Cyber Fixer: Matryoshka
Inside a €1.4 billion acquisition, someone hid a weapon. Lasse found it. Then found something worse.
What You’re About To Read
A long-form cyber thriller about a clean job with a dirty architecture: dismantle 43 fabricated articles targeting Ukrainian Olympic athletes before a €1.4 billion acquisition closes at Sunday noon — without ever leaving a trace that points back to the client.
A desperate CFO can’t let a market manipulation scheme detonate his deal, so the ask routes through a Milan cocktail bar to a Rome deal-lawyer — then lands in Tuscany, on Lasse Hansen’s floor, where problems become operations.
This one isn’t about finding the disinformation. It’s about finding what’s underneath it — layer after layer — until the job you were paid to do and the thing you cannot ignore are no longer the same thing.
Genre: Cybersecurity Thriller / Techno-Thriller — disinformation, AI voice synthesis, market manipulation, influence operations.
Length: Long-form episode (novelette-length, ~30,000 words).
Content Notes: Profanity; morally grey protagonists; institutional corruption; detailed tradecraft (AI prosodic fingerprinting, hosting infrastructure analysis, anonymous dead drops, regulatory pressure plays); and one decision that was never part of the contract.
Setting: Milan, Rome, and Tuscany — 62 hours, Friday evening to Sunday noon.
The core idea
A sophisticated disinformation operation isn’t always what it looks like. If the infrastructure carries a political aesthetic — pro-Russian framing, Ukrainian athletes, Olympic timing — the audience pattern-matches to state actor and stops asking who’s actually paying.
Lasse doesn’t need to prove the articles are fake. The BBC already did that. He needs to find the landlord — the person two layers below the contractor, three hops above the public story — and understand what they were actually buying.
The answer isn’t geopolitics. It’s never geopolitics. It’s a short position and a morality clause and a boardroom full of people who assumed no one would pull the thread.
Lasse pulls the thread.
Who this story is for
Readers interested in:
Disinformation mechanics that feel uncomfortably plausible — AI voice synthesis, prosodic fingerprinting, rented influence infrastructure
The architecture of market manipulation dressed as political interference
What happens when the job you’re paid to do leads somewhere you weren’t hired to go
Anyone who likes: competence with consequences, and protagonists who never raise their voice because they don’t need to
Meet the characters
Lasse Hansen — The fixer in a Tuscan sanctum: grumpy, precise, allergic to speeches. Works from the floor of a €1,100-a-night hotel suite because the desk chair is the wrong height. Treats every problem as a node map and every client as someone who curated the version of reality most convenient for them.
Anna Haas — Rome-based equity partner: she speaks fluent structure — shells, invoices, morality clauses — and makes crimes look like legal precedent without ever calling them that. Has a sapphire ring she turns without knowing she’s doing it whenever the calculation gets difficult.
Konrad Albrecht — The client: CFO, Brunello Cucinelli coat, crypto wallet loaded before the meeting. Hired Lasse to clean up a mess. Did not fully disclose how much of the mess he made himself.
Tom Vrbel / Helix Narratives — The Bratislava contractor: ran 43 fabricated articles for €180,000, left his company name on the hosting registration, and stored the operational brief in an unlocked shared folder. Not a sympathetic figure.
SportBridge AG — The architect: Geneva-registered, board-level positions at the acquisition target, a short position on the stock, and the specific arrogance of a scheme built on the assumption that nobody would look past the geopolitical costume.
Chapter 1 — Still Water
Friday, 20 February 2026 — 19:00 CET — Bar Basso, Via Plinio 39, Milan
The street outside was black.
Not picturesque black. Not the black of a travel photographer’s best effort on a clear evening in October. February black — the particular absence-of-colour of wet pavement under sodium streetlights when the rain has been going since early afternoon and shows no intention of stopping. Via Plinio in this weather was a gutter with aspirations. The kind of rain that doesn’t warrant an umbrella but doesn’t let you forget it’s there. Lasse had walked the last four hundred metres from the taxi because the driver had estimated the drop-off incorrectly and he hadn’t bothered correcting him. His Barbour was damp at the shoulders. He didn’t care.
He’d been inside Bar Basso since 19:00.
The meeting was at 19:40.
The forty minutes were not punctuality. He didn’t particularly value punctuality — punctuality was a social performance, a way of communicating that you respected someone else’s time, and he could not be made to care less about communicating that. What the forty minutes were was reconnaissance. The corner booth: back to the wall, unobstructed view of the entrance, close enough to the bar that ambient noise swallowed his side of any conversation. He had clocked the barmen’s positions, the exit through the kitchen, the couple at the table beside the window who were having the particular kind of argument that would become louder in thirty minutes. He had clocked all of it in the first seven minutes. The remaining thirty-three he spent with a half-finished sparkling water and approximately zero thoughts about the man he was waiting for.
He had thoughts about the problem. The man was incidental.
Bar Basso had been serving the wrong kind of Negroni to the right kind of people since sometime in the early seventies — the Negroni Sbagliato, prosecco where gin should be, the house modification that made this place famous and built its reputation on a deliberate substitution. Lasse knew the story. He’d thought about it briefly when he chose the venue, found the parallel slightly too obvious, and had decided he didn’t care. He wanted the noise floor and the deniability and the amber light that made the mirrored back wall into a surveillance asset. Bar Basso gave him all three.
He watched the entrance without looking at it.
Konrad Albrecht arrived at 19:46.
Six minutes late. Not fashionably late — that required awareness of the fashion — but the late of a man whose calendar had gone slightly wrong and who had dealt with this by not dealing with it. He came through the door in a Brunello Cucinelli coat that cost more than Lasse’s first car and moved differently from the other coats in the room. It had a specific weight and fall that announced itself. Lasse registered it from across the bar, through the mirror, without turning his head.
Broad-shouldered. Dark blond going silver at the temples. A face that had been athletic at twenty-five and had been carefully maintained into something that still read capable at fifty-two. He located Lasse in four seconds, which was slightly faster than average and not particularly impressive given that Lasse was the only person in the room in jogging pants. He navigated the tables without checking them. He moved like a man used to rooms that knew who he was.
Bar Basso did not know who he was. He did not notice this.
He extended his hand when he reached the booth. The handshake was firm, precisely two seconds, eye contact,
Herr Hansen
— the correct name deployed immediately, the full two-second hold, a textbook power-neutral grip that was either trained or had been trained long enough to become natural. Lasse shook his hand, said nothing, and sat back down.
Creed Aventus. It arrived with the handshake. Expensive, confident, and slightly desperate, which was a combination of qualities Lasse associated with men who had recently discovered they needed something they couldn’t buy through their usual channels. Albrecht settled into the booth across from him with the settled expression of a man used to rooms orienting toward him. He didn’t remove the coat immediately. The coat was doing work he needed it to do.
A barman appeared. Albrecht ordered a Negroni. Lasse gestured to the sparkling water he already had.
The barman left. Albrecht looked at the water.
You’re not—
No,
Lasse said.
He didn’t drink when he was being pitched to. This wasn’t a rule he’d written down anywhere. It was just the thing that was true.
The Negroni arrived. Albrecht wrapped both hands around the wide-mouthed glass — unnecessarily; it was not going anywhere — and began.
He explained the problem in the way CFOs explain problems they haven’t fully understood: with the specific confidence of a man who has been briefed by three different people and synthesised the briefing into something he could present as his own understanding. Loudly. Not loud enough to carry — the ambient noise of a Friday evening in Bar Basso, cocktail glasses and Italian voices and the couple at the window escalating on schedule, meant nothing went further than the booth. But loud for the space. Albrecht was calibrated for boardrooms. He hadn’t recalibrated.
Lasse let him go.
Forty-three articles. AI-generated voices impersonating journalists. Fabricated doping allegations targeting two Ukrainian athletes — one of them the primary brand ambassador for Albrecht’s acquisition target, bound to a morality clause in a sponsorship contract that was, by Albrecht’s account,
standard boilerplate.
The campaign had launched eleven days ago. The articles had distributed across social platforms, a cluster of Telegram channels, and two content aggregators that picked them up as genuine. A BBC Verify investigation — Albrecht said
the BBC thing
— had flagged the audio clips as synthetic within forty-eight hours. The synthesis had been identified using prosodic fingerprinting techniques developed at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, the same methodology that had previously traced a pro-Kremlin influence network targeting Ukrainian narratives across West African and South Asian media channels. The identification was clean and public. What was not clean was the distribution velocity: eleven days of indexed articles, shared links, a six-point-eight percent depression in the acquisition target’s stock price, and a morality clause sitting in a contract that now had reasons to trigger.
Albrecht’s acquisition of the target —
a €1.4 billion strategic consolidation in the outdoor-apparel sector
, he said it like he was still rehearsing the press release — was scheduled to close in seventy-two hours. Sunday noon.
If the morality clause triggered before then, the valuation model collapsed. The deal was dead.
He needed the articles traced, discredited, and the infrastructure behind them identified and neutralised before Sunday noon. He said this as though he were ordering from a menu. The Negroni had barely moved.
Lasse drank his water.
Forty-three articles was not an especially large operation. He’d seen larger — political influence work could run into the hundreds before it got sloppy. Forty-three was precise. Calibrated. The kind of number that suggested someone had done the minimum necessary to achieve a specific effect rather than flooding the zone hoping something stuck. That was either ideology or a budget. He suspected neither.
He also suspected the BBC Verify flag and the Clemson prosodic methodology weren’t news to whoever ran this. They’d been public tools for two years. Anyone building a sophisticated influence operation in 2026 had read the research. Which meant either they hadn’t expected scrutiny — unlikely, given the construction — or they’d expected scrutiny and believed the operation would complete its function before tracing reached the infrastructure. That was a time-bounded operation, not a resilient one. Someone had a window.
He filed this thought and didn’t share it.
Who benefits,
he said,
if the deal collapses?
Albrecht blinked. He had been waiting for a different question — something about methodology, timeline, resources required. A contractor question. This was a different kind of question.
Competitors,
he said.
Our sector is— there are two other groups who would benefit from the consolidation not happening. Voss Athletic and—
Which competitors specifically.
Albrecht named them. He named them with the confidence of a man who had done this analysis himself and was certain of it. He laid out the competitive logic: market share, distribution overlap, the specific ways in which Meridian Outdoors absorbing its main rival would compress margins for the other players in the space. It was coherent. It was also wrong, and Lasse knew it was wrong within approximately four seconds of Albrecht finishing the sentence.
Not lying. Just the wrong question. The man had asked who loses if the deal completes and answered that instead, which was the competitive analysis his team had run and which was entirely correct as competitive analysis and entirely useless as attribution. The right question was who profits if the stock stays depressed through the window — and that question pointed somewhere Albrecht, for reasons that would become evident, had not thought to look.
Lasse said nothing.
He set the sparkling water down. The glass was mostly warm by now — no ice, he’d been here forty-six minutes. He looked at Albrecht across the table with the expression that people who met him for the first time frequently mistook for blankness and that was in fact the face he wore when he was running several parallel calculations simultaneously.
The morality clause,
he said.
What’s the language.
Standard boilerplate for endorsement contracts in—
Send it to me.
Albrecht pulled out his phone. It was a new iPhone, no case. He navigated to the document and airdropped it to the address Lasse gave him, which was not any address Albrecht could have found before tonight. Lasse didn’t look at it yet.
Timeline,
Lasse said.
Sunday noon. That’s the—
I understood what Sunday noon meant.
A pause. Albrecht had the particular social intelligence to register that the register had shifted, even if he could not quite identify how. He adjusted — not retreat, but recalibration. He set the Negroni down. Looked at Lasse more carefully.
You can do this,
he said. It was not quite a question.
The infrastructure trace, yes. The discrediting depends on what I find and how clean it is.
The articles are demonstrably fabricated. The BBC—
The BBC told you what they are. They didn’t tell you who built them or why. Those are different questions.
Another pause. The ambient noise of Bar Basso swallowed it.
And if you find who built them,
Albrecht said,
what happens to that information.
Lasse looked at him.
You get a documented infrastructure map you can hand to a regulator or a lawyer. The hosting gets an abuse report. The distribution chain gets severed.
He picked up the water.
That’s what you hired me for.
Albrecht nodded slowly. The nodding of a man confirming something he needed to hear rather than something he’d learned.
Then Lasse named his price.
He named it in crypto — a specific figure in ETH, at the current rate a number in euros that would register on a CFO’s face if a CFO were inclined to register things on his face. Albrecht was not inclined. He absorbed the number with the stillness of a man who had already decided, before the meeting, that the number would be acceptable. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t negotiate. He said,
Acceptable, subject to a retainer now and delivery on Sunday.
The retainer arrived — on-chain, on the address Lasse specified, while they were still at the table.
That told Lasse more than the entire preceding conversation.
A man who doesn’t flinch at the number and has the wallet loaded before the meeting isn’t negotiating. He’s paying for certainty. And a man paying for certainty is a man who knows the thing he’s asking you to fix is bigger than the thing he described. Not necessarily lying — in Lasse’s experience, clients of Albrecht’s type rarely lied deliberately. They simply curated the version of the problem that could be handed to a contractor without requiring a full account of how the problem came to exist.
The problem is technically interesting.
That was the only reason he agreed. Not the ETH — the ETH was automatic at this point, numbers of this size were automatic, he had more money than he would spend in four lifetimes and the only things that moved him were problems that required him to actually think. Forty-three fabricated articles with a consistent prosodic fingerprint, distributed through infrastructure that had the architectural signature of ideological influence work, deployed with the precision of a commercial hit — that combination had a name in his professional taxonomy and the name was for hire, and for hire meant there was a paper trail somewhere, and paper trails were the one thing that never disappointed him.
He lit a cigarette.
He lit it at the corner booth of Bar Basso, which had been non-smoking since the Italian national indoor smoking ban had come into force in 2005, and he lit it because he felt like it and because the decision had been made and the retainer had landed and there was nothing left to discuss.
The barman at the far end of the bar looked over.
Then looked away.
No one said anything.
Albrecht watched this. He watched the cigarette. He watched no one say anything. He looked at Lasse across the table with an expression that was the closest he would come, in Lasse’s presence, to genuine recalibration — the specific expression of a man who has just understood, very slightly too late, that the person he has hired is not the category of person he usually hires.
Lasse drew on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly toward the amber-lit ceiling.
Outside, Via Plinio was still wet and still indifferent. The rain was still not worth an umbrella and still too cold to ignore. The woman at the window table had raised her voice by exactly the predicted increment. A barman was constructing a Negroni Sbagliato in a glass the size of a small fishbowl — the wrong ingredient, the right result, the house specialty since Mirko Stocchetto reached for the wrong bottle sometime in the early seventies and decided to serve it anyway.
Albrecht finished his Negroni and stood. They did not shake hands again. He left through the front door in the coat that carried itself and was gone into the rain-wet street within thirty seconds.
Lasse stayed.
He sat in the corner booth with the cigarette burning down and the sparkling water that was now room temperature and the morality clause document he hadn’t opened yet and the knowledge — clean, precise, filed — that Albrecht’s answer to who benefits if the deal collapses had been wrong in a way that Albrecht would never know was wrong, and that the correct answer pointed somewhere that was going to make the next sixty-something hours more complicated than a standard infrastructure trace.
Good, he thought, in the flat, private way he thought things he would not say aloud. Straightforward jobs are boring and boring is the one thing I charge extra for.
He opened the morality clause on his phone.
Read it once.
Read it again.
By the third line of the triggering conditions, something in his attention shifted in the specific way it shifted when a problem stopped being a surface problem and became an architecture. The clause was not standard boilerplate. Standard boilerplate did not have language this particular, this structurally specific, this precisely drafted. Someone had written this. Someone who knew what they were writing it for, and had written it to fail in a specific direction at a specific time.
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter.
Right then.
He finished the water. Tucked the phone away. Left thirty euros under the glass — the water, the ashtray he hadn’t asked for, and a margin for the inconvenience of the smoke, which was the one courtesy he was prepared to observe about it. He stood, rolled the family ring once on his right hand without being aware of doing it, and walked out into the Milan night.
Via Plinio was rain-slicked and empty. He turned west without deciding to, the way he always walked when a problem needed processing — not toward anything, just away from where the thinking had started. He’d cross the city toward the Navigli. Thirty minutes on wet stone was better than a hotel ceiling. He pulled his phone out, opened a fresh note, and wrote four words:
Morality clause — not boilerplate.
Then he put the phone back and flagged a taxi on the street, thinking about the prosodic fingerprint.
Forty-three articles. Same synthesis model, same signature across all of them. The Clemson methodology had caught it in forty-eight hours — the same methodology that had traced a Russian state-backed network through DCWeekly.org in 2023, a network that had increased its article output by two-and-a-half times after it integrated generative AI, the operation identified partly because the LLM had leaked its own prompts in the output text. Sloppy. That operation had been ideological — pro-Kremlin narratives, anti-Ukrainian framing, designed for breadth and persistence. That wasn’t what this was. This was precision. Forty-three articles, consistent fingerprint, a specific stock depression target, a specific triggering window, a specific legal instrument ready to receive the impact.
Someone had bought the costume. The geopolitical aesthetic — the impersonated outlets, the Ukrainian athlete targeting, the synthesis model borrowed from the political influence toolbox — was a wardrobe, not a worldview. It would make anyone who looked at it briefly think state actor and stop asking follow-up questions.
It had almost worked on him.
Almost.
The taxi arrived. He got in. Gave the address of the hotel.
Through the window, the Navigli canal slid past — black water, sodium light, the rain making small circles on the surface that were immediately still. He watched it without watching it. He was already thinking about the node structure. He was already, in the flat purposeful way he approached problems that interested him, six steps ahead of the thing Albrecht thought he had hired him to do.
The taxi moved north toward Piazza Cordusio.
He pulled out his phone again and added three more words to the note.
Find the landlord.
Chapter 2 — Forty-Three
Friday, February 20, 2026 — 22:15 CET Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite
The desk chair was the wrong height. He’d established this within forty seconds of walking through the door, set the laptop on the floor, and that was the end of any pretense that the room would be used as intended.
The Cordusio Suite had an opinion of itself. He’d clocked it immediately: Molteni furniture in the correct positions, the Bang & Olufsen Beosound speaker on the console glowing with the particular smugness of expensive electronics waiting to be appreciated, a freestanding bathtub visible through the bathroom arch like a marble argument. Private terrace overlooking the Piazza Cordusio. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the piazza below rain-grey and sodium-lit, old cobblestones doing what old cobblestones do in February. Everything exactly right. Ceiling three point two metres, which any architect would call generous.
Not generous enough. He needed height when the problem was complex. Three point two metres was a lid.
He sat on the floor with his back against the bed frame, the laptop open in front of him, and pulled up the Clemson paper. His necklace — silver eagle, oval turquoise, a genuine bald eagle talon — swung forward when he leaned over the screen, and he tucked it back inside his crewneck without looking at it. Force of habit. He opened a cola from the minibar and noted with grim professional satisfaction that the hotel charged €7.40 for a 250ml Coca-Cola. He would bill this at €66.60.
Albrecht would not notice. Men who bought Brunello Cucinelli coats did not read minibar receipts.
The forty-three articles were open across both screens — the laptop and a tablet he’d pulled from his bag that ran a separate OS he kept clean for exactly this category of work. The tablet had no Wi-Fi history, no cookies, no personality. It existed only to touch things he needed to touch without the touching being traced back to a machine that knew his name.
He started with the audio.
Twelve of the forty-three articles had attached voice content — AI-narrated summaries, synthetic news-reader deliveries, the kind of thing that gets shared on Telegram before anyone checks the source. He ran the first three through his own forensic pipeline: resampled to 16kHz, spectral residual analysis, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients compared against the model attribution database he’d been building since 2023 on the principle that every synthesis model leaves artifacts the way every printer leaves microscopic dot patterns. Neural vocoders were no different. They had signatures. Consistent, model-specific, sitting in the residual noise floor like a watermark nobody bothered to hide because most people didn’t know to look.
He looked.
Same model across all twelve clips. Same prosodic fingerprint — the particular way this synthesis engine handled plosives at phrase boundaries, the characteristic suppression of the 3–5 kHz band that the Fraunhofer people had flagged in their last published paper, the barely-perceptible formant discontinuities at synthesis boundaries that a human speaker couldn’t produce because a human speaker breathed. This wasn’t twelve articles made by twelve different actors. This was one operator running one pipeline across a single production run.
Contractor, he thought. Not a political cell. Not some basement nationalist with a grudge and a GPU. Someone who had a workflow, had run it before, and was running it again for whoever was paying this week.
He noted this and moved to the hosting layer.
The articles themselves were distributed across eleven different domain names — most of them plausible enough at first glance. SportInfoDaily.eu. AlpineAthleticsNews.com. EuroEnduranceReport.net.The kind of names that made the content look like the output of a minor-league sports desk rather than a fabrication pipeline. WHOIS records on three of them had been privacy-shielded through a Panamanian registrar. Four more had the DNS fingerprint of a bulletproof hosting provider he’d seen before — a company that advertised
no-questions infrastructure
on the kind of forums that no-questions infrastructure was built for.
Two of the domains had been registered sloppily.
He found the sloppiness on the second pass, the way you found anything by being methodical when impatient people counted on you not being methodical. The registrant email on EuroEnduranceMagazine.org — note the deliberate near-miss on the legitimate EuroEnduranceMagazine.com — had been auto-populated from a template and not changed. The email resolved to a .skdomain. Slovakia. He cross-referenced the IP block on the hosting side.
Primary node. Bratislava.
He looked it up. The registrant was a company called Helix Narratives s.r.o. — s.r.o. being the Slovak equivalent of a limited liability company, which told him precisely nothing except that whoever set this up knew enough to use a local corporate wrapper rather than a British Virgin Islands shelf company and apparently not enough to understand that a Slovak LLC registered to a shared serviced office address in Bratislava’s old town was not, in practice, more anonymous. It was just an extra step. The kind of extra step someone added to the playbook after watching a previous operation get burned without it.
He ran Helix Narratives through four databases in sequence. The first three returned nothing useful — registered agents, a generic SIC code, no litigation. The fourth one gave him a name.
Tomáš Vrábel. Director. Formerly employed by a Prague-based media analytics firm — not his words, the registry’s words — called Narrativ360 s.r.o., which had been dissolved cleanly in March 2023 following what the Czech media ombudsman’s office had obliquely referred to as
contractual irregularities with undisclosed political clients.
He ran Narrativ360. Five years of operation, 2018 to 2023. Client list never made public. The company had dissolved — this was the telling part —cleanly.No bankruptcy, no outstanding judgments, no creditor claims. Just a company that decided to stop existing one afternoon and did so thoroughly.
Very tidy. Far too tidy for ideology.
Ideology leaked. Ideology left manifestos in the GitHub repos and rants in the commit messages and the fingerprints of true believers who couldn’t stop themselves from signing the work with something. This operation had none of that. The forty-three articles read as authentic political grievance — AI-generated Ukrainian athlete, fabricated doping scandal, the implicit suggestion of institutional cover-up — but there was no excess. No flourish. No message being sent to a particular audience. Just the minimum viable disinformation required to move a stock price.
Someone had built a machine for doing this. The machine had opinions about nothing. It just ran.
He stared at the ceiling that was too low. He counted the moulding sections — there were eight between the window wall and the bathroom arch, each one a testament to late nineteenth-century stucco craftsmanship that he had absolutely no use for — and thought about what kind of person builds a disinformation machine for hire and then parks it in a Bratislava s.r.o. with the name of a former political operative on the directorship filing.
The kind of person who had done it before. The kind of person who understood that the political wrapper was good camouflage — pro-Russian narrative, Ukrainian athletes, Olympics — because Western analysts would pattern-match to state-sponsored interference and stop asking who was actually paying. The geopolitical aesthetic was costume. Rented, not believed. Probably cheaper than the infrastructure itself.
He wrote this down in a flat, abbreviated note on the clean tablet. Not conclusions yet. Just topology.
The minibar got a second visit. He took another cola and a packet of mixed nuts he would also bill at 900% markup, settled back onto the floor, and opened the node map he’d been building since the first hop resolved.
The map was growing the way maps grow when you’re doing it properly — not branching from a single root but converging from multiple vectors until the same nodes started appearing from different angles, confirming each other. He had the Bratislava hosting provider. He had the Helix Narratives registration. He had the AI synthesis fingerprint confirming single-operator production. He had the distribution pattern — Telegram as primary seed, three channels, then organic spread via content aggregators that automated the re-publication of anything tagged with specific sports hashtags.
The distribution layer was the most professionally constructed part of the whole operation. Someone had put genuine thought into the seeding pattern — not flood-and-pray, which was the amateur approach, but targeted injection at venues where sports journalists monitored for breaking news. The Telegram channels had been posting legitimate sports content for four months before the disinformation campaign launched. They’d built an audience first. They’d made the channels look real before they needed them to work.
This was not improvised.
He was now fairly certain this wasn’t even the first time the infrastructure had been used. The tooling was too polished. The Matryoshka nesting — his private designation for the architecture, layers inside layers, each one designed to contain the burn if the outer shell got pulled — had been constructed with a practitioner’s understanding of exactly how much of the stack you could sacrifice before losing the core. Someone had built this knowing they would need it again after the first time it got found.
