Chapter 90. The Summons

The culvert was empty.

A frayed length of rope, neatly sliced, lay in the filthy trickle of water. The gag was discarded on the gravel. Marcus was gone. The only sign of his presence was a single, polished leather loafer, lying on its side as if kicked off in a frantic struggle—or removed deliberately.

A cold, sick dread pooled in Anton’s stomach. They’d been too late, or too trusting of his fear.

“He didn't escape,” Sabe said, kneeling to examine the cut rope. The edge was clean, surgical. “This was a professional cut. Not a saw or a fray. A blade.” He looked up, his eyes scanning the dark embankment. “They found him. Or he signaled them.”

“The burner phone we left him,” Anton realized with a sinking heart. The cheap, untraceable phone they’d given him with a single number—a supposed lifeline. A tracker. A beacon.

Before the weight of the failure could fully settle, the burner phone in Sabe’s pocket vibrated. Not Leora this time. The number was unknown, but the format was Swiss.

Sabe answered, putting it on speaker. The voice that came through was Marcus’s, but it was different. Stripped of the panicked whine, it was flat, controlled, and chillingly formal.

“Anton. I assume you’re listening, Mr. Stalker.”

“Marcus,” Anton said, his voice tight. “Where are you?”

“I’m where I was always meant to be,” Marcus replied. There was a strange, hollow triumph in his tone. “At the table. I’ve been… reconsidering my position. It seems my partners were keeping certain aspects of our arrangement from me. The identity of the buyers, for instance.”

So he knew. He’d been extracted, debriefed, and had his betrayal reframed.

“What do you want, Marcus?” Sabe’s voice was a low growl.

“I want what was promised to me,” Marcus said, a thread of petulance returning. “But the goalposts have moved. So I’m moving them back. I’m inviting you, Anton. A family meeting. To discuss the future of Rogers Industries. And to negotiate the terms of your… retirement.”

“A trap,” Anton stated flatly.

“A negotiation,” Marcus insisted, but the lie was thin. “Somewhere neutral. Somewhere we can speak frankly, without… interference.” He meant Sabe. “The Villa des Aigles. You know it. Father took us there when we were boys. Midnight. Come alone, Anton. If I see your shadow, the deal is off, and the prototype is sold. Evelyn is… amenable to this. A clean, familial transfer is preferable to more messy headlines.”

The Villa des Aigles. A modernist fortress of glass and steel perched on a remote mountaintop above Geneva, accessible only by a single, winding private road or helicopter. It was the ultimate lion’s den. Isolated, defensible, and owned by a shell corporation Anton now suspected was Meridian-linked.

“And if I don’t come?” Anton asked.

“Then the Quiet Hour begins at 00:30 as scheduled. Valkyrie gets its key. And you, brother, will spend the rest of your very short life looking over your shoulder for the kind of professionals who make Mr. Stalker look like a mall cop.” The threat was delivered with a bland confidence that was more frightening than any shout. Marcus had been re-armed, psychologically, by his true masters.

The line went dead.

Anton looked at Sabe. The operative’s face was granite. “They’re consolidating. They have Marcus back under control. They have the prototype primed. They’re inviting you to remove the last unpredictable variable—you—from the board before the final transaction. They’ll force you to sign the memorandum at gunpoint, then have an ‘accident’ on the mountain road. Clean, tragic, and final.”

“And if we don’t go, they launch the prototype,” Anton finished. “We lose any chance to stop it or expose them.” He paced the narrow space of the embankment. “But if I go, walk into their fortress, it’s suicide.”

“Yes,” Sabe said, the word absolute.

They stood in the dark, the city’s lights glittering coldly below them, the mountain a dark giant against the starry sky. The invitation was a noose, beautifully engraved.

“We have to go,” Anton said finally, the decision crystallizing from the cold dread. “But not the way they expect.”

