One Night in Monaco

by Blair Babylon

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.

  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.

  The crowd’s movement seemed as aimless as dust motes billowing in the breeze.

  And then, a Black woman wearing a sparkling white dress ran across the salon like a dark sword blade stabbing through the room. Her bare, ebony arms stretched ahead of her as she ran, all the more visible as her long, white dress frothed
around her legs.

  People recoiled, getting out of her way, or turned to see why she was rushing. The meat of the room was pulled toward her and sliced away.

  The woman darted into the alcove where the facial recognition software had pinpointed Maxence had been standing. Her long skirt, darker near the hemline, fluttered as she moved.

  Arthur whispered under his breath, “Wait. Who was that woman?”

  Luftwaffe said, “I’ll see if I can get an image of her face and run it through the database.”

  Vlogger1 asked, “Isn’t that Simone Maina?”

  Racehorse muttered, “Who?”

  Arthur nodded to indicate that he also wanted to know who that was. He assumed they were all watching him sitting there on the floor either by hacking into the surveillance system for themselves or by slipping into his tablet and watching him through the webcam.

  Vlogger1 said, “Simone was two years behind me at Le Rosey, which would have put her in your class, Blackjack.”

  Arthur nodded. He vaguely remembered her, but they had run in different circles. By high school, Arthur had spent his time in the computer lab, out and about with Max and Caz, or at home in England.

  “We were on a field trip to Laos together during one of the school breaks. I liked her. She’s from Mauritius. It’s an island nation off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Gorgeous island, from what she said. She said that the only reason she got into Le Rosey was because her parents put down that her first language was Tamil, which is from Southern India, because the spots reserved for Francophones were filled up with legacies like they always are. She didn’t speak a word of Tamil, though. I mean, like, I speak more Tamil than she does, and I’m Malayali. Or, you know, my parents are. She said her mom was part Tamil, part Chinese, and half Ethiopian, and her dad was from Trinidad and Tobago, I think. ‘Typical Mauritian, if there is such a thing,’ she said. Didn’t she marry some French guy?”

  Luftwaffe asked, “Was she the girl who married Estebe Fournier?”

  Vlogger1 said, “Oh God, I think she did.”

  Arthur felt his brows lowering and strain between his eyes. Estebe had been a year ahead of them in school, but the whole campus had known he was a jerk. Arthur remembered Simone now. Everyone had been shocked that a guy like Estebe had gotten a woman like Simone, but Arthur had just assumed it was another example of the cliché that beautiful women liked assholes.

  A few people—security men or bodyguards from their stiff movements and the officious way they were shoving people out of their way—followed Simone through the crowd but got hung up in the mass of people. They reached the alcove a few minutes later and walked into it.

  Arthur rewound and ran it again.

  No, those men had already been moving when Simone ran across the room.

  Maybe.

  They had either been moving to converge on Maxence’s location or to intercept the woman’s flight. It was hard to discern purposeful movement within the random flow of the room.

  Arthur reran Simone’s mad dash through the crowd that swirled around her, and that time, he saw the men chasing her. “She had pursuers.”

  Clicking in his ears.

  Vlogger1 asked, “Five of them?”

  “I saw four,” Arthur whispered.

  “The four that entered behind her, but one guy was coming in from the right, see him? At the four o’clock.”

  Arthur watched the footage of the room filled with people bumping into each other like water at a rolling boil.

  This time, he saw the white man wearing a dark suit, as most of the casino’s guests were wearing, walking in from the right.

  And then Simone ran in.

  The man had his hand inside his suit jacket and sliding across his waist like he was readying himself to pull a gun from a cross-draw holster.

  And then the man startled, looked back, saw Simone, and withdrew, fading back into the crowd and moving toward another exit.

  Arthur whispered, “He was already moving, and then he saw Simone. Look.”

  The others agreed with him, mumbling that he was, indeed, another jackal coming in.

  Racehorse said, “We’ve got another one. Top-left corner.”

  Arthur looked. Another man had begun purposefully walking toward the alcove where Maxence had ducked his head into view, and he kept following Simone on the video until she disappeared into the small doorway blocked in by Christmas trees. Only then, he ducked his head, pivoted, and walked the other way.

  “Was there more than one party at play here?” Racehorse asked.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, his heart falling. “I don’t know.”

  He’d still been holding out hope that Maxence had decided to drop out of society for a few days and would be discovered in due time sitting under a banyan tree in India, futilely seeking enlightenment.

  But if at least two parties were hunting him, and maybe at cross-purposes?

  They had to find him.

  “This is disconcerting,” Racehorse said, utilizing understatement. “Are we sure it’s Simone Maina?”

  Luftwaffe said, “The facial app confirms it. Simone has been all over Paris during the last year. Lots of images to cross-check the identification. It’s her.”

  “What’s she doing here?” Arthur asked, squinting at the screen. Simone had disappeared into the alcove where Maxence had been, and the crowd had resumed its aimless wandering.

  Luftwaffe said, “Shit. I lost them. Damn Christmas trees. Here’s the room behind that doorway.”

  Another view opened on Arthur’s tablet. It was from a different camera and of a different room. The carpet, upholstery, and decor in there were more muted, done in pale golds, blues, and white. Even the Christmas decor was white and pale gold, from the trees in the corners to the garland around the doors that led outside.

  “Is that the White Room?” Arthur whispered.

  “It looks like it,” Luftwaffe said. “I can see the terrace on the other side through the windows. I haven’t seen 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.r />
  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.