Dree thanked Matryona profusely and prayed to Mary and all the saints that the little lever to open the bathroom window wasn’t broken.
Chapter Nine
Mother Hen
Maxence
Beneath the helicopter, sparkling blue water flowed to the horizon in every direction, interrupted only by the cargo ship that the chopper buzzed away from.
Ever since Max had been kidnapped when he was nine years old and held hostage on that damned cargo ship for over three weeks, he’d agonized that it might happen to him again.
Now that it had, he didn’t feel like a terrified child anymore. His plan was only to find Dree and then make sure those pirates and traitors didn’t do this to anyone else.
But he didn’t feel much else.
A thick fog of limbo separated him from everything he might have felt.
Maxence toggled the microphone on the hearing protection earphones so he could talk to Arthur and Casimir over the shrieking growl of the helicopter. “How far away from Monaco are we?”
Casimir, who was sitting beside him in the backseat, answered, “A bit over a hundred kilometers. Are you quite all right, Max?”
As the helicopter had risen in altitude, the temperature inside had dropped precipitously. Max was naked from the waist up and wearing the equivalent of shorts where he’d ripped off his pants legs. He told Casimir, “I’m fine.”
Arthur shrugged his arms out of his suit jacket and tossed it into the back seat at Max. “I’m hot. The front seat is getting all the sunlight.”
Max slid his arms into the suit jacket gratefully. He wouldn’t have died of hypothermia, but he was a lot more comfortable with the suit coat. The silk-lined wool slid up his bare arms.
Arthur glanced back at him, probably making sure Max put it on like the mother hen Arthur was.
“What the hell happened to you?” Casimir asked him, his low voice growling in Max’s earphones. “We saw news footage of your own goons dragging you away.”
“Kidnapping, again.” Maxence told them the rest, using the driest terms he could muster.
Boat.
Dark room.
A plan to escape, thwarted.
Talking the crew around to his side.
Helicopter arrived.
And that was all.
Arthur and Casimir nodded.
“And who do you think financed your abduction, and what was the goal?” Arthur asked.
Max told him, “My uncle Prince Jules Grimaldi is number four in line for the throne. He employed Michael Rossi, who assassinated Nico at the Sea Change Gala, and Quentin Sault named him when I was trying to talk him around. The people in the line of succession between Jules and me have already signaled they won’t accept it. I’m the only person standing between him and one-point-one billion euros.”
Arthur nodded from the front seat. “So, Uncle Jules is the de facto number two in line for the throne after you, if you Monegasques went by absolute primogeniture instead of this horrendous election system you’ve set up.”
Max nodded. “Rossi signaled Quentin Sault at the gala right after he assassinated my cousin Nico. Sault put a bag over my head, said he was preventing me from attending the Crown Council election tonight, locked me in a storeroom, and tried to kill me.”
“So mysterious,” Arthur quipped. “We’ll probably never know.”
Casimir squinted, turning his head to look down at the sea as the helicopter buzzed toward the horizon.
“Right,” Arthur said. “So, your entire security apparatus is compromised.”
“Yeah. That’s what I think, too.”
“Then our first priority will be finding the traitors in your security,” Arthur said, unlocking his phone.
“No, our first priority is to find Dree Clark.”
“The Crown Council meeting is in eight hours. If you’re not there, Jules will be elected, and he’ll win.”
“We’re making sure Dree Clark is safe first.”
Arthur sighed. “Right. Dree Clark. I’m sure your secretary’s well-being is every bit as important as your national security. Nevertheless, we’ll do them concurrently. I will discuss the matter with some friends, who will follow your security’s electronic footprints to determine who stands with whom.” He thumbed his phone, texting quickly.
Arthur then handed his cell phone back to Max. “Why don’t you call the palace and inquire about your friend? The earphones have Bluetooth. It should sync up.”
Max dialed the phone number for his valet.
The man picked up. “Who is this? How did you get this number?”
Max said, “Tommaso, it’s me, Maxence.”
Tommaso’s naturally bass voice rose to a pitch Max had never heard before. “Your Highness! Are you all right! Are you injured! Where are you and we will come to find you, Your Reverence Your Serene Highness my Prince!”
That was gratifying. At least some people had missed him this time when he’d been kidnapped. “I am fine, Tommaso. Thank you for your concern. Has Dree Clark, my admin, been accounted for?”
“Oh, Your Highness, I’m so sorry. Last night after the incident at the Sea Change Gala, everything was in chaos. Miss Clark is on the list of people who are still unaccounted for.”
Terror stabbed into Max’s heart, caught fire, and turned to rage. His voice came out as a growl. “Did my cousin Nico survive?”
“No, sir, he didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Dark fire compressed in his chest like it would squeeze his heart until it popped. “I will be at the palace helipad momentarily. Tell no one that I’ve contacted you.”
“But, surely, you will need security. I will contact Colonel Sault—”
“No. Contact no one in our Secret Service or the police, and Quentin Sault is no longer the head of our Secret Service.”
“Has Colonel Sault—resigned?”
“He’s gone,” Maxence said.
“Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”
“Meet me at the helicopter with fresh clothes and athletic shoes. Not a suit. Casual, and maybe black.” Max sniffed himself inside Arthur’s jacket and found himself disgusting. “Gauze bandages, a pack of those antiseptic wipes and ointment, and a stick of deodorant.”
“I will make arrangements for you, sir.”
“And Tommaso, tell no one about this who doesn’t have a need to know. You haven’t heard from me. No one has. You’re just packing a bag and going up to the roof for absolutely no reason.”
“Yes, sir. You can rely on me, sir!”
He ended the call and handed the phone back to Arthur.
Casimir asked him over the intercom, “Are you going to meet your palace staff dressed like you’ve been shipwrecked for a decade?”
Maxence shrugged. “This is what happens when my security services can’t do their job.”
As Arthur took the phone from Max, he took a second look at what Max was wearing. “Is that your new Kiton tuxedo you were having tailored?”
Maxence shrugged, waving his hands over his trousers torn off above his knees. “My first plan was to jump overboard and swim back to Monaco. I had to cut it down to swimming trunks.”
Arthur snorted. “Even I would’ve thought twice before shredding a Kiton tuxedo, and I would’ve submitted a receipt to Her Majesty for reimbursement.”
Maxence did not dignify that with a response.
“You’d lost most of your Tom Ford when we rescued you in Genoa a few months ago. You’re rather hard on tuxedos these days, aren’t you?”
Max ignored him. British people loved to insult you and then ask you to agree with them. “Dree might still have my phone. Can you track it?”
Arthur’s sigh whooshed through his headphones. “That involves hacking into the mobile phone system to track your phone’s pings on cell phone towers, and then triangulate a more precise location once we get closer to it. I don’t have the equipment with me to do that. I was on a different kind of trip when she called, and then we saw your spot of
trouble on the telly. She might’ve just gone home with a friend because she was shaken up, you know.”
Max shook his head. “Her phone is out of service. And she didn’t pick up mine that she might still have with her, either. And there’s no way I could tell if she’s texted me because I don’t have my phone. Everything I need is on my damn phone.”
Arthur cleared his throat. “I might have access to some of it.”
Maxence popped his head up. “Arthur, did you clone my phone?”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
That was not an answer. “You cloned my phone!”
“Well, it seemed prudent, considering how often you go missing.”
“Arthur, I’m an actual world leader!”
“You weren’t until a month ago, and it’s still not official. And you deny it will ever be official.”
“That’s espionage!”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Dammit, Arthur. Check my messages and see if she’s texted me.”
Arthur did something on his phone. “You’ve received no texts from her since you texted her to come to your apartment and ‘take notes.’ I assume that’s amateur code for something depraved. You have many other messages from other people, asking after your welfare and demanding you answer them.”
“You need to uncouple your phone from mine right now.”
“Perhaps we should wait until we’ve secured Dree Clark.”
“Yeah, okay, but I don’t want you reading my text messages anymore.”
“I won’t.” He paused. “You’re a dirty, dirty man, Maxence.”
“Jesus, Arthur.” Max sat back in his seat, still pissed.
Beside him, Casimir was smirking and looking out his window.
Max said to him, “He’s probably cloned yours, too.”
Casimir straightened. “Arthur, did you clone my phone?”
Arthur shrugged, his bulky headphones weaving against the bright sunlight shining in the helicopter’s front windscreen. “Full-court press then, unless and until we find out Miss Clark is all right. We need powerful computers and a lightning-fast connection to hack Monaco’s 5G mobile network.”
Casimir said to Max, “He didn’t answer my question. He changed the subject. That means he did it. He cloned my phone.” He turned to the front. “Arthur, quit reading my texts!”
Max shook his head. “He has no boundaries.”
“Arthur! I’m a lawyer, and there is such a thing as attorney-client privilege. Those conversations are legally privileged, and no one should be reading them. I can’t even be subpoenaed about them. Now, dammit, you un-clone my phone right now and quit reading my texts.”
Arthur said, “Gentlemen! Focus! Our missions are to find Miss Clark and to provide Monaco’s ad hoc sovereign with proper security.”
Casimir sighed. “We’ll sort out personal boundaries later. Arthur, didn’t you say you met Tristan King at the Monaco Yacht Club, and he was arbitraging stock options using Monaco’s 5G?”
Arthur mused, “Yes, Twist might be using the type of computer equipment that would work. Max, tell your valet that we’ll do a touch-and-go at the palace, and then we’ll take the helicopter directly to the yacht club to see if we can rouse Twist. You can change out of that tragic Kiton tuxedo at the club. It just breaks my heart, what you did to that poor Kiton.”
Maxence was ready to strangle Arthur with the ripped-off Kiton tuxedo trousers he still wore, but death by platinum-stitched cashmere was too good for the wanker. “May I use your phone to make another call?”
“I suppose.” Arthur’s phone flipped through the air toward the back seat.
Maxence snatched it out of the air and dialed a number from long-held memory, waiting while it rang.
