The second thing I learned was that my father was, in fact, a very, very well-connected man.
“A passport, driver’s license, and a credit card?” I said to myself, in complete shock. I looked through the rest of the envelope Paolo had given me while he pumped gas. There was also a couple thousand in cash. Strangely, it looked like the large white envelope the policeman in San Diego had given him.
Paolo got back in the car and started the engine.
“Are these real?” I held up the passport. The photo was the same one I had taken for my university ID a week ago.
“Yes,” was all he responded. I couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of power a person had to have to get a genuine passport with a phony identity—in a week.
“Julie? Julie Jones?” That was the name they’d given me. “Not very creative, are you?”
He shrugged. “It’s a name people easily forget.”
“Is this really happening?” I said to myself.
We pulled back onto Highway 10, heading east. The morning sun had long ago transitioned into a bright, sunny afternoon. “Give it time. You’ll adjust,” he said.
“How many times have you done this? I mean, taken someone into hiding.”
“A few,” he replied.
“Oh.” In a million years, I could never have imagined this was his life. “So why did you come back? I mean, my father could’ve assigned someone else to babysit me at college.”
Paolo shrugged. “I took you on again because he asked. I’m his best.”
Arrogant much? “So you didn’t want to come back?”
“No.” He glanced at me, with no sign of apology in his eyes.
“Don’t blame you, I guess. Watching the boss’s daughter can’t be very exciting.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he replied, and a smile twitched across his lips.
“Then why didn’t you want to be assigned to me?”
“I have my reasons,” he replied.
“A man of few words.”
“Yes.” He smiled.
Oh, now I knew he was teasing. “Stop that.”
“Okay.”
I slapped his arm. “I mean it.”
“Ow.” He feigned being hurt and rubbed the spot. A few moments of silence passed, and I watched as his eyes focused on the road while his jaw muscles worked, giving away the wheels turning in his head. “I didn’t want to be assigned to you, because I am very attracted to you,” he finally said. He didn’t look at me, and I was glad. He’d only see me trying to hide a smile.
“Is that why you left?” I asked.
“Your father is one of the most powerful men in the world. He would not appreciate me…appreciating his daughter.” I felt a shameless, and admittedly shallow, little glow inside my chest. He considered me a temptation.
“Who does he work for?” I asked.
“For no one. That’s what makes him powerful. That, and no one knows who he is, except me and a few of his most-trusted men.”
The way Paolo described him, my father sounded like a mob boss.
“Can you at least tell me if he works for the good guys?” I asked.
“Good is a slightly subjective term—survival of the fittest might be more appropriate. But his customers, so to speak, are the obvious players.”
I assumed he meant the U.S. government or their allies, but it still didn’t sit well with me knowing he and his men were a bunch of international 007s.
“So that photo of you I found on the Internet—why was it there if you’re a spy?” I asked.
“I’m not a spy.”
“Do you kill people?”
“I have, but that’s not my primary function. I’m not a hit man,” he explained.
Right. How had he explained it before? “You just gather information and get paid not to exist. So, you’re a ghost with a curious streak?”
He smirked. “You could say that.”
“Except your picture is on the Internet.”
“Not anymore. We killed that site after that little incident with you. But it was one of the ways we communicated without contacting each other. Your father had posted it so I’d send him a flare.”
“Flare?”
“It’s a signal to—never mind. The less you know, the better. It’s too dangerous.”
So I’d nabbed this “ghost’s” photo off the Internet and used it to build my fake boyfriend. “Wrong place at the wrong time. Poor you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“That if I’d picked someone else’s picture, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
He shrugged. “Must have been fate. Your father already had a few people assigned to you and was in the process of finding you someone more permanent for college. Male. He’d already approached me, but I’d turned him down.” Paolo looked at me. “For obvious reasons.”
Was he referring to finding me attractive?
“Well,” I said. “It’s nice to know, I suppose, that my dad tries to take care of me.”
Paolo glanced at me. “He loves you. He’s always put your safety first, assigned his best people to you and your mother.”
Best people. Like who? Christ. “Mandy? She’s one of the other…” I didn’t know what to call them if they weren’t spies. “People?”