Latitude Zero (33 page)

57

PRESTON CROSSED
the floor to us in three steps. He put his hand firmly on the bike I was holding. “I believe that belongs to me.”

I gripped the handlebar tighter. “You can’t take this,” I said. “We’re finishing Juan Carlos’s ride.”

“Oh, really.”

I held his gaze. “Yes. We have evidence that you’re a consultant for an illegal sports gambling business.”

He laughed, but then stopped when he saw I was serious.

“We know it’s called Sports Xplor,” I went on. “We know you and Coach Mancuso have been trying to fix races. I have media connections, I know where the flash drive is, I’m holding a bike full of cash you put in it, and I’m going to make sure this gets out. Just like Juan Carlos wanted it to.”

“You know where the flash drive is?” His eyes lit up. “Where? Do you have it now?” He held out his hand.

“It’s in a secure place,” I said mysteriously. “With one of our own agents. Who will release the data to the media if anything happens to Mari and me.”

He sneered at me. “You’re quite the little investigator. I see you’re getting a good education at Shady Pines. Glad my money is going toward fine minds like yours. Didn’t I just award a scholarship to one of your classmates? You should think about that before you run to the cameras and the cops.”

“Taking away my friend’s scholarship won’t change my mind. This is bigger than Kylie.”

He glared. “I don’t have time to play games. I have ways of silencing people. Now give me that bike.”

“Silencing people? Oh, we know all about that,” said Mari, glaring back at him. “You’re a murderer. You killed Juan Carlos, didn’t you?”

He laughed. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“No. It’s not,” said Mari. “You made sure those tools had Dylan’s fingerprints on them, and you put them where the cops would find them when the investigation turned into a homicide case.”

“And you bribed Dylan to leave the door to the trailer open, so you could get in there and do that sabotage job yourself,” I jumped in. “And you’re laundering money here in Ecuador, through charities like Vuelta. We found it in the bike.
Your
bike. This bike never belonged to Juan Carlos. You just put his name decal on it so he’d be blamed if customs took a closer look at the Team EcuaBar bikes it was originally going to be shipped with.”

Preston flinched. Then he smiled, almost sheepishly. “Look. I’m a businessman. I’m willing to make a deal here just to get us out of this awkward situation. How much do you girls want?”

Mari and I exchanged a look. Money? I hadn’t expected that response from Preston.

“I’ll give you half of what’s in that bike. You can split it between you.” He sounded almost pleading. “That’s about three thousand dollars for each of you.”

For a moment I thought of presenting Kylie and her mom with a stack of cash. For medical bills. For that experimental drug.

In the next instant, I erased that thought. “We don’t want your money,” I said. “You’re ruining cycling and your charities and EcuaBar, and even my school, with all this illegal money. It’s corrupt. And people should know.”

“Fine.” Preston’s smile curdled. “Then I’ll have my team plant some drugs in your backpacks, make a phone call, and get you locked up in the Quito prison before the day is over. Did you know that Ecuador has one of the longest prison sentences for attempted drug smuggling? And that the criminal justice here is woefully inept? People rot in prison here for years, just awaiting a trial. And there’s not a thing the U.S. Embassy can do for you except get you an English-speaking lawyer, whose hands will be tied, and who won’t spring you or even move your case along.”

I sucked in my breath. I had no doubt he could work with Darwin—or on his own—to do something like that.

“Tessa. I don’t want to be locked up in an Ecuadorian prison,” Mari whispered to me.

I didn’t, either. But I couldn’t stop the words that came next.

“Yeah, speaking of jail? Dylan doesn’t deserve to go there,” I said, surprised at the strength in my voice. “Neither does Jake Collier, or whoever else you set up to look connected to Juan Carlos’s ‘accident.’”

“You’re a criminal,” Mari added, lifting her chin. “We’re going to make sure people know the truth. And we can still talk in prison.” She linked her arm through mine. “You really want to frame us? Go ahead.”

I nudged her. That was taking it maybe a little too far.

“We’ll still tell everyone what you did,” Mari went on. “We’re going to talk and talk, until somebody listens. Starting now.” She opened her mouth wide, as if to shout.

