by Diana Renn
“And you? You’re going in the taxi too?” Mari asked him.
“No. I will stay and keep Preston busy while you two do this thing. And your host sister can help.”
Santiago jumped out of the container and had a few words with Amparo, words Mari and I couldn’t hear. “I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think we should leave the bike once we have it. How do we know the Explorers crew won’t find some way into the warehouse? Or that Amparo’s safe?”
“We have to trust Santiago,” Mari responded. “There’s no more time. Here comes Mr. EcuaBar now.”
Santiago immediately tossed Preston another heavy box, this one full of bicycle pumps. Preston started to hand the box back to Santiago, protesting, but Amparo trotted over to him, camera in hand. “What a wonderful thing you are doing for Vuelta! This will look great for Cadence Bikes publicity, Señor Lane,” Amparo purred.
Preston immediately stood straighter and balanced the box in his arms. While Preston was occupied with Amparo, who seemed to have seized the opportunity to play interviewer and grill Preston about his involvement with Vuelta, Santiago ushered us out of the container. “Go!” he hissed, after quickly explaining where the storage closet was.
“All right. Let’s do this,” Mari muttered.
I leaped out of the container and Mari passed the Cadence bike down to me before jumping out too.
Santiago kept the human chain busy ferrying a fleet of kids’ bikes down the line. Preston was trapped between the chain of volunteers and Amparo. Mari and I each held a handlebar of the Cadence bike and made a beeline for the warehouse.
Once inside, we headed straight for a far corner that was partitioned off to form a makeshift closet. The small space was filled with cleaning supplies. “What are you doing?” I asked as Mari suddenly knelt down. “Let’s lock this thing up and get out of here!”
“Wait. While we’re here, I just want to make sure this bike’s really got contraband inside it,” she said. “So we can be really specific about what we tell the ambassador. Amparo can’t stop talking. Preston’s tied up. We have time.” She got busy, taking three tools from her jeans pocket. First she removed the seat post and looked inside. Then she pulled a bracket off the downtube. She put in her fingers and pulled out three tightly wadded-up bills. Hundred dollar bills. She peered inside the tube again, shook it, and whistled under her breath. “And there’s a lot more where that came from,” she said. “They’re all crammed in there. This frame is totally stuffed.”
I sucked in my breath. “Oh my God. It really is cash. So Preston was using Juan Carlos’s bike to smuggle money into this country.”
“And laundering it through Vuelta and other charities,” Mari added, unfolding one of the bills. Then she turned to the bike and picked at the name decal. It unrolled easily. “This isn’t even an official label,” she said. “This is a home computer print job, on a sticker. The real decals are put on with heat transfer and they don’t come off. Tessa.” She looked at me. “We were right. This isn’t even Juan Carlos’s bike. Remember how I saw his spare bike on the wall at Dylan’s place? I think Preston Lane labeled this bike with Juan Carlos’s name so Juan Carlos would take the fall if anyone at customs found out what was inside. Juan Carlos would look like the cash smuggler, not Preston.”
Relief, warm relief, flooded me. Juan Carlos was a good person at heart. I’d judged him well. And the cash in the bike was further proof that Jake had nothing to do with either of the bike crimes from the morning of Chain Reaction. I didn’t love him, or even want to see him again, but at least his name would be cleared.
“There’s tons more cash in here. But we can let someone else count it up.” Mari quickly screwed the seat and the downtube bracket back on. “We have to get the bike and the flash drive down to the media circus at the starting line. The race is starting soon.”
“I thought we were locking up the bike and just taking the flash drive.”
Mari smirked and pointed at the lock on the doorknob. The latch could be turned, yes, to lock the door on the way out—but the doorknob itself was hanging off-kilter. “Seriously? This is hardly high-level security,” she said. “If Preston comes in to the warehouse to look around, or the guys in the Ford Explorers, they could easily bust their way in. No way am I leaving this bike and the money here.”
I turned and looked around. Mari was right. The closet was little more than a partition with a door. The walls of the partition could be scaled with a ladder, or even punched through with a heavy object.
“But how will we walk the bike out and get a taxi, without Preston’s backup creeps following us?” I asked.
“Did you happen to see a box of used bike shoes and helmets? I packed it myself. That should have been one of the first things off the container.”
“Yeah, I saw it by the door. Why? Why is this important right now?”
“Grab it. We need shoes for clip-ins.”
I darted out into the main warehouse area and grabbed the box, wondering what this was all about. When I came back, Mari had Juan Carlos’s bike and a Diablo bike that she had snagged from a rack just outside the partition. “Find two pairs of shoes that might fit us,” she said.
“But I can’t ride in—”
“Don’t argue, Tessa. No time. If we bike the side streets and alleys, we can ditch the cars and make it down to the race. We can throw the cars off our trail, and leave them stuck in traffic.”
We quickly exchanged our sneakers for bike shoes and strapped on helmets. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly fasten my helmet. I thought of Rosio and the determined look on her face as she completed her maiden journey around the block the other day. If she could ride so fiercely, why couldn’t I? I had to put Chain Reaction behind me and get back in that saddle.
But just as we grabbed the handlebars of the bikes—me with Juan Carlos’s Cadence, Mari with the Diablo—we heard a man’s voice. “Going for a little ride, are we? What fun.”
In the makeshift doorway stood Preston Lane.
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.”
