Page 68 of Vincenzo
“It’s fucking late, Enzo.”
“Cassius, please. I will quite literally pay youhowevermuch you want. Just please get it done, and fast.”
I hang up without an answer, knowing Cassius will do it, not for the money, but because he’s a decent fucking human being who’s always been there for my family.
“Any idea who those guys are?” I ask Fabien.
He shakes his head. “No, no idea.”
With my gun still aimed at him, I say, “Are you sure?Nothingrings a bell for you there?”
Fabien throws his hands back up in front of him in defense. “No, I swear. I’ve never seen that car here before. I-I have no idea without seeing their faces,” he scrambles out.
“Alright, alright, alright. Relax. I’m not going to shoot you, you big baby.” I put my gun away. “But I do need two more things from you, and then after tonight, you’ll never see my faceagain. Well… that is unless I find out you did something you weren’t supposed to do.”
Fabien nods frantically, hands still in the air.
I wave at his hands. “I put the damn gun away, so put your hands down. You look fucking ridiculous.”
He slowly lowers them and says, “What else do you need from me?”
“I need you to delete that footage, and if anyone comes here looking for it, you tell them you had an issue with your security system and nothing from the past couple of days saved in your cloud or whatever the fuck it is.”
Fabien nods but doesn’t move to delete the footage.
“Now, Fabien. Delete the footagenowand show me.”
“Oh, yes, sorry. I’ll do that right now.”
“And the backup,” I snap.
A few minutes pass of just the clicking of Fabien’s keyboard filling the air.
“Would it be faster if I just shoot your servers or something?” I ask.
“No, I’m just about done. I have several firewalls to get through to make sure everything is scrapped.”
After a couple more minutes, Fabien turns his attention to me, and says, “Done.”
He moves his monitor back so I can see it. “I can walk you through it to show you there’s no history.”
I assess Fabien closely to see if there’s any tell that he could be lying to me.
“There aren’tanybackups left? You’re unable to get that footage backat all? As in, if I held my gun back up to your head and demanded you recover the files, you wouldn’t be able to?”
Fabien’s eyes widen, and he frantically shakes his head again. “No, no I swear. I deleted the footage permanently off the server. There’s nothing in there from the past couple of days. I evenwent into my security log and entered in the missing footage and noted I’m in contact with IT about it so it looks like I recorded it when it happened.”
Well, I’ll be damned. I’m even surprised at how much work he just did.
“Good,” I say. “Now, for the next thing I need from you… You don’t know me, and everything you learned after I walked into this club tonight, never fucking happened, got it?”
He nods frantically, which seems to be his MO.
“And what you saw on that footage got deleted from your memory the second it got deleted from your computer. If you open your mouth, I will come back here and do to you what I plan on doing to those men in that footage.”
Fabien swallows deeply, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each movement. “What footage?” he asks hesitantly as if he was afraid to say it.
“Good answer,” I say with a wink.