He thought about this for a moment.
Who builds for multiple use? Not a one-time hit man. Not a political operation running a specific campaign. Someone who had decided that this was a service they could offer. Repeatedly. To whoever needed forty-three articles and a convincing prosodic fingerprint and didn’t want the provenance traced back to the boardroom where the order was placed.
He reached for the Clemson paper again, opened it to the section on multi-campaign attribution using prosodic consistency markers, and cross-referenced the model signature he’d identified against the known training corpus fingerprints in the appendix.
He found it on the third comparison. The synthesis model was an open-source TTS fork — specifically a modified Coqui TTS build that had been fine-tuned on a dataset the Fraunhofer AISEC group had flagged in their October 2025 paper as a probable training corpus for multiple Central European influence operations. The fine-tuning data was built for Central European language phoneme distribution — Slovak, Czech, Polish. A model trained to sound native in that language cluster when rendering names and places.
Which made sense. If you were running commercial disinformation for hire out of Bratislava, you would use tools calibrated for your environment. You would not import a San Francisco TTS startup’s API for attribution reasons that didn’t require explaining.
Local tools. Local cover. Rented Western anxiety about Russian operations as additional cover layer.
The machine was elegant. He would give them that.
He wouldn’t give them much else.
He found the first infrastructure node at 23:17 — the primary Bratislava hosting endpoint from which the content delivery network was orchestrated. It resolved through the CDN’s own abuse-contact WHOIS to the same registrant email he’d found on the domain. That was the second sloppy thing. You did not use the same email twice if you understood basic operational security. Using it twice meant you had a template and the template had a field you’d forgotten to randomise.
He noted the provider’s abuse reporting interface. He noted the specific article URLs he would cite. He noted the AI voice fingerprint methodology he would reference, sourcing the Clemson paper and the Fraunhofer October 2025 publication as verifiable academic scaffolding for the claim, because a good abuse report was not a rant — it was a technical brief with citations that left the abuse handler’s job already half-done and made ignoring it professionally embarrassing.
He had not yet filed the report. He would file it in sequence. There was more to map first, and he wanted the full shape before he started burning layers, because burning a layer before you understood what was underneath it was how you lost the thread.
He finished the mixed nuts. He found the packet had contained mostly cashews, which were the least interesting nut, and noted this without surprise.
He was building the second access log pass — working back from the CDN exits in Romania and the Netherlands to the control layer commands that had seeded the initial article uploads — when the timestamp stopped him.
December 12, 2025.
That was six weeks before the first article went live. Six weeks before the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics opened and the disinformation campaign began hammering Meridian Outdoors’ acquisition target. Someone had been in this infrastructure in December 2025, logging in through a VPN exit node he recognized from a previous job — not because he’d mapped the same node before, but because he kept a running reference database of VPN exit infrastructure and the patterns of known commercial users, the way a tracker kept maps of watering holes. Some exits were associated with specific organizations through correlation between their public IP announcements and confirmed traffic timing.
This one was in Geneva.
He cross-referenced it against his database. Three prior correlated appearances, each within a business-hours window that suggested European corporate use rather than consumer VPN traffic. The exit node was operated by a provider that marketed aggressively to financial services and sports industry clients.
Sports industry.
He wrote: Geneva client. Pre-operational access, Dec 12. Content upload commenced Jan 6. Then he wrote: Who in sports industry Geneva had both the motivation and the infrastructure access?
He looked at the Albrecht briefing materials he’d photographed on his phone at Bar Basso — the acquisition structure, the cap table of the target company, the key parties named in the morality clause activation pathway. He ran the Geneva connection against the listed counterparties.
He found SportBridge AG in the third column of the cap table. A Geneva-based sports marketing intermediary with two board-level positions at the acquisition target. He looked it up. Registered 2019. Turnover not disclosed. Website the specific kind of vague that sports marketing intermediaries’ websites always were — photographs of athletes, mentions of strategic partnerships, a contact form that led nowhere.
Boardroom positions at the target company. Financial interest in whether the deal closed. And an access log timestamp six weeks before the campaign launched.
There it is.
He felt the thing he always felt at this moment — not satisfaction exactly, more the particular satisfaction of a mechanism clicking into position. The shape of it. The problem had seemed like forty-three articles and a hostile disinformation operation and a morality clause triggered by fabricated content. It wasn’t that. It was a commercial market play wearing the costume of a geopolitical operation, constructed with rented infrastructure, commissioned through a cutout in Bratislava, and designed to destroy the valuation of an acquisition target for the financial benefit of parties who sat on that target’s own board.
Albrecht had said competitors when Lasse asked who benefited from the deal collapsing. Wrong. Albrecht had been looking horizontally — rival outdoor apparel companies. The answer was vertical. People inside the structure of the deal itself.
Lasse had known the answer was wrong at Bar Basso. He’d said nothing because Albrecht’s mis-framing wasn’t information he needed to correct. He just needed to be right about where to look.
He was right about where to look.
He wrote the SportBridge connection into the node map in a separate file — documented but not yet actioned. Not yet sent anywhere. Held.
He was about to close the Helix Narratives hosting tab and move to the upstream distribution documentation when he noticed the folder.
It was in the shared storage attached to the Helix content delivery account — the same account where the article drafts, audio files, and distribution schedules were stored. The folder structure was organized by campaign identifier: a string of eight characters that functioned as a job number, the kind of naming convention a contractor firm uses when they are running multiple engagements and need the client billing to be unambiguous.
The folder for this campaign — he had the identifier from the registration metadata — was protected at directory level with what appeared to be an access control list. He probed it. The ACL was configured correctly at the directory level. The folder underneath it was not. A sub-directory called /ops-brief/final/ had a world-readable permission flag that had been left open — almost certainly from a deployment script that reset folder permissions on new content uploads and hadn’t been updated to exclude this subdirectory.
A rookie mistake. The second one tonight, though this one was considerably worse than the email reuse.
He looked at the contents without downloading anything. Standard operational security: browse metadata first, understand what you’re touching, minimize footprint. The folder contained three files. A PDF. A second PDF with a different naming convention. And a third file — larger, ZIP-compressed — whose filename he read twice.
marta-voss-mgmt-PHASE2-LEVERAGE.zip
He read it a third time to confirm he wasn’t misreading it.
He wasn’t.
He looked at the first PDF. It was the operational brief — fourteen pages, SportBridge AG internal header, dated December 10, 2025. Target parameters. Article topics and their sequencing in relation to the Olympic schedule. Timing windows aligned to media cycles. The language was professional in the particular way that documents written for deniability are professional — functional but vague, strategic outcomes described without specifying mechanism. Achieve targeted narrative penetration across designated channels by January 6, not publish forty-three fabricated articles about Ukrainian athletes doping.Same thing. Different sentence.
The brief’s timing section ended normally. Then there was a page break, and a half-page addendum in a different font — Calibri where the body had been in Times, a different header footer structure, clearly appended after the original document was drafted. Someone had dropped it in, formatted it differently, and either not noticed or not cared.
Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. File attached. Deployment at client discretion pending trigger conditions.
He read the addendum twice. Then he looked at the third file again.
He did not open it yet.
He sat on the floor of the Cordusio Suite — €1,100 a night, Albrecht’s card — with the laptop running hot and the minibar cola going warm and the ceiling three point two metres above him being three point two metres above him, and he thought about what supplementary leveragemeant when the target of a disinformation campaign was a named athlete in a sponsorship contract with a bespoke morality clause.
It meant the forty-three articles were Plan A. Plan B was something worse.
He opened the file.
It extracted to 34 pages. A doping protocol document — not fabricated, the formatting was wrong for fabrication and the metadata he pulled from the PDF header placed its creation in a version of Adobe Acrobat registered to a business entity in Munich, which he cross-referenced in seventeen seconds. Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH. München.
He read the first three pages carefully. Lab result schedules. Substitution protocols. A list of three officials — names, roles, the particular brevity of a note written by someone who assumed the reader already knew the significance of the names listed.
This was not manufactured. The metadata was clean. The file had not passed through the Helix Narratives content pipeline — it had been received by that pipeline from an outside source, stored in the operational folder, and left there with a world-readable permission flag because whoever ran the compliance on this job was the same caliber of professional as whoever used the same email address twice.
Which meant someone inside Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH had extracted 34 pages of doping documentation from their own management company’s systems and sold it to a Geneva sports intermediary as insurance.
And the insurance had been sitting in an unlocked folder on a Bratislava contractor’s content server for the last ten weeks.
He put the cola down.
He stared at the document for a moment. Then he closed it, noted the file hash, noted the metadata, and saved nothing to his primary machine. The tablet only. Clean, air-gapped, purpose-built.
He looked at the ceiling for a while. Not thinking — that wasn’t quite accurate. Registering. The way a clinician registers a reading before deciding what it means.
The doping file was not his job. Albrecht had hired him to discredit forty-three fabricated articles and trace the infrastructure before Sunday noon. That was the job. A clearly scoped, technically interesting, straightforwardly deliverable engagement. The doping file was found alongside the job. It was not part of the job. It had nothing to do with the valuation model, the morality clause, or the €1.4 billion acquisition.
Except that it did, actually, because it was sitting in the same operational infrastructure as the thing that was trying to detonate the deal, and someone had been planning to deploy it as Phase 2 if Phase 1 didn’t deliver sufficient leverage. Which meant the campaign Albrecht had hired him to dismantle was less an endpoint and more the first increment of something with more teeth.
None of that changed what the file was. A real document. Forensically traceable to a real source. Thirty-four pages of documented systematic doping in a sport where the participants who weren’t doing it were competing against the participants who were.
Not my problem, he thought, and found the sentence technically accurate and completely insufficient simultaneously.
He lit a cigarette and opened Signal.
She answered on the second ring.
Anna Haas. She was, officially, an equity partner at a Rome-based M&A and corporate law firm with a client list that ran to three sovereign wealth funds and a former head of state. Unofficially she was the only person in his contact list who could look at a complex, morally compromised situation from the angle opposite his own and land at a conclusion that was both practically actionable and unflinching about what it cost.
He ran the situation in six sentences. The forty-three articles. The Bratislava infrastructure. The AI synthesis fingerprint. The December access log. The Geneva VPN exit. SportBridge AG.
She was quiet through all six sentences in the way she was quiet when she was pulling the thread from her end — not waiting for him to finish, but running it simultaneously. He could hear her moving, the particular indoor-outdoor ambience shift of someone stepping from a terrace into a room.
«Lasse.»
«I know.»
A pause. The specific pause of someone who had just read something in a document they hadn’t been looking for.
«Someone in my firm—»
«I know. That’s why I called you and not the IOC.»
The Meridian Outdoors acquisition. The morality clause. She was reading the same filing he’d photographed at Bar Basso. She had her own copy — he knew she would have pulled it the moment Albrecht had been mentioned. She worked faster than people expected because people expected a woman in a silk shirt and a Cartier bracelet to be ornamental, and Anna Haas collected that underestimation the way other people collected insurance policies: patiently, and with the full intention of spending it.
The morality clause language. She knew it because she had written it — not this document, not this specific clause, but the structural DNA was from her firm’s precedent library. He knew this from her silence. Three seconds, which for Anna was the equivalent of anyone else dropping the phone.
«Someone in my firm drafted that clause.»
«Yes.»
«The mechanism—»
«The mechanism is what makes the forty-three articles functional. Without that specific clause language, the campaign produces bad press. With it, the campaign produces a legal trigger. The disinformation was the ignition. The clause was the engine.»
Another silence. He heard her lighter.
«Who else have you told?»
«No one. You’re the call.»
A third silence, shorter. She was recalibrating. He’d seen her do it in person and knew it by the quality of the pause — the specific moment where she moved from what has happened to what happens next.
«I need the Pfeiffer connection,» she said. She named him before Lasse did, which meant she’d either already suspected it or moved through the firm’s M&A precedent authors faster than he’d have predicted. Gerhard Pfeiffer. Fifty-eight years old, brand licensing specialist, three favours owed to a Geneva sports marketing intermediary.
«That’s what I’d start with,» Lasse said.
«I’ve already started,» she said, which was Anna for I started before you finished sentence four.
«There’s one more thing,» he said.
He told her about the unlocked folder. The ZIP file. The 34 pages.
She was quiet for longer this time.
«Is it real.»
«Forensically confirmed. Originated from their own server. Not manufactured.»
«Then it’s not ours.»
«No.»
A pause that was doing more work than the words on either side of it.
«Lasse.»
«I know.»
«That file doesn’t change the scope of the engagement.»
«I know.»
«Leave it alone.»
He didn’t say anything.
«You’re going to do something with it.»
He still didn’t say anything.
«Fine,» she said, which was Anna for I already know your answer and am recording this moment for later reference. Then: «Call me in the morning.»
The call ended at 00:09. He noted the time out of habit.
He sat on the floor for another three minutes. He did not open the doping file again. He opened the node map instead and continued working outward from the SportBridge VPN correlation, mapping the remaining distribution infrastructure with the steady, methodical pace of someone who had a long Saturday ahead and no intention of wasting Friday night worrying about the parts of the problem that were solvable.
The parts that weren’t solvable yet — the 34 pages, the athlete who didn’t know her management had sold her out, the officials whose names appeared on a list that was currently sitting in a world-readable folder on a Bratislava content server — those he would deal with when he understood the full picture.
He was still three hops from the full picture. He went back to work.
The ceiling was still too low. The minibar still charged too much. Outside, Piazza Cordusio was rain-slick and empty and deeply indifferent to any of this.
He liked the indifference. It was honest.
Chapter 3 — The Ring Turns
Friday, February 20, 2026 — 23:50 CET Villa Aurora, Pinciano, Rome / Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite
Rome at midnight in February is not the postcard version. The city exhales something older and colder — stone holding the day’s insufficient warmth, damp air coming off the Villa Borghese, the amber fog of a million streetlamps pressing up against a sky with no stars in it. From the panoramic terrace of Villa Aurora the rooftops of Parioli are a geometry of pale ochre and dark rust, interrupted here and there by the blue flicker of a television through a window, someone else’s late Friday.
Anna was on the terrace with a merino wool blanket across her shoulders and a bottle of Billecart-Salmon she hadn’t opened yet. She’d been watching the stock ticker on her phone while the men’s ice hockey semifinal went out on the television inside — the kind of match that produced noise even through closed doors, which she was using as a time anchor while she refreshed the price of Meridian Outdoors’ acquisition target for the third time. A habit that was not producing useful information and that she had not stopped doing.
The blanket was good cashmere, the kind that held body heat without performing warmth. The champagne was correct — a premier cru blanc de blancs she’d been saving for something, though she hadn’t been specific with herself about what. Three browser tabs sat open on her second screen behind the terrace door, inside on the war room desk, and she was cross about this. The tabs were due diligence she was technically not doing. She was technically just having a drink and watching Rome breathe.
The Signal notification came through at 23:47. She answered on the second ring.
For Anna Haas, second ring was practically a lunge for the phone. She knew it. She was also cross about that.
Six sentences,
Lasse said. He didn’t say hello. He never said hello on Signal. His voice had the particular flatness of a man who has been staring at a screen in a low-ceilinged hotel room since ten o’clock and has just found something that requires a different kind of head than the one he is currently running.
Anna said nothing. She listened, which she only did without interrupting for Lasse, and which she judged herself for each time. The blanket tightened slightly around her shoulders.
He was methodical. Forty-three fabricated articles. AI voice synthesis — same prosodic fingerprint across every clip, same generation model, a signature as readable as a handwriting sample once you had the Clemson research open. Prosodic fingerprint was the technical term; what it meant in practice was that the rhythm, stress, and pitch variation of a synthesised voice carries traces of the model that built it, the same way a specific inkjet printer leaves patterns invisible to the naked eye but trivially identifiable under forensic comparison. Someone had used the same synthesis tool across all forty-three pieces. Sloppy. Or they hadn’t imagined anyone looking for it.
Then the Bratislava hosting node. Then Helix Narratives s.r.o. — eighteen months old, a serviced office address, a name in a database that resolved through three hops to one Tomáš Vrábel, former hand at a Prague influence shop that had dissolved very tidily in 2023.
Far too tidily for ideology, Lasse said. Four words that meant: this is commercial. This is for hire. Someone rented this infrastructure the way another person rents a van.
On the fourth sentence —
the morality clause was activated through a legal instrument
— the sapphire ring on Anna’s right hand began to turn.
She was not aware of doing it.
The ring was an antique. Eighteenth century, probably French — a deep cornflower-blue oval stone in a closed-back gold setting, the kind of piece that arrived at auction with a provenance note rather than a family story, which was, she had always thought, considerably more interesting. It had been on her right hand for eleven years and she had never once consciously touched it during a conversation.
When she turned it, she wasn’t lying. She wasn’t afraid. She was calculating the distance between what she already knew and what she was about to be required to say out loud, and the ring was the unit by which that distance was measured.
She pulled up the Meridian Outdoors acquisition filing on her second screen.
The acquisition. The morality clause — a clause in the sponsorship contract of the acquisition target’s star athlete, structured to trigger on any credible evidence of doping or conduct violations, which would in turn collapse the valuation model the deal was built on. Standard boilerplate, in theory. The kind of clause a brand licensing partner insists on. The kind a careful corporate lawyer drafts in an afternoon and bills out in three hours.
Except.
The language was specific in a way that standard boilerplate was not. Bespoke was the word that assembled itself in her head while Lasse was still talking. Not standard-adjacent. Not imported from a precedent library with find-and-replace. Structurally specific. The particular architecture of a clause that had been designed for a particular application rather than adapted from a general template.
She knew that language. She had written that language. Not this specific document — she would have remembered. But the structural DNA was from her firm’s precedent library. The trigger mechanics, the definition of credible evidence, the notification timeline — all of it came from a template she had contributed to fourteen months ago during a brand licensing practice seminar.
Someone in her building had drafted this.
Lasse.
I know.
She did not ask how he knew. He always knew. This was one of the things she had decided not to examine too closely.
Someone in my firm—
I know. That’s why I called you and not the IOC.
The champagne stayed unopened.
She went inside from the terrace, through the arched French doors and across the living room with its white sofas and the dark wood desk in the library corner and the baby grand she hadn’t played since December, and up one flight of stairs to the second floor. The war room. The study. The room that her submissives were never permitted to enter, that her cleaner entered only with Anna present, that contained twenty-six years of black journals she had never reread and had no intention of destroying.
The room smelled of paper and old leather and the ghost of this morning’s espresso. The fitted shelves ran floor to ceiling, colour-coded lever-arch files in strict alphabetical order, the mahogany partner’s desk wide and clear except for the laptop and the ceramic mug she’d put down at nine o’clock and not touched since.
She sat in the banker’s chair — old green leather, cracked on both armrests in exactly the places her forearms rested — and began pulling files.
The ring had stopped turning. What replaced it was something considerably colder. Not anger. Anger was for people who hadn’t already done the calculation. This was the specific temperature of a woman who had run the numbers in the time it took to walk upstairs and did not like the result but had already accepted it and was now allocating resources accordingly.
Her firm’s precedent library was internally accessible to any partner and most senior associates. The structural fingerprint of the morality clause narrowed the field — not many people had worked on that brand licensing template. She opened the partner directory. She opened the client management database, which she had authorised access to and which, at 23:52 on a Friday night, no one was monitoring.
Gerhard Pfeiffer’s name appeared in the first search.
She didn’t say anything. She read. Pfeiffer, 58, corporate and brand licensing, Rome office. Eighteen months of client records. SportBridge AG, Geneva — a sports marketing intermediary — appearing four times in the billing history. Four times was not a coincidence. Four times was a relationship. The kind of relationship that generated favours. The kind of favour that involved someone saying I need a morality clause for a sponsorship contract and Pfeiffer nodding and pulling up the precedent library and not asking what the clause was for.
He wouldn’t have asked. He never asked. That was the specific danger of Pfeiffer’s particular configuration of agreeableness and technical competence — he was very good at drafting things and almost entirely uninterested in what the things were for. She had watched him operate for twelve years. She had occasionally found it useful. Right now she found it catastrophically, irreversibly stupid.
The kind of stupidity, she thought, that only people who believe they understand more than they do are capable of.
She pulled up SportBridge AG’s public registration next. Geneva, 2019, three board members, a Zurich operational address. She ran two of the three names. Both appeared — she cross-checked — on the acquisition target’s cap table.
There it was.
Short the target. Commission disinformation to suppress the price. Install a legal trigger mechanism using a compliant lawyer who doesn’t know what he’s signing off on. Watch the valuation model collapse and the deal fall apart. Profit on the position.
Clean in theory. Messy in execution because Helix Narratives, whoever they were, had left their hosting registration in their own name and apparently kept their operational brief in a shared folder they hadn’t locked. The architecture of a sophisticated scheme built on the careless assumption that no one would look. The geopolitical costume — a pro-Russian disinformation operation targeting Ukrainian athletes — was designed to make observers nod knowingly and stop pulling the thread.
They had not accounted for Lasse Hansen, who was constitutionally incapable of nodding knowingly and had a documented personal problem with threads that wanted to be left alone.
She opened a new document and began to type. Not a memo. Not a strategy. A list of four names and four actions, one next to each, in the compressed notation she used when she was working fast and needed to be able to read it back at pace.
Pfeiffer. Letter of resignation, effective Wednesday, personal reasons, no counter-narrative, no calls.
SportBridge — Geneva. The colleague she used for quiet regulatory discomfort. Monday.
The morality clause review. The activation mechanism needed to be neutralised before it triggered. This required a conversation she would need to be careful about.
Firm exposure. Document protection. The precedent library access logs.
She stared at the list for a moment.
Four actions. Forty-eight hours. She had worked faster in worse conditions on deals worth more money than this and she had never once failed to close her end. Pfeiffer was going to have a very bad Sunday morning, but that was his problem. He should have done a conflict check. He had the professional obligation and the intellectual capacity and twelve years of seeing what happened when people in this industry did favours without a paper trail, and he had done it anyway because SportBridge was a referral source and it was a routine clause and sometimes the brain simply refuses to do the work it was hired for because the immediate social cost of inconveniencing someone is easier to calculate than the abstract future cost of catastrophic structural failure.
Routine. Naturally.
She sent Lasse a single message at 00:03.
I have Pfeiffer’s client history. SportBridge is in it four times. Call me when you have the node map.
She did not ask about the exposure window. They both knew when it closed. The acquisition needed to be clean before Sunday noon, which meant Lasse’s infrastructure work and her internal containment needed to be complete before Sunday noon, which meant the next thirty-six hours had a very specific shape.
She picked up the ceramic mug, confirmed it was cold, and went back downstairs to make another espresso, because the rest of this night was going to be work and she was going to need to be running at full capacity by morning. On the way through the living room she did not look at the champagne on the terrace. It could wait.
Victory first. Then the good bottle.
Back in Milan, Lasse had the hotel ceiling to consider.
Three point two metres, nominally generous. Not enough. He was on the floor, back against the bed frame, the laptop balanced on a copy of the minibar price list he’d appropriated as a hard surface and would not be charged for because he had not consumed it. The second cola of the night sat on the parquet to his right, room temperature because the minibar ice was theatre and he didn’t have time for theatre.
He had Anna’s message on his phone. He read it. He set the phone down.
Four times. He’d had Pfeiffer’s name forty minutes ago — different path, same destination. The SportBridge connection resolved through the access logs to an IP associated with their Zurich office’s VPN, which connected through three hops to the Helix Narratives control layer, which connected to the Matryoshka content delivery infrastructure they’d rented for the job. The architecture was legible now. Clean, in the sense that its logic was clear.
VPN hop three of three was a Panama-based provider popular among what the threat intelligence community called commercially motivated state-adjacent actors — which was the industry’s polite way of saying people who used infrastructure originally built for geopolitical operations because it was available and because Western audiences were trained to see it and stop asking follow-up questions. The Matryoshka system had been built by someone with a budget and a political purpose. Helix had rented the costume. The political aesthetic was a coat of paint over a market manipulation scheme, chosen not for ideology but for its proven ability to make observers nod and walk away.
He noted this. He didn’t find it interesting. He had seen this particular move before — different names, different commodities, same fundamental bet that the surface story would be sufficient. It usually was. That was the thing about influence operations: they didn’t need to fool sophisticated analysts. They needed to fool enough people for long enough. A six-point-eight percent stock price move in eleven days was the result of enough people accepting the surface story and acting on it without checking the seams.
He was in the seams. The seams were obvious once you were in them. They were obvious because the people who built the seams had made two specific errors.
Error one: The Bratislava hosting registrant. Helix had not used a cutout. Their own company name was on the registration, which was recoverable in three database hops. This was the kind of mistake an operation makes when it believes the geopolitical costume will function as an off switch for investigative attention. Sloppy. Predictable. The exact kind of sloppiness that emerged when contractors believed they were protected by aesthetics rather than tradecraft.
Error two: The unlocked shared folder.
He was looking at it now. A folder on the Helix server infrastructure — hosted on the same Bratislava node, accessible once he was through the hosting provider’s abuse reporting interface, which had a vulnerability in its session handling he had documented and not reported to anyone in 2024 because it was useful in exactly this kind of context. The folder was not password-protected. It contained the original SportBridge operational brief — dated December 2025, fourteen pages, with the target parameters and timing windows and article topics all specified in the bureaucratic language of a contractor relationship. Very tidy. The kind of brief that made clear the client had done this before.
