rolling thunder, a cycling tale, part du
Following is Part 2 of an excerpt from a manuscript tentatively titled “rolling thunder.” If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you might want to. The story flows better in that order. Otherwise, feel free to consider Part 2 the start of the story, as far as you’re concerned, and Part 1 a retrospective dream sequence if you’re into that kind of thing.
Part 2 starts to get to the real meat of the story. Here’s a sample that lets the cat out of the bag:
“That’s where it get’s interesting. I can’t tell you everything, but he was playing a valuable role in exposing powerful people behind athletic doping, all the way up to pharmaceutical company reps providing the drugs, down to the couriers and team helpers who aid in distributing products and keeping records about which riders were using what, how they performed as a result, what new products were becoming available, and so on. There is even growing evidence that certain athletes were given experimental new drugs and cocktails of drugs to just see how their bodies would react – and the athletes were unaware that substances were being switched on them for these purposes. They thought they were taking run of the mill EPO or testosterone, when they may be taking massive doses of multiple drugs, some of which were designed for horses, cows, or dogs, and had completely unknown effects on humans. These riders were chosen to be Guinea Pigs because they were viewed as disposable, and there were rumors that some people who manage teams were receiving payments for aiding in this ‘research.’
“Gerard wanted to help us blow the cover on all this, and we were getting close at the time of his death. Now we have a major setback.” She didn’t bother finishing the sentence with …because of you.
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The next morning Shamus awoke slowly and pulled a pillow over his face to block out light streaming through the window. His head hurt and while he dreaded trying to lift it or move it in any way, he knew he should get up or else he might never do so again.
Still wearing the t-shirt and comfortably threadbare boxer shorts he’d slept in, he walked the four steps from his bed to the front door of the tiny cabana he called home, for now. Too tired to brew coffee, he grabbed a breakfast beer as he passed the refrigerator and found his favorite chair on the tiny patio that jutted like a tongue out over the sand, as if to lick at the ocean.
He thought about the past night.
He didn’t know if what he’d done was smart, spilling his guts about fears and phobias that haunted him, and his confused thoughts about whatever in the world he was supposed to do about them.
In the light of a fresh day, though, he didn’t feel bad about having done so. The lady, Sheila, had been nice to talk to, and he’d needed someone for that. What she was going to tell her husband about why she was out drinking until late in the evening, he didn’t know. He felt relieved to have been able to tell his story, stitching it together in full detail and not having to guard his words for worry they get back to his team, or the sponsor, or the press. The fact that Sheila knew essentially nothing about his sport and had no personal connection to it, allowed him to speak in veritable anonymity.
So he’d vomited emotions and vented his anger and anguish until his system was more or less purged.
At the same pace he’d emptied himself of these toxins, he’d refilled the cavern within with more beer than he’d drunk in the past year. It hadn’t taken much. A cyclist’s life was one focused on building strength and shedding weight. Strength was gathered in the leg muscles, the lungs and the heart, by the simple act of riding the bike hard for several hours a day, which also served to keep a rider at optimal weight, provided they also avoided food or drink to such extent as would frighten off any runway model.
This morning the ocean was picture perfect. Or maybe it always was, and today was the first day he saw it clearly, or even looked at it without distraction. He watched wave after wave climb toward the shore, hunching up into a glassy blue wall, then curling forward into a perfect rolling liquid barrel pushing a virgin white cloud of foam toward the thirsty beach.
It suddenly occurred he needed to learn to surf those waves, and today was the day to do it, and he smiled at the prospect of doing something fresh and new. The thought of doing something other than cycling jolted him back to the realization that he couldn’t remember what he’d done with his bike, and his heart raced at the thought that he might have left it at the little shack he’d gotten drunk at last night. Aside from it being his sole mode of transportation, it was also his security blanket and a major part of what his life had been, and an unknown factor in what it might be in the future. He leapt from his chair and was about to lapse into frenzy when he noticed part of a bicycle tire rising up from beyond the far edge of the patio; obviously it had found its way home last night and slept beside the cabana. He was pleased that it was capable of looking after itself.
Shamus stepped down onto the shimmering white sand; it immediately warmed the bottoms of his feet. He strolled toward those tumbling turquoise pipes, and as he did so, he thought of Sheila and wondered if he would run into her again before she headed back to Phoenix with her husband and his golf bag and tales of important discussions had in pursuit of a little white ball.
