Read Chapter 25: Aftermath of Truth

The room smelled of sweat, copper, and the stale air of a hotel that had never once been called home. Emile Fournier sat on the edge of Jack’s bed, his forearms resting on his knees, the fresh bandage on his shoulder a stark white against the grime of his skin. His face was pale beneath the hotel lamplight, the kind of pale that came from blood loss and adrenaline finally cashing out.

Jack locked the door, checked the chain, then pulled the curtains shut with two hard tugs. The city hummed below, indifferent to the two men hiding inside it.

“You need a doctor,” Jack said.

“I need a drink more.”

Jack crossed to the minibar, pulled out two tiny bottles of whiskey, and handed one over. Emile cracked it with one hand, winced as the motion pulled at his shoulder, and drank the thing dry in a single swallow.

“Talk,” Jack said. “You said Luca confronted them. I need all of it, and I need it clean.”

Emile set the empty bottle down on the nightstand. For a long moment, he just stared at the far wall, as if the story he was about to tell was not something he had learned secondhand but something he had lived through himself, frame by frame.

“Three days before Monaco,” Emile began, his voice rough, accented, “Luca called me. He was in Maranello, at the factory. He said he had something that was going to tear the team apart, and that I needed to know about it in case anything happened to him.”

“Something happened to him,” Jack said.

“Yes.” Emile’s jaw tightened. “He had pulled the telemetry from his last three races. The suspension failures, the gearbox glitches, the qualifying hydraulics issues — he ran every anomaly through his own engineers. Friends, not Fenice people. Independent. And they all found the same thing.”

“Sabotage.”

“Not just sabotage. Deliberate, patterned. Small enough that it cost him points but never put him in the wall — except that one time in Barcelona, when he nearly went into the fence at turn nine. The data showed the failure was triggered by a component that shouldn’t have been there. A micro-fracture introduced at manufacture. Something designed to fail after two hours of running.”

Jack sat down across from him, on the armchair by the window. “And that pointed to Alain.”

“It pointed to whoever signed the parts order. Alain approved every modification to Luca’s car. Philippe signed the budgets. There was no one else in the chain.” Emile looked at him now, and the grief in his eyes was old and worn, a thing he’d been carrying for months. “Luca confronted Alain first. In his office. Alain denied everything, of course, told him he was paranoid and tired and needed to focus on the championship. But Luca had the data. He showed it to him. Told him he was going to the FIA.”

“And Alain caved?”

“Alain’s not the kind to cave. He’s the kind to call Philippe.”

Jack leaned forward. “What happened at the meeting?”

“I don’t know the details. Luca wouldn’t tell me everything — he was scared, and he was careful about what he put on the phone. But I know he met them both, Philippe and Alain, in a private room at the Ritz in Paris. Two days before he left for Monaco.” Emile’s hand drifted to his shoulder, resting just below the bandage. “When he came out of that meeting, he called me again. He said it was bigger than Fenice. Bigger than one team. He said Philippe had tried to buy him — not the way you buy a loyal driver, but the way you buy a mule. A payout. A cut of the action. All he had to do was underperform in the right moments.”

“The betting ring.”

“Yes. Philippe didn’t just want to win. He wanted to control outcomes. Certain drivers. Certain races. Certain margins. Luca was meant to be part of it. The team’s golden boy, underperforming just enough to make the house money on underdogs and over-rounds.” Emile shook his head slowly. “Luca told him no. He told Philippe he was going to the FIA with everything — the sabotage, the bribes, the whole scheme.”

“And they killed him.”

The words sat between them for a moment, heavy as engine blocks.

Emile nodded. “He died before he could say anything else. The crash was designed to look like a racing incident. A suspension failure at speed — plausible, tragic, the sort of thing that happens in this sport every few years. No one questions it. Everyone says a prayer and moves on to the next race.” His voice cracked slightly. “Except his brother. Except me.”

Jack let the silence stretch. The hum of the city seemed to grow louder, pressing in against the window.

“Marco,” Jack said. “He asked me for fifty thousand euros to tell me where your safety deposit box was. Said he was doing a favor for a friend. Said he wasn’t sure you were still alive.”

Emile’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Marco’s a coward with a good heart. He knew I was in danger. He also knew I owed him money from an old deal, years back — a debt I never managed to clear. When I disappeared, he saw a way to settle it. Sell the location to whoever came asking. That was his version of loyalty — get paid, and hope the guy he gave the address to was on the right side.”

“He didn’t know about the bribe.”

“He knew I had something valuable. He didn’t know what.” Emile leaned back carefully, wincing again. “The fifty thousand was never a random number. It was what Philippe offered Luca to throw the Singapore race. Luca turned it down. He told me the number himself, ashamed that they thought he could be bought that cheaply.”

Jack felt the pieces slide into place, a lock finally turning. The debt he owed Marco wasn’t just a debt. It was a number that Philippe had used to try to buy a man’s integrity, a number that had been refused, and now a number that had come back to haunt him from beyond the grave.

