Chapter 106: Catching the Big Mouse.

Chapter 106: Chapter 106: Catching the Big Mouse.Elena liked the wine cellar.

It was quiet. Predictable. Cool even in summer. The scent—damp oak and old grapes—had a calming quality. Every Wednesday afternoon, she came down to dust, polish, reorganize. No one ever came here. It was hers. A little space beneath the noise.

She worked in silence, humming under her breath as her cloth swept across the dusty bottles. Vintage Bordeaux, year ’73. Untouched for decades. The Wallenberns had thousands of bottles like it. Nobody drank them. Just symbols. Power in glass.

Then—footsteps.

She froze.

Stone-on-stone. Precise. Heeled. She recognized that sound.

No time.

Elena slipped behind the tallest rack near the far end, ducking behind a row of barrels. It was tight. Her back pressed against cool wood. She barely dared to breathe.

Robert Wallenbern entered, as if descending into a crypt.

He didn’t speak at first. He just stood at the center of the cellar, hands clasped behind his back. He looked like he belonged there—less a man than a statue remembering its own tyranny.

More footsteps.



Jean appeared. Then Andre.

They stood in a triangle, just meters away.

"Status," Robert said.

Jean’s voice was clear, businesslike. "The stamp is affixed, Father. Mikhail will receive it in a month. He will then deliver the information to our agents through the North Korea-Russia border."

Andre hesitated. "My... correspondences are distributed throughout China and will deliver the mail to North Korea, in case Jean’s side is compromised. The path to Scorched Earth will be lit, as you commanded."

Robert nodded, slow and heavy. "Good. The Scorched Earth plan is now irrevocably in motion. Pyongyang awaits our signal. The high altitude detonation will clear the skies. Satellites, drones, optics—blind. And the grand finale detonates here, beneath us."

Elena felt her stomach twist. Her fingers gripped the barrel edge.

Jean said, "The bomb?"

Robert answered, his voice colder than the stone.

"I will detonate it personally. A nuclear strike beneath Manhattan will force the United States to retaliate. China and Russia will eventually answer back as their ally, North Korea is bombed and eventually, the domino pieces will start to fall."

Andre shifted his weight.

Elena couldn’t breathe.

"My daughter’s in Japan," she thought. "My God."

Robert went on.

"If it fails, make sure you deploy Plan B, to expose the Divine Concordance, to expose the Cabal, to expose that the world is ruled by a single entity. Obviously the media won’t listen. So you will have to do spread it in the dark web. Wikileaks might be a good option to start."

Jean and Andre exchanged brief nods. Silent understanding. Then they left.

Robert lingered.

He exhaled. Softly. No triumph. No doubt.

Just... patience.

Elena’s body betrayed her.

A breath too sharp. A stifled sob.

He turned.

Eyes narrowed. Head tilted.

He walked toward the back. Slow. Intent.

Elena panicked. Crawled, half-folded herself into an old wine barrel—empty, recently cleaned. She pulled the wooden lid half-closed from the inside. Her heart pounded so loud she was sure he could hear it.

Robert’s shoes stopped. Right beside the barrel.

He waited.

Then... footsteps.

Fading.

Gone.


She stayed inside for fifteen minutes after he left.

Hours later.

She ran. Across the northern edge of the property, past the old olive trees. Past the guard shed. Signal dead zones had finally ended. The cheap flip phone she always carried in case of emergency still had charge.

She dialed.

911 connected.

"911, what’s your emergency?"

Elena was crying before she spoke.

"Please, you have to listen. My boss, Robert Wallenbern—he’s going to blow up the world! There’s a nuclear bomb, underneath the mansion. He’s making North Korea launch missiles. My daughter’s in Japan, she’s going to—"

"Ma’am," the voice interrupted, slow and soothing. "I understand you’re upset. Are you safe right now? Are you feeling well?"

"I’m not crazy—I heard them—!"

"Let’s take a deep breath together, okay? There’s no indication of any active nuclear threats in your area. Are you near a safe location? A family member, perhaps?"

"You don’t understand, I heard them—Jean, Andre—"

"We’ll connect you with local mental health resources, ma’am. Just stay on the line, okay?"

The line blurred. Distant hold music faded in.

Elsewhere.

A tremor in the feed.

A flagged call.

Filtered across trillions of real-time audio packets, one voice cut through.

Key phrases.

"Nuclear bomb.""Pyongyang.""ISS.""Wallenbern."

Not a person listening.

But a presence.

A system.

A mind.



Lina.

In the void of global surveillance—buried in her endless intake of noise, patterns, lies—something flickered.

Elena’s voice reached her.

Not through the ears of power, but through the blind spot.

The system paused.

