Page 30 of Happily Ever After

More Strategy

Raphael Mirabaud

More plans,

and more of Clausewitz’s wisdom.

Raphael sat in a small apartment in Nice, France and made phone calls from a variety of cell phones he’d retrieved from a drawer in the apartment’s bedroom.

He called Blaise Lyon—the hacker whose name didn’t come up on any search engine searches and whose national identification number mightbe the only one in existence that was not for sale somewhere on the dark web—to tell him that Rogue Security was going to attack the Prince’s Palace in Monaco soon. Blaise and his few underling, gray-hat hackers had work to do. The Rogues were going to need a blackout for the city and total communications failure for the palace and police. He wanted the WiFi down and any weapon that needed computerizedtargeting to fail hard.

And he needed it all in forty-eight hours.

Blaise laughed. “Do you want unicorns to crap rainbows on the palace walls, too?”

Raphael hung up, but he knew Blaise would come through.

Next, he called Aiden Grier, the Scotsman. “I need to get inside the Prince’s Palace tonight.”

“Och,‘ave you lost your damn mind, ya wee bawbag? Ye cannot just walk inside!”

“You did,so get me in,” Raphael said.

“Away wi’ you, and chew me banger!”

“And meet me in the usual place in Nice this afternoon.” He hung up.

Now, for the trickier calls.

He summoned other Rogue Security andWelfenlegionmembers who had arrived in France via different means, not on Wulfram’s airplane, to a hotel room a few miles from the apartment. He was glad to see Romain Belmont, his old drinkingbuddy from years past. Romain’s dark eyes looked pleased to be back at home in France, and they promised to go out for a beer soon.

Once the dozen or so men had assembled in the room, Raphael withdrew a large piece of paper from a manila envelope. Inked arrows and scrawls overlaid a blue diagram of the Prince’s Palace and vicinity. Raphael told them, “We’re going in through the tunnels from theMonte Carlo Casino.”

Romain frowned. “Those tunnels have to be well-defended, and the surveillance must be top-notch. That’s the first place they’d expect an infiltration.”

“We have a skeleton team set to assault the walls,” Raphael told him. “They’ll draw all the attention, but the real operation will be through the tunnels. We’ll send eighty percent of our forces in that way. After all, ‘Thebest form of defense is to attack,’” Clausewitz again, “so our defense will be another attack. The frontal assault will disengage the moment they encounter any resistance. Their whole job is to not get shot.”

Romain and the rest of theWelfenlegionnodded solemnly. Romain said, “I’m going to need to study that map.”

“I happen to have a dozen copies.” Raphael passed them out. “We have two weeksbefore the operation, however. We’ll go during the first quarter of the moon. They’ll expect something at the new moon, if they’re expecting anything. If we wait, they’ll become fatigued and return to normal operations.”

Romain nodded. “Good plan. Very good plan. I like it.”

Raphael watched him for any signs of deception because Romain was relatively high on his list of possible suspects, buthe saw nothing exceptional. Romain had been hyper-alert, drumming his fingers on the table, when Raphael had been watching theWelfenlegionover the webcam one time, and he was a newer guy, not Swiss army or ARD-10 with Raphael and Wulf.

Not that it mattered.

Raphael frowned, his heart heavy. He hated suspecting everyone of disloyalty. The concept felt foreign.

Everyone was a damned suspect.Every, single one of them.

Now, he had to wait.