And now, Maxence was missing.
Perhaps Pierre had received a note to some effect, and that was why there had been a frantic, midnight call to Arthur.
His heart clenched.
God, he hoped that wasn’t it.
On the other hand, Max’s older brother, Pierre, might be the cause of his disappearance. The bodyguards who’d lost him had said that Pierre had given the command to inform Caz and himself.
A cold mist condensed on Arthur’s back and his scalp under his thick, black hair, and Arthur wondered again if he and Caz had been brought to Monaco to find Maxence’s body, allowing Pierre some deniability in how it had happened.
He swallowed down his unease and muttered into a button microphone taped to his jaw, “Has your biometrics software found him yet?”
Luftwaffe chuckled one short, German huff of a laugh into Arthur’s earbuds. “We’re not miracle workers. All these Christmas trees and tinsel are confusing the scan.”
The biometrics software, which used to be called facial recognition software but took in much more data than mere facial features, was an enormous program, much too large for Arthur’s tablet to run. The application and its subroutines were running in a cloud-based platform on virtual machines set up on a server farm located on a nondescript container ship currently docked in Malaysia.
That was how you did deniability, he mused. Nothing short of a national intelligence service could have traced this particular operation back to the four of them.
Plus, like sharks not eating other sharks, there would have been a recognition of professional courtesy, and the NSA or GCHQ would have backed off.
Speaking of the NSA, as soon as Arthur had called Vlogger1 and his other computer buddies from the Orly Airport outside of Paris to put this project together just two hours before, all of them had been dying to hack the Monte Carlo casino. They couldn’t tell anyone they’d done it, but indiscriminate bragging wasn’t the point of hacking.
In Arthur’s earbuds, Vlogger1 whispered, “I found another image of Max. He flew from Nice to Geneva and back yesterday morning. What was he doing in Geneva? I’ll feed this pic in and update our profile. I can’t believe how few surveillance pictures there are of him in the last few years. How the hell did Maxence Grimaldi hide from the omnipresent corporate Big Brother?”
Arthur whispered, “He’s been living somewhere in Africa for a few years, in the Republic of Congo or Rwanda, or somewhere. I’m not quite sure how long he’s been there.”
The fourth hacker in their group, Racehorse, groaned. “Geez, Africa. That’s practically cheating. And now he’s hiding in the damn Christmas trees? Every time I get a blip, it’s just somebody with half their face behind a garland or a tree.”
Luftwaffe said, “That last photo did it, Vlogger1. Good sniffing, there. That one has the distance between Max’s pupils to a tenth of a millimeter. With the other biometrics we have, the program should be able to identify him even if he’s wearing a mask.”
“But not if he’s behind a damn Christmas tree with his head draped in glass icicles,” Racehorse grumbled.
Arthur smiled and adjusted his legs, careful not to bobble his tablet too much. He didn’t like people surveilling him personally, of course, but it was quite handy when one wanted to find a missing person. Also speaking of which, “Racehorse, did you erase me from the footage yet?”
“Oh, yeah. Did that minutes ago. You’re gone.”
Excellent. Arthur didn’t bother to reply out loud. While his cohorts were scrubbing his voice from any security surveillance footage as he spoke, he didn’t need to chat out loud and give them more work to do.
Besides, someone in meatspace might hear him. The closed casino was preternaturally quiet.
Luftwaffe said, “We’ve got a hit.”
Already?
Nice.
Luftwaffe continued, “I don’t know the target that well. Take a look, Blackjack?”
That was Arthur’s cue. He angled his tablet away from the spots of light reflected from the lamps behind him to see the screen better.
The surveillance video feed was a little grainy and staccato in the way of surveillance footage everywhere. People walked through the frame a little more quickly than was natural, bobbing like an old-time movie. The swags of Christmas garland and conical trees flashed shards of light into the lenses, flaring into horizontal bars.
The room pictured on the footage looked to be one of the salons farther away from the lobby because Arthur didn’t particularly recognize the salon from his brief stroll into the casino with Casimir that evening. Slot machines filled most of the gambling areas near the front. The roulette and poker tables were farther back in the more exclusive areas.
Arthur was pretty sure they were looking at one of the public areas, though. The exclusive, private rooms for high rollers were more sparsely populated. A thick crowd eddied and streamed sluggishly through the salon.
Two wide-screen televisions occupied one side of the room, and a crowd was watching what appeared to be a soccer game.
On the right side of the screen, a yellow box flashed as a man stuck his head into view, looked around, and retreated.
Luftwaffe asked, “Was that him?”
Arthur moved the slider bar backward on his screen to rewind time.
The man had dark hair, and it was a little overgrown in curls around his face and the collar of his tux. He turned his head, and a strong cheekbone and jawline swiveled into view, sort of.
Arthur whispered, “I’m not sure.”
“The program says it’s a hit.”
“What percentage?”
“Seventy.”
Not enough. “Timestamp?”
“Nine-thirty.”
“Where does he go after that?”
Hums of indecision filled Arthur’s ears. “Looking.”
Arthur scrolled forward on the footage, looking for when the man left that little niche and came back into view. “What’s the room behind where he is? Through that doorway?”
Through his earbuds, Vlogger1 said, “On it.”
Arthur felt like he should know which room it was. He’d come home with Maxence for summer vacations practically every year since he was thirteen. He really should know the Monte Carlo casino’s floor plan, even though some renovations had changed its footprint in the last decade.
A decade and a half.
Actually, nearly two decades had passed since the first time Arthur traveled with Max to Monaco for a school break.
That couldn’t be right, and yet the math seemed to be accurate.
Good Lord. That was unpalatable. Arthur was getting old.
He asked the ether, “Is that the north or south salon he was in?”
Racehorse said, “I don’t remember them well enough to tell them apart.”
Arthur was idly swiping his finger back and forth across the chronological scroll bar at the bottom of his screen, when the movement of the crowd changed.
Before, the movements of the crowd had been a random walk through the casino’s salon. There was a constant, slow swell and ebb as people meandered from one room to another, always in search of a new place and way to gamble.
Roulette players moved toward the poker tables.
Poker aficionados flowed toward the slot machines.
Slot machine patrons streamed toward the sports-betting rooms and roulette wheels.