the Earl of Severn, sat on the carpeted floor inside the cashiers’ cage, behind the counter and out of sight, with his keyboard and tablet rig plugged into one of the casino’s computers with a thin, black snake of a cord. His long legs were crossed at his ankles, and he precariously balanced the tablet on his thighs.
Somewhere beyond the walls strewn with green Christmas garland and the gilded bars of the cage, Casimir was chatting with the casino employees as they walked into the rabbit warren of rooms, their voices rebounding from the ornate crown moldings and crystal chandeliers dangling from the high ceilings.
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 called hackers or spies—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 of Institut 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