And appended to the timing section, in a different font — added later, clearly, by someone who had come back to the document after initial drafting — a single line: Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. File attached.
He looked at the attached file.
Thirty-four pages. Metadata that resolved, through the forensic tools he ran on autopilot for documents found in circumstances like this, to a server belonging to Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH, Munich. An internal document. The kind of document that should have been on an encrypted drive in a locked office, not accessible through a VPN connection to a contractor’s shared folder in Bratislava.
He read the first two pages.
Doping protocol. Lab results. Substitution schedules — the specific methodology by which a prohibited substance was managed across a competitive season to avoid detection, a process requiring coordination between the athlete’s medical team, the lab technician responsible for sample storage, and at minimum one official with the authority to flag a test for administrative delay. Three officials named. The document was not manufactured. The metadata was intact. The file hadn’t been created by Helix Narratives — it had been received by them and stored, which meant someone inside Marta Voss’s management company had extracted it from the firm’s own server and sold it to SportBridge as insurance. Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. In case the disinformation campaign wasn’t sufficient. In case the article retraction timeline left the morality clause unactivated. In case someone like Lasse cleaned the infrastructure up before Sunday noon and the scheme needed a secondary detonator.
He closed the file.
He opened the Helix node map on his second screen and continued working. The infrastructure documentation needed to be packaged and the abuse report needed to be filed. The Der Spiegel contact needed the anonymous drop prepped. He had approximately nine hours before he needed to drive south, and the doping file was not his job.
He wrote this down, in fact. Not my job. Not because he was likely to forget but because writing things down had the effect of forcing them out of the peripheral vision of his thinking and into a position where they could be examined directly. And examined directly, not my job had the structural integrity of something true but not quite sufficient. It was true that he had not been hired to address a doping protocol. It was true that the file’s existence was consequential to the 43 Articles problem only as a leverage instrument — Phase 2, supplementary — rather than as the primary mechanism. It was true that Albrecht had paid for infrastructure documentation and clause neutralisation and not for anything else.
All of this was true.
He finished the fourth cola and put the can down.
The specific thing that made not my job feel insufficient was not sentiment. It was not outrage. He did not experience outrage as a rule — outrage was the response of someone who had expected better, and he had not expected better from anyone in this particular food chain since approximately 2009. What made it feel insufficient was more technical than that. The file existed. It had forensic provenance he could confirm. It documented something that was in the public interest — a competitive integrity violation at an Olympic Games level, with three named officials in the chain of knowledge and a management company whose server had been internally breached by someone who had sold the information to a market manipulation operation.
The file was real, it was significant, and it was currently sitting in an unlocked folder in Bratislava that Lasse had access to and that no one else would find because the Helix infrastructure would be deregistered by morning once the abuse report went through.
After which the file would be gone.
He thought about this for eleven minutes by the clock on the laptop. He watched the node map render the last upstream connection. He noted the timestamp. He closed the file tab, opened the abuse report interface, and began drafting the documentation that would direct a regulator’s attention toward Tomáš Vrábel and Helix Narratives s.r.o. and nowhere else.
The report took forty minutes to draft correctly. Every verifiable fact was accurate. The architecture of what was documented and what was omitted was deliberate and precise. Vrábel would receive the regulator’s attention. Vrábel had taken €180,000 for a job that had caused material harm to market participants and had left his infrastructure in a state that a competent eight-year-old with internet access could have navigated. He was not a sympathetic figure. The report was accurate in every stated fact, and what it omitted was a separate question from what it said.
At 01:23 he filed the abuse report. Anonymous, through three hops, the source IP resolving to a residential connection in Düsseldorf that belonged to no one in particular. He packaged a copy of the node documentation — the architecture of the 43 articles, the AI voice synthesis fingerprint analysis, the Helix Narratives registrant trail — and dropped it in the anonymous dead drop for the Spiegel journalist who covered influence operations. The journalist was good. She would know what to do with it. The story would run in two or three days and the framing would be exactly what it should be: Russian-built influence infrastructure rented for commercial disinformation, Slovak contractor, forty-three fabricated articles, Olympic Games timing.
The sports marketing intermediary who commissioned it was not in the dead drop package.
That was Anna’s end.
He sent her a message at 01:31.
Helix burns in the morning. Spiegel has the infrastructure story. SportBridge node documented but held — that’s your geography. I need to know the Pfeiffer situation before Sunday.
Her reply came back in four minutes, which meant she was still in the war room and not sleeping, which he had assumed.
Pfeiffer resigns Sunday. I’ll have his letter drafted before he calls me. SportBridge Geneva will become uncomfortable by Monday — I have someone there who owes me considerably more than a phone call. The morality clause — I can have the activation review suspended through the partner responsible for the holding. He’s manageable.
He read this. He approved it in the way he approved most of Anna’s operational reasoning — silently, because it didn’t require comment.
And the doping file? he typed. He didn’t explain what he meant. She would know what he meant.
The reply took two minutes longer than the others.
Not our problem.
No, he typed.
A pause.
But you’re going to make it someone’s problem.
He read this. He put the phone face-down on the parquet.
He picked it up again.
Haven’t decided.
Yes you have, she sent back.
The phone went face-down again. He looked at the ceiling that was too low. Outside, Milan was mostly quiet — the particular 1 a.m. quiet of a city that works hard and sleeps early, the distant sound of a tram on wet rails somewhere south of the piazza, the rain that had been going since afternoon still doing what rain does in February without any dramatic intention.
He had, in fact, decided. He just hadn’t caught up to it yet in the part of his brain that required things to be formally acknowledged before they became actions. The walk on the Navigli canal tomorrow would be where he caught up to it. He knew this the same way he knew most things about himself — factually, without particular sentiment about what the fact meant.
The doping file was real. The officials were named. The management company’s server had been breached internally. None of this was his invention. All of it was verifiable. And the specific journalist whose dead drop he had in his contacts and had not used in three years had a demonstrated record of protecting sources and publishing things that institutions would have preferred to suppress, and the story she would write would be about the doping protocol and the cover-up rather than about how the file was obtained, because she was good at her job and that was the story that mattered.
He could make all of this happen with a clean machine and a three-paragraph provenance note. Untraceable. Unconnected to the 43 Articles job, to Albrecht, to the morality clause, to anything.
He would do it from the farm. Sunday morning, after the drive, before Albrecht’s call.
He did not open the doping file tab again. There was no need. He had read it once and that was sufficient. He knew what was in it and he knew what it meant and he knew what was going to happen to it, and thinking about it further was the kind of activity that was entirely without productive output and was in fact a mechanism for pretending a decision hadn’t already been made by replacing it with something that resembled deliberation.
He opened the minibar instead. The last cola. He would put it on the invoice at the established rate.
At 01:58 he sent Anna one more message.
Get some sleep.
Her reply arrived at 02:04.
Scheiße off.
Which, from Anna at two in the morning on a Friday that was becoming a Saturday, was as close to a term of endearment as the situation was likely to produce. He read it. He put the phone down. He did not smile, but internally, briefly, the thing he did instead of smiling ran through him like a very small current in a very cold wire.
He went back to the floor and the laptop and the node map.
Outside, Milan kept raining. The ceiling remained exactly the wrong height. Neither detail was going to change anything, and he had never in his professional life required either the weather or the ceiling to cooperate.
In Rome, Anna made herself a second espresso at 02:11. She stood in the kitchen with the marble counter cool under her hands and the skylight above her a square of absolute black and the smell of the coffee cutting through the quiet of the house. The champagne was still on the terrace. She was aware of it in the way you are aware of a thing you have made a decision about without quite articulating the decision — it would be there when this was over. Sunday afternoon, perhaps, if things were clean.
She went back upstairs.
The war room’s north-facing window showed nothing — just the particular lightlessness of a Rome garden at two in the morning, the bare branches of the trees in the courtyard below, the suggestion of the city beyond. She sat in the banker’s chair and opened Pfeiffer’s personnel file and began reading everything she already knew, in the careful and slightly cold way of a person who is building the architecture of a conversation that needs to be over in nine minutes and end in exactly one outcome.
Pfeiffer would call her Sunday. She would let him finish. Then she would tell him what he was going to do. He would thank her at the end of the call. She knew this because Pfeiffer had a very specific configuration of professional shame and self-preservation instinct, and when those two things were correctly calibrated against each other the result was compliance and gratitude rather than resistance. She had seen it before. She would see it again.
She was not angry at Pfeiffer. Anger would have required her to expect better from him, and she had never expected better from Pfeiffer than she was going to receive from him on Sunday morning. What she felt was the specific temperature of maintenance — the cold, precise attention to a structural problem that needed to be resolved before it propagated. The clause had been drafted. Pfeiffer had drafted it. The drafting was over. What remained was the management of consequence, and consequence management was the thing she was best at in the world and had been for twenty years, and she was not going to waste any emotional register on a 58-year-old German corporate lawyer who had committed the particular stupidity of believing that being agreeable and technically proficient were sufficient substitutes for thinking about what you were doing and why.
They were not substitutes. They had never been substitutes. The idea that they were was the most expensive misconception in the legal profession and possibly in professional life generally, and Pfeiffer was about to pay a price for it that was proportionate and precisely engineered and completely without mercy.
Not because she was cruel. Because the structure required it.
She typed a message to Pfeiffer at 02:19. Three sentences. His first name, which she never used in professional correspondence. He would see it on his phone when he woke up. He would spend the first half of his Saturday round deciding what to say to her.
He would choose the wrong thing to say. She would let him finish.
Then the other thing.
She closed the file. She sat for a moment in the quiet of the war room — the sealed shelves, the leather smell, the faint mineral cold of the window — and looked at the list of four actions on the screen. Three and a half of them were, functionally, complete. The half was the morality clause activation review, which required a conversation with the partner responsible for the holding that she would have on Saturday morning once she had slept.
She was going to sleep for four hours. This was not a preference. It was a technical requirement. A lawyer operating on no sleep at two in the morning handling a time-sensitive matter with structural exposure for her firm was a liability, and she was not in the business of being a liability to herself.
She closed the laptop.
The war room light went out at 02:23.
On the terrace, the unopened champagne sat in the February cold, the bottle slowly reaching the temperature of the night around it. Patient. Not going anywhere.
Neither was the deal. Neither was the thirty-six hours ahead. Neither, for that matter, was the particular quality of silence on the phone with Lasse — the kind of silence that wasn’t empty so much as fully occupied — that she had not mentioned in the message and would not mention and that sat somewhere in the background of the evening like a note held too long on a piano, still technically part of the music, technically not yet resolved.
She went upstairs to the master bedroom.
She did not think about the exposure window. The window closed Sunday noon. She knew when it closed. She had known since she pulled Albrecht’s personal filings at nine o’clock, which she had not mentioned to Lasse, which Lasse had mentioned to her, which meant they had arrived at the same number by different roads and understood it in the same way and had agreed, without saying so, on everything this implied and nothing it required.
The ring was still on her right hand. She did not take it off when she slept.
Rome was grey and cold and old and entirely indifferent to any of this. In the Pinciano, the Art Nouveau buildings stood as they had stood since 1910 and the bare winter trees did what they had done since before any of the people in them were a problem anyone needed to manage.
Four hours. Then Saturday.
Chapter 4 — The Clause
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — 07:30 CET Villa Aurora, Pinciano, Rome
Anna had not slept.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Sleep was something she permitted herself on weekdays and negotiated with on weekends, and the negotiation had been ongoing since approximately 2002. What was unusual was the view from her war room at half past seven in the morning: Rome in February, grey and damp through the north-facing window, the courtyard plane tree stripped bare, the pale stucco of the villa’s side wing showing the kind of cold she could feel through the glass without touching it. She had been looking at this view for six hours. The espresso at her left elbow was the third one of the morning and the first she’d allowed to go cold, which was a character assessment she filed without comment.
She had changed at five. The Barbour jacket — moss green, waxed cotton, the kind of garment that understood mornings before Rome did — over a merino rollneck, leather riding boots, hair up without ceremony. No point dressing for anyone. The submissive who had been sleeping in the green guest room downstairs had been sent home via a car service at three a.m. with a text that said something came up and contained, deliberately, no question mark. He would interpret this as punishment. She neither confirmed nor corrected this interpretation. It simply was not relevant to her current situation, which was considerably more interesting.
The file was open on the left monitor.
The morality clause. Six pages, Annex C of the athlete sponsorship agreement between Meridian Outdoors AG and the Olympic athlete — unnamed in the public filing, which told Anna precisely nothing and confirmed what she already suspected. She had not needed to search. She had pulled the Meridian acquisition file on her right monitor the moment Lasse said morality clause on the call, and the language had stopped her cold before she’d finished the second paragraph.
Bespoke. That was the word. Not boilerplate. Not the standard catch-all language that firms recycled from template to template — the broad, sweeping language that read conduct likely to bring the Company or its affiliates into public disrepute or scandal, including without limitation and then listed twelve examples that sounded comprehensive and covered nothing specifically. This clause was specific. It named categories. It defined thresholds. It included a triggering mechanism she had last seen in a precedent document from her firm’s own knowledge management system — a mechanism she had helped architect seven years ago during a particularly complex athlete-IP licensing deal for a Formula One client who was, at the time, very carefully navigating a personal crisis.
Her precedent library. Her structural DNA.
Someone in her building had drafted this. Not with malice, almost certainly. But with her firm’s institutional fingerprints on every sub-clause.
The sapphire ring had been turning since approximately 2:15 a.m. She was not aware of it until she noticed the faint abrasion on the inside of her right index finger. She put both hands flat on the desk. The ring stopped.
Pfeiffer’s client list for the preceding eighteen months was up on the second screen by six o’clock, extracted from the matter management system she had full partner access to and no business consulting at this hour on a Saturday. She had consulted it anyway. She was very good at consulting things she had no business consulting and she had been doing it since she was eleven years old and her parents had left her alone with the teachers’ grade book during a staff meeting.
SportBridge AG — four times. Four engagements. The most recent: November 2025. Three months ago.
She pulled SportBridge’s Geneva registration filings. The board was three names. Two of them she recognised immediately — not personally, but by reference. They were on the cap table of the acquisition target. She had the acquisition file open on the second screen, she had the SportBridge registration on the first, and she could see the connections between them the way you can see the shape of a fish’s skeleton through the meat: cleanly, structurally, without any additional light required.
Someone had used SportBridge as the instrument. SportBridge had used Pfeiffer’s laziness and her firm’s precedent library as the raw materials. And the thing they had built — the morality clause, sitting in an otherwise unremarkable sponsorship annex, triggered by the specific categories of conduct that forty-three AI-generated articles were currently fabricating at scale — was the legal detonator for a market manipulation scheme. Clean, deniable, and structurally invisible unless you happened to be reading it from inside the building where it was drafted.
She sat with this for exactly as long as it required. Which was not long. Long consideration of unpleasant facts was a luxury she did not indulge in before breakfast.
Pfeiffer. Of course it was Pfeiffer.
Gerhard Klaus Pfeiffer was fifty-eight years old, a German corporate lawyer of the specific vintage that believed professional competence and ethical scrutiny were two separate disciplines, only one of which was strictly required. He had joined the firm fifteen years ago from a Frankfurt boutique and had never quite shed the boutique habit of treating long-standing clients as personal favours rather than structured engagements. He played golf on Saturday mornings at the Acquasanta Club in the Appia Antica park — a twenty-minute drive from here. He played with the focused, unglamorous determination of a man who had taken up the sport at forty-five for networking purposes and had since developed genuine attachment to something he was still not particularly good at. It was the most human thing about him.
He also owed three documented favours to a Geneva-based sports marketing intermediary. One of those intermediaries was SportBridge AG. The favour was the morality clause.
This was not conspiracy. She would have respected conspiracy — conspiracy required a certain kind of operational intelligence, a planning horizon, a willingness to accept risk. What Pfeiffer had done was worse: it was casual. He had drafted a legal instrument as a routine courtesy for a good referral source, using his firm’s best precedent material because he was technically meticulous and personally lazy, and he had not asked what the clause was for because asking would have implied that the favour warranted a conflict check, and performing a conflict check would have implied that the favour was actually billable work, and billable work could not be done as a favour. So he hadn’t asked. The clause existed because thirty years of professional agreeableness had made Gerhard Pfeiffer constitutionally incapable of asking the second question.
Catastrophically, irreversibly stupid. She used the phrase internally not as cruelty but as precision. The kind of stupidity only people who believe they understand more than they do are capable of. She had a taxonomy for this. Pfeiffer was a Tier Two: intelligent in application, absent in audit.
The espresso was cold.
She drank it anyway.
By seven she had the full picture. She had known the full picture since approximately six forty-five, but she had spent the remaining fifteen minutes cross-referencing it because she refused to act on incomplete information and because verification was the only professional discipline she held genuinely sacred. Legal interpretation required evidence. Evidence required checking. This applied to her enemies, her clients, and the colleagues she was about to dismantle.
The structure, mapped flat:
SportBridge AG — Geneva — two board members on the acquisition target’s cap table. Short position on the target. Commission Helix Narratives to run forty-three fabricated articles via the Matryoshka infrastructure, creating reputational damage sufficient to trigger the morality clause. Morality clause triggers, sponsorship contract fails, deal valuation model collapses, acquisition stalls, target stock continues falling, short position pays.
And the detonator — the clause itself — sourced via Gerhard Pfeiffer, drafted using her firm’s own precedent library, inserted into a sporting contract nobody looked at twice because sporting contracts do not receive the same scrutiny as acquisition agreements and this one was attached to a sponsorship annex that a client’s junior counsel had filed without review.
The elegance was genuine. She acknowledged this because she acknowledged craftsmanship where she found it, even when she was about to burn the craftsman’s house down. Someone at SportBridge had understood exactly how law firms worked from the inside — understood that precedent libraries were institutional memory, that experienced partners did favours for referral sources, that the gap between what was permitted and what was audited was wide enough to park a market manipulation scheme inside it with room to spare.
What they had not counted on was that the resulting clause would end up read — at midnight, from the Rome office of the firm that had generated it — by the one person in the building who had helped write the original precedent.
She knew this language the way she knew her own handwriting.
The ring was still. What replaced it, when the ring stopped, was something considerably colder.
Pfeiffer was unreachable until he left the golf course, which would not be before ten-thirty at the earliest. He played with his group every Saturday, a fact she knew from the firm calendar. She typed a message to his personal mobile — not the firm device, which he would not check on a Saturday morning — in the spare, precise register she reserved for situations where subtext needed to do the work of an entire sentence:
Gerhard. Call me the moment you finish. — A
She used his first name. She never used first names in professional correspondence. In ten years of working alongside him she had addressed him as Pfeiffer in emails, in person, in the partner’s coffee room, in every corridor conversation this building had ever produced. The first name was the signal. He would know, when he saw it on the seventh hole or the eighth or whenever the message reached him through the specific fog of middle-aged male Saturday-morning selective inattention, exactly what it meant.
She put the phone face-down on the desk.
Rome was grey through the window. The plane tree in the courtyard moved faintly in something that was not quite wind. The courtyard’s Roman-era stone paving was darkened by the overnight damp, not quite frost, not quite rain, the exact temperature at which a city decides it is neither one thing nor the other and commits to nothing.
She pulled the acquisition filing back to the front screen. Read the morality clause again, once, from the beginning. Not because she had missed anything — she had not missed anything. Because she wanted the full text present in her mind when she spoke to Pfeiffer. She wanted to know the instrument better than he did, which in all likelihood she already did, but she was not a person who acted on all likelihood. She acted on certainty.
By the seventh paragraph she was certain.
The clause had three triggers. The first: public allegation of prohibited substance use substantiated by published media coverage across a minimum of three jurisdictions. The second: formal investigation by a sporting governance body. The third — the one that made her stop the first time she read it and that still made her stop now — a catch-all provision: conduct materially inconsistent with the representations made in Schedule 2, Clause 4 (b), as determined by a panel of not fewer than three independent assessors appointed by the Company at its sole discretion.
That last clause was not from any template she recognised. That last clause was custom. Someone had inserted it later, after the rest was drafted. It was the override switch — the mechanism that allowed the morality clause to trigger without a formal investigation, without three jurisdictions, without anything except the Company’s own determination and three handpicked assessors. In the right hands, with the right media coverage creating the impression of public allegation, the third trigger could fire before the first two were formally activated.
The disinformation campaign was not designed to constitute the trigger. It was designed to create the appearance of trigger conditions. The actual trigger was Clause (b). The campaign was the justification for invoking it.
She had written catch-all clauses in her career. She had written them precisely because they gave clients flexibility. She had never written one this precisely calibrated for weaponisation.
Bespoke, she thought again. Someone had read the firm’s precedents, understood their function, and improved them for a specific purpose.
The cold feeling deepened. It was not fear. Fear was imprecise. This was something more useful: the exact, focused anger of a woman who had spent twenty-three years building an institutional reputation that was now being used as raw material for market fraud.
She closed the filing.
She opened a fresh document.
She began typing.
The document was for her own use. She would not file it, share it, or attach it to anything. It was the habit she had formed in law school and never broken: when facing a complex problem, write the structure before you act on it. Write the names. Write the connections. Write what you know and separate it, clearly, from what you can demonstrate. The distinction mattered. In her experience, the distinction was the only thing that ever mattered.
Names: SportBridge AG — Geneva — [two board members]. Connection: acquisition target cap table. Gerhard Pfeiffer — Rome office, corporate/brand licensing. Connection: four SportBridge engagements 2024–2025. Morality clause drafted November 2025 as favour. Helix Narratives s.r.o. — Bratislava. Connection: Lasse’s thread. Infrastructure. 43 articles. Matryoshka infrastructure — distributed. Connection: Lasse’s thread. Technical layer.
The legal instrument: Sponsorship agreement, Annex C. Firm’s precedent library, Pfeiffer’s drafting. Three triggers, third trigger custom-inserted. Panel of assessors appointed at Company’s sole discretion. Override mechanism.
What SportBridge needed from Pfeiffer: Access to firm’s precedent quality. The clause’s technical legitimacy. Pfeiffer’s reputation lending credibility to the document. None of this required Pfeiffer to understand what the clause was for.
What Pfeiffer provided: Everything. Without asking. Without a conflict check. As a favour.
She stopped. Read it back once. Added a line at the bottom:
What Anna Haas provided, inadvertently, in 2018: the structural precedent that made this possible.
She did not delete this line. She left it. Accountability was the price of precision.
The structural work was done by seven forty. In the thirty years of her professional life in which she had operated on two hours of sleep, she had never found the tiredness arrived until the problem was solved. The problem was not solved — Pfeiffer was still on the seventh hole, SportBridge was still registered in Geneva, and the clause was still in the acquisition document — but the architecture of the solution was complete in her mind, which meant her body had decided the cognitive emergency was over and was now presenting the invoice.
She stood. Stretched. The Barbour jacket had stayed on all night because the war room ran cool — she kept it that way deliberately, the lower temperature sharpening attention and discouraging visitors, of whom there were never any because submissives were forbidden entry and nobody else came to this floor. The room’s single window faced north. The light through it was thin, February-grey, the kind of light that didn’t warm anything.
She went down to the kitchen.
The kitchen in winter had a quality she had never articulated to anyone because articulating it would have required admitting she found it comforting, which was a category of admission she made very rarely and only to herself at approximately seven forty on the morning after a crisis. The professional Gaggia on the counter — black body, chrome fittings, three kilos of Italian engineering that had cost her more than most people’s first cars — was still warm from the last cycle. She loaded it fresh. Ground the beans herself because the pre-ground was always wrong and because the smell of freshly ground coffee at this hour was one of the few purely sensory facts she allowed to reach her without a filter.
While the machine ran its cycle she stood at the kitchen island with her palms flat on the breccia marble and looked at the courtyard garden through the glazed garden door. The plane tree. The old stone paving. A single terracotta pot she had not gotten around to moving inside for winter, which had survived the overnight frost with the particular stubbornness of things that were built for harder climates and just hadn’t told anyone.
She was furious. She knew she was furious because the ring was turning again and she hadn’t noticed until just now. She made herself stop. Put both hands flat on the marble. The marble was cool. The marble did not care about SportBridge AG or Gerhard Pfeiffer’s Saturday golf game or the fact that her firm’s most trusted institutional document — the document the whole precedent library was built on, the document she had spent six weeks in 2018 perfecting with a client who had trusted her with something genuinely difficult — had been extracted like a key from a lock and used to open a fraud.
The controlled kind of fury. Absolutely still. Absolutely quiet. Absolutely certain.
The espresso arrived.
She was back upstairs at the war room desk by eight fifteen, the new espresso hot this time, the document still open on screen. The Cartier bracelet was on her wrist — she had put it on before coming upstairs, which was not exactly a ritual but was close enough to one that she had stopped examining the impulse years ago. It settled her. The weight of it, the specific cool of the 1920s Art Deco links against her wrist. Her grandmother’s voice: don’t waste your beauty on good men; they’ll ruin it with guilt. The bracelet was not advice, strictly speaking. It was inheritance. The distinction mattered to her less and less as time went on.
She sent Lasse a message on Signal. No preamble.
