Lee struggled to lift himself and braced his arms on the table. He gestured toward a couple of closed-circuit cameras on a pole beside his table. One was directed downward to focus on the cards. One was pointed at the chairs where patrons would sit. “You can ask the police to review the security footage. They’ll need a warrant. The courthouse is up in Monaco-Ville, behind the palace. It doesn’t open until nine o’clock.”
“I’ll look into that. I think my friend was here earlier, and he may have come back. Are they still recording?”
Lee flipped his fingers at the darkened light on the top of the camera. “We turn off the table cams when we declare the casino is closed, but the house cameras are still on.”
Casimir regarded the obsidian half-globes embedded in the ceiling, as they are in every casino around the world. “Could we look around the casino? Maybe he’s sitting at a slot machine or having a drink somewhere.”
They pointed toward a hallway in the back of the room and gesticulated while explaining the rather complicated route to walk the entire casino complex, which also included a theater that housed the Opéra de Monte-Carlo and the office of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.
Casimir feigned having trouble with the directions, so they walked him over to the hallway, still pointing, both of them telling him the directions again, first in English and then in French because, evidently, the English wasn’t cutting it.
Still, Casimir discussed the directions with them, and then he asked whether the security cameras covered every room and which parts of the casino were less surveilled. Perhaps his friend was still there. Were any tables still open? Or slot machines?
The discussion grew longer, with more pointing and multiple languages, and they paced into another room as the guys woke up a little more.
Things became more complicated. There was indeed a bank of slot machines with little camera coverage, and a white-haired East Asian lady had fallen asleep back there, her golden tokens spilling off her red silk dress and onto the blue carpet on the floor.
The three men carefully woke her and made sure she was all right, just napping, and helped her into a taxi back to her hotel before they once again turned to the question of whether Casimir’s friend has also escaped notice.
By the time the dealer and the pit boss had chaperoned Casimir around the casino and discussed these very important matters with several security personnel who were still on the casino floor, he was sure they had forgotten Arthur had been with him at all.
Chapter Six
The Cage
Arthur
Lord Arthur Finch-Hatten, 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 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.