Latitude Zero (29 page)

An MC speaking into a microphone introduced el Ratón, trilling the
r
, drawing the name out long.

El Ratón, a small red dot atop the hill, raised his arms in greeting.

Then he placed his hands on the handlebars and began his descent with a dazzling leap that sent his tires spinning. The sun caught the spokes and made them gleam.

The crowds cheered as el Ratón slipped into tight spaces. He darted. He dodged. He skittered and slid.

“A new victory for el Ratón! He has completed the course with record-breaking time on his death-defying descent!” the MC shouted in Spanish, as the crowd went wild. “We hope this is the start of many more victories to come, as he turns to road racing and leads Equipo Diablo!”

Loud merengue music pulsed through the speakers. The cloud went wild as el Ratón took a victory lap around the Plaza de la Independencia, pumping his fists in the air, then holding his arms up in a V as he pedaled, just like his friend Juan Carlos used to do.

Mari, Santiago, and I were the only people in the crowd not cheering or clapping. We watched his victory laps in morose silence. His victory was our failure. El Ratón wasn’t talking about that flash drive, that was clear. Unless we found it ourselves, Darwin was going to start the wrecking ball on my family members’ lives. And we’d never be able to finish Juan Carlos’s job.

51

MARI STAYED
another night with my host family, even though her laundry had finished. We all talked about the urban downhill race at dinner with them, marveling at el Ratón’s record-breaking time and his heart-pumping, thrill-a-minute downhill ride. But when the conversation unexpectedly changed to religion, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. The Ruizes were curious about my religious background—which was fairly nonexistent. We were talking in Spanish—part of the homestay experience, to improve my language skills—but it was exhausting to explain my school’s Quaker values, and the history of the Quaker people, in another language.

“And yet you wear the crucifix,” said Lucia, pointing at my chest. I’d taken off my usual necklace-concealing cotton scarf. “Surely this is not just for fashion?”

“Not just fashion,” I admitted, my hand instinctively reaching up to cover the crucifix. “It was a gift. From a friend.”

“Your boyfriend?” Amparo asked, wide-eyed and curious.

I felt Mari’s eyes on me. “No,” I said. “Just a friend.”

As usual, the after-dinner Spanish went into warp speed. My head began to throb. I just wanted to crawl away. Besides, the Ruizes all seemed more interested in Mari and her family background, trying to understand where her various cousins had grown up in Ecuador and why they had moved to the States.

I retreated to the patio to brainstorm new fake reports to stave off Darwin. I’d just started listing some on my computer when Mari’s figure suddenly appeared in the doorway, hands on her hips.

Her eyes traveled to just below my collarbone. “Tell me about that necklace,” she said.

I looked down. The moonlight bathing the patio made the gold—or gold paint—on Juan Carlos’s necklace gleam.

“I wear it all the time. I usually tuck it under a shirt or a scarf, here in Ecuador. Since it’s gold. I don’t want to be a target for muggers. Being a target for international spies is enough. Right?” I laughed.

Mari didn’t. She knelt down beside me, frowning, and held the crucifix part in her hand. “Was this from Juan Carlos?” she demanded. “Did he give this to you?”

Her tone—a mix of hurt and angry—caught me off guard. “Uh, yeah. He did.”

“When?”

“Right before the Chain Reaction race. He said to take care of it for him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Honestly? I didn’t see what it had to do with the case. I thought it was sentimental.”

“It
was
sentimental. And it was supposed to be mine.”

“What?”

“He tried to give this to me when he came to see me at the shop, the day before the race. I told him it always brought him luck, and I was afraid to take it. He said it wasn’t the necklace he usually wears, it was new, and it was heavier than USA Cycling rules would allow. I told him to wear it anyway, that he needed all the help from God he could get at Chain Reaction.”

“Look, I’m sorry he changed his mind. But he gave it to me, for safekeeping.” And he’d guided me to stand behind a tree while he put it on me. As if he hadn’t wanted to be seen.

As if he knew people were looking for him.

“Let me at least wear it tonight,” said Mari, pulling at it a little.

“Ouch. You’re pulling too hard.”

SNAP
.

