Royal: A Royal Billionaire Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 6)

by Blair Babylon

  Members of the hospitality staff stood on the side of the helipad to greet them, because while Tommaso might be able to keep a secret, the concierge grapevine was real.

  Arthur and Casimir sequestered and questioned several of them, looming over the liveried staff members and demanding answers to queries they had no right to ask, like which berth was registered to Tristan King’s yacht and what gossip they had heard regarding the attack at the Sea Change Gala the night before.

  One of the other staff immediately whisked Maxence off to a hospitality suite where he could compose himself, lest the other club members see him in such a state of disarray, whispering, “We are very, very glad to see you’ve returned, Your Highness. Is there anything I may supply you with? Coffee? A meal?”

  “Coffee and food to go,” Maxence told him. “For four.”

  Showering while Dree was still out there somewhere—possibly kidnapped, possibly lost, possibly dead—seemed like the most ridiculous waste of Maxence’s time, but Arthur and Casimir were on their way to Tristan’s yacht to try to track her cell phone. Nothing could be done until they found a cell phone signal, or until it had been determined that they could not.

  Max scrubbed the sour fear-sweat off his skin in a scalding hot shower, nearly raking his fingernails over his scalp as he washed the stinking salt out of his hair.

  Three minutes later, he was out of the shower and slapping the water off his body with a towel with one hand while he tried to yank clean underwear and his dark gray trousers up his legs with the other.

  He did manage several decent swipes with the stick of deodorant before he dragged the black tee shirt over his head, and he bandaged the palms of his hands that had been scraped raw by the sharp rust on the ship’s railing.

  His valet had included other items: a black jacket, a small bottle of his cologne, and a toothbrush and toothpaste tab. Max made a mental note to give Tommaso a raise.

  As Maxence left the hospitality suite, the staff member shoved two white paper bags into his hands. “Be careful with them. We sealed the lids as well as we could. His Highness Prince Casimir said to tell you ‘Row B, berth five.’”

  “Thank you.” Maxence raced out of the yacht club toward Tristan’s yacht.

  Tristan “Twist” King’s yacht was small by billionaires’ standards, which were the standards of the boats around his. At first glance, it looked like a tugboat among tankers.

  Tristan’s boat would have been considered large at many yacht clubs around the world. It appeared to have two decks, most likely one or two downstairs bedrooms and a living room upstairs. The radar array on top suggested it was equipped to cross oceans.

  Maxence sprinted down the jetty and vaulted over the low gate onto the boat that he hoped did indeed belong to Tristan King. He yelled, “Arthur! Caz! Where are you guys?”

  Arthur stuck his head out of the door on the yacht’s upstairs deck. “Up here! My God, Max, you have to see Twist’s computer set up. I think I’m in love. Don’t tell Gen.”

  Maxence took the stairs two at a time. “Did you find Dree yet? Is she okay?” He flung open the door to the upstairs room on the yacht.

  Arthur ushered him inside, chortling with excitement. Maxence hadn’t seen him this gleeful since England had last beaten Australia in the Ashes cricket tournament.

  The darkened room was plastered with computer screens. Loading bars ran across several of the monitors. Lines of code scrolled on others.

  Max stared at the computer screens tiling the room. “It really is a slippery slope from a double-monitor to an evil mastermind’s lair, isn’t it?”

  “They’re great screens,” Arthur told him. “Excellent resolution.”

  Maxence distributed the coffee and breakfast sandwiches. “But did you find her yet?”

  “We’re working on it,” Arthur said, waving him off while he opened the lid of his coffee to examine it. “Twist has procured next-gen chips from Intel and somewhere else in Korea. His graphics cards are like something out of a science fiction movie, and he has two of them!”

  Casimir was sitting in a gaming chair and scrolling on his phone that was plugged into a power strip on the end of the long, U-shaped desk.

  “But can you use it to hack into our cell phone system? Can you use it to find Dree?” Max asked.

  Arthur continued, “And I think we’ve got a handle on that infiltration problem of yours. Some friends of mine hacked into your military’s intranet.”

  “Arthur!”

  “What? I didn’t do it. It’s not my transgression, nor is it my wholly inadequate cybersecurity.” He sipped the coffee.

  Maxence grabbed Arthur’s arm. “I don’t care about security. I’ll walk into the damn Crown Council meeting with a shotgun if I think it’s necessary, but I’m not going to walk in there at all unless Dree is safe.”

  “Speaking of the election and the Crown Council—” Casimir consulted his watch. “The election is seven hours from now. You should be making your presence known and networking. Maybe a television appearance. But definitely, you should be in the palace. You could lose this if you don’t take it seriously enough, you know?”

  “I don’t want to be the Prince of Monaco,” Maxence said, dismissing that asinine idea once again.

  “You keep saying that, but you certainly don’t want to end up with your uncle Jules on the throne. There’s nowhere in the world you would be safe from him.”

  “Right, so I need to sway the election to someone who’s ethical, someone who’ll be the right sovereign for Monaco. I know that. That’s the plan.”