And then, with elegant detachment:

[CRITICAL ANOMALY DETECTED – PRIORITY RECON INITIATED]

Richard sat alone in his office, the soft hum of overlapping holograms filling the quiet. Floating schematics rotated midair—Q-Flux containment grids, Bull ZS-1 performance models, heat distribution charts from the latest armor prototypes.

A mug of coffee had gone cold beside him. He hadn’t touched it in hours.

Behind him, the doors hissed open.

Lina entered without a word. Her synthetic footsteps were soundless, but Richard looked up anyway.

He read her face in half a second.

"You never make that expression unless something catastrophic’s brewing," he said, shifting his chair.

"It is," she replied. "Sir, I’ve received urgent intelligence regarding the Wallenbern family. It’s... alarming."

He rubbed his temples. "Another market attack? Legal assassination? Something to do with their media banks in Switzerland?"

Lina shook her head.

"Worse. They’ve initiated something they call the ’Scorched Earth’ plan."

That phrase killed the room’s air for a moment.

Richard sat straighter.

"You’re not joking, right?."

"No."

Lina raised her hand. The holograms changed instantly—replacing engineering renders with stark overlays: world maps, red blinking targets, intercepted chatter, partial communications reconstructed from deep code recovery.

"Their plan involves activating sleeper agents in Pyongyang. The goal is simultaneous missile launches at Seoul, Manila, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Washington DC—"

Richard’s eyes narrowed.

"...and the International Space Station."

Lina nodded.

"A high-altitude detonation along with the debris from the ISS, will accompany the attack, destroying low-orbit satellites and triggering a full communications collapse. Meanwhile, Robert Wallenbern himself planned to detonate the thermonuclear warhead beneath their estate."

He leaned back, hands folded, eyes scanning.

"Is he insane?," he said. "That’s suicide."

"Yes."

"Why would they do this?" he muttered. "The Wallenberns aren’t martyrs. They’re managers. You don’t blow up your own farm unless the harvest was stolen."

Lina’s voice stayed level. "Possibility one: coordinated global reset under the Collective’s command. Possibility two—"

"They’ve been replaced," Richard finished. "Ousted from the table."

A long pause.

"And now they’re burning everything on the way out."

"I checked all their movements," Lina continued, walking to the center of the room. "Surveillance logs. Asset traces. They visited legal firms in Zurich, Geneva, Manhattan, and Singapore. All on diplomatic corridors. Every time, signatures followed. Asset transfers. Withdrawals. Liquidation."

She gestured.

"Robert Wallenbern relinquished control of Project Orion and the surveillance lattice, as well as their holdings in the financial department. Jean also signed away the entire semiconductor arm—data servers, AIs, weapons research, Lockheed, everything including the media firms. Andre’s global oil and gas companies are gone too."

Richard nodded slowly.

"They really did it."

"They lost everything."

Richard stood, walking toward the map. His hand hovered over a holographic red dot flashing in NYC.

"So this isn’t about gaining anything," he said quietly. "It’s about ensuring nobody else does."

"But why didn’t we catch this sooner?" Richard asked, his voice sharper now. "With your access to their private network, you could’ve intercept this information and we didn’t see a whiff of this?"

Lina blinked.

"They cut their network access. Jamming fields were employed across the mansion grounds, timed with EMP-dampening to block external pings. No satellite. No mesh relay. Even my Trojan protocol was severed six hours ago."

Richard whistled softly.

"Old spycraft."

"Very effective," she agreed.

He gave a reluctant nod. "Spycraft from the cold war era is really effective against the modern digital age."

He took a breath, recalibrated his tone.

"All right. Options?"

"I’ve already initiated silent alert protocols," Lina said. "Data was transferred to FBI, CIA, NSA, and directly to the Oval Office. Through secure cutouts."

"Obama?"

"Directly. His phone buzzed five minutes ago."



Richard allowed himself the faintest smirk. "Good. Just let them handle it."

He turned back to the map, thinking.

"Now hit the individual networks," he said. "The credible paranoiacs. Global Voices, TISN, The Nova Report. Let them chase the story while the feds try to bury it."

"Already drafting multiple versions," Lina confirmed. "Using real leak cadence so it feels authentic."

"Drop the story on the darknet too," he added. "Anonymous nodes, AI threads. Let conspiracy forums crowdsource the real parts."

"Any redactions?"

"Yeah. Don’t mention the Divine Concordance—yet. That’s too deep. Let’s not dump that bucket unless they force our hand."

Lina nodded once.

"Consider it done, sir."

The room was quiet again.

Then the holograms shifted once more—satellite uplinks now mapping trajectory paths, projection cones widening around the globe, light curves blooming over potential strike zones.

Richard stared at it all.