They scanned backward, tracing her path through the Grimaldi Forum. Micah dragged his red square over the ground behind her, but they couldn’t see any place that she might have dropped it.
Twist shook his head. “If your phone was still on Monaco’s 5G network, we would’ve picked up the signal a long time ago. Did you have a full charge last night?”
Maxence nodded. “I picked it up off of the charger right before I left for the gala. As long as I don’t watch videos on it, a charge usually lasts for at least thirty-six hours, often forty-eight.”
Twist said, “She might still have it with her. We’ll keep searching.”
Arthur said,“Wait!Back it up just a few seconds. There was a full face shot of the guy.”
Twist adjusted the video.
Arthur leaned in. “That’s it.”
Micah dropped his red box over the guy’s face.
Maxence couldn’t see much difference between all the other partial shots and this somewhat better one. In the low-resolution security camera footage, Dree’s kidnapper still looked like a Halloween mask of a ghoul.
The computer algorithm must’ve been able to tell the difference, though. The next two passes of rendering over the computer-generated sketch refined the man’s face considerably, becoming less cartoonish but just as cadaverous.
“That’sKir Sokolov,”Maxence said. “He’s Matryona Sokolov’s younger brother. Kir was at Le Rosey with us, but he looks like he’s lost a lot of weight since then.”
Casimir squinted at the screen. “Jesus, yourecognizedhim from that?”
Maxence shrugged. “Matryona introduced him to me earlier that evening, so I knew he was there.”
Casimir rolled his eyes. “Cheater. You had me going there for a minute.”
The five men in the yacht’s computer room watched as Kir Sokolov dragged Dree outside and shoved her into the back of a white commercial-style van.
Micah told Twist, “Freeze it,” and raced his analyzing square over to the van’s license plate.
They got one digit of the license plate.
“But it’s French,” Maxence said. “It’s an EU license plate, so it’s longer and skinnier. Monegasque license plates have shorter numbers on them because we only give licenses to a few cars. The stripe on the right side of the license plate has the EU stars and an F, so it must be registered in France. Can you follow it?”
Twist grimaced. “Your closed-circuit TV cameras on the streets are harder to hack into than your 5G network or the convention center security system. I haven’t managed to get in yet.”
Maxence turned. “Arthur?”
Arthur’s steely eyes slid to the corners to look at Maxence. “I would if I could, but I haven’t hacked in yet, either. We came to Twist for his expertise. This kind of hacking isn’t my field.”
Twist and Micah stopped what they were doing and turned to look at Arthur. Micah asked him, “Oh, really?”
Arthur glanced at them. “It’s nothing in particular.”
Twist and Micah shared a glance before they went back to work. Twist said, “Then we’ll have to wait until your phone pings a cell phone tower, but we’ll brainstorm and try to think of something else to try in the meantime.”
Maxence asked Twist, “How long do you think it will take to find where my phone is?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “It depends on whether it’s turned on and whether somebody uses it to text or make a phone call. If someone’s removed or destroyed the SIM card, we’ll never find it.”
Maxence remained serene, for Max was HisSereneHighness, and he must not appear agitated or ready to climb up the wall of the yacht and hang from the ceiling by his fingernails, which were dirty and broken from trying to escape from the locked storage room on the container ship. He asked, “Any approximation of how long, perhaps?”
“Ballpark?” Twist surveyed the ceiling while he mused. “Might be five minutes, might be never.”
“How will we know?”
Twist gestured toward the computers. “Oh, it’ll beep if your phone sends a ping to the towers.”
