I wince a little. Whoever has been playing with the Natali firewall has purposefully been leaving files behind for me to read through. At first, I thought they were just being sloppy, but they’d outsmarted me too many times for this to be a mistake.
“They’re trying to lure me into trying to hack their local network.” I sigh.
Martino crosses his arms. “Like, go into their territory? Would that work?”
“Theoretically,” I concede. “But given how much they want to get me there, who’s to say there isn’t an insane amount of security on their local? It’s very likely a trap.”
Dante snatches the baseball out of the air. “Do we have any other leads?”
I grit my teeth. “Not currently.”
“But you’re like a wizard, right?” Martino tries. “Even if there’s a shit load of security, you’ll be able to bypass it?”
“Eventually, maybe. But it could take hours, and I don’t see how I could stick around long enough without getting caught.”
Dante hums. “What if you didn’t need to?”
I turn to look at him. “That’s not really?—”
“You only need to access the local server, right? As long as no one noticed, you could plug in a cloner and hack from afar.”
I weigh it in my mind. It’s a bit old-school, and the cloning devices I have on hand aren’t exactly discreet. I would need to be a pretty successful stealth operation.
Which means…
“Martino, go find Alessandro for me,” I say, rubbing my temples.
Dante echoes my frustration with a groan. “Are we sure we need him?”
I don’t bother replying.
The problem with Alessandro is that he’s almost too good at his job.
Which, in situations like attempting to infiltrate the Prince’s Hand undetected, are hugely beneficial.
Unfortunately, that means he’s also made himself indispensable, so when he says things like, “I don’t see why you didn’t put me on surveillance of the Natali broad. I’d have got you answers faster than she could have groaned my name,” I can’t kill him on the spot.
“Shut the hell up,” Dante snaps at him for me.
The three of us are parked outside the Prince’s Hand Casino. This particular branch is one of the only casinos that actually closes its doors in the early hours of the morning.
A steady trickle of staff and cleaning crew have been leaving the building for an hour now as we slowly wait for our opening.
“I’m just saying,” Alessandro grumbles to himself.
He had, unfortunately, already proved his value to the task at hand, unearthing the blueprints of the building seemingly out of nowhere and putting together at least a dozen escape routes in the span of an hour.
But that doesn’t mean I want him here at all.
“All right.” I nod toward the main entrance, where it seems a manager is locking the door and securing the metal grate in place. “You’re up, Alessandro.”
I don’t even hear him leave the car.
“We should get him a bell,” Dante comments, seemingly as unnerved as I am by his sudden disappearance.
“Don’t think that will help us tonight.”
I can just about make out a lone, dark figure darting into the building next to the casino before we go back to waiting with bated breath.