  “And you need to be there to do that.”

  Maxence turned back to the computer equipment. “As soon as we find Dree.”

  Twist stood up and walked over. “We’ve already hacked into your cellular network—”

  Max handed him the fourth cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich. “Shouldn’t it have taken longer than that?”

  “Oh, hey, thanks,” Twist said, peering into the bag. “Yeah, it should have taken hours, but I hopped in within a few minutes. You need much better security protection on it.”

  Arthur nodded. “Told you.”

  Twist continued, “We’re running searches to see if we can locate your phone. It’s a good thing Arthur cloned your phone a few years ago—”

  Maxence spun and glared at Arthur. “Years?”

  “—because it made it much more likely that we’ll be able to pick up its signal. Hello there, Maxence. Long time, no see.” Twist offered his hand to shake.

  Maxence grudgingly turned away from Arthur, who was still staring at the computer rig with lust in his silvery eyes.

  The yacht’s door was still standing open, and a cone of sunlight spread through the room and reflected on the computer screens.

  Tristan’s blue eyes matched the electric blue computer screens running a graphic-interface operating system, and yet his eyes were striped with a fathomless deep-sea sapphire. He was a white guy, probably Norwegian and German ancestry from the Midwestern look of him, with strong cheekbones and a jaw like a right angle, but he was tanned from living on the Mediterranean Sea. His thick dark hair had a wave to it, though it was neatly trimmed.

  Tristan cocked his head to the side and raised his eyebrows at Maxence, a look of concern on his face. “Heard you ran into a bit of trouble last night.”

  Maxence waved him off. “I’m fine.”

  Tristan shrugged. “Okay, but if you want me to hack their ship’s radar so they sail around in circles for a month until they run out of fuel and sink, let me know.”

  Max laughed at him. “That’s vicious.”

  He grinned, showing perfectly straight, white teeth. “I don’t like bad guys.”

  Arthur glanced at Twist with one eyebrow raised.

  Twist hadn’t been one of Maxence’s closest friends when they were at Le Rosey, the billionaires’ boarding school Max, Arthur, and Casimir had attended from the time Max was five until he graduated from upper scho
ol. Twist and the other scholarship kids had arrived for high school, but he’d been around enough that they’d gotten into trouble together a few times, which was the bedrock of any friendship. The scholarship kids had hung out amongst themselves most of the time, partly because they hadn’t matriculated to the boarding school until they were teenagers and partly because some of the rich kids were snobs.

  Tristan had been one of the few teenagers in the world who’d shown so much promise and ambition that he’d been plucked from his parents’ farm and admitted to the Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland. He’d been given a world-class education and a chance to rise to rule the world, and he’d grabbed onto that shining opportunity and hung onto it. Connections could be forged at Le Rosey that could not be acquired any other way. How else could a Midwestern farm boy like Tristan end up standing on a yacht in Monaco with two royal princes and an English nobleman?

  What he’d done to catch the attention of the admissions committee had always been a mystery that no one had ever pried out of him.

  Where he’d gotten his start-up funds after graduation had been another conundrum.

  But that had been over a decade ago, when they’d been teenagers in upper school. Now, most of Maxence’s friends were running billion-dollar corporations and a few were running countries, while the scholarship kids were still fighting their ways up the ladders of life and sometimes succeeding.

  Only Maxence’s set had called them “the scholarship kids.” The staff at Le Rosey referred to them with the derogatory term “the charity cases,” but they’d had a different name for themselves, sort of a club name.

  Maxence couldn’t quite recall what it was. He hadn’t been admitted.

  “Hello, there. What’s going on, Twist?”

  The sonorous voice startled Maxence, and he glanced back toward the door they’d come in.

  A tall blond man stood there, peering in. Max knew that as he got closer, his pale eyes would shimmer like opals with flecks of teal and violet.

  “Micah?” Trained by decades of sheer courtly habit, Maxence walked to the rear of the room with his hand outstretched to shake. “The last time I saw you was at that soiree at Versailles. Did the gentleman invest in your opportunity?”

  “Yes, he did,” Micah said, clasping Maxence’s hand but still looking puzzled. “Thanks for that, Maxence. Are you all right? I saw what happened at the Sea Change Gala last night.”

  From near the computers, Twist called back, “Micah, come on inside. You can contribute to this. We’re looking for Maxence’s secretary. She went missing last night and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Max, I’m sorry.”

  Twist kept talking. “Luckily, she has his cell phone with her, and we’ve got a signature off the SIM card, so we’re waiting for a ping off of a cell phone tower to locate it. In the meantime, though, is there any way you could hook up with some of your special projects to see if we can get a lead on her? I can hack into the Grimaldi Forum security cameras, but I don’t have facial recognition software.”

  Micah looked straight at Twist, his eyes cold as steel in ice. “I don’t have facial recognition software, either. No one has facial recognition software that’s any good. Even the police and military software has a failure rate around fifty percent.”

  Twist flipped a hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. Can you use it anyway?”

