Chapter 32 Clue.
Chapter 32 Clue.
CASSIAN
The silence in my study was a physical presence, heavy with the taste of failure. Days had bled into one another since the attacks—the coordinated strike on the hospital, the breach of my home, the near-successful kidnapping, the poisonous text message that seemed to know my deepest fears. I had thrown every resource at the problem. My security teams had swept every digital and physical trace. My internal IT division, among the best in the corporate world, had hit a wall so absolute it seemed to be made of shadow. The message that had started it all, the one calling me “baby Cassian,” was a ghost. Untraceable. It was a level of sophistication that spoke not of hired mercenaries, but of a rival whose resources mirrored my own.
Frustration was a cold, sharp stone in my gut. I detested unresolved variables. I despised mysteries that resisted my will to solve them. This enemy was operating from a place of intimate knowledge and formidable capability, and my inability to strike back was an insult that burned.
There was only one person I trusted to carve a clue from the void.
I picked up a phone that was not a phone—a secure, encrypted satellite line. It rang twice before a calm, cultured voice answered.
“Cassian. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten my number.”
“Tom. I have a problem your particular brand of genius might appreciate.”
There was a soft chuckle on the other end. “When the great Cassian Vale admits to a problem, the world should tremble. What’s the nature of the void you need me to fill?”
I outlined the events with the utmost precision: the timing, the methods, the dead-end investigations. I read him the text message verbatim. On the other end of the line, I could almost hear the whirring of his mind, a more potent and dangerous machine than any supercomputer.
“‘Baby Cassian,’” Tom repeated, the phrase sounding absurd in his measured tone. “A personal touch. Reckless. Sentimental. That’s your first clue, you know. He wants you to know it’s personal.”
“The ‘how’ is what I need, Tom. The ‘who’ will follow.”
A pause. “My schedule is… congested. The new branch of Azus will launch in Singapore in seventy-two hours. And it requires my presence.”
“Name your price.”
“Cassian,” he said, a note of gentle admonishment in his voice. “We haven’t played that game since we were at university and I debugged your first hostile takeover algorithm. Send me everything you have. I’ll be on the next flight.”
True to his word, he arrived at Aethelgard the following evening. I met him at the entrance to the situation room. Where I was all sharp angles and contained violence, Tom Roland was a wildflower in composed intellect. He stood just as tall, but where my frame spoke of gym-toned power, his suggested the lean strength of a distance runner. He wore a flawlessly tailored charcoal suit, but it was the details that defined him: a gold-rimmed pair of Cartier glasses perched on his nose, behind which eyes of a startling, perceptive grey took in everything with unnerving speed. His smile was easy, genuine, and it never quite reached those analytical eyes. We were a study in contrasts—the storm and the deep, still lake.
Together with Sebastian Croft, in our university days, the press had dubbed us “The Trinity.” Sebastian, the flamboyant, hedonistic heir, all charm and volatility. Tom, the genius inheritor of a tech dynasty, the quiet architect. And me, the self-made destroyer of dynasties. We had been a formidable, if uneasy, trio. Now, we were a triangle of fractured rivalries.
Lysandra was in the library when Tom arrived. A new schedule I had proposed, which she followed very easily. She wanted to learn about my life, the calculated part. Before, if I told her to learn about it, she'd have protested but now, she's hungry for it, knowledge. I saw her through the open doorway, curled in an armchair with a book. When Tom entered the hall with me, she looked up. Her eyes widened slightly, taking in the unfamiliar face of a man who carried an aura of authority so different from my own or Sebastian’s. It wasn’t fear or attraction I saw, but a sharp, intelligent curiosity. She stared at me with a questioning eyes, as if asking me who this person that was allowed into my study is.
“Lysandra, this is Tom Roland, an associate. Tom, this is Lysandra.” I kept the introduction purposefully vague.
Tom stepped forward, his approach respectful, not intrusive. He didn’t offer his hand, merely gave a slight, polite nod. “A pleasure. Cassian’s spoken highly of your resilience.” It was a masterful thing to say—acknowledging the ordeal without naming it, offering respect without presumption. Lysandra, to her credit, simply nodded back, her guard up but not hostile.
We retreated to the situation room. For the next eight hours, the outside world ceased to exist. Tom was a conductor before a symphony of data. He didn’t just look at the information; he interrogated it, conversed with it. Lines of code cascaded across multiple screens, network maps bloomed and dissolved, and the ghostly architecture of proxy servers and encrypted relays began to take shape under his touch. He worked in near silence, punctuated only by the soft tap of keys and the occasional murmured query.
I watched, a potent mix of impatience and admiration churning within me. This was why I had called him. Where my people saw a locked door, Tom saw the faintest wear on the hinges.
Finally, as dawn tinged the sky grey outside the armored windows, he leaned back. He removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Your people weren’t wrong,” he said, his voice flat with fatigue. “It’s elegant. Military-grade encryption, routed through a daisy-chain of hacked satellites and compromised corporate servers. A black hole.”
My jaw tightened. Had even Tom failed?
Then he put his glasses back on and pointed to a single line on a secondary screen. A string of numbers and letters, seemingly meaningless. “But every black hole has an accretion disk. Matter spirals in, and sometimes, a faint photon escapes. They made one error. A single packet of data, a handshake protocol, didn’t get fully scrubbed. It was logged by a Turkish telecom satellite being used as an involuntary bounce point.”
He zoomed in. The string resolved into an IP address.
“It’s a virtual server,” Tom explained, “registered to a shell corporation in the Caymans. Untraceable on its own. But the payment for that server’s lease six months ago originated from a discretionary fund.” He turned to look at me, his grey eyes utterly clear. “A fund belonging to Croft Innovations’ R&D division in Zurich.”
The name hung in the air like gunpowder smoke. Sebastian.
It wasn’t proof of his direct involvement. It was a filament, a single thread leading back into the labyrinth of his empire. But in our world, a thread was all you needed to begin unraveling everything.
"I hope you are well aware of the fact that this... clue, can also be deliberate. It can as well be a move to distract you from the main culprit. But at the same time, it's the only lead that's available. It's truly a tricky situation."
I nodded slowly, acknowledging my awareness of the situation.
Tom watched me, his expression unreadable. He had delivered the clue, pulled it from the digital abyss. The next move was mine.
“So,” he said quietly, the question simple and profound. “What will you do, Cassian?”