Read Chapter 9: The Betting Market

The paddock lights were dying by the time Jack swung the rental BMW up the coastal road, but his mind was still on the car—and the damage Viktor had done to it. The floor damage had cost him three-tenths in the final sector. Three-tenths. At Monaco, that was the difference between pole and eighth.

He killed the engine in a gravel pullout above Nice and checked his phone. Sophie had sent three messages in the last hour. The third one was a link and the words: *Call me before you see Marco’s contact. I found something worse.*

He called. She picked up on the first ring.

“Tell me you’re not already knocking on doors up in the hills,” she said.

“I’m parked. Talk.”

“I was running patterns on the offshore bookmakers—the ones that don’t report to the FIA’s integrity unit. There’s a site, BetBlack, operates out of Curaçao. Grey market, unlimited max stakes. And someone’s been moving serious money through it on Fenice races all season.”

Jack leaned forward, squinting at the dark hillside beyond the windscreen. “Define serious.”

“Six figures. Per bet. Multiple accounts, same signing IP. They’re not betting outcomes. They’re betting timing.”

“Timing of what?”

“Crashes.” The word sat in the static for a moment. “I reverse-engineered their ledger from public odds movements. Before Bahrain, someone placed €220,000 on a first-lap retirement for the number 27 car—Moreau’s car. Payout was nineteen-to-one because the oddsmakers had him finishing. Someone cleaned up when he didn’t.”

Jack’s jaw tightened. “Luca crashed on lap one in Bahrain?”

“Retired. Contact failure, official report said. Nothing dramatic. But the payout was real.”

“And Monaco?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. Today, the same account cluster started placing bets on this race. Huge sums.” She paused. “Jack, the odds on you winning have drifted out to forty-to-one.”

“I’m a rookie in a second-tier car. That’s about right.”

“No, you’re not listening. The odds on you *crashed out in practice* were fourteen-to-one. They hit that. The odds on Viktor outqualifying you by more than four-tenths dropped from even money to one-to-four. They hit that too.”

The cold night air through the cracked window suddenly felt sharper. “So someone’s betting on specific outcomes. Including my car getting damaged.”

“Including your car getting damaged. By a specific driver. On a specific lap. It’s not gambling, Jack. It’s scripting.”

Jack watched a pair of headlights wind along the switchback below him, slow and deliberate. “Scripting crashes means someone on the inside is coordinating. Who places a bet on a car failure and then makes sure that failure happens?”

“That’s what I’m trying to trace. The accounts are shelled through a payment processor in Andorra. But I found something else.” Pages rustled on her end. “The betting pattern matches the notebook you found in Luca’s apartment. Same race dates, same retirement timing, same structure. Luca wasn’t just part of this. He was *calibrating* it.”

“What do you mean, calibrating?”

“Betting markets need accuracy. If you’re going to place a two-hundred-thousand-euro bet on a first-lap retirement, you need to know the car will retire on lap one. Luca was the driver. He knew exactly when a component would fail—or could be made to fail. His role was to ensure the script held. The notebook tracks how much each race was supposed to pay out versus what actually landed.”

Jack pressed his palm against the steering wheel, steadying himself. “So Luca was in on it. He wasn’t just a victim of some betting syndicate. He was a participant.”

“Was. And then something changed. The last entries in the notebook—the ones marked ‘A.G.’—don’t match any bookmaker I can find. They’re not payouts. They’re transfers. Regular, monthly, to a private account. I think Luca was getting paid a retainer. And I think when he tried to walk away, or when he threatened to expose the operation, they made the next race his last.”

The headlights below disappeared around a bend. Jack’s phone screen glowed the coordinates Marco had sent. Emile’s coordinates. “So the brother isn’t just running from the people who killed Luca. He’s running from the people Luca worked for. Which means he might have the same dirt on them—the names, the accounts, the whole operation.”

“Worse. If the brother knows what Luca did, he might think Jack Turner—the driver who replaced his brother at Fenice—is part of the same machine. Marco said as much. Emile probably thinks you’ve been sent to finish the job.”

Jack exhaled slowly. The wind picked up, rattling the rental’s side mirror. “Then I need to convince him I’m not.”

“How?”

“By showing him what I found. The notebook. The sabotage damage. The fact that I have as much reason to want the truth as he does.”

Sophie was quiet for a moment. “And if he doesn’t believe you?”

Jack glanced at the glove box, where he’d stashed a copy of Luca’s notebook and the photographs Sophie had taken of the fracture surface. “Then I make him believe me.”

He ended the call and stepped out of the car. The trailhead Marco had marked was fifty meters up the road, hidden behind a rusted guardrail. The coordinates pointed to a disused shepherd’s hut on the ridge, reachable only on foot. Jack pocketed the phone, took a small flashlight from the boot, and started climbing.

The switchback trail was loose gravel and dry brush. His racing boots weren’t made for hiking, and within ten minutes his calves were burning. Above him, the stars were sharp and close, the Monaco glow bleeding orange along the horizon. Somewhere down there, Fenice’s engineers were still working on his damaged floor. And Viktor was probably already in bed, dreaming of his next victory.

Jack reached a low stone wall and paused to catch his breath. The hut was below him now, a dark silhouette against the moonlit scrub. No lights. No movement. Either Emile was gone or he was very good at staying still.

Jack descended carefully, keeping to the shadow of the wall. He was ten meters from the door when his foot caught a tripwire. A tin can rattled across the stone, loud as a gunshot in the silence.

The door flew open. A man filled the frame, thin and wired, holding a crowbar. His face was half-lit by the moon—hollow cheeks, tired eyes, the same sharp jaw Jack had seen in Luca’s team photos.

“Emile.” Jack raised both hands, slow. “I’m not here to hurt you. I was your brother’s replacement at Fenice.”

The crowbar didn’t lower.

“I know my brother’s crash wasn’t an accident,” Emile said, voice cracked. “And I know you’re driving the car he was supposed to die in.”