The car tailing me picks me up within two minutes. It's a black sedan, hanging back at a respectful distance, which tells me that his men have been doing this long enough to know how not to beobvious about it. I drive normally for several minutes, taking the route toward midtown, and I watch the sedan in my mirror.
I take a left and then a right and then another left and I pick up speed gradually through a series of turns that have no logical destination. I watch the sedan match each one and then I turn into the covered parking structure on West 47th. I go down two levels and I take a right into the maintenance lane at the back and I cut the lights and I wait.
In the mirror I watch the sedan drive past the entrance, slow down, and keep going.
I get out of the car and I begin to walk until I get to a bar.
The bar is the kind that doesn't have a sign outside, just a door that knows what it is and expects you to as well. I find a stool at the far end and I order water and I wait and three minutes later someone sits down beside me. I look sideways at the cap pulled low and the jacket collar turned up.
"I still have no idea why I agreed to this," Renzo says to the bar top.
"Would you prefer a pat on the head or a treat?" I ask.
He turns and looks at me. "When did you get such a sharp mouth?"
I smile. When I whispered in his ear."I want to get rid of my father. Help me."
I expected a no, or flat-out silence. Looking back, I don't know where I got the courage to ask, maybe because I knew that deep down, he wouldn't say no, because of Luca.
"Did you bring it?" I ask.
He reaches into his pocket and produces a flash drive, small and unremarkable, and he sets it on the bar between us without looking at it. "It's a grade A intrusion software," he says quietly. "You plug it into any computer on the target network, it copies everything and transfers it without a trace."
I take it from him. "When I get the information I want everything linking Luca to my father gone. Every file, every record, every correspondence, erase. Everything else comes back to me."
"Ai suoi ordini, signorina," he replies, with exaggerated formality.At your service, Miss.
I almost smile.
"How is he?" I ask.
Renzo picks up his drink. He takes a sip and sets it down and he looks at the bar and he says, "He is working eighteen-hour days and pretending that's a personality." He glances at me sideways."You could tell him about this. He would help you. You know he would."
"I know," I reply.
"I don't know how much longer I can hide this from him, Nathalie. He's not an easy man to keep things from."
"I don't want my father to make trouble. I barely got him to believe that Luca had nothing to do with James and his condition and I doubt he fully believes it," I answer.
"Ah, no wonder he stopped raising dust," Renzo said.
He turns on his stool to look at me properly. "I don't understand you," he says. "You made him feel like you hated him and yet here you are protecting him by erasing his history with your father. Why?"
Men like Luca, who spend their lives being the ones who protect and never the ones who are protected never take being protected well. It was best I did this my way.
"It's my fight," I say. "And he needs to stay out of it."
Renzo shakes his head slowly. "The second thing," I say.
He nods and he stands and he tilts his head toward the back of the bar. "This way."
The room we enter is underneath the bar. It's a tiny hidden room, under a flight of stairs and when the door opens, the light falls on the two figures seated against the far wall.
Alana and her father. Alana sees me first.
I watch their faces go through several things in quick succession.
"You?" she says. "You kidnapped us?"