He was grateful to find she’d been a superb listener, soaking up everything he said as if the most rabid cycling fan, especially since she certainly wasn’t a cycling fan, or noticeably rabid. Volleying question after question, she never lost interest or allowed her eyes to drift across the room in search of something new; he’d been the focus of her attention for several hours, and greedy as it had been on his part, he’d taken full advantage of it. In return, he knew little more about her than he’d read on her business card, and barring circumstances leading him to need the assistance of a realtor in Arizona, that was probably all he would ever know. Maybe when his life got straightened out he’d send her a letter, just to say thanks.
Shamus headed back into his hut to dig out his swim trunks, and go find someone to teach him how to ride waves.
Days later, returning from his morning ritual, Shamus set the butt of his board in the sand and leaned it up against the patio railing, ready for the next time duty called. He’d bought it used from a young guy named Pedro who surfed this beach daily. Shamus had asked around for someone to teach him to surf, and shortly Pedro had appeared at his hut with two boards. Pedro had enough English to get the job done, and mainly spoke the exclusive language of universal surfer, anyway.
It didn’t take long for Shamus to figure out what Pedro wanted him to do, and within hours he’d caught his first wave and stood on the board long enough to say he’d done it. The next day they’d gone out again, and once his newly sore muscles limbered up he managed to get up on a more frequent basis, and the rides got longer. By the end of the week, Pedro was teaching him techniques and helping him refine movements, and the rides came more naturally. They went out each morning with the sunrise and stayed until mid-morning breezes kicked up and made the waves dirty, then he and Pedro would head in to find proper surfer food, typically fried fish tacos with lime sauce and cold Tecate, and bide their time until late afternoon when the winds abated and the waves regained their polish.
To the extent Shamus spent more and more time on the dual-fin Pedro had sold him, he spent less and less on his bike. Not once did he feel guilty about it. His winter break had arrived in a bad way, but he’d still made it to paradise. Anyway, he needed a separation, physically as well as emotionally, from the bike, which wasn’t his bike to begin with, but a loaner the team provided when he’d gotten out of the hospital. The one he’d crashed in the Tour, they said, had gone missing afterward.
As he entered the hut, he grabbed his cell phone and unplugged it from the charger it was tethered to. He dropped it into the pocket of his increasingly threadbare swim trunks that were in the last throes of a losing battle against sun and saltwater, and threw on a tank top that wasn’t in much better condition. Altogether, what his ensemble lacked in fashion, it made up for in discouraging peddlers, who quickly sized him up as indigent. But he was meeting Pedro for lunch and had to dress appropriately to play the part of a proper surf rat. The only fashion concession he made, was to don a pair of black carbon Rudy Project wraparound sunglasses, which were a gift from a team sponsor, and pretty much essential protection against the cloudless sun-baked skies.
As he grabbed his shades he heard the faint beeping sound his cell phone made when messages awaited. He pulled it out, flipped it open, and saw the symbol that confirmed a voice message had been received. He held down the number one on the keypad until the phone autodialed T-Mobile’s voicemail system.
“Mister McDonough, the message began, this is Mary Ives, senior investigator for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations. We would appreciate if you would return our call. We understand you are out of the country, so please ring the following number at your earliest opportunity.” The female voice spoke a series of digits in the familiar three-three-four grouping, but he didn’t bother noting it down. He pressed five on the keypad and saved the message, then closed the clamshell phone and left the hut.
Shamus was stunned. FBI calling me? He thought. What in the world could it be about? At first it occurred that somehow it would have to do with his family. He had an interesting collection of cousins who were often in trouble with the law; maybe they were just upping their game these days? As realistic as that was, he dismissed the idea since they focused their misanthropy exclusively on their Irish neighbors and neighborhoods, and there wouldn’t be any reason the FBI would be involved in all that.
As he walked up the beach toward the pier and the little joint that served the world’s best fish tacos, in his opinion anyway, Shamus couldn’t shake the thought that he was missing something obvious.
The fact that the FBI had called him was a curiosity more than a concern; he was as clean as they come, he reminded himself. Moreover, his gut told him there was something he hadn’t paid close enough attention to in the message.
