by Diana Renn
“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?”
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.”