Pfeiffer. Partner, corporate/brand. SportBridge client four times. Drafted your morality clause November. Did it as a favour. Call confirmed for when he’s off the course. My precedent library. My structural fingerprints. He used our best material without a conflict check.
A pause. Then a second message, because the first had covered the facts and the second was the thing that hadn’t been said yet:
The clause has a third trigger. Panel of assessors appointed at Company’s sole discretion. No formal investigation required. It can fire on the appearance of public allegation alone. That’s the real mechanism. The 43 articles were never the weapon. They were the excuse to pull the trigger.
She put the phone down and waited. The response came in forty seconds, which for Lasse was almost immediate. He was awake. Of course he was awake.
I know about the third trigger. Found the operational brief. SportBridge sent Helix the full clause language in December. They built the article topics to match the trigger categories specifically. Custom fit.
Of course he’d found it. She had known he’d find it. The acknowledgment was confirmation, not news.
How bad is the brief?
His reply: Bad enough.
She read those two words three times. Lasse did not use bad enough to mean manageable. He used it to mean there is something in here I haven’t told you yet and you should probably not ask on a Saturday morning before coffee.
She had already had the coffee. She asked anyway.
What are you not telling me?
No reply for ninety seconds. Then:
Later. Finish your end first. I’ll call you at eleven.
She put the phone in her jacket pocket and turned back to the document. The file at the top of her current-case stack was the Meridian acquisition brief that Albrecht’s legal team had sent across through the Maltese intermediary — six hundred pages of deal documentation, due diligence, structural filings. She had read the relevant sections three times last night. She knew where the clause sat in the wider document. She knew which firm had countersigned on the target’s behalf and which partner had reviewed the Annex C language, which was a partner who would have seen Pfeiffer’s name on the draft and assumed it was correct because Pfeiffer’s name on a brand-licensing clause was institutional shorthand for this has been checked.
Nobody had checked it. Because it looked checked. That was the elegant, infuriating, structurally inevitable problem: the clause was professionally drafted, correctly formatted, stylistically consistent with the firm’s standard. The fraud was embedded in its purpose, not its form. And legal review, in the ordinary course of a six-hundred-page acquisition document, was formal review — does this language make legal sense — not operational review — why exactly was this clause designed this way and who specifically requested the third trigger.
Nobody asks the second question. This was SportBridge’s fundamental strategic assumption. They were right about everyone except Anna.
At 08:47 her phone showed a notification. Not Pfeiffer — too early, he was still on the course — but an alert from the firm’s matter management system that she’d set four hours ago to flag any external activity on the Meridian file. A small thing. A junior associate at the counterparty’s firm had uploaded a document to the shared deal room at 08:44 on a Saturday morning, which was either diligence or alarm, and in her experience those two things felt identical from the inside.
She opened the upload. A supplementary representation letter regarding the sponsorship agreements — the athlete’s management company providing updated assurances on the contract status. Routine on its face. She read the signature block. Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH, Munich. The athlete’s manager, countersigning to confirm no material change in the sponsorship portfolio.
Marta Voss had no idea what she was confirming. The representation letter was standard — it was a document she probably signed six times a year without reading past the first paragraph because her legal counsel told her it was routine and her legal counsel was right in all the ways that mattered and completely wrong in the one way that was catastrophic.
She was confirming the validity of a contract that was a loaded weapon.
Anna read the letter twice and put it aside. Not her problem directly — the letter’s validity or invalidity would be resolved by whatever happened to the clause itself, which would be resolved by what happened to Pfeiffer, which was a conversation she was going to have in approximately ninety minutes. She made a note in her private document. Added Marta Voss’s name at the bottom with a single annotation: will need counsel Monday. Doesn’t know yet.
The espresso was finished. The case was mapped. Pfeiffer was on the golf course. Rome was grey and damp and indifferent outside the small north-facing window.
She had been awake for twenty-five hours.
This was, she decided, an acceptable number for the circumstances. She had functioned on fewer. She had once ran a nine-hour closing meeting in Frankfurt on thirty-six hours without sleep and a 38.5-degree fever because the client was about to lose a deal on a force majeure clause nobody had read correctly and there was nobody else in the building who understood the instrument well enough to fix it at five in the morning. The client had closed the deal. The fever had resolved.
This was easier than that. The structure was clean, the actors were identified, the solution was already written in her head. It just needed Pfeiffer on the other end of a phone to become real.
She stood again. Went to the window. The courtyard tree moved.
Someone in my firm drafted this. That was what she’d said to Lasse on Friday night, before she’d had the full picture. Now she had the full picture and the sentence was still true and still the same temperature inside her chest — not cold exactly, not hot. Precise. The temperature of a thing that is very clear and cannot be made less clear by wishing it otherwise.
Pfeiffer had handed them a loaded weapon. He had not known it was loaded. This was the only fact that prevented his situation from being considerably worse than it was going to be, and the margin between those two states was not wide and had been narrowing for approximately six hours.
She turned away from the window.
At the desk, she opened a clean email — not the firm address, the encrypted personal one — and began drafting a message to a Geneva colleague she had worked with on two previous matters. A Swiss solicitor of the particular type who understood exactly what this information is from a trusted source and requires discreet attentionmeant in the context of a Geneva-registered consultancy whose board had a structural conflict of interest with an active acquisition. The email was three paragraphs. The first was context. The second was specific. The third was a request that would, in the natural course of Swiss professional correspondence, be acted on by Monday and produce results that were not criminal, not public, and entirely sufficient. SportBridge AG’s Geneva registration would become very uncomfortable by the start of the working week.
She did not send it yet. It would go after the Pfeiffer call, when she knew the shape of her end was clean. She was not a person who moved pieces simultaneously when she could move them sequentially and verify each one.
The document on screen. The clause on the left monitor. The matter management system on the right. The Zippo lighter on the left side of the desk — she had not used it yet this morning, which meant she had not yet reached the threshold of genuine indecision about anything. She preferred it this way. The lighter was a barometer.
She had not smoked yet. This meant she was certain.
She was certain.
Pfeiffer was going to resign, effective Wednesday, citing personal reasons. He was not going to contact SportBridge. He was not going to brief colleagues. He was not going to construct a counter-narrative, because the counter-narrative was the one thing she would not permit, because the counter-narrative required someone to look very carefully at why the morality clause existed in this specific form and that was the one thread she needed no one to pull.
Not because it would expose her — she had written the original precedent, yes, but in 2018 for an entirely legitimate purpose, and no audit trail led anywhere interesting. But because it would expose the gap — the institutional gap, the oversight gap, the gap between formal document review and operational review that SportBridge had walked a fraud through. And that gap was a firm-wide problem, and firm-wide problems generated committees, and committees generated partners asking each other questions, and partners asking each other questions generated exactly the kind of visibility that this situation did not need.
She would fix it herself. Quietly. As she fixed most things.
At 09:02 she drafted the message to Pfeiffer’s personal mobile that she would send later, the one containing the specific language of his resignation letter so that he understood she had already written it and that his job was simply to sign his own name. She didn’t send this either. She saved it.
She had three things staged: the Pfeiffer call, the Geneva email, the resignation draft. A sequence, not a simultaneous operation. Each one dependent on the previous one landing correctly.
She leaned back in the banker’s chair — old green leather, slightly cracked at the armrests, the one item in this room she would not replace. Put her feet flat on the floor. Looked at the ceiling of the war room, which was plain plaster, exactly the right height, which was not something she had thought about explicitly but which she noticed now as a contrast to whatever Lasse was currently doing in a hotel suite in Milan with a ceiling he had complained about in three separate messages across two days.
She thought about what he wasn’t telling her.
Bad enough. Two words. From a man who had been mapping a distributed influence infrastructure since midnight on a Friday and had, as of six hours ago, found an operational brief containing what she could infer was something beyond the scope of the original job. He had kept working. He had not told her what it was. He had said finish your end first.
He had found something. Something that was not his job and that he was still, demonstrably, thinking about. Because Lasse Hansen did not say I’ll tell you later when later meant nothing. He said it when later meant I’m deciding something and he was not yet ready to admit he’d decided.
The ring was still.
She looked at it. Turned it once, deliberately, consciously. Then stopped.
At 09:15 she sent Lasse’s Signal thread a single message:
My end is clean. Pfeiffer calls by ten-thirty. Geneva message ready to send post-call. Staged and waiting. When you’re ready.
She put the phone down.
Picked up the cold espresso.
Drank the rest of it.
Gerhard Pfeiffer was somewhere on a golf course in the Appia Antica park, playing the eighth hole or the ninth, a man doing mathematics about which version of the truth to lead with. He had eleven holes or ten to get the calculation right. He was going to arrive at the wrong answer, as people constructing self-justifications almost always did, because the self-justification was never about what was true. It was about what was survivable.
She would let him finish. Then she would tell him what was survivable.
The war room’s desk lamp cast its focused cone onto the document stack. The monitors glowed. The twenty-six identical black journals on the third shelf from the top were silent, as they always were.
Rome, outside the small north-facing window, continued being entirely indifferent to the situation.
She preferred this in a city. The indifference. It meant she was the only one who had to care.
Chapter 5 — Borrowed Infrastructure
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — 09:00 CET Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite
The fourth piece of toast was still on the plate.
Lasse had moved from the floor to the window ledge because it was the highest seat in the room and he needed to see the piazza while he thought. The ceiling in the Cordusio Suite was 3.2 metres — generous by any architectural standard, and not enough. He had the laptop on his left thigh, the tablet balanced against the cold glass to his right, and the parquet three metres below him, which was not the same as three metres above. He was aware of the distinction.
Outside, Piazza Cordusio was doing what Milan did on a grey Saturday morning: going about its business at a pace that said nothing urgent had happened here yet. He had been awake since Friday night’s call to Anna. That was fourteen hours ago. His hair was still in last night’s man bun, the same black crewneck, the same jogging pants. He’d had a cola from the minibar at 07:45 because the espresso machine in the corner was a Nespresso and he had some standards left.
The node map was open on the tablet. He wasn’t looking at it.
He was mapping the Helix Narratives server infrastructure from the access logs — tracing the chain backward from the 43 published articles to Helix’s Bratislava hosting registration to the upstream CDN architecture they’d rented. Which was, he’d established by two in the morning, not Helix’s own infrastructure at all. Helix had built nothing. They’d leased it. The whole thing — the content delivery layer, the distribution network, the seeding mechanism for the Telegram channels — was rented capacity from a pre-existing system. Someone else’s machine, dressed in Helix’s clothes.
He called it the Matryoshka because the architecture nested. You open one layer and there’s another one inside, and inside that, another. Not elegant — nested like an afterthought, like someone had bolted commercial modules onto political infrastructure and told themselves it was seamless. It wasn’t. You could see the join if you knew where to look.
He’d found the join at 06:20.
The access log that mattered was from December 2025. Six weeks before the Olympic operation went live. A client connecting to the Matryoshka content delivery system — not to run articles, not to seed channels, but to configure the system. The pre-operation setup window. The IP resolved through three hops: first a Romanian commercial VPN exit, then a transit node in the Netherlands, then — at the third hop — an exit address that appeared twice in a threat intelligence database he kept locally, last updated November 2025.
The database flagged it as an address regularly associated with a VPN service used by a Geneva-based corporate cluster.
He ran the flag. Cross-referenced against a company registry pull he’d done at midnight on SportBridge AG, the Geneva sports marketing firm Anna had already surfaced from Pfeiffer’s client files.
The overlap was exact.
SportBridge hired Helix Narratives. Helix Narratives rented the Matryoshka infrastructure. Someone with access to a Russian-built political influence network had licensed its capacity to a Swiss sports intermediary for a commercial market play. The geopolitical skin — fabricated articles targeting Ukrainian athletes, the aesthetic of state-sponsored disinformation — was a costume. It was borrowed because it was available, because Western journalists and regulators would readpro-Russian influence operation and stop asking the second-order question about who actually benefited from the stock movement.
That was the point. The costume did its job. It would have done its job on everyone except someone who looked at the architecture rather than the headline.
He noted this in a text file on the clean tablet. One sentence. No editorialising.
The toast was still there.
He’d eaten three pieces between seven-thirty and eight because his grandmother had died of pancreatic cancer and he’d read a study once about smoking on an empty stomach, and he didn’t like putting ideas in the universe’s head. The fourth piece had been sitting next to the plate since the laptop notified him of a completed recursive directory scan on the Helix shared server at 08:47.
The scan had found an unlocked folder.
Not password-protected. Not encrypted. Not even hidden — it sat in the server’s root directory structure like someone had dropped it there in a hurry and meant to lock it later. The folder name was OB_FINAL_SB_DEC25. Operational brief, final version, SportBridge, December 2025. Someone at Helix had named their own crime with the precision of a filing system designed to be audited.
He’d opened the folder.
Inside: the SportBridge brief to Helix. Eleven pages. Target parameters, article topics, timing windows, distribution instructions, the Matryoshka access credentials in plain text because why use a password manager when you had an unlocked folder on an exposed server. The brief was businesslike. Formal, almost. The language of a company that had commissioned contractor work before — deliverables, milestones, kill clauses. A market suppression operation written in the grammar of a consultancy engagement. Forty-three articles, specific timing to coincide with the Olympic closing ceremony, the morality clause activation window as the exit condition.
He read it twice. Filed it. Then he noticed the addendum.
Appended to the timing section. Different font — added later, clearly not part of the original document, pasted in the way people paste things when they’re working fast and stopped caring about formatting. Two lines:
Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. File attached.
He opened the attachment.
The file was 34 pages.
PDF. Dense. Medical terminology in the header — the kind of header a sports medicine clinic used on their internal documentation. He scrolled to page three, which was where the summary lived, and the summary was clear enough that he understood what he was looking at before he reached the end of the first paragraph.
A doping protocol document. Systematic. Dated across fourteen months. Lab results — specific assays, specific compounds, the kind of substitution methodology that required either an inside official at the testing authority or a very sophisticated sample manipulation technique. He knew enough to read it correctly, because he’d spent six hours in 2019 reading the WADA database leak for reasons that were adjacent to a different job and had never entirely left his head.
The athlete was unnamed in the document — referred to by an internal code — but the management company’s letterhead was on every page. Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH, Munich. A firm he knew nothing about until this moment. He pulled it in two minutes: twelve professional athletes under management, two current Olympic medallists, one of whom was the target athlete at the centre of this entire operation.
He pulled the file’s metadata.
Created: March 2024. Last modified: October 2025. SHA-256 hash unchanged between creation and receipt in Helix’s folder — the file hadn’t been altered. The originating device fingerprint in the extended metadata resolved to a macOS system, a specific model identifier, registered to an address in the Munich metropolitan area.
The file had come from inside Marta Voss’s own infrastructure. Not hacked remotely. Not manufactured. Someone with internal access to her firm’s systems had extracted this document and sold it to SportBridge as insurance. Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. If the 43 articles weren’t enough to trigger the morality clause, this would be.
The doping file was real.
He put the toast down. He hadn’t remembered he was holding it.
Eleven minutes, by the clock in the corner of the tablet screen.
He sat on the window ledge and did not open a new tab and did not type anything and watched the piazza below where a courier on a cargo bike was navigating the wet cobblestones with the specific optimism of someone who had not yet fallen on them this morning. The Matryoshka node map was still open on the tablet. The folder scan results were still open on the laptop. The 34-page doping file was there on the screen where he’d left it, page three, the summary section, and he didn’t close it.
The doping file was not his job.
He knew this. He had accepted a job with a specific scope — discredit the infrastructure, trace the origin, neutralise the morality clause trigger, deliver the documentation package by Sunday noon. The doping file was outside that scope by a comfortable margin. It had nothing to do with the acquisition. It had nothing to do with what Albrecht had hired him for. The athlete was an instrument in the scheme, not a target, and the scheme was already unwinding without anyone needing to touch the 34 pages.
He knew all of this.
He also knew, with the specific certainty he got when something had already been decided somewhere below the level where he argued with himself about it, that he was going to come back to the file. Not now. He had work to do first. The node structure needed documenting, the Helix abuse report needed filing, the SportBridge connection needed packaging. There was an order of operations and the file wasn’t next in the sequence.
He closed the tab.
Then he opened the node map on the full screen of the tablet, positioned it on the window ledge against the glass, and got back to work.
The Matryoshka architecture, layer by layer, in the daylight of a grey Milan Saturday.
Layer 1 — Content. The 43 articles themselves: AI-generated text, AI-synthesised audio clips attached to each one. He’d run the audio through a prosodic analysis tool at 11pm Friday — a method documented in a Clemson University research paper he’d bookmarked in 2024 and kept because the methodology was sound. Prosodic fingerprinting: the AI voice synthesis model left a consistent signature across every clip. Consistent pause cadence. A specific pattern in how the synthesiser handled vowel elongation at sentence boundaries. The same model, every time. Not because the operator had to use the same model — they used it because they had a licence for it and it was in their workflow. Contractors reused tools. Everyone reused tools.
The prosodic consistency was the first thread. It said: one operator, one toolkit, one production pipeline.
Layer 2 — Hosting. The Bratislava node — Helix Narratives s.r.o. — was the operational mistake. A hosting registration under the company’s own name, at a registered address that was a serviced office in the old town. Lasse had run it through four databases on Friday night: the third one returned Tomáš Vrábel, 39, founder, former employee of a Prague influence operation that had dissolved cleanly in 2023 before anyone interesting could look at it. Vrábel had taken the playbook, moved 360 kilometres east, changed the company name, and filed for a new registration. The old operation’s clean dissolution was either very good legal work or some regulatory goodwill he’d earned somewhere. Either way, it hadn’t transferred.
The CDN mirrors in Romania and the Netherlands were redundancy. Belt-and-braces content delivery in case the Bratislava primary node got pulled. The kind of redundancy that said the operator knew platforms would eventually take down the content and wanted the window to stay open as long as possible. Professional thinking. Operationally irrelevant now — Lasse had the Bratislava node, which meant he had Vrábel, which was all the trail the abuse report needed to terminate at.
Layer 3 — Control. The December access log. The VPN exit correlation. The unlocked folder. The SportBridge brief. This was the layer nobody was supposed to find — the layer you only reached if you followed the node map back past the Bratislava registrant and kept going. Vrábel had expected the trail to stop at Helix. Most people’s trails stopped at the patsy. Lasse didn’t stop at patsies.
He opened the text file and added three more lines. The SportBridge VPN correlation. The brief’s content summary. The December timestamp placing the setup six weeks before the operation launched — before the Olympics had even begun, which meant this was not opportunistic. This was pre-planned market suppression with a fixed exit window. Someone had looked at the acquisition timeline, worked backward from the Sunday noon closing date, and designed the operation around the morality clause’s trigger conditions.
That was not Helix’s work. Helix had no reason to care about a Swiss acquisition timeline. That was SportBridge. Which meant SportBridge had access to the acquisition’s legal structure — the morality clause, its specific language, its trigger conditions — before commissioning the disinformation campaign.
Which meant the clause’s language had been shared, or leaked, or deliberately constructed for this purpose.
Anna had said last night: someone in my firm. She’d pulled Pfeiffer’s files. She already had this end of it. He flagged the line in his notes and added a bracket: (Anna — Pfeiffer confirmed link).
Then he saved the file, closed it, and looked at the piazza for thirty seconds.
The courier had not fallen yet.
At 08:47 he had found the folder. At 08:52 he had read the brief. At 09:03 he had opened the doping file. At 09:14 he had closed it and gone back to the node map.
At 09:51 he reopened it.
Not because something had changed. Because the specific discomfort of a file sitting in a tab you’ve closed is different from the discomfort of a file you never opened in the first place, and he had been in the business long enough to know the difference between something that wasn’t his problem and something that wasn’t his problem yet.
He read it properly this time. All 34 pages.
The doping protocol was systematic in the specific way of something that had been running long enough to become routine. Monthly intervention windows. Micro-dosing schedules. A substitution methodology for out-of-competition testing that relied on advance notice of the testing window — advance notice that could only come from someone inside the testing authority’s scheduling process. Three names in a summary table on page nine. Officials. Not athletes, not support staff — officials. The people whose job was to catch this.
The document was fourteen months old. The doping it described had been ongoing for at minimum fourteen months. Probably longer — the document’s language was not the language of something newly initiated. It read like an operational update on a running process, which meant the process predated the document.
The morality clause in the sponsorship contract — the one Pfeiffer had drafted without a conflict check, the one SportBridge had used as a detonator — was triggered by doping findings. The 43 articles had fabricated doping allegations. The irony of this was not lost on him. Someone had manufactured fictional doping to trigger a contractual clause, while a real doping protocol sat on a server two network hops away from the manufactured fiction.
The scheme inside the scheme. The doll inside the doll.
He read to the end and then sat with it for three minutes, which was longer than he usually sat with anything that wasn’t actively breaking.
Then he put the tablet down on the window ledge and lit a cigarette — he’d been in the suite for fifteen hours and the housekeeper had clearly given up, there was a small pile of ash on the windowsill from last night that nobody had mentioned, which was the correct response to Albrecht’s minibar markup — and looked at the Piazza Cordusio in the grey February morning light.
The courier was gone. The piazza was doing its quiet Saturday thing: a man walking a dog that was deeply unhappy about the temperature; two women in good coats moving at the pace of people going somewhere specific; a delivery van with its hazards on, the driver visible through the windscreen eating something he’d bought from somewhere that wasn’t open yet.
Normal. Ordinary. Nothing in the piazza had any interest in a 34-page doping file sitting on a laptop in a window above it.
He finished the cigarette. He put it out on the window ledge in the pile of evidence that he’d been here. He closed the doping file. He opened the node map.
He had work to do first.
He would come back to the toast. He would come back to the file.
Not yet.
By ten-fifteen he had the node documentation in its first structural draft — a clean, precise map of the Matryoshka infrastructure that was true in every verifiable fact and organised in a way that pointed in one direction. The Bratislava hosting node. The Helix Narratives registration. The prosodic fingerprint evidence from the Clemson methodology. The abuse report he’d draft to the hosting provider: specific, factual, referencing the article URLs by identifier, citing the AI voice analysis methodology by name.
He was not manufacturing evidence. He was selecting what to document and where to send it. The distinction mattered to him. It did not matter to anyone else in this transaction, which was fine — most important distinctions didn’t.
The SportBridge connection was in a separate document. Not in the abuse report. Not sent anywhere yet. Held.
That was Anna’s to work with. The Geneva end was hers.
He annotated the SportBridge file with a timestamp and a one-line note: VPN correlation + December access log + OB brief. Cap table link — two board members. Anna has Pfeiffer confirmation. Then he saved it to the clean tablet, encrypted, with a key he’d need to remember rather than store. He was good at remembering keys. Better than he was at remembering to eat the fourth piece of toast.
He looked at the toast.
It was cold. Obviously. It had been cold since before he’d found the folder. He ate it anyway because waste was a moral failing his grandmother would have mentioned, and because he’d need something in his stomach before the afternoon’s work, and because the minibar had run out of cola and he wasn’t calling room service again until he’d earned it.
Cold toast. Saturday morning in a luxury hotel in Milan. A 34-page doping file sitting closed in a tab he hadn’t deleted.
Outside, the February piazza went about its indifferent business.
He opened the node map. He started building the trail.
Chapter 6 — Video Call, 11AM
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — 11:00 CET Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite / Villa Aurora, Rome — The War Room
The suite’s Bang & Olufsen speaker had been silent since Friday night. The only sounds the room produced now were keyboard, the occasional mechanical pop of the minibar opening, and the particular kind of quiet that accumulates around a person working too hard in a ceiling that is too low.
Lasse was on the window ledge. He had migrated there from the floor forty minutes ago when his lower back registered a formal complaint, and the window ledge was the room’s one concession to height — not enough, but more than the parquet. He had the laptop propped against the glass, the screen angled so he could see both the call and the node diagram on his tablet, and the fourth piece of toast balanced on his knee because he’d finally remembered he was hungry. The toast was from breakfast service. It was slightly cold. He ate it anyway.
He’d been awake for twenty-six hours. This was not remarkable.
The call connected at 11:02 on Signal — two minutes past the hour, which from Anna meant she had been ready at ten-fifty-eight and had made herself wait, which was the kind of detail she’d consider a minor act of self-discipline. The video loaded. She was at the desk in her war room: silk shirt, dark fabric, the Cartier bracelet catching the focused cone of the desk lamp even at this resolution. Rome’s February light came grey through the north-facing window behind her. She looked like someone who’d had roughly as much sleep as he had, which was to say none, but had the grace to perform otherwise.
You look terrible,
she said.
You look like you’ve been billing someone for the past four hours.
I have. Two of them.
She moved a file to the edge of her desk without looking at it.
The node map. Show me.
He rotated the tablet toward the camera and talked her through it, segment by segment. She didn’t ask him to slow down. She had the Clemson University paper open in a tab on her second monitor — she’d pulled it overnight, apparently, and had annotated the sections on prosodic fingerprint persistence in AI-synthesised audio, which meant she’d done exactly what he’d done and in approximately the same sequence. He found this efficient and did not say so.