He pressed and held one again until agent Mary Ives’ voice came back on the line, and when it did he nearly dropped the phone, but instead held it away as if it had gone rancid.
The message was the same as before, but now he realized what hadn’t been right – he knew the voice on the other end of the line. As the message finished off, he hit star on the keypad and listened to it over again, and was certain he was hearing the voice of Sheila Brown-Cahill.
Shamus was perplexed. Still he didn’t feel threatened by the call; he wasn’t in the U.S., and he hadn’t broken any laws he was aware of. He supposed it was possible that two women had popped into his life with remarkably coincidental voices, and it was also possible that the voices both came from the same person notwithstanding that one purported being a realtor, and the other an FBI agent. Which of these was more improbable, he couldn’t fathom.
Lunch with Pedro had been a pleasant distraction; there were few things that couldn’t be placed in perspective by a couple hours with a friend talking surfing over good food and drink, only yards from pristine beaches. Pedro now spoke more fluent English, and likewise Shamus was becoming effective at Spanglish, albeit with a touch of brogue.
With the universe properly re-centered, Shamus decided to return agent Ives’ call on the walk back to his hut. He dialed the number she’d left and on the other side it was picked up on the first ring.
“Agent Ives here,” came the voice of the doppelganger.
“Miss Ives, this is Shamus McDonough returning your call, how can I help you? He asked, listening as intently as possible over the sound of the crashing waves and the screeches of seagulls feasting on whatever the ocean managed to toss aside.”
“Hello, Mr. McDonough, and thank you for returning my call so promptly. I’ll come right to the point of why I called, and you can decide what this might mean to you, if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” Shamus said. “I’ve got time and you’ve certainly piqued my interest. It’s not every day someone gets a call from the FBI.”
“I’m guessing it’s crossed your mind that Mary Ives sounds a lot like that nosey Sheila you recently met at that little bar on the beach. Of course, we’re one and the same, although Mary Ives is my real name, and I’ve never sold real estate, or lived in Phoenix for that matter.
“I am an FBI agent and sometimes I work undercover, hence the business card. I was truthful when I told you I was in Mexico with my husband on his annual boondoggle with the boss. I wasn’t down there on FBI business, and I certainly wasn’t looking for you. I also told you that my son is about your age and recently moved back in with us. Those are facts as well.
“However, a point I wasn’t candid about was that my son had been a budding bike racer, not a college student, just before he moved back. He’s been riding with a domestic pro team for the past two years, but just abandoned the sport when his best friend died from coronary failure resulting from blood doping he’d been involved in. The boy was twenty-one years old.
“So I actually know a thing or two about world of competitive cycling and some of its darker sides. When I saw you in the bar, I sat down next to you because you looked like the most interesting person to talk to. I speak five different languages pretty well, so I figured no matter where you came from we’d be able to chat. That was all. During our conversation you told me a lot of your impressions about the sport, including aspects of it that aren’t pretty. What you couldn’t have known was that since the death of my son’s friend, I’ve participated in an ongoing FBI investigation into doping in sports, including cycling of course, but not specifically focused on it. Since I got back from Mexico I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what we talked about, and how that might be useful in our investigation. Rest assured, I haven’t discussed this with anyone else in the Bureau.”
Shamus carefully took in everything Sheila/Mary said. He resisted the urge to ask questions, deciding perhaps he’d already spoken enough for the time being.
Sheila continued. “So what I called about, was to make a suggestion about how you might help your sport, if you want to. I know you’re trying to figure out what direction you should go in next, including maybe going back to Europe to race. Cutting to the chase, I’d like to ask you to do that, and to work with us as we investigate the roles of drug companies, middlemen, teams, management, and athletes alike in sports doping. We want to figure out how the system works from the production of doping products, through distribution, to people who push them on athletes. We’re not out to punish athletes, since other authorities are supposed to do that. Rather, we want to break the system that turns athletes into lab rats, but it’s not easy to do from the outside in, and not many athletes are willing to break the silence, let alone get involved in solving this mess.”
“Okay,” Shamus began, “I understand you’d like for me to volunteer to help your investigation, and naturally I’m concerned about what that might involve and what risks that might have for my career or for me personally, but I’m open minded. Aside from being a good citizen, which isn’t a particularly bad reason, why do you think I should do this?”