Sabe’s head snapped up. “Anton—”

“They expect me to come alone, or with you, trying to sneak in. They’ll have every approach covered. Road, air, even the cliffs. It’s a fortress. So we don’t try to sneak in.” A wild, reckless plan was forming in his mind, born of equal parts desperation and his own deep knowledge of the players. “We accept the invitation. We walk in the front door. But we don’t go as supplicants. We go as… auditors.”

Sabe stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Marcus said it’s a family meeting to discuss the future of Rogers Industries,” Anton explained, a grim smile touching his lips. “So we brought the board. Or rather, we bring the threat of the board. We make it a corporate event. One so loud and public that they can’t just disappear.”

“How?”

“We call every major financial news outlet. We leak the location. We say that Anton Rogers, amid the turmoil, is holding an emergency press conference at the Villa des Aigles at midnight to address the rumors, to present evidence of the conspiracy against him, and to announce the future leadership of Rogers Industries.” He saw the dawn of understanding in Sabe’s eyes. “We turn their private trap into a global stage. We invite the world to watch. Cameras, reporters, live feeds. They can’t massacre a news crew on live television. They can’t launch a cyber-weapon while the world is watching the very people selling it.”

It was brilliant and insane. It was using the Meridian’s own tools—secrecy, control, privacy—against them, by violently injecting the one thing they couldn’t manipulate: the chaotic, blinding light of full public scrutiny.

“They’ll lock down the villa,” Sabe argued, but he was already turning the idea over, looking for flaws. “They’ll deny access.”

“Then the story becomes ‘Reclusive CEO barred from own family meeting by armed guards.’ The speculation, the scrutiny, goes nuclear. The pressure on Evelyn, on the Meridian, becomes unbearable. It forces their hand. Either they let the circus in and we have our audience, or they retreat, and the launch of the Quiet Hour happens under a microscope they didn’t choose. Either way, we break their control of the narrative.”

Sabe was silent for a long moment, running scenarios. “It’s a gamble. They might just kill everyone and deal with the fallout later.”

“The fallout would be the end of them. The Meridian survives on plausible deniability. A bloodbath on live TV is the opposite of that. Valkyrie might not care, but the Meridian’s other members—the politicians, the bankers—they would be exposed. They’d never allow it.” Anton’s conviction grew as he spoke. “They need silence. We give them noise. Deafening, chaotic noise.”

He took Sabe’s hands, his grip firm. “It’s the only move they won’t expect. They’re prepared for a covert op, a desperate assault. They’re not prepared for a press conference.”

A slow, fierce smile spread across Sabe’s face—the first real one Anton had seen in days. It was the smile of a man seeing a path through an impossible minefield. “We’d need a leak they can’t stop. A broadcast they can’t jam.”

“Leora,” they said in unison.

They called her. The hacker listened to the plan, her silence profound. When she finally spoke, her digitally altered voice held a note of what might have been admiration. “You’re both completely mad. I love it. I can’t get news vans up a private mountain road. But I can do something better. I can hijack the signal.”

“What signal?”

“The villa has its own dedicated, ultra-secure satellite uplink for… discreet communications. I’ve had a backdoor into it for a year. I can turn it into a public broadcast beacon. I can patch the feed into every major news network’s secondary systems simultaneously. At midnight, when you’re supposed to be having your ‘family meeting,’ I turn the Villa des Aigles into the world’s most exclusive reality TV show. Live, uncensored, and utterly unstoppable. You’ll have about sixty seconds after I flip the switch before they trace and physically destroy the dish. Make them count.”

It was perfect. A live mic in the lion’s den.

The plan was set. They would accept the invitation to the mountaintop. They would walk into the trap, not with weapons, but with a live, global audience in their pocket. They would turn the Meridian’s own secluded fortress into a glass box.

As they made their final preparations, Sabe looked at Anton, his expression unreadable. “You realize,” he said quietly, “that if this works, there’s no going back to shadows for me. My face will be on that broadcast. Next to yours.”

Anton met his gaze. “I’m counting on it.”

The invitation to the lion’s den had been received. And they were about to arrive, not as sheep, but as shepherds bringing an entire flock of witnesses. The stage was set for the most public, most dangerous confrontation of their lives.

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