Chapter 42 ELenor's POV
The Janus Report was less than forty-eight hours old, and it had already sparked a global firestorm. From our concrete bunker, we watched the fallout stream in via satellite: denials growing louder, more panicked. The Senator held a press conference, sweat beading on his upper lip as he stumbled through rehearsed lines. Sir Alistair Fleming “stepped back from all public engagements due to a sudden and debilitating illness.” Meanwhile, markets weren’t just shaky—they were collapsing. A cold, mechanical unraveling of trust.
We’d done exactly what we set out to do.
And it was terrifying.
Ollie’s threat board—a dense weave of code and network maps—now pulsed with soft, persistent alerts. “They’ve stopped probing,” he said, voice tight. “They’re in assault phase.
DDoS floods, packet injection—you name it. They’re trying to drown the signal or brute-force trace it.” His fingers flew across the keyboard like a pianist in a storm. “My layers are holding, but they’re adapting. Faster now. Peeling us open.”
Alec paced the narrow bunker, like a caged tiger nursing a wounded side.
His body thrummed with restless energy, but his face was ice-calm. “This isn’t random. See their vectors? Initial attack nodes are all in Balkan server zones. Why?
Because those are likely bounce points we used.”
“So they’ve got top-tier talent,” Ollie growled. “State-level. Or Consortium-contracted. Probably both.”
“Which means they’ll be here—in the real world—sooner than we hoped,” Alec finished. He stopped, eyes fixed on the steel door.
“They’ll triangulate the signal to a region, then use old-school intel: satellite imagery, power grid anomalies, patrol patterns.” He turned. “We’re in a killbox, Ollie. They just haven’t drawn the lines yet.”
The word hung in the air like a death sentence. Killbox. A military term for a zone marked for total annihilation.
“We have contingency exfils,” Ollie said. It wasn’t a statement. It was a plea.
“Three,” Alec confirmed. “All compromised the second we transmitted.
They’ve got my playbook. They’ll know every route.” He looked at me. “We need an exit they wouldn’t predict. One I wouldn’t predict.”
His gaze settled on me, quiet but urgent. “Ellie. You’ve been in my head. And in theirs, in a way. You’ve seen the data from both sides. Where do we go?”
The question stunned me. He wasn’t just asking for a location.
He was asking me to outthink the system using my greatest strength: unpredictability.
“We wouldn’t go to a place,” I said slowly. “We’d go to a person.”
Both men turned to me.
“Who?” Ollie asked, skepticism battling curiosity.
“The one person they’d never believe you’d trust. The one with as much to lose from The Janus Report as they do—but for different reasons.”
The answer came clear, chilling, perfect. “Leblanc.”
“The old journalist?” Ollie’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s in hiding. We sent him to the Jura.”
“And the Consortium will have every known contact—mine, Vain’s, anyone linked—under surveillance,” Alec said, eyes alight with strategic fire. “But they’ll write off a frightened old man as irrelevant. They’ll think he’s just a rabbit, gone to ground.”
“But he’s more than that,” I said. “He’s a historian. An archivist. He knows sources—not spies, but people who owe him. And he’s furious.
They destroyed his life’s work. He helped start this fire. He can help us survive it.”
Alec nodded. “It’s a move that looks like weakness. Desperation. They won’t expect it because it’s not tactical—it’s human. And that’s why it might work.” He looked at me with something like pride. “Because it’s real.”
“It’s a huge risk,” Ollie countered. “Any contact creates a signal. If they’re watching him—”
“They’ll monitor his family, his bank, his known channels,” Alec cut in, already moving.
“We don’t call him. We use the dead drop. The book code. Send a message only he’d understand—to a place only he’d check.”
“He might not be checking anymore,” I said, doubt creeping in.
“He will be,” Alec said firmly.
“A man like that? After everything? He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’ll be watching for a sign.”
No vote was needed. In a killbox, you take the only path that’s open.
Ollie crafted the message: a line from an obscure French poem about vineyards and revenge, posted to a forgotten book-review forum. A single digital feather tossed into a hurricane.
Then, we waited.
The cyber-assault intensified. One European server went dark.
Then another. “They’re closing in fast,” Ollie said, voice flat. “Hours, maybe a day, before they lock our region.”
On the second night, the bunker was silent except for humming electronics and wind outside. I stared at the motion-sensor feed—a grainy stretch of road—when a small alert popped up on Ollie’s screen.
A response.
Not on the book forum. On a secondary dead drop we’d never used. Just one phrase:
“Les raisins sont aigres cette année.”
The grapes are sour this year.
Alec, leaning over Ollie’s shoulder, exhaled sharply. “Acknowledgment and a warning. The harvest is bad. Danger.” He straightened. “The next line in the poem mentions a wine cellar. He’s telling us where to go.” He turned to Ollie.
“Search Jura property records. Look for wine cellars or caves owned through shell companies or blind trusts.”
Twenty minutes later, Ollie found it: a struggling organic vineyard in the Jura foothills, owned by a Liechtenstein-based holding company—one tied to a lawyer known for representing former intelligence officers.
“Leblanc’s cousin,” I said.
“Not perfect,” Ollie admitted, pulling up terrain maps. “Single access road.Isolated. Another killbox—if they find it.”
“But it’s one they don’t know about,” Alec said. “And it’s our only move.” He began packing: data drive, weapons, med kit, cash. “We leave now. Van to the nearest town, then cross-country on foot. No signals after this. Ghost protocol.”
The scramble was swift, silent. We wiped the systems, stripped the gear, left the bunker as we’d found it: cold, hollow, empty.
Outside, the alpine night stretched vast and star-strewn—a beautiful, frozen sky. I glanced back at the concrete tomb.
We’d forged our weapon here. Now we ran before it buried us.
The van coughed to life, the sound deafening in the silence. Ollie killed the headlights once we hit the gravel, steering by moonlight.
Alec sat beside me, his silhouette sharp against the stars.
In the dark, his hand found mine. Cold fingers, firm grip.
“We’re not retreating,” he murmured, for me alone. “We’re relocating the headquarters. The Janus Report isn’t a place.
It’s us.”
I squeezed his hand, watching the mountain shrink in the side mirror.
We were leaving the kill zone, and walking straight into the unknown.
But we were together and the story—our story—was still being written.