“Something you said in particular was that you had tremendous respect for Gerard Jouyet, your team leader in the Tour, and someone you considered a good friend as well as a mentor in the sport.”
“Yeah, that’s correct,” Shamus confirmed.
“Well you should know that Mr. Jouyet was helping us before his accident.”
“Helping the FBI?” He was a French citizen. “How could that be?”
“He was actually working with Interpol. This is a worldwide investigation and Interpol coordinates between agencies in different countries. We knew about his role, as well as certain other name brand athletes in other sports. There aren’t many, I won’t kid you, but there are some, and they are invaluable to us.”
“Was he forced into it; did he get caught doping or something?” Shamus asked.
“No, he wasn’t compelled to cooperate. He was approached years ago, before he got to the top of the sport, and he said no. Then, a year later, as he started to win bigger races and become more of a headline athlete in Europe, he called back the investigator who had approached him and said he’d changed his mind. When Interpol interviewed him, he was concerned about his health and said he was quitting the doping products he’d been using since he was a young man. He recognized that athletes were being pushed to develop aggressively, including drugs and other unhealthy practices, and said he couldn’t face becoming a role model while knowing that he was cheating to win. It was agreed that if he helped, any future charges pertaining to his prior activities would be taken care of.”
“And was it working, was his help making any difference?” Shamus questioned.
“That’s where it get’s interesting. I can’t tell you everything, but he was playing a valuable role in exposing powerful people behind athletic doping, all the way up to pharmaceutical company reps providing the drugs, down to the couriers and team helpers who aid in distributing products and keeping records about which riders were using what, how they performed as a result, what new products were becoming available, and so on. There is even growing evidence that certain athletes were given experimental new drugs and cocktails of drugs to just see how their bodies would react – and the athletes were unaware that substances were being switched on them for these purposes. They thought they were taking run of the mill EPO or testosterone, when they may be taking massive doses of multiple drugs, some of which were designed for horses, cows, or dogs, and had completely unknown effects on humans. These riders were chosen to be Guinea Pigs because they were viewed as disposable, and there were rumors that some people who manage teams were receiving payments for aiding in this ‘research.’
“Gerard wanted to help us blow the cover on all this, and we were getting close at the time of his death. Now we have a major setback.” She didn’t bother finishing the sentence with …because of you.
Shamus silently absorbed this information, deciding if it was possibly believable or a complete fabrication. As much as he wanted to be convinced, he wasn’t yet.
Mary continued. “The coincidence of meeting you last week was unbelievable. Here I am on vacation and sitting at the bar is the rider Mr. Jouyet was drafting behind during the Tour. It was obvious he trusted you to help him win, more than anyone else on the team. After the accident, the task force looked into the nature of your crash quite thoroughly. We even have the bicycle you were riding and put it through lab analysis. Experts reviewed film from Versus and from fans that photographed the group up to the time of the accident. I don’t suppose you’re aware of any of that.”
“I knew nothing of it,” Shamus said. “So did you find anything interesting?”
“You bet we did, and I’d love to have the chance to show you first hand, because if you saw it, I think you’d want very much to get involved in stopping these evil things people are doing to your sport.”
“Can you tell me about what you found out about the accident?” Shamus asked.
Few questions had gone through his mind as often in his lifetime as what exactly had caused that terrible accident. Was it his fault, or possibly something completely mechanical and out of his control. His conscience begged for the relief the right answer could give; lacking that, he was unable to stop punishing himself for an outcome whose responsibility still rested at his feet.
After their serendipitous meeting the prior week, she knew what torture he must be putting himself through, and she couldn’t wait to give him reason to go easier on himself. She’d described what they’d learned.
“Your bike failed mechanically due to a broken chainstay. The laboratory evaluated the fracture in the bike’s frame, and it did not happen as a result of racing, nor was it a fatigue crack from being worn out. And based on evidence they observed, they’re certain the frame was weakened intentionally and maliciously. Shamus, what I’m telling you is that someone did this to you, and they did it on purpose. She let this sink in before continuing.
