Read Chapter 2: The Full-Court Press

Alex drove them in the wrong direction first, taking the Boulevard des Moulins and looping back through the tourist crush toward the Hôtel de Paris roundabout. Jules didn’t ask why. He knew the drill: never approach the target in a straight line. The police watched for pattern, for purpose. A car that wandered looked like a car that belonged.

The Casino de Monte-Carlo rose ahead of them, wedding-cake white and gaslit, crawling with security in off-the-rack black suits who tried too hard to look like they weren’t bored. Race-day banners hung from the lampposts, the red-and-white of the Grand Prix bleeding into the casino’s gilded trim. Formula cars shrieked through the tunnel below, and every few seconds the ground vibrated through the tires.

Alex killed the engine half a block early and pulled the collar of his jacket up against the sea breeze. “Walk it with me.”

They crossed the street at a strolling pace, two men with nowhere to be—but Jules’s eyes were already working. That was why Alex had picked him. Not the hands, though God knew those hands had won Monaco’s mechanic of the year three times before the syndicate had taken his license over a rubber-banded fuel line. No. It was the eyes. Jules saw patterns in motion the way other men saw color.

“Service entrance is at eleven o’clock,” Jules said, sotto voce, as they passed a boutique selling watches that cost more than Alex’s debt. “Full view of the main drag. Bad spot for us, good spot for them.”

“Used to be better,” Alex said. “Two years back, the laundry trucks used to back straight up to the kitchens. You could walk a bomb in with the linens. Then they built the employee lot and moved the loading dock around the corner.”

They rounded the block. The service road ran narrow and shadowed between the casino’s rear wall and the back of a hotel that hosted the less-important Saudi royals. A chain-link gate, rolling shutters, a steel door with a keypad. Three deliveries stacked near the dock: cases of champagne, a crate stamped with frozen turbot, and one gaudy floral arrangement that probably cost more than the fish.

“Sixty seconds,” Alex said, checking his watch. “Maybe ninety, before someone comes out to abuse the smokers.”

Jules grunted. He’d pulled a grease-stained baseball cap over his eyes and was leaning against the wall like a man waiting on a bus that would never come. But his chin was tilted just enough to track the guard on the roof—a silhouette patrolling the parapet with a rifle slung across his back like it was a fashion accessory.

“Roof guard,” Jules said. “Twelve-minute rotation. He’s got good sight lines down the east side. But the west stairwell housing blocks him from seeing the dock once he passes the AC units.”

Alex filed that away. The helicopter plan that Viktor had pushed on them last night—the rooftop landing that had felt wrong from the moment Étienne had mouthed it in that café—was looking worse with every passing hour. He didn’t trust that bird. A chopper landing on the casino roof at four a.m. was not a pickup. It was a photo op for whatever trap Viktor had in mind.

But Viktor held the file. Alex’s file. Twenty years of mistakes and debts and half-buried sins, all in a red folder on the director’s desk. Viktor had promised it would burn once the job was done.

Alex had stopped believing in Viktor’s promises somewhere around the third glass of veuve he’d poured himself last night.

A delivery van pulled into the service road, and the gate slid up with a hydraulic hiss. A man in a high-vis vest hopped out, lit a cigarette, and walked back to the driver’s side to argue with dispatch through the window. The gate stayed open. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. A staffer in kitchen whites stepped out for a smoke, leaned against the dock, and scrolled through her phone.

“Here she comes,” Jules said, almost cheerfully.

The security patrol did a full loop every hour, sweeping the perimeter. Alex had watched enough of them to know there were three on rotation during the day—two more at night, plus the roof guard who was the only one who changed his pattern with the race schedule. But Jules was watching something else.

“There,” Jules said, barely moving his lips. “You see it?”

Alex followed his gaze. A uniformed guard—older, graying, carrying his weight like a retired boxer—had rounded the corner, walking the perimeter. He paused at the loading dock, checked his phone, and kept walking. Nothing remarkable. Except.

“He took the long way,” Alex said.

“Exact same lap he’s done three times since we got here,” Jules said. “But that’s not why I called it. Look at the roof.”

The roof guard had gone still. He was standing at the near parapet, looking down at the service road. Not patrolling anymore. Watching. The old guard on the ground never looked up.

“That’s new,” Alex said.

“Yep. Got here an hour ago. Before that, the roof guy kept moving. Now he stops, watches the service entrance, waits until the ground patrol clears, then moves on. It’s like he’s watching out for somebody.”

Alex felt the ice settle in his stomach. Could be a routine change. Except this was the same window Viktor’s route had just been altered to pass through.

“Étienne said extraction’s off the roof,” Alex said. “Said security would be lightest on the east parapet at 0420.”

Jules snorted. “If that roof guard keeps his new pattern, east parapet’s his smoking spot. He’s dead center of it at 0415 every rotation.”

Alex’s mind was already mapping the shape of the betrayal. Viktor had handed them a new route, promised them open sky, and had directly fed them into the one spot on the whole roof that would have a guard planted—unless that guard was waiting for them, ready to wave them into a chokehold.

“Then we don’t go up,” Alex said.

“Where do we go?”

Alex was quiet for a long moment. The casino’s back wall rose above them, marble and shadow. Through the service gate, he could see the staff locker room door, the loading dock manager’s office with its half-shuttered blinds, and beyond that, the stairwell that led down to the basement—where the settlement system hummed in its climate-controlled vault, balancing a day’s take of millions in chips and cash and wired transactions that existed nowhere else in the world.

“We came in tonight thinking we’d fly out,” he said. “But Viktor wants us up top. So Viktor’s planning on us being up top.”

“And we hate when people plan on us.”

“We hate when people plan on us,” Alex agreed. He turned. “That ground patrol—the gray-haired one. When does he take his break?”

Jules consulted the imaginary watch on his bare wrist. “Two thirty-seven, like clockwork. Nineteen minutes in the staff room. Then he comes back out, does another loop.”

“And his replacement?”

“New guy. Doesn’t know the route yet. Slower, checks his phone twice.”

Alex smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile. “What time does the kitchen load out start?”

“Loading dock’s got a four a.m. pickup for the breakfast prep,” Jules said, already nodding. “Fish and produce. They open the gate for the van at three forty-five.”

“But the basement stairwell—the one that exits into the loading dock—does it have an access control that logs remotely?”

Jules’s eyes went narrow. “The keypad’s recycled from the old system. I saw it when I scouted last month. It broadcasts plaintext if you sniffer it.”

“Zoe gets us a code, we walk in through the kitchen door, hit the vault from below, and we’re out through the service gate before Viktor’s helicopter even lands.”

“And Viktor?”

Alex looked up at the roof one last time. The guard had moved on, continuing his slow sweep of the parapet, waiting on an extraction that was never going to come.

“Viktor gets a lovely view of the sunrise and an empty rooftop,” Alex said. “Now let’s go see if Zoe already cracked that keypad.”

They drifted away from the service entrance, back toward the bright madness of the Grand Prix crowds—two more anonymous men in a sea of cameras and champagne. Behind them, the casino glittered, patient and indifferent, holding its secrets in its stone belly.

The roof guard made his turn at the east parapet and looked down at the empty service road. He pulled out his phone, keyed a message, and watched the little bubble that meant the message had been received and read.

On the other end, in an office above Place du Casino, a man smiled.