Read Chapter 16: The USB

The text message from Sophie came at 4:17 a.m., and Jack was awake before the phone finished vibrating. He'd been lying in the dark of his hospital room, staring at the ceiling, the threat still burning in his mind. *Leave Monaco or die.* Qualifying was in nine hours.

*It's done,* Sophie wrote. *Come to the apartment. Now.*

He didn't bother with the hospital gown. His street clothes were folded in the locker, still smelling faintly of smoke and carbon from the crash. The nurse at the station gave him a look as he walked past, but he just raised his hand—signing himself out.

Sophie's apartment was a twenty-minute walk through streets that were already stirring with the machinery of race weekend. Scaffolding crews and caterers, marshals checking barriers. The early light was pale over the harbor. Jack kept his head down, moving fast, checking reflections in shop windows for anyone following. He saw no one.

She buzzed him up before he knocked. The door opened onto a small living room that had been transformed into a war room. Sophie's laptop was open on the coffee table, cables snaking to a stack of external drives. Empty espresso cups littered the surface. Her hair was tied back in a messy knot, and there were dark circles under her eyes that made her look like she'd aged five years since Friday.

"You look like shit," she said.

"You look worse." Jack closed the door behind him. "What did you find?"

Sophie turned the laptop toward him. On screen was a spreadsheet—rows of payments, dates, amounts. Some in euros, some in Swiss francs, some in what looked like Bitcoin addresses. All flowing from one entity to another.

"Aethel Insurance Group," she said, tapping the screen. "That's the company Claire worked for. They're not just a motorsport insurer—they're a holding company. And look at this."

She highlighted a column of recipient names. They all resolved to the same parent organization, a name Jack had never seen before but recognized instantly from the pattern.

"Rivière Partners," he said.

"Viktor's shell company, yes. But that's not the interesting part." Sophie clicked to another file, pulling up a document showing corporate ownership structures. "Rivière Partners doesn't just own betting syndicates and insurance claims. They own a Luxembourg-based manufacturing group."

Jack stared at the screen. "What do they manufacture?"

"Suspension components. Specifically, the suspension components supplied to Scuderia Fenice." She let that land. "Your car runs on Viktor's parts. Every Fenice car has run on Viktor's parts for the last three years."

Jack felt the floor tilt slightly. He'd driven those suspension arms through Eau Rouge at 180 miles an hour. He'd trusted them with his life through the Tunnel at Monaco. And the man signing the checks for them was the same man he was racing against.

"That's how they did Luca," Jack said slowly. "They had access to the car. They could weaken a part, watch it fail, collect the insurance—"

"—and control the outcome of every race," Sophie finished. "Not just crashes. Not just deaths. They can make a car slow. Make a car handle badly. Make a driver look washed up." She paused. "Make a driver look like he deserves to lose his seat."

Jack thought of his brake failure that morning. The incendiary device. Someone had access to his car, and it wasn't a random mechanic. It was someone who could touch any part of the machine without raising suspicion.

"Show me the email," he said.

Sophie clicked again. A new window opened—an email chain, retrieved from the Aethel servers she'd cracked. The subject line read: *RE: Monaco contingency.*

The sender: Philippe Moreau, Fenice Team Principal.

The recipient: a generic booking address at Rivière Partners.

The body was short. Clinical. Two lines of French that Sophie had translated in a note beneath.

*Luca was taken care of. We can proceed with the revised driver program for next season.*

*Confirm the insurance timeline aligns.*

Jack read it twice. Then a third time.

"That's it," he said. "That's the murder. In writing."

"Philippe ordered it," Sophie said. "Or at least, he knew about it and approved it. And Viktor paid for it through the insurance structure. Claire was going to expose this. She was filing a whistleblower claim the day she died."

"Which is why André certified her death so fast." Jack's jaw tightened. "He's not just compromised. He's part of it. He signs the paperwork for their deaths so nobody asks questions."

Sophie closed the laptop. "There's more. The USB had a directory of personnel files. People who've been paid off, silenced, or transferred out of Fenice over the last five years. Engineers, mechanics, a race strategist who asked too many questions after Luca's crash. All of them have NDAs and six-figure payouts on record." She hesitated. "One of them is still active at the team. A senior engineer who received a payment six weeks ago."

"Who?"

"Marco's replacement on the engineering side. A man named Rinaldi. He's been on the team for eight months." She pulled up a personnel file with a photo of a lean man in his forties with a thin mustache. "He signed an NDA with Rivière Partners two weeks before Fenice hired him."

"He's their plant inside the factory," Jack said. "He could be the one who touched my brakes."

"Probably. But you can't prove it without exposing the USB, and if you expose the USB, you expose what Claire was doing before she died. They'll paint her as a disgruntled employee and you as a driver who's clutching at conspiracy theories."

Jack stood up, pacing the length of the small apartment. Out the window, he could see the rooftops of Monte Carlo, the palace high on the rock, the harbor glittering below. Somewhere down there, Viktor Steiner was probably having breakfast, reading the morning racing papers, waiting to crush him in qualifying.

"He didn't come to my room personally," Jack said. "He sent thugs."

"What's your point?"

"My point is that Viktor's been careful. He's three layers removed from everything. Philippe is the one who wrote the email. Philippe is the one who ordered it." Jack stopped pacing. "If I go to the FIA with this, they'll say the document chain is compromised. They'll say Claire's death was suicide, that the USB was planted, that I'm a desperate driver trying to frame the man ahead of me."

"Then don't go to the FIA."

Jack looked at her. "Then where do I go?"

"The race," Sophie said. "You go into qualifying and you beat Viktor in front of every camera in the world. You make them need you. You make it so they can't kill you or discredit you without destroying the team's chance at a championship." She met his eyes. "The spare car is checked. I had Marco's former chief mechanic, Jean, look at it overnight. He found a loose bleed valve on the rear brakes. He fixed it. No one knows except us."

Jack let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "The gearbox?"

"Mapped it myself. Ratios are set for low downforce—you'll be quicker on the straights, a bit twitchy through the hairpins. It's a knife's edge."

"That's all I need."

He walked to the door, then paused. The weight of what he was about to do pressed down on him. Qualifying at Monaco. In an unverified car. Against a man who had killed once and wouldn't hesitate to kill again.

"Sophie," he said. "Keep the USB. If something happens to me today, you find a journalist. Not the racing press. Someone who covers organized crime. You give them everything and you disappear."

She didn't argue. "Backup copy is already in a safety deposit box under your mother's maiden name at the Credit Lyonnais in Nice."

Jack almost smiled. "You think of everything."

"Someone has to." She stood and came toward him, and for a moment he thought she might hug him. Instead she pressed a small key into his palm. "Safety deposit box. If I'm not around, you'll need it."

He closed his fist around the key. "I'll see you at the track."

"Don't die," Sophie said. "I'm not finishing this without you."

Down on the street, the Monaco sun was climbing over the casino, and the city was waking to race day. Jack walked toward the harbor, toward the paddock, toward the spare car that would either carry him to glory or kill him trying.

He didn't look back.