A woman’s sleepy voice answered, “Hello? Maxence? Are you all right? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. I saw on the news—”
“I’m fine. I’m in a helicopter with Arthur and Casimir.”
“Oh, thank God. I was so worried about you. With, you know, kidnapping. Please tell me you’re all right.”
“I’m fine, Flicka,” Maxence said, “and I need to talk to your husband.”
Chapter Ten
Closet
Dree
Matryona Sokolov’s henchmen tied Dree Clark up more securely the next time.
She hadn’t even made it out of the damned parking lot. After she’d climbed out the bathroom window, a stupid truck had turned in at just the wrong time, its headlights lighting her up like a spotlight at a prison, and the driver had narced.
They wound a clothesline around her wrists that were wrenched behind her back and then wrapped the thin rope around and around her, binding her arms to her chest and her legs together like a mummy.
It was a good thing they still hadn’t frisked her and found Max’s cell phone or that jewelry box under her boobs, the idiots. If she’d been back home, she might’ve had a gun hidden in her girls or a thigh holster. When she got out of there, those amateur criminals deserved everything that was coming to them just for being so dumb.
She cussed at them the whole time and threatened to shoot them and their whole organization with a variety of range weapons, some of which she made up, like the .85 caliber ballistic thunder rifle. Stupid Russian mafia guys didn’t know Western American weapons from a hole in the ground. Let them figure out which ones were real.
They left her lying on the floor of a closet, but they didn’t shut the door all the way. Through the crack in the closet door, Dree watched Kir Sokolov walk over to his sister Matryona and begin boasting about how well he had done the night before at the Sea Change Gala when he had kidnapped Dree.
Matryona disagreed. Kidnapping someone for mere revenge in the middle of an international incident might draw unwanted attention to their operation.
Kir and Matryona started arguing again, viciously attacking each other’s secret emotional weaknesses and personal hygiene, like siblings do. Evidently, Kir had screwed up more than one mission by being too quick to kill people, which Matryona believed was his greatest weakness and evidence of his inability to ever lead their crime family.
Okay, things were getting a little Godfathery around there. Dree hoped they shot each other as she laid on the floor of the closet and cursed them with a variety of different skin diseases and brain infections that she hoped they’d get.
And then Kir and Matryona started debating whether or not to kill Dree.
She was beyond pissed at them.
Kir said, “But that little shitbag in Phoenix said this girl has the money he owes us, at least part of it. And I did see her name on some of the bank accounts. Why wouldn’t she be able to access it?”
“You shouldn’t have grabbed her,” Matryona said. “Didn’t you see that the Prince of Monaco was trying to propose to her? Fifty cameras were livestreaming it. The whole world is looking for her. Even beyond the horrible violence of the mass shooting that is on every news channel right now, everyone wants to know who the girl was who was standing in front of the Prince when he went down on one knee, and you kidnapped her, you dumbass.”
Kir shrugged. “Monaco has restrictions on media. There were no journalists there.”
Matryona balled up her fist and shook it at him. “There were social media influencers at that gala last night. They’re unregulated. Marie-Therese brought a bunch of her friends to the gala because she wanted herself plastered all over Instagram today. Instead, there are Instagram photos of the unknown girl, who is Dree frigging Clark, with millions of likes and a billion questions about who she is and where she is now!”
Kir shrugged again. “So? We were going to make her disappear anyway. What is the difference if we disappear a girl that nobody knows about, or one who is internet-famous for one day?”
“There was security camera footage, and some of those influencers were livestreaming the whole thing—the dancing, the proposal, and then the shooting. They saw you dragging her out
of there. Your picture is all over the place from five hundred different angles, too!”
“No one will put it together.”
“Interpol has facial recognition software, dumbass.”
“It won’t recognize me. I had a haircut recently.”
“That’s not how it works. And besides, there were hundreds of people there. Maybe a thousand. There were witnesses.”
“Then we will kill them, too.”
“Hundreds of witnesses? And millions of people on the internet? Are you out of your damn mind, Kir?”
“Yes,” he said.
Oh, now he was just sulking.
Dree was even more disgusted by him. He was one of those guys who always had to be right even when confronted with glaring evidence that he was a screw-up, like a lot of the surgical residents were.
Matryona asked, “So, you think you’re just going to kill her then?”
“Of course. People need to learn what happens when they cross the Sokolov bratva. Then they will be afraid of us, and no one will cross us again.”
“You are such an idiot, Kir,” Matryona said. “Why can’t you ever come up with any options other than just killing people? When you kill somebody, there’s a body we have to dispose of. When the police find it, then there’s evidence on the body of where it was, which is this warehouse, where we have our stock for half of Europe. If we can make her disappear but not kill her, then we don’t have a body to hide, and maybe her living body will make some money for us.”
Dree didn’t like any of those options.
She was going to have to escape again.
Chapter Eleven
The Monaco Yacht Club
Maxence
Later, after a touch-and-go at the palace where Tommaso insisted on interrogating Maxence about his health before he would step back and allow the chopper to leave, the helicopter touched down on the roof of the Monaco Yacht Club.
Royal: A Royal Billionaire Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 6) Page 5