“Oh my God,” said Mari, as she looked down at the piece of the cross now separated from the rest of it, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, with a small black chip sticking out of the gold.

A flash drive.

52

THE MOMENTS
dragged on as Mari and I sat in the moonlit patio in stunned silence, each of us staring at the piece of the cross we held. I had most of it—with the entire figure of Jesus—and Mari held the bottom quarter inch, the base with a USB port nested inside.

I heard a whooshing sound in my ears. The “valuable information” Juan Carlos wanted to leak had been right under my nose the whole time. Literally!

Darwin and his crew hadn’t even noticed the necklace. Or if they had, they must not have figured out that the crucifix was actually an elaborate storage case for the flash drive.

“This has to be the data Darwin’s looking for!” I exclaimed. “Juan Carlos must have wanted to show me what’s on it after he finished the race. That’s why he asked me if I had a laptop.”

Mari handed me the drive. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

I plugged the drive into the USB port on my laptop.

A folder appeared, labeled
BELIZE VACATION PICS
.

Mari’s face fell. “Vacation pictures?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Is that it? Must have been some vacation, if Juan Carlos had to carry those pictures around his neck. I can’t think when he would have gone to Belize, though. I mean, there’s no bike event there.”

I kept staring at that label. “Juan Carlos didn’t go to Belize,” I said. “And Darwin said Juan Carlos stole his client’s information. Whoever is in these vacation pictures should be Darwin’s client.”

“Oh, that’s right!” Mari said.

“Unless, of course,” I added, “these aren’t really vacation pictures.”

“What do you mean?”

“People can deliberately mislabel their files and folders. My dad does that for his clients.”

“What are you waiting for? Open this up!” Mari urged.

I clicked on the folder.

I was right. There were no JPEGs, no photos. Just a list of files labeled
SX CORRESP
ONDENCE BACKUP
, and ranges of dates between March and May.

“SX correspondence? Is that what it sounds like?” said Mari, wide-eyed. “Do you think Juan Carlos was going to expose some kind of sex scandal? Not something about drugs?”

“I don’t know.” Cringing, I opened one dated from March, the first on the list.

Mari read over my shoulder. “This is to Gage!” she exclaimed.

To: [email protected]
Subject: Moving On

Gage,

Just wanted to follow up on our discussion from last week. Thanks for taking the time to meet and to consider the offer. Sounds like you’ve made up your mind. It’s too bad—I think you’re missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime. You could secure a good future for your wife and your kids. But it’s your choice. I respect your decision. I wish you the best of luck with the bike shop. Thanks for all your hard work with the team. I’ll have my agent personally deliver the cash for your severance pay, and for your discretion, which I’ll appreciate in this matter for the protection of all involved.

Best,

Preston

Mari and I looked at each other. I clicked through a few more emails in that file to confirm my suspicion. They were backups of emails Preston had sent or received from various people—names I didn’t recognize—about company meetings and promotional schedules.

“Preston Lane,” Mari breathed. “You were starting to get suspicious about him the other day. With that bike in the hotel room stuff you heard about. I laughed it off, but now I think you were right. I don’t know if he was hiding cash in his own bike—that still seems weird—but he’s definitely hiding something.”

I was trembling with excitement. Or fear. “I think Preston is Darwin’s client!”

Mari nodded. “He has a reputation to protect.”

“And he’d have the funds to hire someone like Darwin to protect him.”

“And he probably had the means to pay someone to kill off his star cyclist,” Mari added, “to stop Juan Carlos from exposing him, costing him millions of dollars, and landing him in prison for twenty years. Tessa. Do you think Preston Lane was involved with a drug cartel? He’s such a socially conscious guy. It’s so hard to imagine.”

“Whatever he was up to, it had to be so bad that he’d kill his star cyclist—or have someone else do it—in order to stop Juan Carlos from spilling his secret.”

We let that sink in for a moment. “So why was he emailing Gage Weston?” I wondered aloud.

Mari toggled back to the first email and reread it. “He’s offering him severance pay in cash? That sounds fishy to me. When my mom lost her job a few years ago, she got severance pay, but they cut her a check. A company doesn’t send a representative to give a laid-off employee a wad of cash.”