“Girls, girls,” he said, holding out his hands in a gesture of peace. “Let’s be reasonable. Let me explain myself before you do something regrettable. I did work with Sports Xplor. You’re correct. I did ask Juan Carlos not to share classified information about the company’s business plan.”

“Asked him?” I spluttered. “You bribed him!”

“Business plan? You mean evil scheme,” Mari added.

“You act like I’m this heinous individual,” Preston protested. “I’m not. I’m an investor and a consultant. Sports Xplor will soon be above board. Because eventually—sooner than you think—our government will see the light, sports gambling will be legal in our country, and Sports Xplor will be in prime position to profit from the sports gambling craze. Not only that, I’m helping the cycling industry.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “Bringing cycling into sports betting is making cycling visible again. Exciting again. If people invest financially in a sport, they invest emotionally, too. It all comes around. Sports betting helps cycling. I’m turning around the whole industry.”

“With racketeering? Money laundering? Race fixing?” I shook my head. “That’s mafia stuff. Not philanthropy.”

“I believed the gains outweighed the risks in this case. Although the race fixing . . .” He sighed and leaned against the doorframe, in a casual pose that deliberately blocked our exit. “Honestly? That was my colleagues’ plan, not mine. I was starting to have mixed feelings, and planned to pull out. I was just going to fix the Chain Reaction race result as an experiment, and then argue it wouldn’t work long-term. Then I would buy myself out.”

“But you didn’t,” I corrected him. “You were going to take this race fixing scheme, if it worked, all the way to the Tour de France next year. We read the emails.”

“Yes. But you have to understand how intoxicating it all became,” said Preston. He attempted the affable grin he used at his Shady Hill keynote speech—only now it looked more like a grimace. “Bets were pouring in for the PAC Tour. There was so much drama with the two ‘rival’ cyclists, and the organization wouldn’t let me stop. They put me up to making Juan Carlos an offer to throw his result at Chain Reaction, as a test run, and then at certain legs of the PAC tour. But Juan Carlos refused to do it. He was intent on leaking our information.”

“How did you know that for sure?” Mari asked.

“He told me he’d overheard conversations between Coach Mancuso and me about Sports Xplor, as well as our plans to ship cash in a Cadence bike mixed in with the team bikes. If I didn’t stop him from leaking that, we’d never be able to launch our scheme. Let alone participate in the PAC tour.”

“So you threw him in a van?” I asked, remembering Darwin’s story the other night.

“There was no
throwing
involved. Your language is very dramatic.”

“What would you call it?”

“When our agents intercepted him, they
contained
him in a van, where they could reason with him away from the public eye. But he burst out, overpowering our agents, and threatening to expose Sports Xplor and my involvement in it.”

Talk about dramatic language. “That’s not all he was going to expose,” I said, looking at the cash-stuffed bike. “There’s a whole other component to your plan.”

“International shipping,” Preston said in a smooth voice. “There are many methods. This happened to be one of them, to avoid paying unnecessary duties and taxes.”

“It’s not international shipping. It’s international smuggling,” Mari corrected. “And because Juan Carlos was going to expose your involvement in all of this stuff, you rigged his bike to fail.”

Preston ran his hands through his hair. “I admit, I got scared,” he said, “I’m human. Okay? What can I say? Humans get scared.”

My skin crawled. He reminded me so much of Jake in that moment, Jake at his worst. Backpedaling. Explaining. Playing the emotional card.

“Look, this issue between me and Juan Carlos goes back months,” he said. “It’s personal. I knew Juan Carlos had overheard some key conversations between me and Coach Mancuso. He lived in my house. When I realized his English was getting good, fast—and that he was using my home computer for some of his homework—I took all my Sports Xplor data off it, for safety. I put it on a protected flash drive and kept it in my briefcase. But he wouldn’t give up pestering me about my international shipping methods for cash. He just wouldn’t leave it alone. When I came to Quito for business in February, Juan Carlos was training here, and he made a bold move. He came to my hotel room—he found some way to get in with the help of a maid there—and he caught me taking cash out of a bike I had packed.”

That must have been Rosio’s mom. So she’d been paid off with EcuaBars, for her silence. But Juan Carlos had been offered more. Much more. And if he’d stumbled on this cash-smuggling secret back in February, that could explain why Jake thought Juan Carlos acted differently after training in Quito off-season. “You paid him hush money,” I prompted. “A lot.”

