Read Chapter 17: Under the Grandstand

The roar of the grandstand was a physical thing, a wall of sound that pressed against Jules’s eardrums as the Ferrari and the McLaren came through Casino Square side by side, two meters apart, both drivers refusing to yield. On the wall-mounted monitor above his workbench, the gap between them held at 0.042 seconds. Jules didn’t need the screen. He could feel it in the vibration through the concrete floor, in the way the pit crew around him held their breath.

His own car—the number 47 Alpine piloted by a pay driver named Moreau who’d finished outside the points in every race this season—was running dead last, three laps down, a mobile chicane with a French flag decal. Jules had been waiting for this moment for eleven laps.

“Front left’s vibrating,” Jules said into the comms, keeping his voice flat, professional. “Graining. Maybe a slow puncture.”

On the other end of the line, the chief engineer’s voice crackled back. “We’re not seeing it on the telemetry.”

“It’s not on the telemetry. I’m telling you what I’m feeling.” Jules glanced at the monitor. The gap between the leaders had stretched to 0.8 seconds. “I’m within my window. If I stay out another lap, I’m on the racing line and I’ll be in everyone’s way.”

There was a pause. The chief engineer was consulting. Jules used the moment to run his eyes over the tool tray beside him. Everything was exactly where he’d left it that morning: the torque wrench, the Allen key set, the small black relay device wrapped in electrical tape that looked like a cheap ECU piggyback module and contained enough custom silicon to wipe a banking network’s backup directories clean.

“Copy that. Box, box, box,” the chief engineer said. “Front tires only. Quick stop.”

“Understood.”

Jules pulled his balaclava up over his face, covering everything but his eyes, and stepped over the pit wall. The lollipop man was already out, signaling Moreau’s Alpine down the short pit lane. The car rolled to a stop in front of Jules’s station, the screech of rubber still smoking as the pneumatic jacks lifted each corner.

The front-left tire changer moved in. Jules, instead of joining him on the front axle, circled around to the rear. He ran his hand along the floor panel until he found the access hatch designed for quick electronic swaps. He popped it open.

“Rear tire fine,” another crew member called out. “Don’t need to touch the back.”

“Checking a sensor fault,” Jules said, loud enough to be heard over the screaming engines of cars still on track. “Codes are throwing an imbalance. Give me two seconds.”

He didn’t wait for permission. He pulled the relay device from his pocket, fitted it into the slot beside the car’s data logger, and snapped the access hatch shut. The device was now drawing power from the car’s system and transmitting on a frequency that would only activate when the car returned to racing speed and the onboard computer reported a fault code to the team’s cloud server. The server, which shared space with the casino’s backup architecture in the same data center under the grandstand, would receive the signal and—if Jules’s math was right—propagate a quiet corruption through every mirrored backup file, erasing the last forty-eight hours of settlement data without raising a single alarm until someone tried to restore from those exact files.

“Fault codes are clear,” Jules said, stepping back. “Front tires are good. Let’s go.”

The lollipop man lifted his board. Moreau’s Alpine roared out of the pit box, back into the fight for eighteenth place. Jules watched it accelerate down the pit lane and onto the track, the relay device now live, the signal buried in the car’s continuous telemetry stream, invisible, anonymous, perfect.

He allowed himself a small breath. Then he turned to the pit board, updating the gap numbers for the Alpine’s next lap, just like any other mechanic.

On the giant screen above the pit lane, the race leaders came through the tunnel, the McLaren now ahead by half a car length. The grandstand erupted. Jules glanced up at the image, then at the empty seat where Alex had been standing earlier that morning, watching the race with the detached calm of a man who wasn’t really watching the race at all.

Alex was somewhere in the casino now, doing exactly what Jules had done here: moving through a system as if he belonged in it, planting his pieces one by one.

The comms crackled in Jules’s ear. “—copy that, we’re not seeing any issues. Confirm your primary systems are nominal.”

“All nominal,” Jules said. “Standing by.”

He pulled his comms helmet off and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. He checked his watch. 17:42. Eighteen minutes until Viktor’s planned arrival, and about forty laps until the race ended and the settlement systems would finalize the betting pools that Alex intended to drain.

Jules felt the familiar weight of his secondary task pressing on him. The ledger. He still hadn’t managed to locate it. Every probe he’d run against Laurent’s personal systems had come back empty, and the data center’s own access logs showed no activity from the casino owner’s private terminal in weeks. The ledger might not be digital at all. It might be physical, locked in the office he wasn’t supposed to enter until after the heist began, or it might have been moved entirely.

What he did know was that Viktor’s arrival was going to change the security calculus. Laurent would tighten everything, make it harder to move through the casino unnoticed, and there was no clean window to go hunting for the ledger anymore. Not before 18:00.

The plan had been to slip into Laurent’s office during the final race laps, when security would be focused on the podium ceremonies and the influx of winners collecting their winnings. But with Viktor on-site, security would double. Every corridor, every door, every camera would be monitored with a new intensity. And Alex, who was supposed to be running the operation from the outside, would instead be inside the building, visible, exposed, the exact opposite of a safe distance.

Jules had been turning options over in his mind all afternoon, and none of them felt solid.

He felt the buzz of his phone in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen. A message from an encrypted channel.

*No. Wait. That solves nothing.*

He frowned. The message wasn’t addressed to him. It was a status update from Zoe’s channel, but the content was wrong. It read like something Alex had composed, then decided against sending, and had accidentally pushed to the group thread instead.

Then a second message came through, this one properly addressed to Jules from Alex’s channel:

*Change of plan. Viktor’s route is confirmed. He’s coming up Avenue de la Costa, not through the main entrance. The escort will pause at the tunnel junction for a security sweep. That’s our window.*

Jules stared at the message. The tunnel junction was directly beneath the grandstand, a hundred meters from the pit boxes, right where Jules was standing now. The plan had been for the crew to intercept Viktor’s escort somewhere synthetic along the route to plant the backup jammers. But Alex was proposing they do it from here, from the pit area, using the race infrastructure to mask their presence.

That was clever. That was also insane. The tunnel junction was guarded by Laurent’s private security, not the casino’s regular staff. They’d be walking into armed territory with the race still running and thousands of spectators overhead.

The comms crackled again. “Jules, we need you on the boards for the undercut call. We’re looking at a two-stop for Moreau if the graining continues.”

He put the phone away and got back to work, his hands moving through the mechanics of his job while his mind raced through the logistics of what Alex was proposing. The backup jammers were in a backpack under his workbench, wrapped in a raincover and disguised as a spare tire cover. He could carry that cover to the tunnel junction in under ninety seconds if he took the marshals’ access route through the undercroft.

The question was whether he could do it without being seen by anyone who would remember his face.

He glanced at the monitor. The leader had pitted for fresh tires. The Alpine was now the only car still on its original set. Jules’s phone buzzed again.

*Confirm readiness. We move at 17:55.*

He didn’t respond. He was already moving toward the undercroft, the tire cover slung over his shoulder, his heart rate steady, his expression exactly as bored as it needed to be.

The grandstand roared overhead, swallowed by the sound of engines and the endless race that had nothing to do with the one Jules was running.