Page 30 of Dangerous Rhythm

Curtis knew something was up from the resoluteness in her eyes.

“We need to go,” she said.

thirteen

“Tell them, Lina,” Curtis said.

Lina looked at the audience before her and stifled a sigh. She’d been irked at Curtis for insisting on gathering his family for a meeting. This wasn’t time for a discussion. It wasn’t a democracy. She made the calls.

It was time to take charge of the situation. But she needed their cooperation.

“We got intel that a couple of Serafina’s enforcers got on a flight from JFK to De Gaulle,” she started.

“How the hell do a couple of criminals get on a commercial flight?” Brandon interrupted.

“Fake passports,” Lina answered.

“And TSA didn’t catch them?” Callie questioned with ridicule.

“Some fake IDs are really sophisticated. The documents themselves may not be fake, and the identities are mostly real and stolen for this purpose,” Lina explained with patience she didn’t have.

“That’s so wrong,” Julien said.

“How did you know they were Serafina’s people if they were using fake passports?” Henry asked.

Lina squeezed the wrist she was holding behind her back to stay calm. “We have our ways of accessing the monitoring system and caught them with facial recognition software. But there was a delay, and for obvious reasons we couldn’t tell the authorities directly.”

“You hacked the airport security?” Brandon asked, his eyes wide with astonishment.

Lina didn’t answer. “What you need to know is we have two assailants coming our way. We don’t know yet how they found out our whereabouts, but obviously it isn’t safe for Curtis and maybe the rest of you to be here.”

Callie looked at Lina sharply. “If you know these people are coming in with fake passports, why can’t you just inform our police here and have them apprehended when they arrive?”

“It’s in the works. But it still means Paris isn’t safe anymore,” Lina said. “We need to mobilize and get everyone to a new safe location.”

“All of us?” Genevieve asked. “That’s ludicrous.”

Lina agreed with Genevieve. It would be difficult to get a family this size to safety. They needed to be divided and sent to different places, far from the others.

“We’re staying. This is our home. We’ll have our own security set up if needed, but I doubt they’ll come after us,” Anaïs said.

Genevieve nodded. “But I understand the Bissets are at the most risk. We have a summer house in Provence that might be far enough from here for you to stay safe.”

Lina had assessed that possibility, and it wasn’t a bad idea. That summer house could accommodate the Bissets better than any of their safe houses.

“We appreciate it, Genevieve,” Callie said. “If we have to go, we’ll go. But I don’t like running because once we do that, whendo we stop? Is there something we can do to stop this Serafina person, Lina?”

B&Y didn’t usually deal directly with eliminating the threats to their clients' without working through official law enforcement. Occasionally, they had to be the negotiator in kidnapping cases for their clients. But unfortunately, this time, they had to rely on the NYPD to handle the Stilettos. Lina didn’t like that she couldn’t give the answer Callie wanted.

“My boss is working with the NYPD to make sure they stay on the Stilettos, but there’s not much we can do directly,” Lina said. “But we can make sure this family stays safe.”

“How? You can’t keep moving us,” Susan, who had been quiet, asked. “My mother is seventy-nine years old. And my granddaughter is only four. We can’t be running.”

“No, it’s not ideal,” Lina said. She glanced at Curtis, who had been uncharacteristically silent. Guilt was all over his face. Gone was the playful man she’d seen earlier. She wanted to reach out to him and tell him this wasn’t his fault.

“Can you arrange to get extra people to escort my family to Provence?” Curtis asked.

“Within the hour,” she firmly said. She’d already had Paul start the arrangements for a quick getaway.

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