The Clemson paper was the technical keystone. Its authors had run spectral analysis across sixty-one AI voice generators and demonstrated that each model left consistent residual artifacts in its output — micro-patterns in pitch timing, formant transitions, and harmonic envelope that persisted across samples regardless of the text being synthesised. The same way a specific printing press leaves register marks. The same way every forger has a hand. You couldn’t hear it. You could measure it. The forty-three articles used the same model for every synthesised audio clip, and the fingerprint matched a commercial text-to-speech API — one that had been access-throttled after its operator flagged unusual bulk usage in January. Too late for the articles. Early enough for the abuse trail.
The audio fingerprint ties all forty-three to the same synthesis run,
he said.
Batch-generated. Not over time — a single production session. Whoever ran this was in a hurry or didn’t care about variation, or both.
Or didn’t think anyone competent would look.
Also that.
He zoomed the tablet to the node diagram’s second layer — the hosting architecture. This was where the construction showed its seams. The primary node resolved through WHOIS to a Bratislava hosting provider, registrant listed as Helix Narratives s.r.o., registered address a serviced office in the old town, company age eighteen months. The registration was sloppy in the specific way of organisations that believe their middle layer is sufficient protection — they’d done the work of obfuscating the content, the distribution, the social amplification. They’d assumed no one would bother with the hosting.
Helix registered the node directly,
he said.
Their name is on the record. Not a shell, not a nominee director — Tomáš Vrábel, founder. He’s former Prague influence ops, dissolved cleanly in 2023. Presumably thought he was clean enough to use his own company name because the tier above would hold.
The tier above being.
SportBridge. Geneva.
He moved to the access log.
December fifteenth — six weeks before the Olympic operation launched. A client IP hit the Matryoshka control layer through three hops. The first two hops are noise — public VPN exits in Rotterdam and Bucharest, rotated infrastructure, standard obfuscation. The third hop is the mistake.
He tapped the log entry on screen.
A VPN exit node in Zurich — same subnet, same provider, same usage pattern as documented connections from SportBridge’s Zurich office. SecurityTrails has the correlation. I ran it against forty-two days of routing data to rule out coincidence. It isn’t coincidence.
Anna said nothing for a moment. She was reading something on her second monitor.
SportBridge appears in Pfeiffer’s client list four times,
she said.
The last engagement is dated November 2025. Brand licensing advisory — that’s the invoice category. It corresponds exactly with the drafting window for the morality clause.
So they had access to your firm’s precedent library through Pfeiffer.
They had access to Pfeiffer. Who had access to the library. The distinction matters legally, though not particularly in any other sense.
She moved the annotated Clemson pages to a different part of her desk.
They gave him a client referral, he owed them a favour, and when they needed a bespoke morality clause drafted into a sponsorship contract for an athlete they were about to publicly destroy, he wrote it. Without a conflict check.
Without understanding what it was for.
He understood what a morality clause is. He chose not to ask what thismorality clause was for.
She paused.
Which is its own kind of understanding.
The node map on the tablet had expanded since yesterday — six new sub-nodes resolved overnight through passive DNS enumeration and WHOIS chain analysis, all of which terminated cleanly at Helix Narratives’ infrastructure. The architecture had been built with some care: three CDN mirrors in Romania and the Netherlands, a Panama-based VPN provider for the control-layer access, content distributed through genuine article aggregators and three Telegram channels whose follower bases had been seeded over three months prior to the campaign launch. Whoever designed this understood layered distribution. They understood deniability by distance.
What they hadn’t understood — or had underestimated, which in Lasse’s experience was a distinction without a difference — was what happened when someone with access to commercial DNS intelligence tools, a current OSINT toolkit, and twenty-six consecutive hours of uninterrupted focus came looking from the outside in.
He told Anna about the shared folder. Unlocked. On the Helix server itself.
A brief silence. Not the calculating kind. The of course kind.
The brief was in there,
he said.
Full operational parameters. Target athlete, article themes, timing windows for each publication batch correlated to the acquisition timeline.
He ate the last corner of toast.
And an addendum. Different font. Added after the original brief — probably December, based on the file timestamps. It says: Phase 2 — supplementary leverage. File attached.
The doping file.
He’d told her last night that there was an additional element. He hadn’t told her the specifics. She’d pulled the inference from the structure of what he had told her, which was the kind of thing she did and which he had long since stopped finding surprising.
Forensically clean,
he said.
Metadata confirms origin from Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH’s own server. The document isn’t manufactured — it’s real, it was taken, and it was sitting in an unlocked folder on Helix Narratives’ infrastructure like a loaded weapon someone left on a park bench.
The sapphire ring moved. He couldn’t see it from Milan but he knew anyway — there was a quality to her silence that went with the ring turning, a particular density to the pause before she spoke again.
SportBridge had Phase 1 and Phase 2 in place simultaneously,
she said.
The fabricated doping narrative in the articles was the public pressure layer — depress the stock, spook the morality clause. The real doping file was the insurance layer. If the articles alone didn’t trigger the clause, they had authenticated evidence they could release through a different vector.
Or hold. It’s also leverage over the athlete’s management. Multiple applications.
Multiple applications,
she agreed.
That’s a sophisticated operation.
It’s a professional operation dressed up in geopolitical costume. The Matryoshka infrastructure was built for something else — ideological work, state-adjacent, Eastern European origin. SportBridge rented access because it was available and because if anyone noticed the signature they’d assume Moscow and stop asking follow-up questions.
Did you?
I read the second page.
He set the empty toast plate on the window ledge.
Political influence operators don’t run Phase 2 addendums appended in a different font to a shared folder with a commercial brief. This is a market play. The geopolitics is wallpaper.
From Rome, a sound he recognised — the particular acoustic of a pen set down on a leather desk surface. Anna thinking.
They were, he noted, looking at the same target from opposite sides of the same problem. She had come from the legal instrument — the morality clause, Pfeiffer’s negligence, SportBridge’s client relationship — and he had come from the technical infrastructure. They had arrived at the same centre point. This happened sometimes. He didn’t have a word for what he found satisfying about it. He wasn’t going to develop one now.
The Bratislava firm gets burned,
he said.
That’s my end.
Pfeiffer resigns,
she said.
That’s mine.
SportBridge?
She thought for three seconds. Her gaze moved slightly off-camera in the way it did when she was constructing something rather than recalling it.
I have a colleague at a Geneva regulatory consultancy. Former Swiss Bar Council member. If he receives a documented summary of SportBridge’s registration, their board composition, and their appearance in the Pfeiffer client list — framed as a potential conflict-of-interest inquiry — their registration becomes very uncomfortable by Monday morning.
A pause.
It won’t be criminal. There isn’t time to make it criminal, and criminal isn’t what they need. They need the kind of attention that makes them decide, quietly, that the Geneva address is more trouble than it’s worth.
How quiet?
Quiet enough that no one asks how the summary arrived. Loud enough that SportBridge’s board understands the question has been asked.
She moved something on her desk.
I’ll have it to him this afternoon.
He filed this. Clean. No public trace, no actionable record, two board members who’d built a market manipulation scheme on rented Russian influence infrastructure would spend their Monday morning deciding which wine to take to the lawyers’ office rather than celebrating a closed short position. This was the correct outcome. It wasn’t justice — justice was a different process for different institutions, and those institutions had not been hired by Konrad Albrecht. Discomfort was what had been hired for.
Albrecht,
he said.
She paused. The Cartier bracelet caught the lamp when she moved her wrist.
He’s long on the acquisition target.
Her tone was even.
Personal filings. I pulled them this morning through the Zurich commercial registry — not his name directly, through the SPV he used, which is traceable if you know the SPV’s nominal director, which I do because the same nominee director appears in two other structures I’ve seen.
She glanced off-camera again.
The position was opened in January. The exposure window closes Sunday noon.
He didn’t say anything.
On his tablet the node map sat static, the Bratislava node pulsing in red at its centre like a bad tooth waiting to be extracted.
He hired you to clean up a problem that was also providing cover for his own position,
she said. Not accusatory. Factual.
He hired me to pull the disinformation infrastructure before the morality clause triggered. He presented it as protecting the acquisition.
He looked at the tablet.
Both of those things are true. Neither of them is the complete picture.
No.
He answered my question wrong.
He meant the question at Bar Basso —who benefits if the deal collapses?Albrecht had said competitors. The correct answer was anyone short the target. He’d known it was wrong the moment Albrecht said it. He’d said nothing. He’d taken the job anyway.
Because the problem is technically interesting,
she said.
Not a question. He didn’t confirm it, either.
So we’re cleaning up a mess made by the same category of person who hired you to clean it up,
she said.
Yes.
Good,
she said.
He recognised what this meant. She wasn’t expressing approval of the situation. She was expressing a preference for situations where the moral geometry was at least internally consistent — where the irony was complete, where the shape of the thing had a kind of closed-circuit logic to it. A CFO who commissioned disinformation infrastructure cleanup had a personal position that opened the same week the operation launched. Everyone in this problem was simultaneously a victim and an architect. There was something almost elegant about it, in the way that only things produced by human greed are elegant: perfectly structured, entirely predictable, absolutely avoidable.
The job is still the job,
he said.
He gets what he paid for. The Helix node goes down, the articles retract, the morality clause loses its public leg, the acquisition closes Sunday.
And the SportBridge architecture.
Contained. Not buried.
He looked out at the Piazza Cordusio. The square below was grey, February damp, a few people moving through it with the particular Milanese winter purposefulness that suggested everyone was going somewhere marginally warmer.
The abuse report goes to the Bratislava provider and Vrábel takes the regulator’s attention. The SportBridge summary goes to your Geneva colleague. Neither of those is burial. Both are accurate. I’m not manufacturing anything.
You’re selecting what to document and where to send it.
Yes.
Which is what you always do.
It’s what everyone always does,
he said.
I’m just better at it.
She almost smiled. He could tell from the slight change in her voice’s temperature when she spoke next — a degree or two warmer, the professional register relaxing marginally. It was the closest she got to a concession, and she gave it rarely, and it meant she’d moved from assessment to agreement.
What about the doping file?
she asked.
He closed the node diagram tab. Opened it again immediately.
Not yet.
She didn’t push. She knew what not yet meant from him — not never, not undecided, but I’ve looked at the problem and I’m not ready to tell you what I’ve already decided. She’d known him long enough to read the gap.
A silence settled that was not uncomfortable. On his screen she turned back to the papers on her desk. The desk lamp’s cone of light made her look like a portrait of someone who had been handling difficult information for a long time and had learned to sit inside it without it getting in.
The documentation package,
she said.
When does it go?
This afternoon. Abuse report filed via clean identity — separate machine, separate tunnel, triple-hop routing, citing specific article URLs and the prosodic fingerprint analysis with the Clemson paper as reference. The Bratislava provider gets it, and a copy routes anonymously through three more hops to a journalist at Der Spiegel—
Not Der Spiegel.
She said it immediately.
He stopped.
Why.
Because Der Spiegel takes three weeks to vet and runs the story after the acquisition closes, which means the articles are already being retracted by the time they publish, which means the story becomes about the disinformation campaign’s discovery rather than about its infrastructure.
She pulled a file from the physical stack.
You want a publication that moves faster and has an established influence-operations beat. Süddeutsche or Die Zeit — the Zeit security desk has run three disinformation pieces in the last six months. They know the format. They’ll move in forty-eight hours.
He considered this for two seconds.
Die Zeit,
he said.
The Zeit desk.
Fine.
She noted something. He didn’t ask what. This was how they worked — she handled the distribution architecture, he handled the technical documentation; each deferred to the other’s domain without ceremony and without needing to reconstruct the reasoning out loud. It was the most efficient state they operated in and also the most comfortable, though neither of them would use that word.
The node map on his tablet showed the full Matryoshka structure now — all layers, all hops, the December access log, the Helix registration, the unlocked shared folder, the Phase 2 addendum appended in a different font. A complete picture. He’d built a trail that was true in every verifiable fact and structured in a way that pointed in exactly one direction. The direction stopped at Bratislava. The tier above — SportBridge, the board members, the Geneva registration, the short position, the cap table connections — none of that was in the documented trail. It was in his notes. It was in Anna’s files. It was going to a Geneva regulatory consultancy this afternoon.
This was not a contradiction. He’d been hired to solve the disinformation problem. The disinformation problem had a documented source: Helix Narratives. The documentation was complete and accurate. What the documentation did not include was everything else he’d found, which was his, and which he would route accordingly.
Albrecht was getting exactly what he’d paid for. The fact that he’d also paid, unknowingly, for a man who would find the things he’d hoped would stay buried, and make independent decisions about them — that was the part of the invoice that wouldn’t appear on the Singapore consulting entity’s ledger. That part was complimentary. It came with the service whether clients wanted it or not.
One more thing,
he said. He said it to his tablet rather than the camera.
Anna waited.
Vrábel’s unlocked folder. The operational brief, the Phase 2 addendum, the doping file — all of it was on a shared folder on the Helix server. No access controls. No encryption. A 34-page forensically authenticated document from a management company’s own server, sitting in plaintext next to the client brief.
He looked up.
Eighteen months in operation. Former Prague influence ops background. He built the infrastructure carefully and left the storage like a rookie.
People compartmentalise their competence,
she said.
They really do.
Is that what you’re doing with the doping file?
A pause. The room was very quiet. The Piazza Cordusio produced a sound that barely reached the suite — a car, a horn, the city going about its Saturday with no interest in what was being decided eleven floors up.
No,
he said.
She looked at him through the camera. The sapphire ring didn’t move. That was, in its own way, a more precise answer than any additional word would have been.
The call ended at 11:54.
He sat on the window ledge for a moment after the screen went dark. The empty toast plate was beside him. The tablet showed the node map. Below the window, Milan moved through its grey Saturday with the indifference of cities that have seen everything at least twice and stopped being impressed.
He picked up the tablet. Opened the file he’d found in the unlocked folder.
34 pages. Lab results. Substitution schedules. Three names.
He read the first page again. Then closed it.
Not yet had a shorter shelf life than he’d indicated on the call. He knew this. He suspected she knew it too, and had chosen not to say so, because she was occasionally merciful in the specific way of people who don’t need to win every exchange to stay ahead.
He lit a cigarette and looked at the low ceiling of the Cordusio Suite for a moment.
Then he went back to work.
Chapter 7 — Helix Burns
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — 13:00–20:00 CET Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite
The room service arrived at 12:58 and Lasse had moved back to the floor by the time it did.
The window ledge was finished. His lower back had made this determination unilaterally sometime around eleven-thirty, which was fine — the floor and he had a working relationship by now. Three days of parquet. The laptop against the bed frame. The tablet on its separate OS propped against the skirting board to his left, clean network, never touched a hotel WiFi in its operational life. He ate the Vitello Tonnatofrom the plate balanced on one knee without looking at it — roasted veal, tuna sauce, capers, the hotel’s version of a classic which was, truthfully, better than the situation deserved. He noted this and moved on.
The node map had been sitting on his secondary screen since the video call with Anna. Complete. Verified. The Matryoshka infrastructure in full diagram: forty-three published articles across nineteen impersonated outlets, the CDN layer distributed across three jurisdictions — Bratislava primary, Romanian mirror, Dutch mirror — the VPN thread leading backward through three hops to a Zurich exit node with SportBridge AG written all over it. The map was accurate. It was also only going to partly appear in the documentation package Lasse was about to build.
The rest would be held.
He set the plate on the floor beside him and picked up the laptop properly.
Right. Time to burn Helix.
The abuse report was a specific instrument. Not a legal complaint — he had no standing for that, no identity he was prepared to attach to one, and frankly the Slovak hosting provider would respond faster to a well-formatted technical report than to anything requiring a magistrate. The process was simple: you document the violation, you name the URLs, you reference credible research, and you give the provider exactly enough to pull the plug without needing to understand what they were pulling. The key was not to make it interesting. Interesting abuse reports got read carefully. The correct kind got actioned and filed.
He was going to write the boring kind.
He opened a clean text editor — not the hotel’s WiFi, obviously; the tablet was tethered to a SIM he’d registered to a name that connected to nothing and no one — and began.
The first section was the factual summary: forty-three URLs hosted on Helix Narratives s.r.o. infrastructure at the Bratislava provider, each one linking to an AI-generated article impersonating an established sports news outlet. He listed twelve of the forty-three individually. The pattern was obvious from twelve. You did not need to read forty-three to understand forty-three.
The second section was the technical evidence. This was where he earned the fee Albrecht had no idea he was paying for.
The prosodic fingerprint.
In each of the forty-three articles, the fabricated audio clips — the kind captioned exclusive audio and source confirmed — carried the same synthesis artefact. Not audible to a human listener. Audible to the analysis methods described in the Clemson research, and, as it happened, to Lasse, who had run all forty-three clips through a spectral residual analysis the previous night and produced a diagram that was, objectively, the same synthesis model generating every single one of them. Neural speech synthesis systems leave consistent model-specific residuals in their output — not in the semantic content, not in the voice performance, but in the sub-perceptual artefacts that survive compression and playback. The same engine had spoken all forty-three fabricated sources. Someone had bought one licence and run it forty-three times.
He described this in three paragraphs. The Clemson paper was cited by name, authors, and publication year. The Slovak hosting provider’s technical team would not read the Clemson paper. The journalist at Der Spiegel who covered influence operations and would receive an anonymous copy of this report through three forwarding hops would absolutely read it, would have it verified by an academic contact within twenty-four hours, and would publish something that made the prosodic fingerprint technique sound both important and inevitable — which it was, on both counts.
The third section named Helix Narratives s.r.o. as the registrant, provided their registered address, and cited the WHOIS record. Nothing Lasse hadn’t found in a database query anyone could run. Nothing that required explaining where he’d looked or how.
He did not mention the unlocked shared folder.
He did not mention the SportBridge brief, the VPN thread, the access logs from December, or the doping file. None of that existed in this document. This document was about forty-three URLs on a Bratislava server, which was an accurate, complete, and surgically edited version of the truth. Tomáš Vrábel had built a system with good bones and unlocked doors. Lasse was walking through one specific door and letting the provider bolt the others behind him.
The fourth section was the ask: content removal, hosting account suspension, and preservation of server logs for potential regulatory referral. Standard language. The hosting provider would read regulatory referral and pull the trigger before their legal team finished the first sentence.
He read it back once. Three pages. Clean. Boring. Accurate. Pointed in exactly one direction.
He filed it at 14:23 under a clean identity — an email address he’d spun up six months ago for exactly this category of use, registered through a privacy-respecting provider in Iceland, never connected to his real name, the IP tunnelled through a sequence of hops that ended somewhere in Singapore and would take approximately eighteen months to untangle if anyone tried. No one would try. The abuse report was a report, not a crime. The hosting provider would action it and file it and never wonder who sent it.
He copied the document.
He encrypted it with a key that unlocked to a Signal contact — a journalist at Der Spiegel, Hamburg bureau, who had broken three influence operation stories in the past four years and whose source in the second one, a particularly thorny Telegram amplification network, had been Lasse, once removed, through a dead drop he’d never reused. He put the encrypted package through a different anonymous account to a different dead drop. The journalist would find it in her secure inbox by evening. She knew what to do with primary documentation on AI-generated disinformation infrastructure. She’d been waiting for someone to send her exactly this category of source material for approximately two years.
The Helix Narratives hosting contract was, as of 14:31 on Saturday afternoon, functionally dead. The articles would be down within hours. Vrábel would get a suspension notice that would not explain what had triggered it. By the time he worked it out, the Spiegel piece would be in progress and the regulatory referral language in the abuse report would have done its job. Helix would dissolve. Less cleanly than Prague in 2023. Lasse had made sure of that.
He picked up the minibar cola — the fifth of the job, he was keeping count, Albrecht’s bill was going to be extraordinary — and held it without drinking it.
Right.
The SportBridge documentation was a different thing entirely.
He built it on the clean tablet, separate file, never going near the abuse report’s document chain. Everything he had on SportBridge was accurate and none of it was going anywhere yet. The VPN thread from December 2025 — three hops, resolving to the Zurich exit node associated with SportBridge’s operational office. The access log timestamp showing their first touch on the Matryoshka infrastructure six weeks before the articles went live. The operational brief itself, its language and structure and the Phase 2 addendum in a different font. The board members’ names appearing in the acquisition target’s cap table, which Lasse had confirmed separately from a public filing and which meant the circle was closed: short the target, depress the price with disinformation, activate the morality clause as secondary pressure, close the position by Sunday noon.
Anna had the legal end. Pfeiffer would resign. SportBridge’s Geneva registration would become, in her words, very uncomfortable by Monday— he didn’t ask for the mechanism and she hadn’t offered one. He had enough of his own opinion about what that mechanism was to find it satisfying.
His end was documentation. Held. Not sent. The SportBridge file was the kind of leverage that existed in a category of its own: too specific to use publicly without exposing the full chain, too valuable to destroy, and currently perfectly useful as the thing no one knew existed while the acquisition closed and the window shut. He saved it to an encrypted partition on the clean tablet — three-layer encryption, passphrase known to him and backed up in a place that was not digital — and set it aside.
Not for now. For when it was needed, which it might not be, and which was fine either way.
He had been at it for three hours. He checked the time. 15:47. He was still on the floor. The Vitello Tonnato plate was on the carpet beside the empty cola can. He should probably call housekeeping. He did not call housekeeping.
He opened the doping file.
He hadn’t meant to. He’d told himself he was going back to the node map to do the final verification pass on the documentation package — the structured summary he’d send to Albrecht’s Sunday morning call, clean and correct and professionally deliverable. That was the job. That was what he was being paid for. He had opened three tabs in the correct order: node map, documentation framework, billing notes he’d been assembling since Friday in a tone that was going to make Albrecht blink.
Then, without particularly deciding to, he’d opened a fourth.
The doping file sat at the top of his download cache, where it had been since the night before. Thirty-four pages. The metadata had confirmed it on first inspection: origin server Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH, Munich. File creation timestamp eighteen months ago. Unmodified. The Matryoshka infrastructure hadn’t touched the content — it had received the file, stored it in an unlocked folder that Vrábel had apparently forgotten about or never noticed, and left it there for six weeks while the rest of the operation ran around it.
He read it this time. All of it.
The first section was the protocol itself: a doping management schedule for an unnamed elite athlete over a fourteen-month Olympic preparation cycle. Substitution timings. Laboratory interaction schedules — the specific windows when a test would produce a clean result versus a contaminated one, mapped to competition dates with a precision that was either extraordinary luck or someone who understood the testing calendar well enough to engineer it. Both, probably. The second section was the lab results — not fraudulent, not manufactured, actual documented results with the athlete’s sample codes running alongside the protocol timeline in a way that confirmed the substitution schedule had worked. The third section was a list of three officials. Not named in full — initials and roles — but the roles were specific enough to narrow considerably. A national federation medical officer. A sample collection supervisor at a named laboratory. A logistics contractor whose company name appeared in three public procurement records if you knew where to look, which Lasse now did.
Someone inside Marta Voss’s management operation had assembled all of this — collated the athlete’s own medical documentation, cross-referenced it with the testing records, identified the three officials, and then sold the complete package to SportBridge as Phase 2 leverage. Supplementary. Insurance, the brief had called it. In case the articles alone didn’t trigger the morality clause.
He put the laptop on the floor beside him and stared at the ceiling that was still too low.
The ceiling did not offer any opinions.
Right. So.
The doping file was not his job. He was entirely clear about this. His job was the forty-three articles — documented, the infrastructure burned, the patsy designated, the deliverables assembled. His job did not include a 34-page document from a server he technically hadn’t been authorised to access, concerning an athlete whose name he didn’t know, managed by a company that would learn about all of this from a newspaper story and not from him. His job was finished. The documentation package was complete. Albrecht would get his Sunday call and his deal would close and the morality clause would be neutralised and the whole thing would be over and Lasse could drive south before dawn and have toast in his own kitchen and use his own sauna.
He could close this tab right now.
He looked at the list of three officials again.
For fuck’s sake.
He got up.
Not a decision, exactly — more the natural endpoint of being on the floor looking at a ceiling for longer than was useful. He pulled on the vintage Barbour jacket, which was hanging over the desk chair he’d been using as a coat rack since Friday because the wardrobe in the dressing area had a mirror he had no interest in walking past. He didn’t look for an umbrella. It was raining and he was going to get wet. Fine.
The lift was empty. The lobby was doing its Saturday evening thing — a couple checking in with too much luggage, a group of men in tech company fleeces on their way to something in the conference suite, a concierge redirecting someone with the practiced patience of a person who redirects people for a living. Nobody looked at Lasse. He was in jogging pants and a waxed jacket in a luxury hotel lobby and he had the specific energy of someone who was not going to explain himself under any circumstances. People sense this correctly and respond by not asking.
He walked out into the Piazza Cordusio.
The rain was doing what Milan rain in February does — not dramatic, not torrential, just cold and continuous and entirely indifferent to whatever you’d been hoping the weather would do. The piazza was quiet at this hour, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele’s lit facade visible at the far end, the old bank buildings ghostly in the wet. He turned toward the Navigli because it was the correct direction to walk when you needed to be outside and cold and not thinking in the specific way that sitting on a floor in a low-ceilinged room encourages.
He walked with the long strides he’d had since he was a teenager — a walking pace that other people experienced as purposeful and he experienced as the only tempo that wasn’t frustrating. His hands were in the Barbour’s pockets. The collar was turned up. His shoulder-length hair, already damp within two minutes, he simply accepted. He walked.