“So I’m not just paying off a shady informant,” Jack said. “I’m paying off the ghost of Luca’s refusal.”

“You’re paying off Marco’s fear. He thinks if he doesn’t get paid, someone comes for him. And he might be right.”

Jack stood and walked to the window, peeling back one sliver of curtain. The street below was quiet, just a few late-night pedestrians, no one who looked like they were watching. But he knew better than to trust the quiet.

“I have the USB,” Jack said. “The diagnostic file, the footage of Alain working on the car. It’s enough to clear my name.”

“It’s enough to prove someone sabotaged the car. Whether it points at Philippe depends on how the story is told.” Emile’s voice was careful now, the tone of a man who had learned to weigh every word. “And after what happened with that journalist — you learned the hard way that evidence in the wrong hands just becomes another weapon.”

Jack turned back. “She twisted the story before she even got the USB. She knew what she was doing when she published that piece.”

“Or she was bought before you ever walked in the room.”

“Either way, I can’t go public the normal way. Not until I understand who I’m handing the story to.”

Emile nodded slowly. “Then we don’t go public. We make them come to us.”

Jack held his gaze. “What do you mean?”

“You have evidence of sabotage, but it’s directed at the car. It doesn’t directly implicate Philippe in Luca’s death. It doesn’t expose the betting ring.” Emile sat forward, the movement causing him to grip the edge of the bed frame. “What if we make it look like they’re not the only ones with secrets? What if we plant something that looks like it’s from the top — an email thread between Alain and Philippe, discussing the betting scheme, naming the drivers they own, the races they’ve fixed. Something that points the investigation in their direction instead of at you.”

“Fake evidence.”

“Evidence that looks as real as the sabotage they engineered.” Emile’s eyes were bright now, the deadness retreating. “You know the racing world. You know how it works. A whisper of a betting scandal — the FIA will tear that team apart from the inside. They won’t have time to chase you.”

Jack considered it. The risk was immense. Planting evidence, getting caught, turning what little legitimacy he had into ash. But the alternative was hiding forever, waiting for Philippe to clean up the loose ends — and Jack knew which loose end was the most obvious one.

“There’s a problem,” Jack said. “I’m locked out of Fenice. I can’t just walk into Alain’s office and drop a file on his keyboard.”

“You don’t have to walk in through the front door.” Emile paused, grimacing as the movement tugged at his wound. “I know a way into the factory. Back entrance, through the fabrication bay. The security camera at that angle has been broken for six months — they never fixed it because they don’t think anyone knows about it. But I know. I used to go through there to visit Luca when he was doing late simulator sessions.”

Jack studied him. Emile was thin, ragged, bleeding through a bandage into his jacket. He didn’t look like a man capable of breaking into a Formula One factory and planting files in the team principal’s computer.

But there was something in his eyes that Jack recognized. It was the same look he saw in his own mirror. The look of a man who had nothing left to lose.

“We’ll need to forge an email chain,” Jack said slowly. “Very carefully. Dates, times, language that matches how they talk. It has to feel real enough that when the investigators find it, they don’t look twice.”

“I know how Alain writes. Stiff, corporate. Long words for simple things.” Emile’s mouth twitched. “I read every memo he ever sent Luca about performance targets. The man writes like a washing machine manual.”

“And Philippe?”

“Smooth. Too smooth. Every message sounds like it was written by a lawyer with a thesaurus.” Emile shook his head. “Together, they have the warmth of a shareholder report.”

Jack almost smiled, then caught himself. The moment felt too heavy for levity, and yet, in the strangest way, levity was exactly what they needed to keep moving. He crossed to the small desk in the corner where his laptop sat closed, the USB drive tucked inside its sleeve in the side pocket of his bag.

“We do this tonight,” Jack said. “While they think I’m hiding. While they think I’m done.”

Emile stood, swaying slightly, but he held his footing. “Tonight.”

Jack looked at him, at the wound, at the exhaustion etched into every line of his face. “You need to eat. Sleep. Get your strength back.”

“I can sleep when Philippe Rivière is in prison.” Emile met his eyes. “Until then, I don’t sleep.”

Jack understood. He’d never met Luca, never raced him, never shared a motorhome or a podium or a late-night engineers briefing. But Emile’s grief was his motor now, the same motor that pushed Jack through every dark morning of his career. You didn’t argue with a man running on grief. You just got out of his way and pointed him at the target.

“Alright,” Jack said. “We forge the email. We get into the factory. And we make Philippe’s entire conspiracy collapse under its own weight.”

He opened the laptop. The screen light filled the dark room, casting long shadows across the walls.

Emile sat down beside him, close enough that Jack could smell the antiseptic on his bandage, and together they began to build a lie precise enough to expose a truth.

The city hummed on, oblivious.