What he’d done to catch the attention of the admissions committee had always been a mystery that no one had ever pried out of him.
Where he’d gotten his start-up funds after graduation had been another conundrum.
But that had been over a decade ago, when they’d been teenagers in upper school. Now, most of Maxence’s friends were running billion-dollar corporations and a few were running countries, while the scholarship kids were still fighting their ways up the ladders of life and sometimes succeeding.
Only Maxence’s set had called them “the scholarship kids.” The staff at Le Rosey referred to them with the derogatory term “the charity cases,” but they’d had a different name for themselves, sort of a club name.
Maxence couldn’t quite recall what it was. He hadn’t been admitted.
“Hello, there. What’s going on, Twist?”
The sonorous voice startled Maxence, and he glanced back toward the door they’d come in.
A tall blond man stood there, peering in. Max knew that as he got closer, his pale eyes would shimmer like opals with flecks of teal and violet.
“Micah?” Trained by decades of sheer courtly habit, Maxence walked to the rear of the room with his hand outstretched to shake. “The last time I saw you was at that soiree at Versailles. Did the gentleman invest in your opportunity?”
“Yes, he did,” Micah said, clasping Maxence’s hand but still looking puzzled. “Thanks for that, Maxence. Are you all right? I saw what happened at the Sea Change Gala last night.”
From near the computers, Twist called back, “Micah, come on inside. You can contribute to this. We’re looking for Maxence’s secretary. She went missing last night and hasn’t been heard from since.”
“Oh, Jesus. Max, I’m sorry.”
Twist kept talking. “Luckily, she has his cell phone with her, and we’ve got a signature off the SIM card, so we’re waiting for a ping off of a cell phone tower to locate it. In the meantime, though, is there any way you could hook up with some of your special projects to see if we can get a lead on her? I can hack into the Grimaldi Forum security cameras, but I don’t have facial recognition software.”
Micah looked straight at Twist, his eyes cold as steel in ice. “I don’t have facial recognition software, either. No one has facial recognition software that’s any good. Even the police and military software has a failure rate around fifty percent.”
Twist flipped a hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. Can you use it anyway?”
Micah was wearing a messenger bag with the strap across his broad chest. He dragged the bag around to his side and removed a laptop from it. “It’s not mine. I’m just the middleman who’s negotiating the deal.”
Twist’s head tilted to the side. “But you know the backdoor login codes, right?”
Micah opened the laptop and asked, “Who are we looking for?”
A few minutes later, two of Twist’s computer monitors were showing the grainy video feed from the security cameras of the Grimaldi Forum the night before. Micah had used some of Twist’s cables to plug his laptop directly into the desktop tower that was pulling the camera feed.
At first, people milled aimlessly around, grouping and regrouping as conversations moved. They sped through the footage of the evening.
Even without sound, the instant when the crowd heard the first gunshots was obvious.
A wave of terror rippled through the crowd as everyone jumped from the snaps of the gunshots and then looked around the convention center’s staircases and upper floors surrounding the atrium, trying to discern where the shots were coming from because the cement building echoed.
The people on the screen froze, and different rooms flipped into view.
“Do you know where Dree Clark was when it started?” Twist asked as he shuffled a mouse with one hand and clicked keys on a keyboard with the other.
“We were together on the dance floor on the upper level. Port Hercule Hall on the east side of the building,” Maxence said.
Twist shuffled the mouse and clicked while staring at the screen. “This room?”
“That’s it. We’re right there in the center.”
The pixelated still shot showed Maxence holding a black jewelry box in his hand as he kneeled in front of a woman wearing a fluttering white dress, but they had both turned away from the camera and were staring off to the side.
Arthur slapped Casimir on the arm. “I almost forgot our bet. That old sod is never going to be a priest now. You owe me twenty bucks.”
Casimir rolled his eyes.
