Chapter 14 - The Yacht in the Mist
"Did you really think I wouldn't sweep the diamond pouches with an RF bug detector the second I boarded my yacht, Duca?" Matteo Conti sneered through the phone screen, holding the small military GPS transponder between his scarred fingers before dropping it onto the deck and crushing it under his heel.
Around me on the pier, Agent Miller and his FBI tech team cursed as the red tracking dot on their monitors blinked out and died.
On the screen, Matteo tilted his phone camera toward eighty-year-old Dr. Moretti, who was tied to a mahogany chair inside the yacht’s salon, a deep gash across his forehead.
"When my men saw your private doctor leaving your estate at three in the morning with blood samples, we picked him up outside his lab," Matteo said, pressing the barrel of his Desert Eagle against the old doctor’s gray temple. "Along with all the toxicology reports proving your mother was poisoned!"
"Leave him out of this, Matteo!" I growled into the phone, stepping away from the police cruisers. "Moretti is eighty years old! He’s been delivering babies in our families since before you were born!"
"Then listen very carefully, Lorenzo," Matteo hissed, blood staining the white shirt beneath his Kevlar vest where my three rounds had bruised his ribs. "You have Sofia in custody on that pier right now, surrounded by feds. If she talks, every corrupt politician and judge on the Conti payroll in Rome and New York goes down. Put my sister on that cigarette boat tied to the end of your pier and send her out into the fog alone in the next five minutes—or I blow old Moretti’s head off on live video and detonate the C4 packed inside his clinic downtown!"
The screen went black.
On the pier, handcuffed Sofia scrambled to her knees, her eyes wide with sudden panic as she realized what her brother had just demanded.
"Don't send me out there!" Sofia screamed, grabbing Agent Miller’s trouser leg. "Agent Miller, please! Put me in protective custody right now! Matteo doesn't want to rescue me—he’s afraid I'll cut a plea deal with the Justice Department! If you put me on that boat, he’s going to kill me the second I get out of range!"
Agent Miller looked down at Sofia with cold professional detachment, then looked at his watch. "My helicopter unit is still twelve minutes out in this fog, Duca. If we don't send someone out on a boat in five minutes, Conti executes the doctor."
"If you send Sofia out there, he shoots both of them and disappears up the river into international shipping lanes," I said sharply, my mind racing at a hundred miles an hour.
"I can't put an FBI agent on an open boat in thick fog without backup," Miller countered. "And Conti knows what Sofia looks like from half a mile away through binoculars—white blonde hair and that torn cream dress."
I looked down at Sofia shivering on the wet planks, then looked at Rocco standing beside my G-Wagon.
"Rocco," I said quietly. "Take Sofia behind the truck and strip that cream cashmere coat and blonde wig cover off her."
Sofia gasped. "Wait—what are you doing?!"
"Miller, give me one of your female agent’s ballistic vests and a blonde wig decoy for the helm," I ordered, stripping off my bloodstained suit jacket and strapping a waterproof tactical holster onto my chest. "Rocco is going to steer the speedboat from the floor pedals while wearing the decoy coat at the wheel—and I'm going in over the stern via the underwater swim platform."
"Are you out of your mind, Duca?!" Agent Miller barked. "You've got a gunshot wound in your left arm and freezing water out there!"
"Moretti saved my mother’s life three hours ago," I said, chambering a fresh magazine into my suppressed pistol and biting down on a tactical dive knife. "And if I wait twelve minutes for your helicopters, a good man dies because he helped my family. Give me four minutes before your SWAT boats move in."
Two minutes later, our twin-engine speedboat roared out from the pier into the blinding gray fog bank hanging over the Hudson River.
Rocco crouched low behind the windshield with the cream cashmere coat draped over the captain's seat backrest, steering toward the last known acoustic bearing of Matteo’s yacht engines.
When the towering white hull of Matteo’s seventy-foot Sunseeker yacht loomed out of the mist a hundred yards ahead, I slipped silently over the back of our slowing speedboat into the freezing river water.
The icy cold hit my open gunshot wound like liquid fire, stealing the breath from my lungs, but I kicked hard underwater across the final thirty yards and grabbed the yacht’s submerged hydraulic swim platform at the stern.
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Above me on the aft deck, Matteo Conti stood at the railing aiming a high-powered sniper rifle at our approaching speedboat, his finger tightening on the trigger to execute the person he thought was his own sister.
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