Read Chapter 8: The Dry Run

The warehouse smelled of sawdust and ozone. Jules had spent three days constructing the mock vault from plywood, steel plates, and scavenged electronics, and the result was convincing enough to make Alex’s palms sweat. He ran a gloved finger along the edge of the fake door frame, feeling the recessed channel where the real one would house the laser grid Viktor’s floor plans had conveniently omitted.

“Timer’s set,” Zoe called from a folding chair near the back wall, laptop open, cables snaking to a bank of monitors she’d rigged to simulate the casino’s security feeds. “You’ve got ninety seconds from when I cut the alarm loop before the grille drops. Same as the real thing.”

Alex nodded, circling the mock. Jules stood by the far wall, arms crossed, still wearing the grease-stained race crew coveralls from the McLaren’s pit practice. His face was an open question.

“We’ve run this layout six times,” Jules said. “It’s solid. Why now?”

“Because Viktor’s floor plans have a flaw,” Alex said. He tapped the east wall of the mock. “Here. He shows an access panel on the inner corridor side. But I’ve been in that vault’s sister room in the Monte Carlo annex. There’s no panel there. There’s a solid concrete wall behind the cladding.”

Jules frowned. “You didn’t mention that before.”

“I shouldn’t have had to.” Alex pulled a folded blueprint from his jacket—the one Viktor had given him, crisp and annotated with careful handwriting. He smoothed it against the plywood wall. “He gave us this to make us feel prepared. But the laser grid he didn’t mention, the panel that doesn’t exist, the second guard rotation he says starts at 02:40 when I know it shifts at 02:15—these aren’t mistakes. They’re little adjustments. Each one buys him time or misdirection.”

“Or he’s just sloppy,” Zoe said, not looking up from her screen.

“Viktor isn’t sloppy.” Alex’s voice was flat. “He’s a professional financer. He’s funded fourteen heists that I know of. Eleven succeeded. The three that failed? The crews didn’t survive. And every one of those failures involved a detail that didn’t match the plans they were given.”

The silence in the warehouse was broken only by the hum of the ventilation. Jules uncrossed his arms and walked to the mock vault’s door, running his hands along the steel jamb. “So what are we rehearsing with now?”

“We’re rehearsing the real layout,” Alex said. “I’ve rebuilt the floor plan from memory—my time at the tables, the maintenance shifts, the schematics I could put together from the annex’s sister vault. Cross-referenced with public blueprints of the original constructors.” He pulled a second set of plans from the back pocket of his trousers, these dog-eared and covered in handwritten notes. “This one’s accurate. No laser grid on the inner door, but there is one on the outer airlock. And the panel Jules is supposed to use to bypass the lock—it’s here, not there.”

He pointed at a spot three feet to the left of Viktor’s marked location.

Jules studied it, then nodded slowly. “That changes the approach angle. I’ll need to come in lower.”

“Because the camera sightline shifts too,” Zoe said. She stood and joined them, looking at the corrected plan. “The one camera that’s supposed to have a blind spot? It doesn’t. It’s an active motion sensor with a refresh rate that’ll catch movement through the gap. You’ll be skylined for a half-second. That’s enough.”

“So we cut the sensor,” Alex said.

“We can’t. It’s tied to the security office’s independent loop—isolated from the mainframe. If it drops, they’ll know something’s wrong within eleven seconds.”

“Then you give them something else to look at.” Alex turned to the mock. “That’s why we’re here.”

He stepped onto the platform, punched the timer on his wrist, and nodded to Zoe. She returned to her laptop and tapped a key. The simulated alarm loop died with a soft beep. The clock started.

Alex moved like water. Hands found seams, fingers worked the bypass tool Jules had fabricated, and the lock clicked ninety seconds in—exactly on target. The steel door swung open without a sound. He stepped inside the mock vault, swept a hand across the shelves where the real ones would hold cash and bearer bonds, and froze.

“Jules,” he said quietly. “Come here.”

Jules crossed the threshold and followed Alex’s gaze. The interior of the mock vault had been dressed to mirror the casino’s—shelving, a false floor, conduit runs along the ceiling. But the ceiling had been changed since their last rehearsal. A section of pipework now ran along the north wall, and the shelving unit was shifted six inches closer to the door than the corrected plan showed.

Jules looked at it, then at the plan in his hand. “That’s not what we built.”

“No,” Alex said. “This is what’s in the real vault now.”

Zoe came to the doorway, peered inside, and went pale. “You’re saying someone’s been inside the real vault since your intel?”

“Or Viktor’s crew modified it after he gave us the plans,” Jules said. “To slow us down even if we did correct the layout.”

Alex stared at the shifted shelving. It wasn’t random. The placement would force a second person to stand in the camera’s newly identified sightline while the first worked the lock box. If they followed the original plan, one of them would get caught. That wasn’t a harmless discrepancy. That was a trap.

“Strip it,” Alex ordered. “Tear down the mock and rebuild it to this. We’ll rerun tonight until we’ve got a new approach.”

Jules moved to comply, but Alex’s phone buzzed. Zoe’s name flashed. She was already looking at him, her phone in hand.

“It’s not from me,” she said.

He read the message: *Finish the rehearsal. I’ll be watching the window. The ledger’s waiting.*

There was no sender identification. No phone number. Just a timestamp and those words.

Alex held up the phone for the other two to see. Jules’s jaw tightened. Zoe’s eyes narrowed, and she turned back to her laptop, fingers flying. “I’m tracing it,” she said. “It bounced through a relay in Zurich. Then a second in Panama. Then—” She stopped. Scrolled. Looked up.

“Then?”

“Then it terminated in Monaco,” she said. “At the casino’s own server cluster.”

Alex looked at the mock vault, at the shifted shelving that would have broken them, and at the text on his screen. The third party who had left the rose on his brother’s grave wasn’t just watching through the casino’s systems.

They were the casino’s systems.

“Someone inside wants this too,” he said slowly. “And they’re feeding us the correction before Viktor can spring the trap.”

The timer on his wrist beeped. Thirty seconds remained on their dry run, and there was nothing left in the mock vault to steal.

Zoe looked up from her screen, face taut. “There’s one more thing. The relay path—it’s identical to the one Viktor uses for his shell company communications. Whatever this third party is, they’re on Viktor’s network. They’re either his partner or his shadow.”

Jules stepped away from the shelving, his hands at his sides. “So what do we do? We don’t know if this is a lifeline or a noose.”

Alex pocketed the phone. “We finish the rehearsal tonight. We learn the corrected layout. And when the race weekend starts, we find out which side the third party is really on.”

He looked at the phone in his pocket. “And we let them think we don’t know they’re watching.”