Chapter 96: The Ticking Heart

They were herded, not to another room, but back to the heart of the carnage. The shattered glass gallery was now a crime scene held in a state of terrible suspense. The alpine wind still keened through the broken wall, swirling snow across the pale stone where Marcus’s body had lain. It was gone now, removed by Rico’s efficient, grim handiwork. Only a dark, indelible stain remained, a Rorschach blot of fraternal ruin.

Silas was gone, too. Rico had seen to that, escorting the stunned architect away under the guise of “securing the asset,” a transaction Anton knew would involve a quiet, secure vehicle and a pre-negotiated immunity deal. The villa felt hollowed out, a beautiful shell waiting to be cracked open by the approaching sirens.

But one problem remained, ticking with the dreadful inevitability of a metronome.

In the centre of the gallery, Evelyn stood rigidly before the control panel. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back, her silver suit smudged with soot and terror. Before her, on a steel trolley, rested a small, transparent case. Inside, nestled in black foam, was a sliver of silicon and platinum no larger than a fingernail: the Aegis prototype. Its potential for salvation or damnation pulsed silently in the room.

Marcus’s final, posthumous gambit.

Rico stood guard over it, his expression unreadable. He’d been clear: his deal was with Anton for immunity and witness protection, contingent on a clean resolution. His loyalty was to his own survival, a language Anton understood perfectly. But Marcus, in his theatrical paranoia, had layered one last trap.

“Midnight,” Rico said, his voice flat. He nodded to a secondary monitor Evelyn had called up. It showed not the Zurich data centre, but a global map. Dozens of pulsating nodes were scattered across continents—financial hubs, power grids, communication nexuses. A countdown glowed in the corner: 00:47:22. “Dead man’s switch. He was always a drama queen. If the code isn’t input to disarm it by midnight local time, the prototype doesn’t just erase one server farm. It broadcasts a corrosive, cascading algorithm to every system his team pre-loaded it into over the last six months. A digital plague. His ‘going-away present to a world that never appreciated him,’ he said.”

Anton felt the scale of it, vast and cold, pressing down. It wasn’t just about his company anymore. It was about a global stroke, a silent, systemic heart attack.

“And the disarm code?” Anton asked, his eyes fixed on the pulsating map.

“In his head,” Evelyn said, her voice ragged. She jerked her chin toward the stain on the floor. “He never wrote it down. He said it was the one thing he had that we couldn’t steal.” A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. “He outsmarted himself. He outsmarted all of us.”

Anton moved to the trolley, looking down at the chip. The ghost Sabatine had birthed, the weapon Marcus had coveted, the shield he had tried to build. It was just a piece of engineered rock. All the meaning was in the hands that wielded it.

Sabatine limped to his side, his bandaged shoulder a stark white under his torn shirt. His face was pale, but his eyes were clear, scanning the control panel, the map, the data streams with a brutal, analytical focus. The shared revelation in the dining room—the ghost in the code—hung between them, a chasm they hadn’t had a second to bridge. But the crisis was a brutal unifier.

“The code will be a derivation of the core Cerberus architecture,” Sabatine said, his voice hoarse but certain. “It’s a seven-layer neural key. He would have based it on something personal, memorable, but obfuscated. A date. A name. Encrypted and run through the original algorithm.”

“We have forty-six minutes to guess my brother’s idea of a poetic password,” Anton said, the absurdity of it almost laughable. He and Marcus had shared nothing, least of all sentiment.

“We don’t guess.” Sabatine’s gaze met his, and in that grey depth, Anton saw the plan forming, ruthless and clear. “We make her give it to us.”

He meant Evelyn.

Anton followed his look. Evelyn, bound, terrified, but still holding secrets. She knew Marcus better than anyone. She was his partner in sin, his confidante in corruption.

“She doesn’t know it,” Anton said.

“No. But she knows him. And she’s motivated.” Sabatine’s voice dropped. “Right now, she’s facing life in a supermax for economic terrorism and accessory to… that.” He nodded at the stain. “But if she helps us stop a global cyber-event, her cooperation looks very different to prosecutors.”

It was a gamble. A trade of one kind of desperation for another.

Anton turned to Evelyn. “You heard him. Help us find the code. It’s your only play.”

Evelyn’s eyes darted from the map to Anton’s face, to Sabatine’s, calculating her dwindling options. The polished CFO was gone; this was a creature fighting for the smallest shred of leverage. “I… I need to think. He was obsessed with legacy. With proving he was the better son. The smarter one. He talked about… about a moment of triumph. The day your father took him to the Rogers building site as a child, before you were even born. He said that was the last day he felt seen.”

Anton’s heart clenched with an old, complicated ache. A memory he didn’t possess, a wound he hadn’t inflicted but had inherited.

Sabatine was already at a secondary terminal, his good hand flying over the keyboard, bypassing crippled security protocols. “A date. Give me a date.”

“I don’t know! It was the 70s, early 80s? He never said that!” Evelyn cried.

Anton closed his eyes, digging into the cold vault of corporate history. “The original Rogers Industries headquarters groundbreaking… May 12, 1979.” He opened his eyes. “But that’s too simple. He’d layer it.”

