An hour where the Meridian and the Zorya could rewrite the rules of everything, from debt to sovereignty, while the world was digitally blind and mute.

The weaponized prototype was no longer a threat. It was a countdown. And the timer was set for midnight.

Sabe sat back, his mind racing. The plan to expose the conspiracy, to force a new corporate signing—it was still vital, but it was now the second priority. The first was to sabotage the launch itself. To find a way to not just steal the keys, but to break them.

“Leora’s packet,” he said, thinking aloud. “It dumps the code. It exposes the design. But if the dragon is already awake in its cage… exposing the blueprint doesn’t put it to sleep. It just tells everyone how dangerous it is while it’s breaking out.”

“You built it,” Anton said, the desperation clear in his voice. “You put in the flaws. The paradox loop. Can you use it?”

Sabe stared out at the dark water, his face a mask of intense concentration. He was navigating the labyrinth of his own creation, seeking a backdoor, a kill switch he’d written into the angry, brilliant code years ago.

“The paradox loop requires a specific diagnostic signal,” he murmured. “A signal that can only be sent from inside the secure environment where the prototype’s core is running. We can’t send it remotely. We’d need direct, physical access to the server where the Aethelred chip is housed. The Freeport vault.”

The very place they were supposed to go to witness the explosion, not to fight the fire.

The boat drifted in the silent lake, a tiny speck of crisis in a sleeping city. They had a hostage brother, a mountain of evidence, a world-ending weapon, and a vault that was the most fortified place in Geneva.

Sabe’s gaze finally lifted, settling on Anton. The fear was there, but it was met with a fierce, unyielding resolve. The soloist was gone. The architect was back.

“We don’t stop the exchange,” Sabe said, his voice quiet and deadly. “We attend it. And we bring the dragon to its knees.”

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