“And the money’s also for his ‘discretion,’” I added, reading over her shoulder. “That almost sounds like hush money. Like being paid to keep a secret. Anyway, I thought you said Gage got fired because he spoke out about carbon fiber bikes and Cadence.”

“That’s what he told us mechanics at the shop,” said Mari. “But this email makes it sound like he got approached about some kind of business deal and turned it down.”

“Drugs are a business.”

“So’s sex.” Mari pointed to the screen. “What’s SX stand for, do you think? Sounds shady to me.”

I frowned. “SX” did sound shady. But it also reminded me of something I’d seen lately, on Santiago’s computer screen, and also on Gage Weston’s back at Compass Bikes. That black screen with team names.
Sports Xplor
. Maybe that’s what SX stood for! I typed “Sports Xplor” into a search engine, but all I got was a message that said the page could not be found.

I told Mari what I was looking for. “It was this weird black screen. With fruit on it. And team names. Cycling teams, in a list, and race dates, and stats. But now it’s not coming up. Maybe it’s defunct and they pulled it off the Internet.”

“Or maybe it’s a secret company,” said Mari, who had resumed scrolling through March emails. “A side business for Preston. The fruit thing you mentioned makes me think of gambling.”

Gambling.
I suddenly remembered the email I’d gotten from Kylie. The Gamblers Anonymous pamphlet in Preston’s office. I grabbed Mari’s arm. “Could Preston Lane actually have a gambling problem?” I asked. “Maybe he was trying to get Gage, and others, into some kind of gambling scheme!”

Mari nodded. “I remember Juan Carlos saying something about Preston going to Vegas a lot. For meetings, but also to the casinos.”

“And at the container load, when he came by Compass Bikes, I heard him say he’d just come back from Vegas,” I added. I tried again, repeatedly, to get to the Sports Xplor website, even trying out different spellings in the search engine.

“Why do people kill other people, anyway?” Mari wondered aloud as I pounded the keyboard, desperate for some code or magic password that would get me back to that weird-looking website. “I mean, how far would he need to go to protect this secret?”

I shrugged. “Bianca Slade once said on her show, murders happen because of love, money, or secrets. I think Preston has got two out of three. A secret about how he spends his money.”

“Yeah, but lots of people gamble, Tessa,” said Mari. “It’s not a crime to go to Vegas. And we don’t know exactly what he was doing on those Vegas trips. We don’t have hard evidence he was gambling. And so what if he was? He wouldn’t face two decades in prison for that, or need to pay Darwin’s group to protect him. There’s got to be more to it. Let’s see what else is in here.”

I gave up on getting into Sports Xplor for now. We went back to the main folder and clicked on April. The first email in this folder was also from someone I knew of. Coach Tony Mancuso of Team EcuaBar.

To: Tony [email protected]
Subject: SX link/password

Hey Tony—

We’re fully operational! Here’s the URL for the site, and this week’s password. Just call the phone number on the site when you’re ready to place your bet. Most of the big wins right now will be in the basketball games. Looking forward to getting the cycling up and running, and seeing numbers that rival the NBA bets!

https://sportsxplor.net
/linkshare
Password: PAPAYAS

Good luck!

Preston

Mari gasped. “This means Preston Lane
is
a gambler—a secret sports gambler!” Mari exclaimed. “And the head coach of Team EcuaBar is, too! Sports Xplor must be a gambling website.”

I clapped my hands to my mouth. More gears clicked into place in my mind. “Balboa. Pizarro. Those are names of explorers,” I said. “They’re in on it, too. And Darwin was sort of an explorer, too. Intellectually. He did research in Ecuador for his survival-of-the-fittest theory. Natural selection.”

“Right. Those code names don’t just connect them to South America,” said Mari. “They connect them to this organization. The names are all part of their operation.”

“But sports gambling isn’t illegal, is it?” I asked. “I know guys who play fantasy sports all the time. Online, even. You can do that when you’re eighteen.” A lot of Jake’s friends had been into that, and Jake himself had won a cool sixty bucks on a fantasy baseball game, which went toward our prom expenses.