Sabatine inputted the date, ran it through a decryption algorithm he was building from scratch on the fly. The system rejected it. He tried variations, permutations.

00:32:15.

“It’s not a date,” Sabatine muttered, more to himself than anyone. “It’s a key. He’d use the architecture.” He turned to Evelyn, his intensity a physical force. “What did he call the Aegis project, between you? Not the corporate name. His name.”

Evelyn swallowed. “He… he called it ‘Phoenix.’ Because it rose from the ashes of the old Cerberus code. His triumph over the past.”

“Phoenix,” Sabatine repeated. He input it, combined it with the date, and ran it through a different encryption pathway. The monitor flickered, but the countdown continued.

00:25:48.

Panic, cold and slick, began to seep into the edges of Anton’s control. He looked at the global map, at the nodes representing hospitals, banks, grids. He thought of the chaos, the cascading collapse. The legacy of his name would not be an empire, but an apocalypse.

It was then, as Sabatine worked with frantic, focused grace, and Evelyn strained against her bonds, that Anton’s hand moved. It was a casual, almost unconscious gesture, a man adjusting his coat under duress. His fingers brushed the inner pocket, finding the sleek, platinum shape of the pen.

The recorder.

Marcus’s voice was gone, but his threat remained. Silas was in custody, but the evidence was a tangled web. And here, in this desperate scramble, was the raw, unvarnished truth—the confession of the plot, the scale of the threat, the attempt to stop it. It was the ultimate deposition.

With a subtle twist of his thumb, he activated the device. The faint, internal vibration was a secret heartbeat against his ribs. He was memorializing their potential failure, or their last, desperate stand.

He caught Sabatine’s eye. Sabatine, leaning over the terminal, saw the minuscule shift in Anton’s posture, the deliberate placement of his hand over his heart. Their gazes locked for a fractured second.

In that glance, a thousand words passed.

Are you getting this?

Every damn second.

If we fail…

The world will know why.

It was the silent promise of a shared plan. Not just to disarm a bomb, but to tell the story, no matter how it ended. Anton would bear witness. Sabatine would provide the action. It was the partnership they had forged in fire, operating now on its purest, most terrifying level.

00:18:03.

“It’s not about our father,” Anton said suddenly, the thought striking him with crystal clarity. He stepped closer to Evelyn, his voice low, urgent. “It’s about beating me. His moment of triumph wasn’t a childhood memory. It was the moment he knew he’d won. The moment the Aegis chip was stolen from under my nose. The moment he proved he was the smarter son.”

Evelyn’s eyes widened. “The theft… it was authenticated at 11:17 PM London time, September 24th.”

Sabatine didn’t wait. His fingers flew, inputting the new date, the time, layering it with ‘Phoenix,’ weaving it into the seven-layer Cerberus key protocol he was reverse-engineering in real time.

The system chimed.

A new prompt appeared: FINAL CONFIRMATION: SPEAK THE KEY.

A microphone icon illuminated on the panel. Voice activation. Marcus’s final, narcissistic flourish. He wanted to hear the word, his word, spoken aloud to seal his victory or his vengeance.

“It has to be a word he associated with that moment,” Sabatine urged, looking at Evelyn. “What did he say? When he knew he had it?”

Evelyn was crying now, tears of frustration and fear carving through her makeup. “He called me. He was laughing. He said… he said, ‘Checkmate, Evelyn. The king is dead.’”

Anton stared at the microphone icon. The king. Their father? Him?

“Not ‘king,’” Anton breathed. The pieces snapped together with awful, perfect symmetry. Marcus’s obsession, his endless, pathetic game. “He didn’t see himself as the king. He was the other piece. The one that moves in straight lines, that attacks from the side. The one that can become anything if it reaches the end.” He stepped up to the panel, his voice clear and steady, speaking directly into the microphone. “The key is ‘Queen.’”

For a second, nothing. The countdown reached 00:00:07.

Then, with a soft, definitive chime, the global map on the monitor winked out. All the pulsating nodes vanished. The countdown disappeared, replaced by a single, green word: DISARMED.

The silence that followed was deafening. The only sound was the relentless wind and Evelyn’s shattered sob of relief.

Anton’s fingers found the pen in his pocket and gave it two quick, deliberate twists. Recording ended. File sealed and sent.

He turned. Sabatine was leaning heavily on the terminal, his head bowed, the adrenaline drain evident in every line of his body. Their eyes met again across the storm-lashed room. No words this time. Just the shared, trembling exhaustion of a battle won, and the profound, unspoken knowledge of what had just passed between them—a trust that encompassed not just life and death, but truth and legacy.

Rico moved, scooping the transparent case containing the prototype from the trolley. He tossed it to Anton, who caught it on instinct. “Our deal’s done,” Rico said. “The authorities are at the gate. The story is yours to tell.” He gave Sabatine a last, inscrutable nod—a soldier’s farewell—and melted back into the shadows of the villa, a ghost exiting the stage.

The ticking heart of the crisis had been stilled. But as the first official shouts echoed from the courtyard below, Anton knew the next battle—the battle of stories, of guilt, of futures—was just beginning. And for the first time, he faced it not with the cold solitude of a king, but with the steady, battered presence of his queen at his side.

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