Latitude Zero (30 page)

She kept reading, open-mouthed. “Tessa,” she breathed. “Preston Lane isn’t just gambling. He isn’t just running a sports betting scheme. He’s
fixing races
!”

53

IT TOOK
me a minute to respond to Mari. I wasn’t even sure if I’d heard her right. “Fixing races!” I exclaimed. “You mean, making certain riders or teams win and lose? Paying athletes and coaches?”

Mari glanced nervously at the door to the hallway and the rest of the Ruiz household. “Shh,” she said. “We shouldn’t talk here.” She ushered me into the former maid’s room. We sat on the bed, and she closed the door.

“My uncle—the one with the gambling problem?” said Mari. “He said sports bookies sometimes do that with major league sports teams. They get basketball teams to shave points off games and throw the odds, and that affects betting outcomes. Preston and the coach—I think they’re doing the same thing with cycling teams. Paying off riders, buying and selling stage wins, tampering with time trials and race stats? That’s illegal. It’s called racketeering.”

“Worth being locked up for twenty years?” I asked grimly. I opened a new window on my computer and ran a quick search on racketeering laws in Massachusetts. Sure enough, one of the penalties was two decades in the slammer.

Mari took the laptop from me and went back to the flash drive folder. We read through April and May, looking for names we recognized, and then we stumbled on one. The big one. An email exchange between Preston and Juan Carlos, which Preston had forwarded to Coach Mancuso.
This guy is trouble,
Preston had written before the forwarded email exchange.

To: [email protected]
Subject: the offer

Juan Carlos,

I did not like how we ended our last conversation. Obviously you are very uncomfortable with the private conversation you overheard between me and Coach Mancuso. My offer still stands, and I think it will make you more comfortable. I’m offering you $10,000 cash for keeping quiet about that conversation. Sports Xplor is a confidential side business, still in a development phase, and I’d hate for some other entrepreneur to catch wind of it and beat us to the finish. You follow?

What you heard is top secret, Juan Carlos. Sports gambling isn’t technically legal here—the U.S. government has not seen the light yet. Once they understand that it is a lucrative and harmless pursuit, the legislation will change. But until then, if I get called out for developing a system for cycling bets, I’m in serious trouble. The FBI will investigate anything associated with me, including this team, and then the whole team goes down together. You too. That would be the end of your racing career, and you could face deportation. Think about that before you make any hasty moves.

Finally, if you follow the racing strategy Coach Mancuso outlined for you and agree to throw the races we discussed, we will offer an additional $10,000 cash bonus.

To:
[email protected]
Subject: RE: the offer

Dear Preston,

I do not want your money. Your new business is bad for our team and for my country. You hide your profits there because you think no one will trace your money. But you’re wrong. Ecuador is not a backwards place. This kind of sports gambling no is legal there. Eventually people will find you. And you cannot pay me any amount of monies to change my race results. I hope you to understand. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Juan Carlos

To:
[email protected]
Subject: RE: the offer

You don’t want the money? Don’t want to help your family? Fine. But if you talk to the media or the police, I will make sure you’re off the team, and your racing days will be over in both the U.S. and Ecuador.

Here is my final offer. I will double the cash payout and offer you an EcuaBar sponsorship. I can get your face in every bike magazine in the country. On a billboard even. You can be the face of EcuaBar. That’s worth more than any prize winnings or salary you’re going to pull as a pro cyclist. You could change the lives of your entire family with what I’m offering you in exchange for your silence and your cooperation. Keep quiet, and follow the racing strategy Coach Mancuso has outlined for you beginning with the Chain Reaction race, and all of this can be yours.

Mari was actually crying, and I was coming close. I’d felt a surge of relief knowing that Juan Carlos wasn’t doping or cheating. And then a slump of disappointment. He’d accepted the hush money and the sponsorship in the end. The billboard, the EcuaBar sponsorship—there was the proof. He’d changed his mind. Was Juan Carlos truly a good person, intent on blowing the whistle on his team owner’s corrupt activities? Or was he a sellout, one of the vulnerable athletes Preston and Coach Mancuso seemed to be scouting?