“From film and photos we obtained, we saw that you were riding smoothly, and there was no indication of flat tires or skidding or loss of control of the bicycle. Then suddenly the back of your bicycle swung out of line and threw you violently to the pavement. It happened in a fraction of a second. When the police recovered the bicycle, the tires were still fully inflated and the rims were true, so clearly the frame didn’t fail as a result of other parts of the bike giving in.”
“If that’s all true, why me? I had no idea Gerard was involved in all this.”
“We don’t know. Interpol speculates that either someone intended to send a message to Mr. Jouyet, to scare him, or to hamper him in the Tour by removing one of his main domestiques, or maybe somebody wanted to harm him but make it look like an innocent accident caused by a teammate. In any case it appears that whoever intended to do harm to Mr. Jouyet succeeded, and Mr. Jouyet will not be able to help us any further,” Mary replied.
“If I was to help, and I’m not saying I’m interested, what would you want me to do? I mean it’s not like there are kiosks set up for cyclists to go get their drugs. Wouldn’t it look funny if I suddenly went around asking lots of questions?”
“What we’d do is have you meet with the people who were handling Gerard so you know what he was doing, who he was doing it with, and who he thought was involved. Then we’d come up with a plan for how you could be positioned in a way that brings these people to you, and how you’d be able to get this information back to us. We have some ideas we’re kicking around. We just need to know if you will do it. I don’t need to remind you that it could be very dangerous.”
“That part I fully understand,” Shamus responded. “Let me think about it and I’ll call you back, but if I decide I’m interested you better be ready to prove to me everything you’ve said wasn’t just a fanciful story. Gerard was a great friend and a role model, and I don’t ever think I’ll get over being involved in his death, even as you’ve explained it, so I’ll give it some careful thought.”
“That’s all we ask, and maybe more than I’d hoped,” Mary said. “We’ll await your call.”
When Pedro came by for their afternoon session, Shamus said he wasn’t in the mood. He asked Pedro where would be a good place to get drunk, and once again Pedro proved an able guide, ferrying him on the back of his Vespa out of the tourist section of Cabo to a place Pedro’s people came for a good time when they were tired of waiting on tourists, and wanted to be waited on themselves.
Shamus didn’t bother Pedro with his tale of woe, and it didn’t take long before the alcohol chased away most of his concerns, anyway. So they shot pool, drank, ate, drank, and shot more pool until the darkest hours of night were gone and the Eastern skies began to bleach into morning like a pair of jeans fading from midnight blue toward a dirty yellow. When they were done, Pedro guided them capably back down the cool and somnolent streets on a Vespa with no headlight until they finally arrived unfettered at Shamus’s cabana, notwithstanding their both being three sheets to the wind. Before Pedro left, an executive decision was taken, and therein they agreed to forego the morning set in favor of sleep.
Not yet ready to call it a night, and even less caring to sit alone in his cabana, Shamus pulled a beer from the fridge and went out and sat in the sand, his back propped against his surfboard which, per custom, leaned against the rail of his patio as if holding the hut back from running off toward the surf. The sun was about to penetrate the horizon and the skies were already becoming singed in yellow and orange. A new day was beginning.
Shamus didn’t give much further thought to his conversation with Mary/Sheila, as he’d come to think of her. His decision had already been made on the simple thesis that while he wasn’t yet a world renowned racer, and might not ever become one, no one had ever wanted more to pull for the team and its now fallen leader, and that hadn’t changed.
Shamus watched the sky lighten and the waves become less ghost-like and more solid in form, and his mind drifted to thoughts of how Gerard had taken him under his wing at a time when he had been ready to quit and find an hourly job, and had thereafter pulled him along in a harmonious relationship that served each of them well, professionally and on a personal basis.
By the time he was twenty-four, Shamus had risen to the top of the U.S. pro circuit and had little problem winning races and making a meager living chasing from one town to the next in search of the next pot. He owned nothing and ate virtually nothing, so the money didn’t have to be large to go far. Inevitably, by besting the occasional European racer who somehow found himself dispatched to the U.S. to beat up the locals and bring home a suitcase full of greenbacks, Shamus had gotten the attention of European teams scouring for up and coming talent. When one bothered to wave a minimum-wage contract at him, he’d signed it without further consideration.