“Which he didn’t take. At least, not right away,” said Preston. “But the trust between us was gone after he caught on to my shipping plan. I couldn’t have him under my roof anymore. I’d caught him in my office, looking around, more than once. So I paid for him to leave my house and live with some older teammates.

“The day before Chain Reaction, my flash drive with the Sport Xplor data went missing,” Preston continued. “We had a team meeting, to get to know Chris Fitch, and I must have left my briefcase open just long enough for Juan Carlos to have a look. I had to leave the room to take a call, and he must have found a way to look around. When I looked for my flash drive that night, it was gone. And at the race the next morning, when I saw Juan Carlos ride off on my Cadence bike—the bike I’d intended Dylan to pack up with the other team bikes—I knew that was when he planned to leak the information. And suddenly everything was at stake.” He made an open-armed, almost pleading gesture. “Everything I’ve worked for. Girls, put yourself in my shoes for a moment. How would you feel? I had to stop him. I didn’t see another way out.”

“So you rigged Juan Carlos’s main bike. Yourself,” I said. “You weakened the tube with a hammer and a razor so the carbon fibers would fail. And you rigged the rear brakes for extra insurance.”

Preston heaved a long breath. “I didn’t think it would kill him. Just put him out for the season. To teach him the power of keeping his end of the deal and listening to his managers. I know it may sound incredible to you, but honestly? I thought it would do him a favor.”

“Some favor,” muttered Mari. “Broken bones? Brain injury? Paralysis? Death? There was no good outcome.”

“Please. Hear me out,” said Preston. “I knew Sports Xplor had crossed a line when they moved into race fixing. I thought of exposing them myself. But if Sports Xplor were prosecuted, I’d be implicated. And what good am I to anyone, especially to Juan Carlos, in jail? What good is my money if it all goes to legal fees? No good at all. But if Juan Carlos were injured in an accident, just a little, just enough to be out of the racing scene, I thought I could get the Sports Xplor guys off my back.”

“You couldn’t bribe the star rider if the star rider couldn’t ride,” Mari said. “I get it.”

Preston nodded. “Right. That would get me off the hook with Sports Xplor, for the race fixing. Then I figured I could set up Juan Carlos with some other team when he recovered, and not drag him into this mess. I planned to take some of the business profits to Ecuador for the last time, pay off the people that I needed to pay off there, and be done with the whole organization. And that’s exactly what I will do.” He reached for the bike.

“Why use the shipping container?” I asked, snatching the bike away and backing up with it. “You’ve been taking money here in your own bike, on your own business trips.”

“I have,” he admitted. “Customs has never bothered me or looked closely at the bikes. I know people in high places. And everyone knows I travel with bikes. But then this I.C.E. crackdown on border security got in the way. My friends couldn’t guarantee they’d help me, like they used to. I needed a safer way to move cash here. That’s why I feel so grateful to you girls.”

“Grateful? To us?” Mari looked skeptical.

“One of you got the bike to Compass Bikes. One of you led Darwin to the bike shop with the GPS on your phone. And since the container load was in full swing when my agents showed up there, and the bike was already on the premises, I got this genius idea. Use the container load as a way to avoid customs inspection and move the cash.”

“But your genius plan didn’t work so well, did it,” I said. “You don’t have the bike in your hands, or the money, or your flash drive. And your star cyclist is gone.”

He looked down and played with his watchband—a simple leather band, not the gleaming Rolex I’d seen before. “You are right. The sabotage part of the plan worked too well. Juan Carlos is gone. And I’ll be paying for that for the rest of my life.” He looked at me, eyes glistening. “I don’t need jail time to think about what I’ve done. I’ll carry this burden around every day. In my heart.”

I watched him carefully. He seemed sincerely regretful now. More like the guy I’d seen on TV right after the crash, distraught and wild-eyed at Mass General Hospital. But did sincerity and regret make up for the loss of a human life?

A part of me truly did sympathize. I’d made bad decisions, too, and tried to pull out too late. Like that paceline at Chain Reaction. But my deceptions and bad decisions were nowhere on the scale of what Preston Lane had done. And if he was anything like Jake, his remorseful moment would soon pass. “There’s help for people with problems like yours, you know,” I ventured. “Gambling is an addiction problem.”