Simone or Maxence come out the other side of that doorway.”
Though the video footage playing on his tablet was grainy, Arthur watched for a man in a black tuxedo or a woman in a white dress to leave that alcove, but he saw neither.
The black-suited bodyguards did burst through from the alcove, look around wildly, and disperse into the crowd in all directions. They’d lost Simone’s trail, too. “Did you see the minders come through?”
“I saw five personal security or other actors. Unless Maxence and Simone stood in that doorway for over three hours, didn’t even stick a knee out, and are still there, they vanished.”
Vlogger1 added, “And those guys would have walked right past them, too.”
“Can’t be,” Arthur whispered. “You sure?”
And yet, in the White Room, people gambled and strode through as they searched for new and more interesting ways to lose their money. The woman in the white dress and the man in the dark tuxedo had not exited the alcove.
It was like Simone Maina had hurtled headlong into a portal to another dimension hidden in that niche and ceased to exist. The bodyguards followed her but walked right through the door area, unaffected.
“I took her biometrics again from that glimpse we have of her, here. If that woman in that white dress had shown up, the program would have found her. I’ve run the system three times over those two rooms for the next few hours. Nothing,” Luftwaffe said.
Vlogger1 said, “They can’t have just disappeared.”
Racehorse asked, “Do you see any evidence that someone wiped them from the footage? Evidently, it’s not that hard to do.”
Arthur suppressed a small smile. It wasn’t that hard to do for them.
They waited while Luftwaffe’s biometrics program scanned the rooms on both sides of that niche where they had seen Maxence again, but to no avail.
It was like they had both disappeared.
The timestamp on the footage said ten-thirty, local time.
The timeline didn’t match up. Max’s security team had called Arthur perhaps half an hour after this had occurred, not four hours after they’d lost him.
The back of his neck chilled as if a stream of air conditioning had blown down the wall and under his collar. If Max’s security had indeed called him directly after this had happened, they were more worried than they’d let on.
“All right,” Arthur said, closing his tablet’s cover and preparing to stand. “Time to go. Lead me out.”
He strolled out of the Monte Carlo casino, his small computer bag tucked under one arm. As he passed, the small, red lights on the black hemispheres embedded in the ceiling winked out.
In the security booth, the monitors were flashing to black.
Arthur could only imagine the distant uproar among the three overnight security guards watching the video screens as it became obvious they had been hacked. No matter how they tried to sound the alarm and lock down the casino, none of their systems would work.
Luftwaffe, Vlogger1, and Racehorse snickered through Arthur’s earbuds.
Even Arthur the oh-so-British earl could not refrain from a grin.
After all, hacking wasn’t fun unless someone knew you’d done it.
Chapter Seven
Monte Carlo
Maxence: Four hours before Arthur got the phone call
Maxence Grimaldi—the man who would be on everyone’s mind just a few hours hence—lingered in a quiet alcove in the infamous Monte Carlo casino in Monaco, swirling a triple whiskey in a crystal lowball glass and ruminating about how he shouldn’t be there.
He should have caught a plane out of Monaco by now, but his uncle lay dying in a hospital. Sitting with the comatose man had taken up much of Maxence’s days for the last two weeks, except for that day.
That day had begun with a hasty morning flight to Geneva, Switzerland to visit his ex-girlfriend who was now his sister-in-law.
Yeah, there was a story about that.
Max’s afternoon had progressed when he’d returned to Monaco after lunch and punched his older brother, Pierre, in the mouth and other bodily locations, directly followed by Max being restrained by the police and threatened with jail or murder.
Not a good day.
He’d had worse.
Maxence drank more of the whiskey. A smoky film clung to his tongue and in his throat, and he rubbed his jaw where Pierre had landed a glancing uppercut before the guards had pulled them off of each other. He thought he’d at least cracked some of Pierre’s ribs with a solid jab to his midsection, and Pierre should have a black eye, too.
Served him right.
Violence still swirled in Maxence’s chest.
The whiskey was telling him that finding his