So anxious had he been to move up to the big leagues, that rather than wait out the winter in the more comfortable climate he could find in the States or a number of other places, he’d flown back to Europe in early November and rented a room in the famous cycling town of Liege, Belgium to live in, and from which to launch his daily solo training rides until the team’s winter training camp got underway in December.
Before the first week concluded, his excitement had been completely tanked by the cold, pelting rains that beat at him every time he ventured out. As he rode from town to town getting used to the relatively harsher conditions than he’d enjoyed while racing in the U.S. circuit, he often noticed riders from other teams out training in the same miserable soup, and most distressing of all, they seemed to be having fun in it.
To top it off, whenever he’d joined in with them on a training ride, he’d be welcomed in whatever language they’d choose – but couldn’t understood a single word of it. The language barrier itself was intimidating and made him homesick for his riding pals who were holed up in an apartment somewhere in the Colorado Rockies, playing by day and enjoying an active nightlife. The final indignity was that he’d constantly found himself breathlessly giving a hundred percent effort while the locals seemed able to churn out the same power and speed while casually sustaining their conversations.
Immediately he began to question whether he had the right stuff for European pro riding.
Back in the claustrophobic room he shared only with his fears and demons, the same two words went through his mind over and over again: go, or stay. As days passed, go was gaining on stay in terms of attractiveness. Seemingly moments before he’d reached his limit though, he’d gotten a call from Gerard, who lived in the area and had just returned from holidays sunning himself in Majorca and wanted to welcome the American to Europe and to their team.
Shamus was first shocked that the phone in his little apartment had actually rung, since it had been absolutely mute since he’d arrived weeks ago, and secondly he was impressed that this star would bother to give him so much as the time of day, but Gerard had done even better and invited Shamus to join him and some other teammates on their training rides. Suddenly he felt not so all-alone.
Whenever the team had gotten out on a ride, Gerard made an effort to flip the conversation into English so that Shamus could be part of it. As they rode, Gerard tutored him endlessly about race tactics, how to prepare and train effectively, the unique aspects about each race they’d ride throughout the year, and an endless list of other matters a young racer might need to know in order to succeed in the business of racing in Europe.
In exchange for Gerard’s kindness, Shamus was determined to ride his legs off if that’s what the team needed, and when they’d finished their rides, he’d just as vigorously attacked CDs, videos, and all the books he could find that would help him learn to speak French, which was the team’s official language as well as Gerard’s mother tongue.
From all that, Shamus credited Gerard as having been the difference between struggling and quite possibly failing to make the step up to European racing, versus learning the ropes and being guided along until he was ready.
Within weeks, thoughts of bailing out were dashed, and Shamus found himself enjoying those long conversations with teammates that provided a welcome diversion from the bracing storms, constant downpours, blustery winds, and the frigid temperatures they rolled through day in and day out.
Shamus removed the cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open, and hit speed dial. He didn’t care what time it might be wherever Mary/Sheila was; he’d just leave a message and let her get back to him.
On the first ring, Mary/Sheila answered.
“Agent Ives here.”
“Dear god, do you know what time it is?” Shamus asked.
“Well, it’s six thirty here in Denver, and I believe it’s the same time in Cabo.”
“Are you always in the office at six thirty in the morning, then?”
“When I’m waiting for an important phone call.”
“You want to call me back then?” Shamus asked.
“I meant this one, Shamus.”
“Oh, I’m flattered, and still a little tipsy also, I suppose, but that’ll make it easier to say what I have to say.”
“Which is?” She asked, crossing her fingers and saying a silent prayer that she’d hear the answer she hoped for.
“The way it ended with Gerard wasn’t right and that’s not how I want to remember things, with me involved in his death and doing nothing about it. Have your people look me up and I’ll do what I can,” he said.
She wanted to scream and dance. One small but pivotal victory for the effort she’d been engaged in for so many months, but which had run into a virtual wall for lack of a person inside the sport, and now seemed to be resuscitated as Shamus agreed to step forward to fill the shoes that Gerard no longer could.
“It’d be easier if you’d come here, and we’d pay your expenses, but I don’t suppose we’ll talk you into it, will we?”
“Not as long as the sunrises look like the one I’m staring at now, you won’t.”
Chapter 3
Their twice a day surf sessions got longer and more energetic as Shamus’s skills improved and as he could sense there being a finite number of days before he’d have to give up the fantasy of a simple and pleasant life on the beach, calendar uncluttered with commitments, and ambitions constrained to riding another good roller.