“I don’t see anything else in this file,” I said, clicking out of the last document on the drive. “But I think we have enough to show the American ambassador that Preston Lane is up to no good. He’s clearly helping to run this offshore gambling site and involved in a race-fixing scheme. Plus he had a clear motive for harming or killing Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos wasn’t keeping up his end of the deal, even with the hush money and the sponsorship deal. He was going to come forward at Chain Reaction. Maybe Preston needed to silence him. Like, permanently.”

“We have to call the police in Cabot right now. Or Bianca Slade. Or both!” said Mari. “Forget the bike in the shipping container. We don’t even need that now!”

“No! We do need that bike,” I insisted. “If the U.S. ambassador thinks highly of Preston Lane, then he’s going to need really strong proof to turn him over to international law enforcement. Plus, that bike and the cash could help link Preston to Darwin.”

“How?” asked Mari, frowning. “We don’t know exactly where the cash came from. You told me Darwin said Juan Carlos stole it from ‘the organization.’ But did Juan Carlos steal it directly from Darwin? Or from Preston? And where is this money supposed to go? We have no proof that the bike links Preston to Darwin.”

“I know we didn’t see Darwin or his group come up in any of these emails,” I said. “But we know they’re connected. And we can’t let Darwin get away with his crimes, either. We have to believe Juan Carlos had a strong reason for wanting to turn over the bike with this hidden money and the flash drive at the same time. Mari!” I sat up straighter. “Remember what Rosio said about her mom seeing Preston taking stuff out of his bike in that hotel room?”

“Yeah.”

“What if it’s
not
drug money? What if it’s gambling profits?”

Mari’s eyes lit up. “That’s possible. According to ice, you can’t bring more than ten thousand dollars into Ecuador. Maybe Darwin’s helping him carry cash into the country, cash earned not from drug deals, like we first thought, but from the Sports Xplor business!”

“Wait—ice?”

“Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. I.C.E.”

Something Preston had said once came back to me now. The fragment of a phone conversation I’d overhead at the Compass Bikes container load.
The ice crackdown
. My breath came fast. “Mari, is there some kind of crackdown by that organization about looking for cash smugglers?”

“Yes. Haven’t you been following the news here?”

I shook my head. I was a news junkie at home, but here I’d been so focused on solving the mystery of Juan Carlos’s death, and following the PAC tour, I hadn’t tuned in to the major headlines.

“Cash smuggling into Ecuador has gotten worse lately, along with the drug mule problem,” Mari explained.

I told her about the phrase Preston had used back at Compass Bikes. “He said something about moving in a different direction because of the I.C.E. crackdown,” I concluded. “So maybe, before this crackdown, he used to move cash himself. Maybe he suddenly needed to go the extra mile to avoid customs, so he hired Darwin’s group. He might have seen the container load as a golden opportunity to conceal this bike full of cash.” I bit my lip. “I just don’t get why the cash would be in
Juan Carlos’s
bike. Who put it in there? Preston? Darwin? Or Juan Carlos?”

“I don’t know. But this is huge, Tessa,” said Mari. “We can’t just sit on this information. Let’s email Bianca Slade right now! She’ll know what to do next.”

I started typing Bianca’s name in my email, then snatched my hands back from the keyboard.

“What is it?” asked Mari.

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can point the finger at Preston.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Mari exploded. “How can you just keep quiet about this? This is a way bigger deal than bike theft or even drug dealing. We’re talking racketeering. Cash smuggling. Money laundering. A major CEO bribing and blackmailing a young athlete. Possibly committing or hiring out a murder.” She paused to let all this sink in. “This is your big chance to complete Juan Carlos’s mission—the mission he wanted you to get involved with. If you don’t share this information, you’re basically betraying him.”

I got up and started pacing the small room, feeling like a caged animal. There was no good option. “But if I do share it, I’m betraying my friend Kylie,” I said. “She just got awarded the Lane Scholarship at our school, to finance her senior year. And she deserves every penny. Her mom has cancer. She’s taking an expensive experimental drug. If Preston Lane is hauled off to jail, Kylie won’t get her money, and she’ll have to go to public school senior year.”

