Chapter 2 - The Number on the Screen
The last command had scarcely left Vittorio's mouth when Elena moved toward Adrian's phone. Marcus blocked her gently, but she strained to read the message a second time.
“Diego is seventeen,” she said. “He doesn't know anything about these meetings. He goes to school, fixes old radios, and thinks I work for an insurance company.”
Vittorio studied her as rain scattered across the tabletop. A minute earlier she had dragged him out of a sniper's path; now she looked powerless before a threat on a screen.
“Where is he?” Vittorio asked. Elena said their apartment was in Queens, above a bakery whose owner left the lights burning after midnight for late customers.
Marcus pressed his earpiece and ordered two trusted men to check the building without sirens or uniforms. He refused to use the wider security channel until they established who could be trusted.
Adrian watched the exchange with painful concentration. “You can't seriously believe that message came from me,” he said. “Phones can be compromised. Messages can be planted.”
“Then you won't mind telling us who has access to yours,” Vittorio answered. He stepped between Adrian and the only door, his anger now disciplined into something more dangerous.
Elena swallowed. On her first day at Moretti Holdings, she'd been told Vittorio rewarded loyalty and punished deception. She had never imagined needing protection from both sides.
“I received something yesterday,” she admitted. “An envelope with my father's handwriting. There was no return address, and somebody had put it inside my office drawer.”
Vittorio's expression shifted. “Rafael Cruz?” he asked. Elena stared at him, surprised that he remembered the name of an accountant dismissed seven years earlier.
“My father didn't steal from you,” she said. “Whatever the records said, he didn't. He vanished before anyone would let us challenge the accusation.”
Vittorio remembered a thick audit report delivered by Adrian, accompanied by security photographs and a written confession bearing Rafael's signature. He had accepted every page without meeting the man.
For seven years, he had told himself that decision was efficient. Now the secretary standing beside him carried the consequences of that efficiency in her voice.
“What was inside the envelope?” he asked. Elena hesitated, glancing toward Adrian, whose gaze sharpened at once when Rafael's name entered the room.
“A note,” she said. “It said, 'The chair will face the east window. Watch the light, not the man.' And there was a photograph of my father.”
The room grew quiet again. Vittorio could understand a secret warning about an attack; he could not understand why a supposedly dead man would know tonight's seating arrangement.
Adrian laughed once, too loudly. “Rafael has been dead for years. Somebody is using an old grievance to get close to you, and you're falling for it.”
“You told me he was dead,” Elena answered. “You told my mother the river took him. But no one ever showed us a body or even a proper report.”
Marcus's earpiece crackled. The men in Queens had reached the apartment. Its door stood open, the living room was empty, and Diego's backpack remained beside an unfinished homework assignment.
Elena gripped the table. Vittorio reached for her elbow, then stopped, conscious that every part of her life had been controlled by men claiming they knew what was best.
“Let me hear,” she said. Marcus opened the connection. A quiet voice described a broken kitchen cup, muddy footprints, and a photograph torn from the wall.
A phone rang in the abandoned apartment. The security man answered on speaker, and a distorted voice said a single sentence: “Tell Miss Cruz the window was only the beginning.”
The line went dead. Elena covered her mouth, forcing back the sob that threatened to break through. The threat was not a bluff; someone had entered her home.
Vittorio turned to Adrian. “Who knew she had a brother?” he asked. Adrian's jaw flexed. He had read the personnel files, approved the hires, and arranged the insurance records.
“Half the office could know,” Adrian insisted. “If you let fear make decisions, whoever planned this has already won. Call the police and hand her over.”
Elena looked up sharply. “Hand me over? To whom?” Adrian's eyes flicked toward the camera above the boardroom door, and Marcus followed that glance without a word.
The camera's indicator was dark. Marcus checked the monitor on his secure phone and discovered that the boardroom recording had stopped four minutes before the shot.
Adrian blamed a routine electrical fault. Vittorio remembered Adrian had personally replaced the security contractor two weeks earlier, supposedly to reduce operational costs and improve building coverage.
“Take him to the adjoining office,” Vittorio told Marcus. “Keep him visible. No private calls, no access to this system, and no chance to destroy anything.”
Marcus secured Adrian's phone in an evidence pouch, then escorted him through the glass doors. Adrian moved obediently, but the hatred in his backward glance settled squarely on Elena.
When they were alone, Vittorio asked about the photograph. Elena took a folded print from her jacket: Rafael Cruz outside an unfamiliar warehouse, holding that day's newspaper beside a faded yellow door.
There was a handwritten number on the back, 9-17, and the phrase her father used when she was frightened as a child: The truth survives the noise.
Vittorio examined the photograph. He knew the warehouse district well enough to recognize the old crane reflected in a puddle, though the sign above the door had been painted over.
“Pier Nine,” he said. He hated the name the moment it left his mouth; seven years earlier, a disastrous fire had destroyed records and ended an investigation into his shipping company.
Elena stared at him. “You knew about that fire?” Vittorio didn't answer immediately. In the pause, she saw a guilt he had never allowed anyone in the office to witness.
“I signed the insurance settlement,” he admitted. “I never asked why a warehouse full of paperwork needed to burn after the auditors finished their work.”
Marcus returned with worse news. Adrian had no weapon and remained secured, but the building's emergency access log showed someone had opened a service stairwell minutes before the attack.
A staff badge had been used. The identity printed beside it was Elena Cruz, though her own badge remained clipped to her jacket and she had never gone downstairs.
“Someone copied my credentials,” Elena said. “They're making me look responsible.” Vittorio nodded grimly. The plan wasn't simply to murder him; it was designed to name a convenient traitor.
Marcus checked the old photo again, then pointed to the digits. “Nine-seventeen could mean a location, or a date. We need to find out before they move Diego.”
Vittorio handed the photograph back. “We're going to Pier Nine,” he said. “But first, you tell me every word your father taught you about that place.”
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Elena looked through the shattered window at the city that had swallowed Rafael and now Diego. She no longer trusted the man beside her, yet she believed he was finally listening.
Across the adjoining office, Adrian stood in the light of a locked monitor. He smiled when a second, hidden phone inside the desk began to vibrate beneath his fingertips.
