The countdown timer showed forty-three seconds when Montreux stepped past Vane and knelt before the device. His fingers moved across the keypad with the confidence of a man who had memorized every code, every sequence, every detail of the journal he had stolen. He typed a single word, and the display flickered.
DEVICE 06-S DEACTIVATED.
"How?" Vane asked, his voice hoarse.
"The code is 'SACRIFICE.'" Montreux did not look up. He was already rising, already moving toward the east quadrant and the next device. "Frost chose it because the Feast of Saint Sébastien is a celebration of martyrdom. Saint Sébastien was shot with arrows and left for dead, but he survived and returned to confront the emperor who had condemned him. Frost saw himself as Sébastien—the martyr who would not die, who would return again and again to confront the system that had wronged him."
"You read the journal. You knew the codes all along."
"Of course I did." Montreux's voice was calm, almost conversational, as if they were discussing the weather rather than the lives of thousands of people. "I have had the journal for three days. I took it from the evidence room the night after Frost surrendered, when you were still running around the city disarming his little toys. I knew that Act Six was coming. I knew that the devices at the Academy were not the end of it. And I knew that you would eventually figure out that someone else was pulling the strings."
They reached the east quadrant, where the second device was hidden behind a statue of Saint Peter. The timer on this device was synchronized with the others—thirty-one seconds remaining. Montreux typed the code, and the display flickered: DEVICE 06-E DEACTIVATED.
"Why?" Vane demanded. "Why orchestrate all of this? The attack on Frost, the stolen journal, the note about Act Six—why not just disarm the devices quietly and be done with it?"
"Because quiet heroism does not advance a career." Montreux turned to face him, and his politician's smile was back in place, cold and calculating. "I have been Director of the Bureau for six years. In that time, I have watched my predecessors rise to the Ministry, to the Presidential Cabinet, to the highest offices in the Republic. But I have remained where I am, a functionary, an administrator, a man who manages crises but does not shape history. The Requiem changed that. The Requiem gave me the opportunity to become something more."
"You let Frost kill those people. Lanvin, Moreau, Montclair. You could have stopped him."
"I could have stopped him after the fact, which would have accomplished nothing. Or I could let him play out his little drama, and then emerge at the critical moment as the man who saved the Republic from annihilation." Montreux's smile widened. "The public does not remember who stopped the first three acts. They remember who stopped the last one. They remember who stood in the cathedral, surrounded by cameras and dignitaries, and defused the bomb that would have killed them all."
Vane stared at him, and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place with a terrible, grinding certainty. Montreux had not been trying to stop the Requiem. He had been trying to exploit it. He had sabotaged the operation at the Academy, ordering the shot that nearly caused Frost to detonate the devices, because he wanted the crisis to escalate. He had stolen the journal and staged the attack on Frost because he needed Act Six to happen—needed a threat so enormous that stopping it would make him a hero.
"You sent the man in the guard's uniform," Vane said. "You ordered him to stab Frost."
"I ordered him to kill Frost. Obviously, he failed." Montreux shrugged, as if the murder of a prisoner were a minor inconvenience. "But the outcome was still useful. Frost is silenced, the Requiem continues, and I am the only person who knows the codes. The only person who can save the cathedral. The only person who can stop the terrorist."
The north quadrant. The third device. Montreux typed the code, and the display flickered: DEVICE 06-N DEACTIVATED. Seventeen seconds remained on the synchronized timers.
"Frost will talk," Vane said. "He is still alive. He will tell everyone what you did."
"Frost is a serial killer, a terrorist, a madman who turned his victims into statues. Who will believe him? Who will take his word over mine?" Montreux turned and walked toward the west quadrant, where the final device was waiting. "And even if someone does believe him, it will not matter. By the time this is over, I will be the hero who saved the cathedral. The President will pin a medal on my chest. The newspapers will call me the Guardian of the Republic. And you, Agent Vane, will be a footnote—the disgraced agent who was suspended for insubordination, who nearly got hundreds of people killed at the Academy, who was only allowed to participate in the investigation because I showed him mercy."
The west quadrant. The fourth device. Montreux knelt and typed the final code: SACRIFICE. The display flickered: DEVICE 06-W DEACTIVATED. ALL ACT SIX DEVICES DISARMED.
The countdown timers stopped at four seconds.
Vane stood in the shadows of the cathedral, his hands clenched at his sides, his heart pounding with a rage that was almost impossible to contain. Montreux had manipulated everything—the investigation, the media, the lives of thousands of people—for the sake of his own ambition. He had let innocent people die so that he could be the hero who saved the rest. And now he was going to walk away, celebrated and honored, while the truth was buried beneath a mountain of lies.