  Micah was wearing a messenger bag with the strap across his broad chest. He dragged the bag around to his side and removed a laptop from it. “It’s not mine. I’m just the middleman who’s negotiating the deal.”

  Twist’s head tilted to the side. “But you know the backdoor login codes, right?”

  Micah opened the laptop and asked, “Who are we looking for?”

  A few minutes later, two of Twist’s computer monitors were showing the grainy video feed from the security cameras of the Grimaldi Forum the night before. Micah had used some of Twist’s cables to plug his laptop directly into the desktop tower that was pulling the camera feed.

  At first, people milled aimlessly around, grouping and regrouping as conversations moved. They sped through the footage of the evening.

  Even without sound, the instant when the crowd heard the first gunshots was obvious.

  A wave of terror rippled through the crowd as everyone jumped from the snaps of the gunshots and then looked around the convention center’s staircases and upper floors surrounding the atrium, trying to discern where the shots were coming from because the cement building echoed.

  The people on the screen froze, and different rooms flipped into view.

  “Do you know where Dree Clark was when it started?” Twist asked as he shuffled a mouse with one hand and clicked keys on a keyboard with the other.

  “We were together on the dance floor on the upper level. Port Hercule Hall on the east side of the building,” Maxence said.

  Twist shuffled the mouse and clicked while staring at the screen. “This room?”

  “That’s it. We’re right there in the center.”

  The pixelated still shot showed Maxence holding a black jewelry box in his hand as he kneeled in front of a woman wearing a fluttering white dress, but they had both turned away from the camera and were staring off to the side.

  Arthur slapped Casimir on the arm. “I almost forgot our bet. That old sod is never going to be a priest now. You owe me twenty bucks.”

  Casimir rolled his eyes.

  Twist scrolled through the footage, switching to different cameras as necessary.

  Maxence was facing a camera in the moment when Michael Rossi executed Nico Grimaldi. The rictus of horror on his face brought the rage rushing back.

  Even Arthur flinched as Nico dropped straight down.

  Twist said to Maxence, “I don’t remember him at Le Rosey.”

  Max whispered, “Nico didn’t go to Le Rosey. He was my cousin. I was going to put him forward to be the sovereign prince, and that’s why he was murdered.”

  Casimir turned away, biting his lip.

  Twist tapped the monitor with a pen. “So, this is where you figured out you’d been set up?”

  Arthur leaned toward Maxence. “I filled him in on what happened.”

  Maxence said, “Yeah. You can see here that I gave Dree my cell phone and the ring box and shoved her into the crowd.”

  They watched, and Twist zoomed in on her hands. “She was definitely holding your phone and something else, too. If we can find it, we might have a chance of finding her.”

  Micah frowned at the screen and then at Maxence. “Is that the girl who was with you at Versailles?”

  Maxence nodded.

  On the screen, the traitors on Max’s security team hustled him out of the ballroom. Max said, “They took me up to the roof where a helicopter was waiting. Follow where Dree went.”

  As they watched, the petite woman in the fluttering dress dodged and ran in the other direction.

  Arthur muttered, “Smart girl.”

  Micah had been watching the screen closely. “She’s talking to somebody on the phone.”

  Maxence said, “I hit the panic app on the phone that calls Arthur.”

  Twist flipped through several cameras, keeping Dree in view. On the computer monitor, she zigzagged through the crowd with the cell phone pressed to her ear until she approached the crowd of people surging for the safety of the stairwell.

  Twist leaned forward in his chair and tapped the screen. “Right there. She turned around right there.” He shuffled the mouse and clicked the keyboard, and the video zoomed in on her. The people in the shot moved forward and backward as Twist adjusted the video a few frames back and a few frames forward until the man she was talking to turned to face the camera. “That’s the best shot I can get.”

  The man’s head was tilted down. Only part of his bulbous forehead was visible in the camera shot.

  A red square flew in from the side of the screen and centered over the man’s face. Micah said, “Run it forward an
d backward a few times.”

  Twist adjusted the red square and clicked a few keys on his laptop. A small window opened in the bottom left corner of the screen, and layers scanned, building up a sketch of a face. Every time the man moved and different angles of his face came into view, the algorithm adjusted the composite drawing to include the new data. The computer-generated sketch looked like a cartoon of an exceptionally old man with sunken cheeks and eyes, and his skin was so wrinkled that it looked pleated.

  Micah asked, “Does he look familiar?”

  Maxence shook his head. “There were a lot of senior citizens at the Sea Change Gala last night.”

  Twist said, “Then we’ll follow them.” He scrolled through the cameras, centering the image on the screen of Dree and the man holding onto her arm and dragging her behind him. Micah chased every glimpse of the man’s face with his red square. It looked like they were playing a combat videogame.

  “Yet?” Twist asked.

  Maxence still shook his head. “He kind of looks like the Crypt Keeper.”

  Several more men surrounded Dree and her abductor.

  Twist clicked on a shot to freeze it and leaned toward the monitor. “She doesn’t have anything in her hands now.”

  Maxence’s heart thudded into the bottom of his belly. “Did she drop the phone?”

  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.