The Naviglio Grande in February was not a canal that was trying to charm anyone. Black water, old stone, sodium light doing its bleak best with the rain surface. The bar terraces were shuttered. A dog walker moved ahead of him, coat up, dog unimpressed by the weather and working through it stoically, which Lasse found he respected. The canal’s smell was iron and cold water. His footsteps on the wet paving stones made the kind of sound that was good for thinking — not loud, not silent, just enough presence to keep the brain from chasing its own tail.
He walked.
He’d been in the Maldives once, contracted for a three-month digital infrastructure audit for a resort group, when boredom combined with the expiry of various statutes of limitations had pushed him back into the old world. He remembered the specific quality of a decision made on flat water — how the horizon helped, how distance helped, how the thing you were deciding stopped feeling like a decision you were making and started feeling like a fact you were acknowledging. You were never deciding. You were just catching up to what was already true.
The doping file was real. Forensically confirmed. Originated from Marta Voss’s server. Three officials. Fourteen months. An athlete who had won something, probably — the timing and care of the protocol suggested serious preparation, national-level competition, the kind of career arc where fourteen months of coordinated effort and cover-up meant something substantial had been won. Illegally. Covered up by three people who had presumably made that calculation and found it worth making.
He knew one journalist who covered this kind of story in the structural way it needed to be covered — not as individual scandal but as governance failure: who knew, who protected, how the system accommodated it. Elisa Brambilla at La Repubblica, who’d broken the 2023 cycling story and whose anonymous source in that case had never been found. He had her dead drop address. He had never used it.
The question was whether this file was something he sent or something he filed and forgot.
He walked.
He walked for twenty-two minutes. He tracked it without looking at his phone — he tracked elapsed time from habit, the fire department discipline from two and a half decades of showing up to things where timing was structural. Twenty-two minutes on wet stone beside black water. He came back the way he came. The Piazza Cordusio was still there, the lobby still performing its function, the lift still empty.
He went back up.
The suite was exactly as he’d left it: laptop on the floor, tablet against the skirting board, Vitello Tonnato plate beginning to do something he was going to have to deal with at some point, the fourth minibar cola standing on the parquet with the practised patience of a drink waiting to be consumed. He did not sit back down yet. He stood in the middle of the room with the damp jacket still on and looked at the ceiling he’d been resenting since Friday night.
Three point two metres. Coffered. Entirely adequate by any architectural standard. Still not enough.
He took the jacket off. Hung it on the desk chair. Sat on the floor.
He had not opened a new tab.
He opened Signal.
Her name in the chat was three characters — a code she’d established years ago, non-sequential, no initials. He typed without preamble, because Anna Haas did not do preamble and neither did he.
There’s a file.
The read receipt appeared within forty seconds, which meant she was at her desk or her phone, which at this hour on a Saturday almost certainly meant the war room. Three dots. Then:
What kind.
The kind that has nothing to do with what we’re doing and everything to do with something that should be in the public domain.
A pause. Not the calculating pause — he knew her pauses the way you know the silences of people you have spent years working alongside. This was the other kind: the one where she was reading the sentence twice.
Is it real?
Forensically confirmed. Originated from Marta Voss’s own server.
The dots appeared and stopped. Appeared again.
Then it’s not our problem.
No.
The dots again, then nothing for almost a minute. He waited. Outside the suite the rain had moderated to the kind of fine mist that made everything in the piazza below look slightly out of focus. He could see the wet cobblestones from where he sat — a strip of the piazza visible from floor level, which was the one visual advantage of working on the floor that no one had ever thought to mention.
But you’re going to make it someone’s problem.
He picked up the cola. Drank from it. It was room temperature. He noted this. He did not care.
Haven’t decided.
Yes you have.
He put the phone face-down on the floor. He looked at the ceiling. He had, in fact, decided — he’d decided somewhere between the seventh minute and the fourteenth minute on the canal walk, probably around the moment he’d been mentally constructing the three-paragraph provenance note for Brambilla’s dead drop and had realised he was already writing it in his head. The decision was made. He was just running through the remaining steps of acknowledging it to himself in the correct order, which was a personal procedural requirement he’d never been able to shortcut and had stopped trying.
He turned the phone over. Typed:
I know.
Read receipt. A long pause. No dots.
Then:
Good.
He put the phone down and opened his browser.
He sat for a moment with the laptop in front of him and the rain on the windows and the ceiling at its permanent, irreducible height. The room service plate was still on the floor. The minibar was down to one cola and something that described itself as an
Italian artisanal aperitivo.
He had no interest in the artisanal aperitivo. He pulled the last cola. He opened it.
Outside, somewhere below, Milan continued to do whatever Milan did on a rainy Saturday at almost eight in the evening — dinner, presumably, the city being structurally organised around the concept of dinner in a way that had always struck him as a reasonable priority. He had not had dinner. He had eaten Vitello Tonnato at one in the afternoon and would eat something else when he thought about it, which would probably be later than was medically advisable.
He picked up the phone again.
The Signal chat was still open. Three characters for a name. He looked at the last message — his I know, her Good — and typed:
Done.
The read receipt came back in eleven seconds.
The Spiegel copy?
Sent. The hosting provider report went in at fourteen twenty-three. It’s in their queue.
And the secondary documentation?
Held. Encrypted. Not going anywhere.
Good. A pause. Brambilla?
He looked at the ceiling.
Tomorrow.
The dots appeared and stopped. He waited.
That wasn’t in the brief.
No.
Albrecht doesn’t know.
No.
Another pause — the long kind, the one that meant she was deciding whether to say the thing she was thinking or to say something adjacent to it that accomplished the same purpose. He knew this pause also. He found it, if anything, restful — the particular quality of someone else’s silence that you’d learned enough to read.
It was real, then.
Forensically confirmed.
Then you didn’t have a choice.
He looked at the flat, cold surface of the minibar cola in his hand. He had, technically, had a choice. He’d been on the canal for twenty-two minutes and had had a choice at every one of them.
I had a choice, he typed.
I know, she replied. That’s what I meant.
He put the phone down.
Outside the piazza was rain and empty cobblestones and the distant lit edge of the Galleria. The job was done. The Helix infrastructure was burning — or would be, within the hour, as the Slovak hosting provider’s abuse handling queue worked through to his report and pulled the trigger on a hosting contract that could no longer be defended. Vrábel would wake up tomorrow to a suspension notice. By Monday, the forty-three articles would be off every platform that had hosted the complaint URLs, and the Spiegel journalist would be three calls into verifying the AI voice synthesis claim against an academic contact. The trail led cleanly to Helix and stopped there. The documentation package was assembled and correct and ready for Albrecht’s Sunday call.
The SportBridge file was held, encrypted, filed under a name that meant nothing to anyone except Lasse.
The doping file was on the clean tablet, in an encrypted container, going nowhere until morning. From the farm. On a clean machine with a Tor connection and a dead drop address he had memorised four years ago. That was the sequence and it was already decided and he was not going to turn it over again before he drove south.
Albrecht would read what eventually got published and not be able to connect it to anything he’d commissioned. This was, objectively, the correct outcome. It was also, Lasse considered — carefully, internally, in the specific mode he reserved for things that were both correct and satisfying without being either simple or clean — quite funny.
He did not smile. He was not going to smile at this in a room where the ceiling was too low and the minibar had nothing left worth drinking.
He found his cigarettes in the Barbour jacket pocket — slightly damp from the canal walk, still functional — and lit one sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Cordusio Suite because the suite had not earned the right to have opinions about that and neither had anyone else. He had been on this floor for most of eighteen hours across two days. He had eaten Vitello Tonnato and hotel toast and five colas. He had burned an influence operation down to its foundations and documented it in a format that would occupy a regulator for months. He had sent a file to a journalist because it was real and it was in the public domain and because there was no version of finding what he had found and doing nothing with it that he could actually live with — not for moral reasons, exactly, not in any way he was going to announce, but because that was how the calculation worked when you ran it all the way through.
The cigarette smoke rose toward the ceiling. Three point two metres. Still not enough.
The Matryoshka had nested all the way down. At the centre, where the smallest doll should have been, someone had left a file. You got there by accident, by following a thread someone had left dangling in an unlocked folder. You found it because the contractor was sloppy and the clients were confident and nobody had expected anyone to look closely enough.
He looked.
He pulled his Sunday-morning driving playlist up on his phone — the A1 south at five AM, the Tuscany hills grey and empty in the pre-dawn cold, the sauna warming up from two hundred kilometres away through a long-range signal to a wood-fired boiler in a converted coop. He’d start the sauna from the hotel car park. He’d be home by eight. He’d make toast from his own bread on his own range and drink his own coffee and let the property do what it always did: put distance between what had just happened and what came next.
He put the cigarette out on the edge of the room service plate.
Tomorrow. Tonight he had documentation to finalise and an invoice to write that was going to require Albrecht to sit down before opening it.
He opened the billing notes.
The artisanal aperitivo from the minibar, he decided, was going on at two thousand percent.
Chapter 8 — The Subtext Scene
Saturday, February 21, 2026 — 21:30 CET Villa Aurora, Rome (terrace) / Hotel Palazzo Cordusio Gran Melià, Milan — Cordusio Suite
Rome at half past nine on a February Saturday was the kind of quiet that only a city of three million achieves when it decides, collectively, to be somewhere else. The Pinciano sat above most of it. Villa Aurora’s terrace sat above the Pinciano. Up here, the city reduced itself to a faint amber smear on the underside of a cloud bank, a church bell somewhere in Parioli that had lost track of time, the occasional diesel drone of a taxi cutting up Via Po. Nothing that demanded attention.
Anna was on the terrace with the champagne.
Not the bottle from Friday night — that one had been dealt with, eventually, at approximately 22:00 on a night that had started with a hockey match on the television and ended with her pulling M&A filings at midnight. This was a different bottle. A Billecart-Salmon Blanc de Blancs she had decided to open at 21:15 because the structural work of the day was done, because the Pfeiffer file was closed and filed and already becoming historical, because she had a two-hour window before she needed to do anything else, and because she was forty-nine years old and had earned a glass of good champagne on a cold terrace in Rome without requiring additional justification.
She had the Zippo in her pocket. She hadn’t used it yet.
The terrace was cold — 6°C, the particular sharpness of a clear February night after a day of low cloud, the sky finally deciding to be honest about the stars. She was in a cashmere robe over the silk shirt she’d worked in all day, and the Louboutin mules she’d put back on when she came upstairs, because some habits were non-negotiable. The champagne flute was fogging slightly in the cold air. She didn’t mind.
Her phone was on the wrought-iron table beside her. Signal. The notification light had been off for four hours.
She was not waiting for it to come on.
Two hundred kilometres north, the Cordusio Suite had stopped being a hotel room sometime around Saturday afternoon and become something else entirely — a forward operating base that happened to have a Bang & Olufsen speaker nobody used and a freestanding bathtub nobody had touched. The parquet floor bore the geography of the last twenty-two hours: the laptop position by the bed frame, the cola cans in a loose cluster near the minibar, the desk chair still pushed into the corner where it had landed on Friday night.
Lasse was on the floor.
Not because anything was wrong. The floor was where he worked. The ceiling was 3.2 metres and architecturally correct and still too low, and from the floor the ceiling was at least a proper distance away, and from the floor the problem looked like what it was: finished, or close enough to finished that the remaining distance was administrative.
He was lying on his back, actually. Frameless glasses on, staring at the ceiling that was too low, the laptop closed beside him for the first time in twenty-two hours. The node documentation was packaged and encrypted in a folder on the clean tablet — the one that ran a separate OS and lived on its own network and had no name because naming things you might need to deny is a specific category of mistake that only amateurs make. The Spiegel journalist’s anonymous dead drop was prepped, a Signal-based one-time channel using a throwaway device registered to an entity that traced back to a shelf company in Liechtenstein that traced back to a different shelf company in Cyprus that traced back to nothing useful for anyone who went looking. The abuse report to the Bratislava hosting provider had been filed at 17:43, citing specific article URLs, the AI voice prosodic fingerprint, and the Clemson paper by name, formatted with the clinical precision of someone who had done this before and wanted to be absolutely clear that they had done this before.
Helix Narratives s.r.o. was having a bad weekend. They didn’t know this yet. They would know it Monday morning when their hosting provider terminated the contract and a copy of the abuse report landed on a journalist’s encrypted device at a time to be determined by the journalist’s editorial schedule.
Tomáš Vrábel had run a tidy dissolution in Prague in 2023 and taken his playbook to Bratislava and assumed the lesson was that you left no trail. The lesson was actually that you left no trail twice, and he’d only learned it once.
Lasse had no particular feeling about this. The man took €180,000 to run a contractor operation for a market manipulation scheme targeting a doping cover-up. He could now explain that to a regulator.
The doping file was closed. The tab was closed. He had not reopened it.
He looked at the ceiling. The ceiling looked back, 3.2 metres of indifferent heritage plasterwork.
His phone lit up on the floor beside him. Signal.
He glanced at the screen. The notification preview showed nothing — message content hidden, which meant it was from the handful of contacts he’d configured for preview suppression. He knew who it was before he picked it up.
He picked it up.
You awake?
He was lying on the floor looking at a ceiling that was too low. He typed back:
No.
A pause of approximately three seconds.
Call me.
He sat up, put the glasses on properly, found the cola he’d started an hour ago and abandoned when it went warm, considered it, decided against it. Set the laptop aside. Opened the Signal call interface and dialled.
She answered on the second ring, which for Anna was practically a reflex.
The terrace was still. Rome at the distance of the Pinciano was ambient, undemanding. She had the phone to her ear and the champagne flute in the other hand and the Billecart-Salmon was exactly as good as she’d known it would be, which was one of the satisfactions of paying attention to what you were buying.
The node documentation’s packaged,
Lasse said. Not a greeting. The greeting was implicit in the fact that he’d called.
Good.
Spiegel drop is prepped. I send it tomorrow morning. Helix burns Monday.
Pfeiffer signed the resignation letter at 21:00,
she said.
He sent it to himself first, for reasons I won’t speculate about, then to me. Effective Wednesday.
Naturally.
He thanked me.
Of course he did.
I know.
The ring turned, once. She was aware of it and let it happen.
SportBridge’s Geneva registration becomes uncomfortable by Monday. I’ve got a colleague at a Zurich firm who owes me a conversation. He’ll know what to do with what I send him.
How uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable enough that their board will quietly wind down the structure within ninety days. Not criminal. Clean. Which is more than they deserve, but which is considerably less than they wanted.
She took a sip of champagne. The cold air made the bubbles sharper.
Albrecht’s confirmation call is at ten-thirty tomorrow?
Ten-thirty.
He’ll be in a good mood.
People like that are always in a good mood when someone else cleaned up their mess.
A silence. The particular quality of a connection that was encrypted end-to-end and therefore without the faint digital artifacts of a less careful call. Just a clean, quiet line between a hotel room floor in Milan and a terrace in Rome, 200 kilometres, six degrees centigrade at both ends, February being February.
The window closes at noon,
she said.
Not a question.
I know when the window closes.
I’m just noting the time.
You’ve noted it.
The ring turned twice. He knew this without seeing it. He had known Anna Haas for eleven years and in that time had developed a functional map of her silences: the calculating pause, which had a slight tension to it that came through even on encrypted audio; the predator’s pause, which had no tension at all and was considerably more dangerous; and the pause that meant she had arrived at a sentence and decided not to finish it, which was the one she was producing now, and which had a very specific acoustic quality he had learned to read approximately three years into knowing her and had never told her he could read.
Don’t,
he said.
I haven’t said anything.
Twice,
he said.
You turned it twice.
A beat. Then, across the line, the specific sound of a Zippo lighter being lifted from a surface and flicked open. The brief jet of flame that would be visible if he could see her — which he couldn’t, because this was voice only, the second call of the day, and he’d made it voice only deliberately, which she’d accepted without comment, which meant she’d made the same calculation.
The lighter. She only used it on the terrace. She only used it when she was genuinely undecided about something.
The sound of a cigarette being lit. The long first exhale.
The exposure window closes Sunday noon,
she said again. More quietly this time. Not making a point. Stating a fact she was already past the point of pretending wasn’t the fact.
Anna.
I know,
she said.
The champagne flute caught the ambient light from the city below — a faint, warm refraction at the rim. She watched it without looking at it particularly. The stars above the Pinciano were doing what February stars in Rome do, which is to exist at a great distance and provide no guidance whatsoever to anyone looking for it.
I know,
she said again, after another three seconds, and this time it meant something different from the first time. The first time was acknowledgment. The second time was a decision.
Lasse was on the floor of the Cordusio Suite looking at the ceiling. He did not say anything for a moment. The ceiling was still 3.2 metres and still not enough. He was aware, in the specific way he was aware of things he didn’t examine too closely, that the call was doing what it was doing and that neither of them was going to name it and that this was the correct arrangement.
The abuse report goes to the provider at nine tomorrow,
he said.
The Spiegel drop at nine-fifteen. The node map gets archived to an encrypted partition and the working copy gets wiped at ten.
Clean.
Clean.
Albrecht won’t find it if he looks.
Albrecht won’t look. He’ll pay the invoice and tell himself he bought a professional service and go back to his deal.
He’ll find out about the doping file eventually.
In three weeks, probably. When Brambilla publishes.
Another silence. She exhaled smoke into the February air above Rome and watched it dissolve.
The file was real.
Yes.
Marta Voss doesn’t know her server was compromised.
No.
She will.
Yes.
He picked up the warm cola, decided against it again, put it back.
That’s not our problem.
No,
she agreed.
It isn’t.
She didn’t say what they both understood, which was that it was nonetheless something — that the 34-page file from Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH had not manufactured itself, that someone inside the management company had sold it to SportBridge AG as Phase 2 — supplementary leverage and had therefore made a calculation about what was acceptable and had calculated wrong, and that Elisa Brambilla at La Repubblica was going to spend the next three weeks verifying provenance on a forensically intact document and was then going to publish something that would not be about the market manipulation scheme at all but would instead be about whatever was on page one of that file, and that whatever was on page one of that file had been there before Lasse found it, and was going to be there regardless of whether he sent it anywhere, and that the only question had been who sent it and when.
He’d sent it. Or would, in the morning.
Neither of them mentioned it again.
The champagne was good. The ceiling was low. The line was quiet. Across 200 kilometres of February Italian night, two people sat in the particular silence of a call that neither of them had ended and neither of them was quite ready to end — not for operational reasons, which were concluded, but for reasons that didn’t have operational names and that neither of them would have used those names for even if they’d had them.
His family ring — the gold crest he always wore — pressed against the parquet floor where his hand rested. In Rome, the sapphire ring on her right hand was still. Had been still for the last four minutes. She was not calculating. She was watching the amber smear of the city below the terrace and listening to a clean encrypted line from Milan and not particularly thinking about anything in a way that she didn’t usually permit herself.
At 21:47 she said:
Get some sleep.
You too.
A pause.
Lasse.
What.
Nothing.
And then, a beat later, with the slight curl of the voice that was the closest she got to admitting something:
Nothing.
The call ended.
She stood on the terrace for another three minutes with the champagne and the cigarette. Rome spread below her in its ancient, indifferent way. The church bell in Parioli found another hour to be wrong about. A cat on the terrace wall of a neighbouring building appeared from behind a terracotta pot, regarded her with the absolute detachment of the genuinely disinterested, and disappeared again.
She finished the cigarette. She put the flute down.
She went inside.
In Milan, Lasse stayed on the floor for another minute. The call had ended and the ceiling was still 3.2 metres and the minibar had three more colas in it and the Piazza Cordusio outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was rain-grey and empty, the wet cobblestones reflecting the streetlights in orange multiples that nobody was there to appreciate.
He had the drive to Tuscany to do. Not now — at five, before the A1 filled up with people who drove like they had somewhere to be. The clean tablet needed wiping. The hotel floor needed its laptop back. Albrecht’s call at ten-thirty needed to be taken from somewhere with a better ceiling.
The node documentation was packaged. The trail led where it was supposed to lead. Helix Narratives was going to have a conversation with a regulator that it had earned entirely through its own carelessness. SportBridge AG’s Geneva registration was going to become, by Monday, the kind of uncomfortable that boards of directors responded to by quietly ceasing to be boards of directors. Gerhard Pfeiffer had written his resignation letter and thanked the person who had made him write it, which was the correct response from someone who understood the alternative.
The doping file was with the one journalist who would know what to do with it.
The exposure window closed Sunday noon.
He picked up the warm cola. Decided it was still warm. Drank it anyway.
The ceiling of the Cordusio Suite was 3.2 metres, which was not enough.
He’d deal with that at five.
Chapter 9 — Pfeiffer
Sunday, February 22, 2026 — 08:15 CET — Villa Aurora, Rome
The call came at eight fifteen.
Not the half-past she’d expected. Not the nine o’clock she’d given him credit for. Eight fifteen, which meant he’d gotten home from the golf course last night, poured himself something expensive, made a decision, reversed it, made it again, slept poorly, and reached for the phone before his wife came downstairs. She knew the sequence because she’d seen it before. Men like Pfeiffer ran the same software.
She was in the war room when it rang. She’d been in the war room since six — early even by her standards, but the espresso machine had been running since five forty-five and there was a particular quality to Sunday mornings at Villa Aurora in February, a grey mineral quiet, that she’d always found useful for the kind of thinking that had nothing to do with comfort. The Pfeiffer file was already closed and filed. She’d done that before calling him back last night. She knew the conversation’s outcome before it happened. Closing the file first was a matter of order.
She let it ring twice. Then she answered.
Anna. It’s Gerhard.
As though she might have forgotten his number. As though she hadn’t memorised it fifteen months ago from the incident with the Lisbon client, the one he’d handled badly enough that she’d had to arrange a quiet correction through two intermediaries and a Maltese notary. She had a file on that too. Also closed. Also filed.
Gerhard,
she said. The use of his first name was intentional. She almost never used it in professional correspondence. He would know what it meant. He would have known since the seventh hole.
He led with the wrong version.
She’d expected that. The wrong version was the one where he was peripheral — a diligent partner who’d drafted a complex licensing clause under commercial pressure, relying on a client’s representations, with no visibility into how the clause might be deployed downstream. A procedural gap. Regrettable. Not culpable. The version where he emerged with minor reputational bruising and an internal memo on conflict-check procedures.
She let him finish.
He had a good voice for it, she would give him that. Thirty years of client-facing work had given him the precise register of a man who had converted genuine agitation into professional warmth so many times the two things had started to sound the same. He spoke clearly. He attributed nothing. He used we for the firm in the parts where he meant I, and I only for the parts where he meant I tried my best, which was the tell she’d been listening for.
She waited until the sentence ended. She did not respond immediately.
The sapphire ring was still on the desk beside the keyboard. She hadn’t put it on yet — it was before eight thirty and no one was going to see her for hours — but she was aware of it in her peripheral vision the way she always was, the particular weight of thirty-year-old silver and deep-water blue. She did not touch it. She didn’t need to.
Gerhard,
she said again, in exactly the same tone,
you drafted the morality clause using the firm’s precedent library. You drafted it for a client with a documented commercial relationship with both board members of the entity that built the short position. You did not perform a conflict check.
A pause on the line. The comfortable silence the professional warmth had been generating dissolved.
That’s—
That’s the file,
she said.
It’s complete. What I’m describing to you isn’t conjecture and it isn’t my interpretation. It is the documented sequence.
She stood up from the banker’s chair and moved to the window. The war room looked north — the second floor, the working floor, the floor between rest and thought — and at this hour Rome was grey and damp and the light through the glass was the colour of old steel. She could see the tops of the stone pines along the adjacent property wall. They were indifferent to everything, as stone pines are.
I understand,
he said. He had stopped talking and started listening. Minute four, more or less. Right on time.
She did not feel satisfaction. She noted the recalibration the way she noted everything in a negotiation — as information, not victory. He was doing the mathematics now. His pension was a number he was running against the other numbers. She knew the outcome. She’d known it before the call started.
What you’ll do,
she said,
is the following. You’ll draft a letter of resignation citing personal reasons, effective Wednesday. You’ll deliver it to the managing partner this afternoon — he plays tennis on Sunday mornings, he’ll be home by eleven. The letter will not contain a counter-narrative, a grievance, or any reference to SportBridge AG or to this conversation. You will not brief colleagues. You will not call anyone at SportBridge. You will not contact the client in Lisbon.
There was a silence long enough that she might have wondered if the line had dropped, except that she could hear him breathing.
Is there—
He stopped. Restarted.
Is there another option?
She considered this question with the attention it deserved, which was not very much.
There is,
she said.
There’s the version where you don’t resign on Wednesday, and I refer the matter to the Consiglio dell’Ordine degli Avvocati, and you spend the next eighteen months in front of a disciplinary panel explaining the conflict check you didn’t perform on a clause that became the legal instrument for a market manipulation scheme. That proceeds to suspension. Possibly expulsion. Certainly civil action from the acquisition parties once the full architecture surfaces, which it will.
She paused.
That option exists. You asked.
Another silence.
Anna—
The letter, Gerhard. This afternoon.
Yes,
he said. And then, after three seconds of a kind she associated with men who’d just understood how comprehensively they’d lost something:
Thank you.