"You will not get away with this," Vane said.
"I already have." Montreux turned and walked toward the cathedral's main entrance, where the first light of dawn was streaming through the great rose window. "But I want to thank you, Vane. Without your obsession, your relentless pursuit of Frost, your willingness to engage with him on his own terms—none of this would have been possible. You were the perfect witness. The perfect audience. The perfect foil."
He paused at the door, his silhouette framed by the golden light of the rising sun. "I am going to hold a press conference now. I am going to tell the world how the Bureau, under my leadership, prevented a catastrophic attack on the Feast of Saint Sébastien. And you are going to stand in the back of the room and say nothing. Because if you say anything—if you whisper a single word of what you think you know—I will destroy you. Your career, your reputation, everything your father built. I will make sure that the name Vane is remembered not as a family of honorable judges, but as a family of corrupt collaborators who enabled a terrorist."
He smiled one last time, and then he was gone, his footsteps echoing in the vast silence of the cathedral.
Vane stood alone in the shadows, surrounded by saints and martyrs and the lingering smell of incense. The devices were disarmed. The cathedral was safe. Thousands of people would live, would celebrate the Feast, would never know how close they had come to being buried beneath a mountain of stone.
But the man who had saved them was a monster, and the man who had tried to stop him was a ghost.
Dufort found him ten minutes later, still standing in the west quadrant, still staring at the disarmed device as if it might spring back to life at any moment.
"I heard everything," she said. "My earpiece was still on. I heard every word."
"Then you know what he did."
"I know. But knowing is not the same as proving." She stepped closer, her face grim. "Montreux has covered his tracks. The journal is in his possession, and he will claim he acquired it through legitimate channels. The man in the guard's uniform has probably already disappeared. Frost's testimony is useless—no court in the Republic would take the word of a serial killer over the Director of the Bureau."
"There has to be something. Some evidence he overlooked."
"Even if there is, we cannot touch him right now. He is about to become the most powerful man in the Republic. The President will elevate him. The public will adore him. We would be throwing ourselves against a wall of political armor."
Vane turned away, his hands clenched into fists. She was right. Montreux had won. He had played the game perfectly, turning the Requiem into a vehicle for his own ambition, and now he was going to reap the rewards while the truth rotted in the darkness.
But then something stirred in the back of his mind—a fragment of a conversation, a detail that had seemed insignificant at the time but now glowed with sudden, urgent meaning.
"The devices," Vane said. "The ones we disarmed yesterday. Forty-seven of them. Frost said they were linked—each one sending a signal to the next in the sequence. If a device is disarmed out of order, the chain reaction begins."
"Yes. So?"
"So the devices in the cathedral were disarmed out of order. Montreux started at the south quadrant, then the east, then the north, then the west. But Frost's journal specified a sequence for the cathedral—I saw it in the maquettes. The sequence should have been north, east, south, west. Montreux disarmed them in the wrong order."
Dufort's eyes widened. "But the devices deactivated. The timers stopped."
"Each device deactivated individually. But if they are linked like the others, if the chain reaction protocol is the same, then deactivating them out of order would have triggered something. A signal. A message. Something that Frost built into the system as a fail-safe."
He turned and ran toward the south quadrant, toward the device that Montreux had disarmed first. The LED display was dark, but when Vane knelt and examined the device more closely, he saw something he had missed before—a tiny antenna, no larger than a thumbnail, embedded in the casing.
"It sent a signal," Vane said. "When Montreux disarmed it out of order, it sent a signal to somewhere else. Somewhere Frost planned for."
"Sent a signal to what?"
Vane did not answer. He was already reaching for his phone, already dialing the number for the detention center infirmary. The physician answered on the third ring, her voice harried and exhausted.
"How is Frost?" Vane demanded.
"Stable, for now. He lost consciousness about an hour ago, but his vitals are—"
"Wake him up. I need to speak to him. It is urgent."
"I cannot wake him. He is sedated. Even if I could, he is in no condition to—"
"Then give him a message when he wakes. Tell him that Montreux disarmed the cathedral devices out of order. Tell him the fail-safe was triggered. Ask him what it means."
There was a long pause. When the physician spoke again, her voice was puzzled. "He is awake. He was not sedated—he was pretending. He says to tell you: 'Act Seven has already begun. Montreux has ensured it.'"
Vane felt the blood drain from his face. "What is Act Seven?"
Another pause, longer this time. The physician's voice trembled when she replied.
"He says Act Seven is called The Judas Protocol. And he says it cannot be stopped."
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!