A lone slot machine trilled in the odd silence.
Arthur had already disabled the surveillance cameras in and around the cashiers’ cage with a few taps on his keyboard. However, if the monitors in the security station had fuzzed to black, it would have been a telltale giveaway that someone had hacked their system. Instead, Arthur had grabbed a minute of footage from the cams inside the cashier’s cage, from when it had been unoccupied just ten seconds before he’d picked the side door lock and broken in. He’d looped forty seconds plus or minus five seconds of that image into the security cameras’ feeds. Thus, the security personnel in the booth were viewing a picture of a nice, empty, safe cashier’s cage on their video monitor, and the little trembles and bobbles of the image seemed random. Human brains are amazingly efficient at picking up patterns, so a perfect forty seconds would have looked odd. Arthur estimated he had at least a few minutes before the security personnel noticed anything amiss.
Perhaps there were a few extra minutes of leeway, considering what an excellent diversion Casimir was creating. Lawyers are born performers. The good ones are, anyway. Arthur was married to one of the best litigating attorneys in London, in his opinion, and a lord’s opinion is never humble. As Arthur’s fingers flew over his silent keyboard, he smiled at the thought of his Gen arguing her cases before judges in her ridiculous white wig and black robes.
In his earbuds, several of his friends chattered gleefully about the hack.
A tiny wire with a camera aimed at his tablet’s screen protruded from one of his earbuds and bounced near his eye when he swallowed. His friends—nobody liked being calledhackersorspies—were commenting on the casino’s rather good security firewalls and having a great time. Most of their hacks these days were formulated to penetrate military intra-webs or terrorists’ dark web meeting grounds and were a matter of life and death.
An innocuous hack into a casino’s security system to look for a missing person felt like the larks they used to pull off in their teens back in the dorms ofInstitut Le Rosey,the Swiss boarding school they’d attended. Le Rosey catered to the most elite billionaire parents in the world and was the most expensive dumping ground for inconvenient children who interfered with jet-set lifestyles.
This had somewhat been the case for Arthur. After his parents had been killed in a car accident when Arthur was very young, Arthur’s grandfather, the Earl of Severn, had packed Arthur off to Le Rosey, ostensibly to learn the ways of the extremely wealthy from others of their kind as he had. It had been a lesson in the British stiff upper lip for his heir to the earldom as his grandfather had seen it. He had never been a nurturing sort of parent, anyway, from some things Arthur remembered his father saying.
Not that his father should have criticized anyone’s parenting.
Casimir’s parents had sent him to the Le Rosey boarding school to protect him from rabid paparazzi who had become obsessed with him for truly despicable reasons. He had some other family, an older sister and her children, younger siblings, and his estranged parents.
But Maxence?
Maxence’s parents had merely found it inelegant to have their two sons cluttering up their mansions, so they had shipped both Maxence and his older brother, Pierre, to Le Rosey as soon as each turned five years old. Managing nannies was such a bore for people like them.
Thus, the three wayward heirs had quickly become best friends, which was why Arthur had gotten a phone call when Maxence had gone missing and why his next move was to call Casimir.
After all, who else would get a phone call about Maxence? Max’s father had died of something cardiovascular years ago, and his mother’s death due to diet pills had been hushed up only a year later. There was an aunt or two somewhere, but they were generally uninterested.
As for women, well—
Arthur shifted the computer on his lap, a wave of sadness rising in his heart.
—Maxence had been astonishingly unlucky at love, always falling for the wrong woman. Arthur was concerned that Max’s recent flirtations with hermitry were the downward spiral of a heart too broken to go on.
And now, Maxence was missing.
Perhaps Pierre had received a note to some effect, and that was why there had been a frantic, midnight call to Arthur.
His heart clenched.
God, he hoped that wasn’t it.
On the other hand, Max’s older brother, Pierre, might be the cause of his disappearance. The bodyguards who’d lost him had said that Pierre had given the command to inform Caz and himself.
A cold mist condensed on Arthur’s back and his scalp under his thick, black hair, and Arthur wondered again if he and Caz had been brought to Monaco to find Maxence’s body, allowing Pierre some deniability in how it had happened.
He swallowed down his unease and muttered into a button microphone taped to his jaw, “Has your biometrics software found him yet?”
Luftwaffe chuckled one short, German huff of a laugh into Arthur’s earbuds. “We’re not miracle workers. All these Christmas trees and tinsel are confusing the scan.”
The biometrics software, which used to be called facial recognition software but took in much more data than mere facial features, was an enormous program, much too large for Arthur’s tablet to run. The application and its subroutines were running in a cloud-based platform on virtual machines set up on a server farm located on a nondescript container ship currently docked in Malaysia.
That was how you did deniability, he mused. Nothing short of a national intelligence service could have traced this particular operation back to the four of them.
Plus, like sharks not eating other sharks, there would have been a recognition of professional courtesy, and the NSA or GCHQ would have backed off.
Speaking of the NSA, as soon as Arthur had called Vlogger1 and his other computer buddies from the Orly Airport outside of Paris to put this project together just two hours before, all of them had been dying to hack the Monte Carlo casino. They couldn’t tell anyone they’d done it, but indiscriminate bragging wasn’t the point of hacking.
In Arthur’s earbuds, Vlogger1 whispered, “I found another image of Max. He flew from Nice to Geneva and back yesterday morning. What was he doing in Geneva? I’ll feed this pic in and update our profile. I can’t believe how few surveillance pictures there are of him in the last few years. How the hell didMaxence Grimaldihide from the omnipresent corporate Big Brother?”
Arthur whispered, “He’s been living somewhere in Africa for a few years, in the Republic of Congo or Rwanda, or somewhere. I’m not quite sure how long he’s been there.”