She found this mildly absurd. She always found it mildly absurd, this quality in men who’d been reduced to a simple and inevitable outcome through their own decisions — the reflexive courtesy, the thank youoffered to the person who’d just closed the only door remaining to them. It was not gratitude in any meaningful sense. It was the last piece of professional manner still functioning after everything else had stopped. She was familiar with it from the findom work, the particular register of men discovering the limits of their leverage. Pfeiffer was not her submissive. He was simply a man who had run out of road. The thank you operated identically.
One more thing,
she said.
Yes.
The junior associate who countersigned the Maltese SPV arrangement. His name doesn’t appear anywhere in this conversation.
A beat.
Of course.
Good morning, Gerhard.
She ended the call.
She stood at the window for a moment with the dead espresso. She’d stopped drinking it sometime during his opening statement, which was probably when she’d decided it wasn’t worth the effort of walking back to the machine.
Rome was grey and damp and entirely indifferent to Gerhard Pfeiffer’s career, which she found appropriate. The stone pines did not move. The light did not change. Somewhere below the courtyard wall a motorino was navigating the Sunday streets with the particular confidence of someone who knew the city was empty, and the sound of its engine rose and disappeared and left nothing behind.
She felt no particular satisfaction. This was maintenance. Maintenance was different from victory — slower, colder, with none of victory’s clarity. Victory was a state she reserved for the things she’d built. This was simply the removal of a problem she hadn’t created, from a structure she needed to remain intact. The distinction mattered to her. It had always mattered to her. The people she dealt with who didn’t understand the distinction were the ones who made messes they couldn’t clean.
Pfeiffer had made a mess. He hadn’t understood what he was touching because he hadn’t asked. He’d drafted the clause because SportBridge was a referral source and the language was standard-adjacent and there was a good bottle of something involved, she suspected, at the dinner where the favour was requested. That was the complete architecture of the catastrophe: a dinner, a referral relationship, and the comfortable laziness of a man who believed that understanding the technical dimensions of a document was less important than knowing the person who’d asked for it.
Irreversibly stupid. That was her formulation and she stood by it. Not corrupt. Not conspiratorial. Just catastrophically, structurally unable to ask the second-order question. The kind of stupidity that only people who believe they understand more than they do are capable of, which was the most dangerous kind because it looked, from a distance, like competence.
She put the dead espresso down on the desk.
The Pfeiffer file was already closed. She had nothing further to do with him until the managing partner called her this afternoon to discuss the letter, which he would, because she was the partner who controlled the relationship that Pfeiffer’s departure would disrupt, and the managing partner was a man who preferred discomfort to arrive pre-packaged with a suggested resolution. She would have the resolution ready. She always had the resolution ready.
She opened the laptop.
The SportBridge documentation was in the second drawer — the physical drawer, paper copies, the ones that didn’t exist in any networked system. She’d prepared it Saturday evening, two hours of work after the subtext call with Lasse, the one that hadn’t been about what either of them had said out loud. She’d drafted the communication to her Geneva colleague from memory, nothing written on the villa’s network, three paragraphs that were technically a request for a due diligence consultation on a Geneva-registered sports marketing entity and were, in practice, the mechanism by which SportBridge AG would find its registration becoming very uncomfortable indeed by Monday. Her Geneva colleague was an old friend from Frankfurt law school, a woman who had spent twenty-two years building the kind of institutional relationships in Swiss corporate governance that operated below the level of public record. She was thorough. She was discreet. She would make exactly the right calls to exactly the right people and SportBridge would feel the geometry of the room changing around it without being able to identify the source.
That communication was already sent. She’d sent it at 23:17 last night, from the terrace, with the champagne open.
She typed two words to Lasse.
Done. Yours?
She read it back once. Then she sent it.
The war room in February light had the particular quality of a room that knows its own function without needing to announce it. The fitted shelving ran floor to ceiling on the north and east walls — lever-arch files, colour-coded in a system that she’d developed over six years and that would be incomprehensible to anyone else, which was precisely the point. The mahogany partner’s desk held the laptop, the dead espresso, and the banker’s lamp she’d had rewired three times rather than replace because the shade was a specific shade of pale green she wasn’t willing to lose. On the high shelf above the north window: twenty-six years of black journals she had never reread, their spines smooth and unmarked, an archive of everything she’d decided not to process.
Nothing in this room was for performance. That was the rule. Every other surface in Villa Aurora accommodated some version of the public self — the Barbour jacket on the hall stand, the champagne glasses on the terrace table, the dining room’s orange velvet and gilt mirror with their cheerful announcement of a person who occupied high-end Roman social life with casual authority. Up here, on the working floor, the floor between sleep and thought, there was none of that. The room didn’t soften. It didn’t flatter. It processed situations.
She stood at the window with the second espresso — she’d made it while the call was still ending, muscle memory carrying her through the kitchen and back before the echo of Pfeiffer’s thank you had fully faded — and she looked at Rome in the Sunday morning grey.
The acquisition would close today. Lasse had confirmed the timing last night — six hours to spare, which was the kind of margin that suggested he’d factored in contingencies that hadn’t materialised, which was characteristic. The forty-three articles were offline or flagging as misinformation across the hosting chain. The morality clause’s activation mechanism had been quietly defused — she’d had a word with the firm’s review partner on Saturday morning, a brief and technically precise conversation that would not be traceable to anything she’d done on the case because she was not technically on the case. The abuse report to the Bratislava hosting provider was already generating responses, if the journalist contact had moved the way Lasse expected.
Her end was clean.
She considered this. Not with pleasure exactly — pleasure required distance, and she was still inside the operation’s geometry — but with the specific state she arrived at when the work was complete and the architecture held. A kind of cold, private endorsement of her own execution. Not pride. Something more functional than pride. The recognition that what she’d built had the structural properties she’d designed it to have, and that nothing had failed.
Pfeiffer would resign. SportBridge would feel pressure in Geneva by Monday. The junior associate’s signature on the SPV document would never be located. The firm’s exposure was contained. Anna Haas had touched this deal exactly as much as was useful and exactly as little as was traceable, which was the operational standard she held herself to in everything she did, from the M&A structuring to the Malta accounts to the findom arrangements that funded the half of her life that didn’t appear in any professional filing.
She moved away from the window.
She did not check the Signal chat. Lasse would respond when Lasse responded — he was driving back to Tuscany this morning, or already there, or in the sauna, which was where he went to think without screens. He would tell her when his end was done. She didn’t need to watch for it.
She sat back down at the desk.
She opened the real file — the one she was actually supposed to be working on this week, the cross-border acquisition in Luxembourg that had nothing to do with any of this and whose term sheet was due Tuesday. She read the first clause. Read it again. The language was correct. The structure was standard. It was, in most respects, a perfectly ordinary piece of M&A documentation that would close without incident and generate a billing line that would look entirely unremarkable in her annual profit-share distribution.
She began to annotate.
The espresso was hot this time. The room was very quiet. The stone pines outside the window were still.
At 09:04 her phone lit up.
Still standing. You?
She looked at it. She looked at it for a moment longer than she needed to, the way she sometimes looked at things that were simple and clear and did not require analysis, which was precisely the reason they took longer.
She typed back:
Clean. Both ends.
A pause. Then:
Good.
She put the phone face-down on the desk. She went back to the Luxembourg term sheet. The second clause was also correct.
Outside, Rome was still grey, still indifferent, still damp with the particular wet chill of a February morning that had no interest in being anything other than what it was. The stone pines moved very slightly in a wind she couldn’t feel from the second floor. A church bell rang somewhere to the south — one of the Parioli churches, she thought, though she’d never bothered to determine which one — and its sound rose and crossed the cold air above the terracotta rooftops and dissolved before it reached the window.
She was aware, in the way she sometimes permitted herself to be aware on Sunday mornings before the week restarted, that the exposure window had approximately two and a half hours left. She did not name this awareness to herself. She did not perform a calculation. She simply held the knowledge in the precise corner of her attention where she held all the things she was neither acting on nor releasing — the black journals she hadn’t reread, the Frankfurt law school colleague who’d mattered before she’d understood what mattering cost, the question of whether what she did for a living was compatible with ever not doing it.
She annotated the third clause of the Luxembourg term sheet.
The fourth clause had a structural issue she’d expected. She noted it in red.
The fifth clause was fine.
Chapter 10 — The Drop
Sunday, February 22, 2026 — 05:10–08:53 CET — Lasse’s Farm, Tuscany
The A1 south of Florence is empty at five in the morning. Not quiet — the motorway is never quiet — but empty in the particular way of infrastructure built for ten thousand vehicles currently hosting eleven, most of them freight. Lasse had driven from Milan through darkness and fog and the occasional tunnel that opened briefly onto black hillside before swallowing everything again.
He thinks best in moving vehicles. Anna has theories about why. He has not listened to them.
By the time he reached Siena he had made the decision. He spent the remaining forty minutes deciding not the what but the how, which is the more interesting problem and the one that actually requires a motorway.
The cypress lane crunched under the G-Class just before five thirty. The headlights swept the stone walls of the courtyard and he killed the engine and sat for a moment in the dark with the driver’s door open, breathing Tuscany in February — cold grass, woodsmoke from somewhere on the property, the faint iron smell of the lake two hundred metres below. The security dashboard on his phone showed green across all twelve zones. The estate had been running itself all night. It does not require supervision. This is by design.
He started the sauna before he did anything else.
The converted chicken coop sits between the lake path and the olive grove, and the wood-fired stove inside takes forty minutes to bring the room to temperature. He loaded the firebox by feel — he knows the weight of the wood from this stack, has stacked it himself — and closed the iron door and watched the draw catch through the vent slot. The chimney began to tick as the metal expanded. He left it to work.
Back in the kitchen, the range came on with a low blue roar and he set the Moka pot on the burner and cut bread. The bread was from Thursday’s bake — the sourdough he maintains from a starter that is eleven years old and has never once failed him — and it was dense and slightly tacky at the crust and required a proper knife. He cut three slices and laid them directly on the range surface because the ceiling in this kitchen is the correct height and the table is his and the room smells of smoke and vinegar and dried rosemary and this is the only kitchen he has used since 2019 that does not annoy him in some structural way he cannot fix.
The laptop opened on the kitchen table, still running the clean OS from the Milan sessions. The doping file was in an encrypted container on the separated tablet, which he set down beside the laptop and left closed while he waited for the Moka pot to do its thing.
The espresso, when it came, was over-extracted — the Moka runs hotter when the stove ring is fully open and he’d left it fully open because he was thinking about something else. He drank it standing at the counter looking at the closed tablet, and the espresso was dense and slightly bitter and correct for the hour.
He sat down and opened the tablet.
The file was 34 pages. He had read it twice — once on Saturday evening in the Milan hotel, once on the canal walk, though that second time he had not technically been holding it, just carrying it in his head in the rain. He knew what was in it. He had known since Saturday evening what he was going to do with it. The drive had confirmed the decision. The sauna start and the bread were the transition ritual, the two-minute ceremony between deciding something and doing it.
He opened the secure terminal on the clean machine. Tor, already connected, had been running since he parked. He navigated to a .onion address he had memorised four years ago and never used.
Elisa Brambilla’s dead drop. La Repubblica, Milan bureau.
He knew her from the 2023 cycling doping story. Not personally — she did not know his name and would not, after this. But he had followed the story as it developed, had reverse-engineered, for his own interest, the forensic methodology she had used to authenticate the lab documents her source provided. She had stripped the file before publication — removed all identifying metadata, published the content, described the verification process without specifying it. Her source was not found. Not by the federation, not by the team management, not by two lawyers the team’s insurer subsequently hired. She had done it correctly, which is rarer than it should be.
He packaged the doping file in three operations.
First, he verified the metadata one final time — not because he doubted it, but because a decision that cannot be undone deserves one more look. The PDF’s embedded XMP data showed authorship from Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH’s standard Microsoft 365 tenant, creation timestamp from September 2024, last modified November 2024. The document had passed through no system other than the Helix shared folder before landing on his clean drive. The chain was intact. The file was what it appeared to be: a real document, created by the management company’s own infrastructure, stolen by someone inside that organisation and sold to SportBridge as insurance. Forensically confirmable. He had confirmed it on Saturday evening using ExifTool and a manual check of the PDF’s cross-reference table for injection artefacts. There were none.
Second, he stripped his own fingerprints. The file had been on his clean machine since Saturday — a machine with no internet history, no identifying hardware fingerprints logged anywhere, acquired through a chain of shell transactions he had not used for anything else. He ran a final check on the container’s access logs. Empty, as they should be.
Third, he wrote the provenance note. Three paragraphs. He wrote it in English, then translated it to Italian.
The attached file was recovered during routine analysis of a distributed content infrastructure involved in an AI-generated disinformation campaign targeting professional athletes in connection with the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic Games. The file was found in an unsecured shared directory on a server operated by Helix Narratives s.r.o., Bratislava. It was not manufactured by the infrastructure — it was received and stored there. Its metadata is intact and confirms its origin from the systems of Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH, Munich.
The file was not the subject of the infrastructure analysis. It was found incidentally. That distinction is meaningful.
Source protection is the reason this is arriving this way. You know how to verify it. You have done it before.
He read it back twice. It said what it needed to say. It said nothing else.
The dead drop ran on SecureDrop — a Tor onion service on La Repubblica’s own infrastructure, the private key on an air-gapped machine in the Milan newsroom. What he submitted would arrive encrypted with Brambilla’s public key, meaning only her air-gapped viewing station could decrypt it. His submission generated a randomised code name in the system — he noted it and immediately discarded it. He would not be checking for a reply. The submission was a one-way door.
He uploaded the file and the provenance note together in a single encrypted container.
The progress bar ran for four seconds.
Receipt confirmed: 08:53:17 CET.
He closed the terminal.
The first piece of toast was cold. He ate it anyway. The second was still warm on the range surface and he ate that standing, looking out through the kitchen window at the olive grove, which was becoming visible now as the sky behind it shifted from black to the particular bruised grey of a Tuscan February morning — not light yet, not dark anymore, the hills resolving out of nothing in slow increments.
He was not thinking about the file. He was thinking about the bread, which was good, and the espresso, which had been too bitter, and the fact that the sauna would be ready in ten minutes.
This was not a performance. He had not decided to not think about it as an act of discipline. He simply had no interest in turning it over and over until it meant something different from what it meant. He had found a file. The file was real. The file showed a cover-up that had continued for over a year, involving three named officials in a sport that ran mandatory testing specifically to prevent this. Brambilla would verify it — she was fourteen months on the cycling story, she did not publish until verification was complete — and then she would publish, and the story would be about the protocol and the cover-up and the officials who knew. Not about a Bratislava server. Not about a weekend in Milan. Not about Lasse Hansen, who did not exist in this story in any form a regulator, a lawyer, or a federation official could reach.
The decision was not sentimental. He had not sent the file because he believed in justice, which is an abstraction with a terrible implementation record. He had sent it because the file was real and the people whose names were in it were real and the athlete was real and the story was true and he had the address and the capability and, frankly, leaving a forensically intact doping protocol sitting in an encrypted container on a clean machine he would wipe on Monday was an absurd waste of a very clear situation.
Also — and he would never say this out loud, and had barely admitted it to himself while driving south on the A1 — the cover-up had been enabled by the same category of infrastructure hygiene failure that had enabled the entire Matryoshka operation. An unlocked shared folder. A file someone had emailed without stripping its metadata. The same carelessness, different context, different magnitude of consequence for the people who couldn’t advocate for themselves inside a system that preferred them silent.
He had seen that category of thing before. Three times if he was being honest. He had not enjoyed it any of those times either.
He lit a cigarette at the kitchen door — propped it open two centimetres against the cold, letting the smoke out and the morning in — and texted Anna on Signal.
Done. File sent. Brambilla’s drop. Untraceable.
A pause. He watched the olive trees become more olive-grey as the sky continued its slow negotiation with the horizon.
Her reply came forty seconds later.
Pfeiffer’s done. You know what you just did.
He considered this.
Yes.
Good, she sent. Then, after twelve seconds: Clean machine?
Obviously.
No reply required from her.
That’s the point.
Another pause, longer this time. He smoked.
Does Albrecht know?
No.
Will he find out?
When she publishes. Three, four weeks. The acquisition closes today. He won’t be able to connect it.
He’ll try.
He won’t find anything.
A longer pause. He knew what she was doing — the same thing she always did when she’d reached the end of a calculation and the answer came out somewhere outside what she’d formally approved. She was sitting with it. He had learned not to fill that silence with words, which is the kind of thing you learn about a person after a long time.
Alright, she sent finally. Call schedule for Albrecht?
Ten thirty. War room.
I’ll be on standby.
He closed Signal and finished the cigarette and went to check the sauna.
The path to the sauna takes three minutes at normal pace. He walked it in two forty, through the olive grove where the trees were old and low and the ground under them was the particular combination of dead grass and clay that February produces when there has been no real frost but no real warmth either. The estate security pinged his watch once — a thermal signature in the southern grove, classified wildlife within four seconds. He didn’t look up. The wild boar that ran this property treated his olive trees with a specific contempt he had been managing for two years and would probably manage for another ten. Some problems resolve themselves. Some problems you learn to work around. He had learned not to confuse the two categories.
The sauna was ready. The stones were dark and the air inside was dry and sharp and smelled of scorched birch wood, and the temperature on the simple wooden gauge read ninety-three degrees Celsius, which is the correct temperature.
He undressed on the small porch and went in and sat on the upper bench and let the heat do what heat does — strip the accumulated operational residue of sixty-odd hours in hotel rooms and car seats and a kitchen table at dawn — and stared at the pine boards of the opposite wall and thought about precisely nothing useful for twenty minutes, which is the duration.
He did not smile. The thing he does instead of smiling ran through him once, briefly, like a current finding ground.
The file was sent. Brambilla would verify it. The story would run in three weeks, or four, and the athlete’s management company and the three officials who had known and stayed silent would encounter a very specific kind of morning, the kind that begins with a phone call from a lawyer and does not improve. Marta Voss would learn simultaneously what had been on her server and what had been done with it, which was not a comfortable combination of discoveries but was a more honest version of events than the alternative, which was no one ever finding out.
Albrecht would get his acquisition. He would get it clean, with six hours to spare, which is what he had paid €2.1 million for — a fact that would remain true and useful and completely unconnected, in any traceable sense, to anything else that happened this weekend. He would be very satisfied until he wasn’t. That was scheduled for approximately three weeks from now, when a story appeared in La Repubblica that he would read with the specific confusion of a man encountering consequences for decisions he believed he had outsourced.
Lasse found this thought privately, specifically funny in the way of things that are correctly structured. He did not require anyone else to find it funny. That was fine.
At minute eighteen he poured a ladle of water on the stones. The hiss was sharp and brief and the temperature spiked and he sat through it, back against the pine wall, the heat closing over him like a very organised problem with a known solution.
Outside, across the olive grove and down through the grey Tuscan hills, the world was assembling itself for a Sunday morning. The acquisition would close. A journalist in Milan would log in to her newsroom’s SecureDrop system in the next few days, work through the queue, and find a container from a source she didn’t recognise. She would take it to her air-gapped viewing station and decrypt it and read three paragraphs and then 34 pages and she would recognise the genre immediately — she had published this genre before. She would begin verifying, quietly, with the patience of a person who has done this and knows that being right matters more than being first.
Somewhere in Bratislava, Tomáš Vrábel had already received the automated abuse notification from his hosting provider. He would read it over his morning coffee, and the next few days would be instructive.
In Rome, Gerhard Pfeiffer was drafting a letter citing personal reasons.
In Geneva, something was becoming uncomfortable at a speed proportional to how many people Anna had called before he’d finished the bread.
Lasse sat in the heat for two more minutes. Then he pushed out through the sauna door into the cold February air, which hit him with the specific clarity of a problem that has been solved and is now simply over.
He walked back through the olive grove without hurrying. The war room light was on upstairs. The Albrecht call was at ten thirty. He had time for another espresso and enough time to make it correctly.
He went inside.
Chapter 11 — Albrecht, Sunday
Sunday, February 22, 2026 — 10:30 CET — Lasse’s farm, war room, Tuscany
The war room was still lit from the night. He hadn’t turned it off when he came back from the sauna. He hadn’t turned it off when he ate. He’d been in and out of the room three times since 08:53 — once to pull a verification hash on the file he’d sent Brambilla, once for no real reason except that the monitors were on and the habit was strong — and each time he’d left the light burning because turning it off felt like a statement he hadn’t decided to make yet.
Ten-twenty-eight. He was in the chair.
The monitors showed what they always showed at rest: the security dashboard on the left, the estate’s topographical layout with its thermal curtains and sensor mesh mapped in quiet green, one drone in its docking cradle on the granary roof, another running a lazy perimeter sweep over the south olive groves. On the right monitor, a Signal thread he hadn’t yet closed. Anna’s last message at 08:07: Done. Yours? He’d replied with a single character — y — and left it there because that was the complete answer and everything else would be performance.
Outside, the hills were the colour of wet slate. February in Tuscany. He’d been here three winters and they were all like this — grey and cold and flat-lit, the olive trees stripped to silver wire, the lake below the orchard looking like a piece of old iron dropped into the landscape. He’d come to love it specifically because it looked like nothing anyone would come here for. No one came here for February. That was the point.
His phone lit up at 10:29:47.
Albrecht, calling.
He let it ring twice. Not because he was busy. Because two rings was the correct tempo for a Sunday morning call from someone who thought they were checking in on a contractor and were about to discover the contractor was closing out.
He picked up.
Lasse.
The voice was warm. Boardroom warm — the specific register of a man who has been practising sounding at ease for so long he no longer notices he’s doing it.
Good morning. I hope Sunday’s treating you well.
It was treating him fine. He’d had three hours in the sauna, two pieces of toast from the bread he’d baked himself Thursday, and he’d sent a 34-page doping file to a journalist at La Repubblica before nine in the morning. As Sundays went, it ranked.
It’s fine,
Lasse said.
Let’s run it.
A brief pause — Albrecht recalibrating from the social opening he’d prepared. He moved on. Smooth. The man was professionally smooth, which Lasse respected the way he respected good machine calibration: neutrally, and without warmth.
Of course. I’ve been watching the situation overnight. The articles — the hosting is coming down, yes? I saw several retracted already this morning.
The hosting provider received the abuse report Friday evening,
Lasse said.
Referenced specific article URLs, AI voice fingerprint analysis, sourced against the Clemson prosodic modelling research. They acted within the SLA — eighteen hours. The remaining nodes will clear in the next four.
And the—
Albrecht paused, searching for the word, which meant he wanted to sayoriginatorand had decided that was too direct.
—the firm behind it. Helix.
Helix Narratives s.r.o., Bratislava. Tomáš Vrábel, director. The abuse report is on file with the Slovak CERT and a copy went — anonymously — to a journalist who covers influence operations for Der Spiegel. She’ll verify and publish. When that runs, the hosting relationship is dead, the operating model is dead, and the regulator’s attention is established. The trail is clean and documented and terminates correctly.
He said terminates correctly the way you’d say correctly lubricatedabout a mechanical component: accurate, impersonal, meaning exactly what it meant and nothing else.
Silence on the line. Not an uncomfortable silence. Albrecht was processing, which meant he was satisfied. His kind of silence was faster than his kind of speech.
Excellent,
Albrecht said.
And the morality clause situation — I spoke briefly with our legal team this morning. They’re telling me the trigger review was withdrawn.
The partner responsible for the activation review will not be pursuing it.
I see.
A beat.
Was that—
He stopped again.
It’s handled,
Lasse said. He didn’t explain the mechanism. There was no version ofAnna had a nine-minute conversation with a man on a golf coursethat he was going to offer to a client.
Well.
Albrecht’s tone shifted into the register Lasse thought of asclosing the loop— the particular warmth of a man about to affirm he has received what he paid for.
This is exceptional work. Genuinely. The timeline you delivered — we’re sitting with six hours of runway on the Sunday noon deadline, and the reputational exposure window is clear. I want you to know the board will be informed that—
The invoice will come from a Singapore entity,
Lasse said.
The entity name is on the call sheet you received from the introductory document. Payment terms are forty-eight hours in cryptocurrency — the wallet address and denomination breakdown are attached. If the payment isn’t confirmed by Tuesday noon, the documentation package gets a second copy sent to a different address.
He said this the way he always said it. Not as a threat. As a fact, the same way gravity was a fact.
The scope of the second copy is not specified in the terms. Neither of us wants to define it.
The warmth in Albrecht’s voice didn’t evaporate — it didn’t have time. Something tightened, briefly, in the quality of his breathing. Then:
Understood. Tuesday noon.
Good.
Another beat. Albrecht, to his credit, knew when the negotiation was over. He’d made CFO by knowing when to stop adding sentences.
I’ll let you enjoy the rest of your Sunday, then.
You do that,
Lasse said, which was technically a pleasantry and functionally a termination signal.
The call ended at 10:34.
He set the phone face-down on the desk. Picked it back up, turned it over, set it face-down again. This was not a nervous habit. He did not have nervous habits. It was just that the desk surface was cold and the phone was marginally warmer and he was thinking, and when he was thinking his hands found something to do that wasn’t type.
Four minutes and twelve seconds. That was how long a Sunday morning debrief with a €2.1 million client took when the job was clean and both parties wanted it concluded efficiently. He’d spent longer deciding which bread to bake Thursday.
