Tod Goldberg - The End Game

It was a fact I hadn’t quite considered, but that was seeming more and more true, now that I could make out a helipad on the bow of the Ottones’ yacht, a forest green chopper sitting at rest.

I was certain it was Nicholas Dinino.

If I didn’t get Alex Kyle and his men on that ship, there was no stopping Bonaventura from exacting vengeance, sometime, somewhere, for all of this. And if those men didn’t get on the ship, there was a good chance Dinino would kill Maria and Liz. Bonaventura most likely told Kyle to watch the boat, make sure I didn’t board it. Make sure I didn’t kill anyone.

Alex Kyle knew the truth. He knew what I was capable of and what I was unlikely to do, but he was following orders. We had to make it look like we were heading for that boat to do what we had to do.

Overhead, I heard the whooping of helicopters. The sky was alive with them now, television coverage beaming images around the world, but there’s a different sound between the nice choppers TV stations use and military transports.

Alex Kyle looked up, too, and pointed. And then turned and pointed at me, like a warning.

And maybe it was.

Fi’s cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” I said.

Virgil’s cell phone rang and he just tossed it overboard. “I got the message,” he said.

The Ottones’ ship bellowed again. We had twenty yards between us and the Cobra, another three hundred before we were in the path of the cruise liner.

“Turn,” I said very calmly to Virgil, “put us right in the path of the ship.”

“We’ll have maybe fifteen seconds and that’s it,” he said. “This girl doesn’t do tricks.”

“That’s all we need,” I said.

Virgil spun our boat towards the Ottones’ ship.

My assumption was that the ship’s captain would make the only correction he could-back towards the Cobra, which it did. The Cobra was a gymnast; it would be able to draw back and around the big ship without a problem.

Well, some problems.

“Get us out,” I yelled to Virgil and he cranked us back towards Miami, the boat lurching, the engine spitting out more blue smoke into the air.

We could hear the engine on the Ottones’ ship sputtering. If the captain were smart-and if the Ottones’ employed him and he wasn’t in the tank to kill Maria and Liz, he was-he’d throw the engine into reverse and kill it, stopping the forward momentum as much as possible. Which is what it sounded like was happening as the engines of the big yacht ground audibly, the captain trying to get it to decelerate any way he could.

The Cobra was fast enough to get out of the way and then circled back around the lumbering ship. I watched the Cobra pacing the cruise liner, which had slowed considerably. Through the binoculars I could see Alex on the radio and his men standing upright with shoulder-fired spearguns aimed above the hull of the ship. They were dressed to rappel, which meant they were planning to board shortly.

“It’s too bad,” Fiona said.

“What is?” I said.

“That Alex Kyle fellow,” she said. “He seemed like the kind of person we might like in a different situation.”

“Maybe he’ll come back and try to sell some plutonium,” I said. I was still watching when he gave the signal and his men fired their spears into the deck of the boat. They weren’t shooting to harm, but to set up rappelling lines. Within seconds, Kyle’s teams was scaling the side of the hull.

“Nice form,” Virgil said.

“We never get to do fun things like that,” Fi said.

“I have a feeling this will be the last time these men get the chance,” I said. Just then a military helicopter swept down in front of the ship and hovered above the stern. Another came to the bow. There were three in the air now and I could make out a Coast Guard cutter screaming in from the east, another from the south. “I think they’ve just acted as pirates in the service of a Mafia boss.”

Fi’s phone began to ring and she handed it to me.

I looked at the caller ID. Restricted. Big surprise.

“Hello?” I said, as chummy as possible.

“Stay,” said the woman’s voice. “Enjoy the race.”

“I think I will,” I said and then tossed the phone into the sea.

When you’re no longer a spy, it’s important to understand that the people you love sometimes need to know that you, belatedly, are willing to deal with some of life’s larger issues with them.

Which is precisely what I was doing while sitting in the offices of Dr. Helen Miyazawa. My mother, Madeline, was sitting to one side of me, an unlit cigarette between her fingers. A stuffed Snoopy, portraying my father, was on the other side of me, and Dr. Miyazawa paced the room. Or at least I think she paced the room. It was hard to tell because all the lights in the office were off and the only illumination in the room came from a flashlight shot through a green marble on the doctor’s desk, which made everything look vaguely like a cave in Tora Bora at sunrise.

It was a week after the race and if Sam’s friend Darleen was to be believed, I’d brought down Christopher Bonaventura and Alex Kyle, saved the Ottone family empire, helped capture the banking information and funds of an international terrorist network and likely imprisoned Nicholas Dinino for life.

Or, as Sam told it, since he didn’t want to involve me too directly, he’d done all of that.

I had to believe what Darleen told Sam because none of this appeared on the news or in the papers, or even on any blogs. Well, except for the photos of Nicholas Dinino and the young girl. She was a minor star now in Europe, probably would have a recording deal within a month and be forgotten in two. Gone. Disappeared.

Just like Nicholas Dinino, a man I’d never actually met, but who probably wishes he never even heard my name on a recording.

There’s a difference, however, between disappearing and being disappeared. You help the FBI with evidence against crime families, you tend to get special treatment, and though Darleen didn’t say so, I was inclined to believe that Nicholas Dinino was probably in a safe house in Phoenix, giving the FBI all the information he could to save his ass.

And the Pax Bellicosa? It came in fifth. On its own, it still lost. And Sam spent twenty-four hours working harder than he had in twenty years. When he came back to America three days later, after some “Sam Time” with what he called “race groupies” he still had blisters on all of his fingers.

All that had been accomplished, and yet I still had to bond with my mother, and it was somehow far more difficult. If things didn’t improve, I thought that it was only a matter of time before I woke up one morning to find Dr. Phil standing in my kitchen, eating my yogurt.

“Tell me, Michael,” Dr. Miyazawa said from somewhere in her office I couldn’t quite pinpoint, “what would you say to your father right now if he were sitting beside you?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said.

“I’d ask him to shoot me.”

“Michael!” my mother said.

“No, no, this is good, Mrs. Westen,” Dr. Miyazawa said. “Go ahead, Michael. Why would you ask him to shoot you?”

I had the vague sense she might actually be beneath her desk. If I’d known this was all going to happen under the cloak of darkness, I would have brought night-vision goggles with me. The week prior, just days after the events of the Hurricane Cup, the three of us actually met out on the beach so the doctor could perform a clarifying ceremony, which involved my mother screaming into the ocean for ten minutes about all of the terrible things I’d ever done to her. Next week there was a field trip scheduled to an ashram in Boynton Beach, where we were to bond over the spiritual revelations.