“That’s
fantasy
sports. That’s different,” said Mari. “Fantasy sports are okay because they require a skill. Not chance. You have to create your ideal teams based on what you know about the individual players. My gambling addict uncle told me how all that works. Plus, people make private bets with their friends about sports teams, all the time. But we’re talking about operating a sports betting scheme. That’s illegal, except in a few places like Las Vegas.”

“What about online sites? Like Sports Xplor?”

“There are lots of them,” said Mari, “but they’re based in other countries. And U.S. citizens technically can’t place bets through them. It’s a gray area.”

“Other countries? Like maybe Ecuador?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m sure there are rules about that here, too, but it’s harder to track where money goes if the gambling ring is outside the U.S. Sometimes the servers and management are based in several different countries, I think. But what does he mean by ‘getting the cycling up and running’? People don’t bet on cycling. It’s a niche sport.”

“No, I think they
do
bet on cycling!” I said, remembering something else that had been on the Sports Xplor screen when I’d seen it before: a list of all the major pro and high-level amateur cycling events of the season. Different quantities of fruit followed each listed item. Almost like the star rating system for movies. “Maybe this is all part of Preston’s famous entrepreneurial spirit.” I clicked on the link in the email, and it took me to that black screen with the clip-art style fruit icons dancing and blinking.

Mari scrolled down the page, and I read over her shoulder.

WELCOME TO SPORTS XPLOR!

YOUR BEST CHOICE FOR THE ADVENTURE OF SPORTS BETTING!

WE ARE THE BIGGEST ONLINE BETTING SITE INTERNATIONALLY.

ADDING NEW SPORTS AND TEAMS EVERY WEEK.

DON’T BE THE ODD MAN OUT.
PAY TO PLAY, PLAY TO WIN!

PASSWORD:
_____________
?

The question mark blinked urgently. I typed in
Papayas
.

Incorrect password
.

I typed
mangoes
. Denied again.

Mari took over, typing every fruit we could think of, in both Spanish and English.
Tomatillos. Naranjas. Bananas. Borojo
—that last one was from Mari; I’d never heard of it before, though she swore it was a real fruit from Ecuador’s Amazon Basin.
Borojo
got us nowhere, too. And then we got a warning message about too many incorrect password attempts.

“We’re wasting time,” said Mari. “We have enough information to incriminate Preston without needing to access the Sports Xplor site. Let’s see what else is on the drive.”

My stomach churned as I clicked on the next item. Jake hadn’t been who I thought he was. And now Preston, too, had this other, darker side. And his money funded good things! Like Vuelta. Like Shady Pines. Like the life-changing scholarship Kylie had gotten. All of that money seemed rotten now. It wasn’t that gambling itself was so awful. What bugged me was that all of this was so secret. Layers of passwords. Layers of lies. Beneath his public persona, the real Preston Lane was a very different man.

The next email we pounced on, in the midst of more general business correspondence, was from Preston to Coach Tony Mancuso, again in April.

Tony—the PAC Tour, our biggest event to date, will be here before we know it. Are you on board with the strategic plan? We need to start building the narrative now. I know you’re concerned about potential impact on our home team, and it’s hard to take some losses when we’ve been on such a streak. But most of the bets for the devil riders will come from Latin America. People love an underdog team, and our regional market research shows overwhelming support in that direction. Also, Tony, you can’t just look at the race stats alone. Betting is about psychology too, and where statistics and emotions intersect.

I understand it’s discouraging to see our planned Chain Reaction loss, and the eventual series of PAC losses, but you have to reframe it as part of the larger story. A temporary setback. We’ll come back fighting at U.S. Nationals, when players here want their turn to cheer for the home team.

The big takeaway from last week’s meeting in Vegas is that we need to be laying the groundwork now for the end-of-season comeback after the “setbacks” on the PAC Tour. Find out which U.S. cyclists and coaches are looking for cash and willing to deal in the second half of our season. Firestone-Panera has a couple of young rookies, I hear. Worth approaching them, see what their financial situation is and if they want in.

Excited for the new possibilities, and you should be too. This is only the starting line for the organization, you know. If this beta version proves successful, we’re shifting operations to the Tour de France next year. The big time, Tony. Get ready for the ride of your life!

“Mari,” I whispered. “What’s he talking about?”