He opened the laptop. On the Reuters feed, a small item: the Milano-Cortina Winter Games closing ceremony had begun at ten o’clock. The Olympic torch at the main stadium was extinguishing itself in front of forty thousand people as the Games formally wound down and the €1.4 billion acquisition closed quietly in a lawyer’s system somewhere, at roughly the same moment, with considerably less ceremony. The coincidence was not something he was going to examine too closely. The structure was what it was.
The thing was — and this was the thing he was sitting with, not because it troubled him but because he was constitutionally incapable of not examining the structure of things — Albrecht had called this exceptional work. He probably believed that. He’d hired someone to neutralise a disinformation campaign and the disinformation campaign was neutralised, the morality clause was dead in the water, the acquisition would close by noon, and the deliverables had arrived with time to spare. From where Konrad Albrecht sat in his Seefeld house with his younger daughter presumably making noise somewhere and his second wife making coffee he hadn’t earned, the transaction was complete.
What Albrecht did not know was that the transaction had contained, inside it, a second transaction that had nothing to do with him and had been completed before his call.
The doping file. Sent at 08:53, Brambilla’s dead drop, clean machine, untraceable provenance. Thirty-four pages of lab results and substitution schedules and three names of officials who had known, originated from Marta Voss Sport Management GmbH’s own server, metadata intact and forensically confirmable. The kind of document that, when it reaches a journalist with the right combination of patience and institutional courage and prior track record with source protection, becomes a story in approximately three weeks.
Albrecht’s acquisition would close today. The morality clause was moot. The athlete’s sponsorship deal would survive the weekend intact. And then in roughly twenty-one days — give or take how long Brambilla took to verify the file and run the legal checks and place the story — there would be a La Repubblica story about a doping protocol that would land in the middle of Meridian Outdoors AG’s shiny new acquisition like a stone through a greenhouse window.
The athlete whose sponsorship was the acquisition’s main morality-clause exposure was going to become a very different kind of story. Not the fabricated one — that was dead. The true one. The one that had been sitting in a server in Munich because someone inside Marta Voss’s firm thought SportBridge AG was a better employer.
Albrecht had hired Lasse to bury the mess. That was what clients like Albrecht assumed they were buying — the burial, not just the neutralisation. They believed that paying enough, and paying in crypto, and routing the invoice through a Maltese SPV signed by a junior associate who would never remember what he signed, meant that whatever got found also got managed. Contained. Disposed of quietly in line with the brief.
The brief had not mentioned the doping file. Because Albrecht hadn’t known about the doping file. Because Albrecht had done what CFOs did — asked the question he understood and assumed the answer would fit inside it.
Who benefits if the deal collapses? Albrecht’s answer had been competitors. That was the surface. The surface was SportBridge AG’s short position, the cap table, the morality clause as a legal detonator. The surface was what Lasse had been paid to address.
The 34-page file was underneath the surface. It had nothing to do with the deal. It had everything to do with the athlete, and the officials, and the protocol they’d run, and the management company that had somehow either allowed or not noticed that its most sensitive documents were sitting in a shared folder a contractor from Geneva could access. The file wasn’t the job. It was just what happened to be in the same building as the job, unlocked.
He hadn’t manufactured it. He hadn’t stolen it. He’d found it because Vrábel had left a door open — operationally sloppy in a way that was almost touching, like a man who builds a very good safe and forgets to close it — and it had been sitting there in a state of forensic perfection, waiting for someone with the right equipment and the wrong sense of obligation to walk past.
He’d closed the tab on Saturday morning and continued mapping the node structure. He’d opened it again at 19:07 and read all 34 pages. He’d walked twenty-two minutes in the rain on the Milan canal and decided. He’d sent it at 08:53 Sunday. That was the complete sequence and it had the kind of internal logic he recognised as irreversible, which meant he wasn’t going to turn it over looking for the point at which a different decision would have been available, because there wasn’t one.
Not for him.
The war room was quiet. The estate’s ambient sounds came through the thick stone walls in the specific muffled way of old construction — the low rushing of wind in the olives, a dove somewhere on the roof tiles, nothing close. The security dashboard showed the southern drone completing its sweep arc and returning to perimeter station. Green all around. The lake, flat and dark in the cold.
He was not what most people would describe as a moral actor. He operated in jurisdictions that didn’t exist on maps, invoiced through Singapore entities, had spent years building a financial architecture of shell corporations specifically designed to keep him untouchable, and had — at various points in his career — done things for states and against states and between states that no one with a bar association number would have sanctioned. He was entirely comfortable with this. The bar association could manage its own problems.
But the doping file was a different category of thing. The 43 articles were manufactured — built to deceive, commissioned for profit, deployed against a person who hadn’t done what the articles said. Fabricated disinformation was a commercial weapon and Lasse had spent the better part of a weekend systematically dismantling its infrastructure, documenting the dismantling in a way useful to regulators, and pointing the forensic trail precisely where it belonged. That was the job. He was good at it.
The doping file wasn’t manufactured. That was the distinction.
Three officials who had known. Lab results. Substitution schedules. A cover protocol that had run — if the document’s dates were accurate, and the metadata suggested they were — across two competitive seasons. None of that was SportBridge’s fabrication. SportBridge had merely found it, purchased it from someone inside Marta Voss’s firm, and filed it as Phase 2 — supplementary leverage in a different font on page 38 of an operational brief.
He’d found that addendum at roughly 19:00 on Saturday. He’d read the 34 pages by 19:40. He’d walked the canal for twenty-two minutes not because he was conflicted about it — he wasn’t, or not in the way that word usually meant — but because a decision of that category required the specific quality of attention that screens and four walls didn’t provide. He needed cold air and the absence of anything that required a response.
He’d come back. He’d opened Signal and told Anna there’s a file. She’d said I know in the particular tone that meant she’d already worked it out and was waiting for him to confirm rather than ask. He’d gone to bed at midnight and slept without difficulty because he wasn’t the kind of person who lay awake re-examining things that were already decided.
The file was with Brambilla. The file was forensically intact and the provenance note was accurate and she was the right person to receive it — patient, protected, institutionally courageous, with a dead drop address she’d published from before. She’d verify it. She’d publish it. It would land in three weeks, by which point the acquisition would be closed and the morality clause would be a historical footnote and Albrecht’s deal would be complete and Albrecht himself would be entirely unable to connect what was about to happen to anything he’d commissioned.
That, specifically, was the thing he found privately amusing.
Albrecht had paid €2.1 million to make a problem disappear. The problem had disappeared. He’d received exactly what he’d paid for. And in three weeks he was going to receive a second problem — a considerably more expensive and unmanageable one — that Lasse had arranged on his behalf without being asked, without being paid, and in a manner that was entirely untraceable back to the operation or the Singapore consulting invoice or the Maltese SPV or the junior associate who would never remember what he signed.
Albrecht would never know. He would read Brambilla’s story in La Repubblica and think about whether he’d seen the athlete at the closing dinner — probably yes, there’d been some hospitality event, there always was — and then he’d call his lawyers and his lawyers would call the athlete’s lawyers and the whole expensive machinery of damage management would grind into motion and at no point, in any version of that sequence, would Konrad Albrecht think of a man in jogging pants working from the floor of a Milan hotel suite.
That was as it should be.
He got up from the chair. Stretched — properly, not the performative stretch of someone who expects to be observed, but the long, deliberate decompression of a man who’d been sitting since nine and whose body had opinions about this. The monitors idled. The stone floor was cold through his socks.
He walked to the window.
The hills were still grey. The olive trees still silver-bare. The lake below the orchard was catching a strip of watery February light off the underside of the cloud cover, just enough to distinguish water from land. From this window you couldn’t see the sauna — it was around the back of the granary, beside the old chicken-coop structure, tucked against the stone wall where the property dipped toward the stream — but he knew it was still warm in there. He’d stoked it before sunrise and the stones held heat for hours.
Somewhere out past the southern perimeter, the thermal sensors had flagged something twenty minutes ago. He’d checked it on the dashboard — the movement signature was the right weight and the wrong shape for a person. Wild boar. There was a small sounder moving through the lower olive grove, probably pushing south toward the stream. He’d noticed them before, a particular group that worked a circuit between the lower terraces and the woodland below the lake. They had no interest in him and he had no interest in them and that was a perfectly functioning relationship.
He went back to the desk. Opened the Signal thread with Anna. The ywas still there, unanswered. She was doing her own version of the morning — Rome would be grey today too, he suspected, the Pinciano garden wet under overcast sky, the terrace cold enough to make smoking on it a statement of intent rather than comfort. She had her own debrief to run: Pfeiffer’s resignation to formalise, the Geneva colleague to confirm, whatever mechanism she was using to make SportBridge’s registration uncomfortable. She didn’t report to him. She worked in parallel and she was better at the legal dismantling than he was and they both knew this and neither of them said so, which was the correct arrangement.
He typed: Albrecht done. Invoice out. 48 hours.
Sent it. Closed the thread.
He needed coffee. Real coffee, the kind the machine in the kitchen made properly — not the hotel minibar cola he’d been running on for two days in Milan, which had been fine for the hotel and was not fine for the farm. The kitchen was downstairs, past the library landing, past the stone staircase with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, into the room that smelled of smoke and vinegar and dried herbs and the particular warmth of a range that had been on all morning.
He’d make coffee. He’d eat something. He’d probably sit at the kitchen table for a while and not look at a screen, which was the closest thing he had to a recovery protocol.
The war room light was still on.
He walked out. Left it on. He’d turn it off when he came back up — there was still the node map to sanitation, still the clean machine to wipe, still the documentation to finalise before the Tuesday payment cleared and the file was archived in the structure he’d built for exactly this kind of job. The kind that looked straightforward from the outside and was considerably more complicated underneath and had a long tail that would land somewhere else, on someone else’s desk, in approximately three weeks.
He went downstairs.
The kitchen was warm. The range had been on since before the sauna. He’d left a pot of water on — not quite boiling, the residual heat of the morning — and the bread from Thursday was still in the cloth on the counter, half a loaf, which was enough. He got the coffee going. Stood at the window over the inner courtyard while it ran.
The courtyard was empty and wet and grey and entirely his. No cars. No one here. The gravel, dark with overnight moisture, led past the limonaia to the granary where the G-Class sat in its correct condition — scratched, dusty, mechanically perfect — and beyond that to the cypress avenue and the gate with its plate recognition and the road and the wider world, which had no idea where this place was and which he had spent considerable effort and engineering keeping that way.
The coffee was done. He poured it. Stood at the counter with it and drank the first half in silence.
Outside, the boar were moving through the olive grove. He could hear them — not from here, the kitchen windows faced the wrong direction — but he knew the sound from the security dashboard’s ambient data, the seismic signature of something heavy and low moving through wet ground at the pace of an animal that owned the field it was crossing. A distant commotion about something small that would resolve itself. They always resolved themselves.
He finished the coffee. Made a second. Cut a piece of bread from Thursday’s loaf.
At 10:41, the Matryoshka infrastructure’s last active node in Romania went offline. He knew this without checking because the hosting provider had given him the SLA timeline and he’d done the arithmetic. The 43 articles were gone. The CDN exits in the Netherlands and Romania were dark. The Bratislava primary was already cold. Forty-three fabricated pieces of content, each with the same prosodic fingerprint in its AI-generated audio, each pointing backward through the same layered hosting architecture to the same unlocked shared folder on the same sloppy contractor’s server — all of it gone, or going, or shortly to be gone in the final sense of a thing that a regulator had been pointed at.
Not buried. Documented, and pointed, and then let go.
That was his job. He was good at it. He’d been good at it long before it was his job.
He stood at the kitchen counter and ate the bread and drank the second coffee and did not open a screen. The war room light was still on upstairs. The boar were still moving in the olive grove. The lake below was still flat and dark and cold.
The exposure window closed at noon.
He knew when it closed.
Chapter 12 — The Perimeter
Sunday, February 22, 2026 — 11:45 CET — Lasse’s Farm, Southern Property Boundary
The wild boar had moved on. Whatever had disturbed them in the olive grove an hour ago — a falling branch, a fox working the lower terraces, a problem that solved itself — had been resolved in the way small Tuscan problems resolve themselves, which is loudly and briefly and without any need for human involvement.
Lasse was walking the southern perimeter in the kind of grey February light that is not quite fog and not quite cloud and entirely indifferent to the distinction. His Barbour jacket — the old one, waxed to the point where the original colour was a matter of archaeology — was doing its job. Thermal base layer underneath. Black jogging pants. No phone in his hand. The security dashboard on the upstairs monitor would handle the property. He had been handling other things since five in the morning.
Fifteen minutes to noon. He noted this without particular feeling, the same way he noted the temperature — somewhere around four degrees, coming down — and the state of the olive trees on the eastern slope, and the fact that the sauna had been off for two hours and he hadn’t gone back in, which meant the decision he’d made at six fifty-three was staying made.
That was fine. He had no plans to unmake it.
The call from Anna came at 11:47, which was approximately when he expected it.
He answered on the second vibration. His pace didn’t change.
The job’s clean,
he said. No preamble.
On my end, yes.
A pause on the Rome end — the terrace, he thought. He could hear the wind. Roman winter wind has a specific quality, thinner than Tuscan wind, more urban, slightly metallic from the rooftops.
Pfeiffer’s letter went this morning. Personal reasons. No counter-narrative.
Did he argue?
He tried. I gave him the bar complaints committee as an alternative. He chose not to argue.
Naturally.
Naturally.
He heard the ghost of her lighter.
The Geneva colleague I trust is handling the SportBridge registration issue this week. Quiet. Regulatory. Nothing that points back.
Good.
Brambilla has the file.
He said it flat. Not a question, not a confession. Just a fact he was putting on the table between them.
The pause that followed was the recalibrating kind — not the calculating kind, which runs faster, but the other one, the one where she is adjusting the map to account for something that wasn’t on it thirty seconds ago. He had seen her do this in person once, during an argument about a Maltese SPV structure. The ring would be turning right now.
That is going to cause problems,
she said,
for several people.
Several someones. None of them our client.
He doesn’t know yet.
No.
He’ll know in three weeks. Four at the outside. Brambilla doesn’t sit on forensically confirmed material.
I know.
Another pause. He had reached the southern boundary fence — dry-stone wall, original construction, beautifully pointless against anything more determined than a curious deer, which was the only threat it was ever meant to address. He stopped. Looked out at the hills beyond the property line. Grey terraced fields, olive-silver in the flat light, a farmhouse on the far ridge with smoke coming from the chimney. Someone else’s Sunday morning. Entirely uninvolved.
Are you comfortable with that distinction,
Anna said,
between the client’s problem and not your problem?
Comfortable isn’t the word.
No.
Her voice was thoughtful rather than pointed. Not a trap. A genuine question, which from Anna was rarer than a correct legal filing from a junior associate.
What is the word?
He thought about this for a moment. The wind moved through the olive branches along the boundary. A single jackdaw crossed the pale sky and did not come back.
Satisfactory,
he said.
The word is satisfactory.
A beat. Then:
That’s a terrible word.
Yes.
It’s also not wrong.
No.
He heard her exhale — not quite a laugh, the other thing, the sound she made when she had arrived at a conclusion she had been resisting but couldn’t argue with any further. He had known her long enough to read it without seeing her face.
The ring would have stopped turning. What replaced it would be considerably colder and considerably more settled.
Albrecht called at ten thirty,
he said.
I assumed. How was his mood?
Good. I disliked it.
Mm.
I told him the invoice would follow from a Singapore entity. Forty-eight hours in crypto or the documentation package finds a second address.
Did his tone shift?
Slightly.
Good. He needed something to worry about that isn’t the deal.
Lasse reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette. The Zippo was in his left hand by the time the thought had finished forming — twelve years of identical muscle memory, no interruption required. He lit it facing away from the wind, cupped hand, first draw producing the particular flavour of cold air and tobacco that is the specific correct taste for a Tuscan hillside in February at eleven forty-nine in the morning with six hundred and seventeen hours of accumulated work somewhere behind you.
The node map is delivered,
he said.“The Helix abuse report is filed. Three copies, three different routes. TheDer Spiegelcontact has the infrastructure documentation. The morality clause review is neutralised through your end.”
Confirmed.
The articles are coming down. The hosting provider in Bratislava received the abuse notice at seven forty-two this morning. They’ll have the primary nodes deregistered by this afternoon.
Which means the campaign is functionally dead.
The campaign has been functionally dead since Saturday afternoon when the CDN mirrors stopped receiving updates. Bratislava was maintenance. A formality.
You like formalities.
I like finished things.
There was a silence after that. The particular silence that lives between two people who have been working the same problem from opposite ends for the better part of a weekend and have run out of problem. Not uncomfortable. Not exactly comfortable. The silence of a thing that has been completed and not yet been given a name.
He took another draw on the cigarette. Down the slope toward the lake, the water was flat and dark and contained some personal sky he couldn’t see from where he was standing. In summer the lake was a different animal. Now it just sat there being cold and holding the reflection of everything above it without comment.
Eleven fifty-eight.
The window’s closed,
Anna said.
Not a question. Not really a statement. The announcement of a fact that had been present in the room for two days and was now, simply, no longer hypothetical.
I know when it closed.
I know you know.
Then why—
Because I wanted to say it out loud.
A brief pause.
Once.
He didn’t answer this directly. There wasn’t a direct answer that wouldn’t be wrong in some way that neither of them would find interesting. The window closing meant what it meant. The market play — the one neither of them had confirmed, the one that existed in the space between two people who understood the same set of facts and had said nothing about them out loud for two days — was either already resolved or was not. No record existed. No record would exist. This was also a finished thing.
Good,
he said.
Which meant nothing. Or meant everything, depending on which version of the previous two days you had been listening to.
Yes,
she said.
Good.
He heard her lighter again. On the Rome terrace, eleven fifty-eight on a grey Sunday in February, Anna Haas was smoking on the panoramic terrace of Villa Aurora and looking out over the terracotta rooftops of Parioli toward wherever the city eventually became sky. He knew this the same way he knew the rest of her tells — not from surveillance, but from accumulation. Years of knowing what the particular quality of silence on a terrace sounded like versus the silence of a war room. The wind was different.
Brambilla will protect the source,
he said. Not reassurance — information.
I know she will. That’s why you used her.
Yes.
And Marta Voss?
Doesn’t know her server was touched. She’ll find out when the piece runs. That’s between her and whoever on her staff sold the file to SportBridge.
Which is not our problem.
Which,
he said,
is not our problem.
A beat. Then:
You could have buried it. Albrecht would have preferred it. Probably would have paid extra for it.
Probably.
But you didn’t.
No.
Because the file was real.
He took a last draw on the cigarette. The cherry was almost at his fingers, the cold having slowed the burn. He dropped it on the stone wall, pressed it out with his thumb — force of habit, three hundred meters from anything that could catch fire, but the habit predated this property by twenty years and had no interest in updating itself.
Because the file was real,
he confirmed.
And because someone inside Marta Voss’s operation sold it to a market manipulation scheme while an athlete’s career was being used as a detonator.
That’s quite moral of you.
It’s quite practical of me. The file existed. It was going to land somewhere. Better Brambilla than whoever SportBridge’s next buyer would have been.
Is that what you’re telling yourself.
He looked out at the grey hills.
Scheiße, Anna.
She laughed. The real one — the loud, unrestrained guffaw that surprised people every time, the one that had nothing to do with the composed attorney and everything to do with the person who had been awake since Friday watching stock tickers while the Olympic closing ceremony finished. It lasted about four seconds and then she was composed again and there was a new kind of silence.
Fair,
she said.
They stayed on the line for another ninety seconds after that. No agenda. No deliverables. Just the specific weight of two people who had been working in parallel for the better part of a weekend and were now separately standing in their respective geographies doing nothing in particular but not yet ready to be done.
He could hear Rome on her end — very faintly, from far enough below the terrace to be impressionistic rather than specific. Church bells, maybe. The distant suggestion of traffic. A city that had been operating continuously since before currency existed and had zero interest in anything that had happened this weekend.
She could hear, on his end, whatever Tuscany offered. Which was not much. Wind. The occasional sound of a property that was alive in the way large properties are alive — a gate settling, the far-off movement of the custodi doing something agricultural and irrelevant at the outer edge of the estate. Silence underneath all of it, genuine silence of the kind that requires a thousand hectares of Italian countryside and a gate with licence-plate recognition to produce.
At 11:59, she spoke.
“The documentation you built — the node map, the abuse reports, theSpiegel package. That’s a clean attribution trail all the way to Helix Narratives.”
Yes.
Which is also true.
Every verifiable fact in that package is accurate.
And what it doesn’t include—
—is also accurate. In that it doesn’t exist.
Right.
A pause.
You’re quite good at this.
So are you.
I know.
The absence of false modesty between them was one of the more functional things about their working relationship. Neither of them had ever pretended to be worse at their respective disciplines than they were. It saved time. It also meant that when either of them said good jobthey were not offering reassurance but rendering a professional assessment, which was more useful and landed differently.
The ring would not be turning now. The Cartier bracelet would be very still on her wrist. The champagne would be open — the bottle from Friday night finally dispensed with, the weekend given permission to end.
At noon exactly, he started walking back toward the farm.
Long strides, military pace, the way he always moved across this property — not hurrying, but covering ground efficiently, as though the distance between any two points was a problem to be solved rather than endured. The gravel track along the upper olive grove, then the turning that took him past the vegetable garden with its symmetrical raised beds dormant in February, the pergola bare above the stone pillars, roses reduced to dark angular stalks. The sauna chimney was cold now, no steam. He’d go back in tomorrow.
The war room light was on upstairs. He could see it through the arched window on the upper floor when he crossed the courtyard — the brick-loft cyber office, the arc of monitors, the topographical security dashboard on the far screen showing the estate as a grid of green icons. Nothing red. Nothing worth noticing. The geophone sensors registered him coming back across the gravel as a known mass-and-gait pattern and filed no alert. The system had known him since he’d had it installed. It was used to him walking the perimeter in the cold.
He stopped in the courtyard.
The job was done. The node map was delivered. The Helix Narratives trail was documented, filed, and pointed in exactly one direction. The morality clause had been neutralised through a partner resignation that would cite personal reasons and never explain them. SportBridge AG would become very uncomfortable in Geneva within the week and would quietly wind itself down within ninety days in the way organisations whose boards contain names from the wrong cap table always do — not with a bang, not with an arrest, just with a set of filings and a gradual silence and the kind of institutional disappearance that leaves no crater. Konrad Albrecht would receive an invoice from a Singapore entity within forty-eight hours and would pay it, because the alternative Lasse had described was not a negotiating position but a fact.
And Elisa Brambilla had a 34-page doping protocol file on a forensically clean dead drop, with a three-paragraph provenance note that was true in every particular and untraceable in every other.
In three weeks, possibly four, Marta Voss would learn something about her own server that she had not known before. That would be between her and whoever on her staff had decided €180,000 was worth what it cost. Albrecht would learn something about an athlete’s sponsorship contract that would make his very clean deal suddenly complicated in ways he hadn’t paid Lasse to prevent. The morality clause would be moot by then — the acquisition would have closed, the valuation would have settled, the €1.4 billion would have moved. But the story would exist. Brambilla’s byline would exist. And Albrecht would have a problem that arrived six weeks after he’d stopped looking for problems.
Lasse found this structurally correct.
He did not smile about it. He stood in the courtyard in the grey February light with his hands in his pockets for approximately ten seconds, which for him was a significant amount of time to spend not doing anything.
Then he went inside.
The kitchen was warm. The range had been running since he’d started the sauna at five thirty and the stone walls had finally caught up to it — the particular heat of a farmhouse kitchen in winter is different from any other heat, slower to arrive and more insistent once present, stored in the walls rather than circulating through the air. The copper pots on the beam hooks had a fine condensation on them. The larder door was slightly ajar from the morning and the faint smell of preserved tomatoes and dried thyme drifted out. He didn’t close it.
He filled the Moka pot from the tap. Cold mountain water, the same source that fed the lake below, slightly mineral, correct for espresso and nothing else. He set it on the range.
The laptop on the kitchen table was closed. He had closed it at 08:53 when the send completed, and had not opened it since, and had no intention of opening it for the remainder of the day. The war room upstairs could run its own diagnostics. The security dashboard would ping him if anything required a decision. Nothing would require a decision.
He stood at the range while the Moka heated.
The thing he did not spend time doing was looking at the laptop. Or re-examining the morning’s decisions. Or turning the doping file over in his head to find the angle where it looked different. It was sent. It was real. It had been real before he found it and would continue to be real after Brambilla published it and would continue to be real whether or not Lasse Hansen had done anything with the information at all, which meant the only operative question had been whether the information ended up somewhere that could use it or somewhere it could be used against someone without public accountability.
He had answered that question at 08:53. He was not interested in answering it a second time.
The Moka began to hiss. He poured the espresso into the small ceramic cup that had a chip on the handle from when he’d dropped it on the stone floor in November and which he had not replaced because the chip was not structural.
He drank it standing at the range. Strong, slightly over-extracted, exactly correct for noon on a grey Sunday at the end of a 65-hour operation in which the job had been delivered, the trail had been pointed in the right direction, and one additional file had found its way to one additional journalist through one additional dead drop that would never be traced.
Structurally correct.
He put the cup in the sink.
He went upstairs to turn off the war room light.