Mari rolled her eyes. “Oh, so sad!” She smirked. “Give me a break. I went to public school. Believe me, there are worse fates than graduating from Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Gee, I’m sorry she’ll miss her cotillion or her debutante ball and the caviar in the cafeteria—”

“My school’s nothing like that,” I insisted. “It’s not ritzy. It’s always short on money, even with Preston Lane’s regular infusions. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s a rich school. That’s where Kylie’s gone to school since kindergarten, and it’s where she wants to finish . . .”

My voice faltered. Mari was right. What was I saying? I couldn’t possibly justify hanging on to Kylie’s private school education if it meant covering up a racketeering operation . . . and a murder. Still, the thought of letting Kylie down, again, made me feel sick to my stomach.

If I didn’t finish the work Juan Carlos had begun, Preston, Darwin, and this whole Sports Xplor organization would continue its shadowy business. My life would just go on. Kylie’s scholarship wouldn’t be at risk. What difference did it make?

A lot. I pictured the faces of kids I had interviewed over the years. Including Jake and Juan Carlos’s teammates on the development team. Keeping quiet would let Preston go on corrupting sports and athletes, and letting a murderer go unpunished.

I’d just have to find a way to explain it to Kylie and hope that she’d understand.

I wrote Bianca a quick note explaining what we’d found, and tried to attach the first file from the flash drive, but an error message popped up:

FILE TRANSFER DENIED.
USB COPY PROTECTED.

“Oh, no,” said Mari. “It looks like this flash drive is locked or encrypted. To prevent leaks.”

“Why would Juan Carlos do that?” I asked, trying now to copy the files to my hard drive. “He wanted to share the information, not lock it up, right?”

The error message showed up again, with a loud beep.

“If this is Preston’s own backup drive,” Mari reminded me, “I bet Preston had it protected—lots of executives do that to prevent data theft—and Juan Carlos took it.”

“Why would Preston save emails on this flash drive, though?” I wondered out loud. “Some of this stuff looks like regular business, but a lot of it’s really incriminating.”

“To get it all off his hard drive and his email server,” Mari guessed. “The cloud’s not safe from hackers, either. A protected flash drive was probably a safer way to keep all his side business dealings separate from EcuaBar.”

“And now I understand why Juan Carlos asked me at Chain Reaction if I had a laptop. He couldn’t just copy the files to his own computer or flash drive and share them. Preston Lane had locked his backup drive.”

“Right. So Juan Carlos had to give someone the actual, physical flash drive to share this information. Otherwise there was no way to leak it.”

“But wait! Why wouldn’t a screen shot of these emails work?”

“Good idea! Let’s try.” Mari leaned over me to press the commands on the keyboard. “We can email our screen shots to Bianca Slade, and to the Cabot Police, and they can take this information and run with it.”

The screen shot Mari took of Preston’s email to Coach Mancuso seemed successful—no error box showed up. But when we opened the screen shot file to check our result, all that showed up was a pixelated mess of garbled information. A message from Mars.

Mari tried again, and groaned. “That is one sophisticated USB lock,” she said. “You can’t even take a picture. Preston definitely didn’t want this stuff getting into the wrong hands.”

“Neither did Juan Carlos,” I said, studying the pieces of the crucifix necklace and flash drive case. The two pieces fit together so snugly you could barely detect a seam. He must have spent some money on this. Not because it was gold—the gold was fake—but because it looked secure. I caressed the necklace. “I’m sure he wanted to keep this on him at all times until he found the right person to hand it over to.”

“Right. You,” Mari reminded me. “And now you have it. Just like he wanted. So what are you going to do?”

We exchanged a long look.

“Hand it over,” I said. “First thing in the morning, we’re going to the embassy office with this flash drive. The PAC Tour comes to Quito tomorrow. Didn’t you tell me the ambassador was planning on attending? He must be back in town.”

“And the bike?” Mari asked.

“We’ll tell him it’s coming Friday. And if he really enjoys a good cultural exchange program, he should come and check out our container unload.”

“What about Bianca?” Mari looked at the screen, where our note to Bianca Slade awaited, along with a red X showing that our attachment was unsuccessful.

“We’ll hold off,” I decided. “There’s no point in telling her about this without proof. There’s nothing she can do from there. We’ll get faster results delivering the flash drive to the ambassador here. Especially since Preston is coming this way.”