LOCATION: CHÂTEAU DE PRANGINS, SWITZERLAND
01:45 CET
The meeting was not on Zoom. It was not on an encrypted line. It was held in a room shielded by three meters of lead and a Faraday cage.
Seven chairs sat around a table of ancient oak. Only five were occupied. One chair—the Bardi chair—had been empty for centuries. Tonight, it felt like a ghost was sitting in it.
Lord Arthur Rothschild-Baron sat at the head. Across from him was Helena Rockefeller and Dieter Merck, the patriarch of the European pharmaceutical monopoly.
"Singapore is gone," Helena Rockefeller said, her voice trembling with a rage she couldn't hide. "Six hundred tons of bullion. De-registered. The legal trail leads back to a 1345 debt-clause. Our lawyers say the claim is... valid."
"Valid?" Dieter Merck slammed his hand on the table. "We own the lawyers! We own the courts!"
"We don't own the Bardi Ledger," Lord Arthur said quietly. He looked at the empty chair. "PKR hid that boy well. For forty years, we thought we were tracking a local Indian smuggler. We thought Alexander was just a man who wanted power in some small corner of the world."
"And now?" Merck asked.
"Now we realize he wasn't building a criminal empire," Arthur replied, sliding a folder across the table. It contained a photo of Stephen standing in the rain at a funeral. "He was building a Sovereign Counter-State. He has used our own Bitcoin algorithms to mask a gold-hoard that rivals the Federal Reserve. He is the first man in history to default on us."
"Kill him," Helena said coldly. "Send the Shen Triad. Send the PMCs. Level that bungalow in Kerala if you have to."
"It's not that simple," Arthur said, pointing to the monitor on the wall. "He has activated the Azrael Protocol. If his heart stops beating, the Bardi Ledger is programmed to release the private banking records of every family at this table to the public blockchain. Every war we started, every currency we crashed, every 'Great Reset' we planned... the world will see it all."
The room went silent. For the first time in three hundred years, the Septagon was afraid.
"He isn't just fighting us," Arthur whispered. "He's auditing us. And he's starting with our most valuable asset: The Oil."