Private Monaco

Chapter 55

Sci, Justine and I waited in the hallway while Mo-bot worked on the keypad under the stairs.

“Just... another... second,” she said, spacing out the words carefully, so the loud clunk came the instant she finished saying “second.”

“Would you look at this?” she remarked, and I peered through the door to see her stooping to enter a room concealed behind a hatch to the rear of the closet.

I followed her in, beyond a four-inch-thick metal vault door that had been covered in plasterboard so as to blend seamlessly with the understairs wall. The room the door concealed was about the size of a prison cell. There were four bunks and shelves full of supplies.

“Panic room,” Mo-bot suggested, as Sci and Justine joined us in the cramped space.

I nodded. “You think you can open that?”

I gestured to a large floor safe tucked in the corner of the room at the end of one of the bunks.

Mo-bot crouched to check it out.

“Keypad,” she observed. “So, it’s probably between a four- and an eight-digit code. I should be able to do something.”

She got to work, prizing open the panel.

Sci sat on the bottom bed of the bunk opposite. “Imagine living the kind of life where you need a place like this to keep your family safe,” Justine remarked, looking around what was effectively a small survival bunker. “He probably told them it was because he’d been a government minister.”

“Looks like it’s a basic four-digit code,” Mo-bot said. She’d connected her cracker to the safe and was interrogating the keypad. “Here we go.”

She input the code displayed on her cracker, and the safe-locking mechanism shifted open with a clang and a click.

My heart thumped almost to bursting the moment Mo-bot pulled the door open, because a loud alarm sounded and rang throughout the house.

“Shit,” she said. “There must be a kill switch somewhere.”

I didn’t waste any time trying to find it because we’d already given away our presence. Instead, I looked inside the safe to see four phones, passports, cash and half a dozen USB drives.

“Grab that and let’s get out of here,” I yelled above the deafening ringing.

Mo-bot swept everything into her gear bag, and the four of us made a swift exit through the understairs closet and kitchen, before hurrying out of the house and into the garden.

“You go first,” I told Mo-bot.

She handed me her gear bag as we approached, immediately starting to climb the rough rockface, which thankfully had plenty of chunky hand- and footholds.

When Mo-bot was halfway, Sci started up, and then Justine, and I went alongside her, conscious of the twin torch beams of the gate security guards heading toward the Duval home.

When I was two-thirds of the way up, I heard sirens approaching, but we crested the top of the rock wall, climbed over the turnout barrier and were in the car and moving at speed before the cops arrived.