On the third day after his last conversation with Mary/Sheila, he came out of the water and across the sugary white sand to spy a man and a woman sitting on the little porch of his cabana, looking overdressed and overheated. He sensed by the sweat their clothes had accumulated and awkward adjustments they’d made to various buttons and sleeves on their business attire, they’d been waiting a while. Shamus sensed his endless summer was, to the contrary, beginning to end.
“Hello, you must be the Reader’s Digest people here to give me my check,” Shamus said as he approached the little hut and planted his board in its usual place. “Roll the cameras and I’ll come through the front door act surprised.” They forced smiles in response. “I can see you’re enjoying the spectacular view but it gets toasty here if you haven’t noticed, so if you prefer we could all walk down to the Hilton and sit in the air conditioning. Maybe I’d even get you to pop for lunch,” he said, continuing the banter. “I’m Shamus McDonough, but I bet you already knew that, he said,” smartly extending his hand first to the lady.
“Eve Blancon, pleasure to meet you,” she offered in a lilting French accent. As he shook her hand, he observed that beyond her strict business suit and all-business attitude, was a lovely French woman, and the prospect of returning to the Continent for another season suddenly didn’t seem completely unpleasant. For a moment his mind developed a picture of her in a gun holster and nothing else, and his smile turned to a leer. Regrettably, he decided in favor of fighting off the fantasy, and returned his cognitive senses to the matters at hand.
“Michael Steineger, we’re with Interpol, offered her counterpart along with his hand. But I’m sure you knew that already,” he said with an identifiable Hoch Deutsche accent that pegged his origins to somewhere north of Frankfurt, and a slight upturn at the corners of his mouth suggesting he’d found this tit-for-tat response uproariously witty.
“Touche,” Shamus responded magnanimously, shaking Steineger’s hand and beaming a smile back not so much at what the man had said, but appreciating a rare instance in which a northern German had attempted humor. Precious were those occasions, from his experience, so he didn’t blame the man for not being particularly good at it.
“Well, so it’s a date then,” Shamus said. “I’ll go inside and throw on something pretty much like what I’m wearing already, a bit dryer perhaps, and you’ll find us a table in the hotel café for a bite.”
Shamus saw them off, stepped inside and grabbed the nearest t-shirt and slipped his feet into the flip flops he’d haggled for locally that came with authentic tire tread bottoms. Looking suitably bohemian, he headed up the beach toward the Automatic Tourist Machine that belched sallow, overfed and over-watered families onto the beach all day long to ripen under the tropical sun into glowing pink globs of shark bait.
He walked into the lobby, bore right, and found his two new companions looking demonstrably more composed in the cool dry air. Unsurprisingly, they’d chosen a booth off in a distant corner, well separated from other diners and probably irking the waitress who would have to hike far out of her way to service the table. Little could she know that the government-issue tip she faced would hardly make the extra effort worthwhile.
“Hello again,” Shamus said approaching the table, careful not to spook the gun-toting officers. Actually he had no idea whether they were packing heat, but why chance it, he thought. Shamus slid into the booth on the empty bench they’d saved for him. They made small talk until the waitress took their orders and scooted off toward the inhabited side of the room. “So where to begin?”
“Mister McDonough,” Eve began, causing Shamus to momentarily ponder the pecking order between the two agents. “Perhaps we should explain who we are, and what our roles have been, and then what we have thought about for getting the most benefit from working with you going forward, which we understand you have agreed to. My colleague Michael will explain his involvement, but I would have you know that I’ve been involved for more than five years in efforts by our agency to work with other agencies to combat the business of athletic doping. Before I became involved in this, I was an inspector in the French police force, le Gendarmerie, based in Paris. My university background was as a Chemist, so I have an understanding of many of the products that exist, and what their functions are in the human body. You should know that I was the person who initially contacted Gerard Jouyet about helping our investigation, which was a national investigation in France, not an international effort as it has become, and was not specific to cycling, and that remains true also today.”
She paused and looked at her German counterpart, and he took up the conversation at that point.
“Ja, so, I am Michael Steineger, and unlike my colleague Frau, uh, miss Blancon, pardon me, I am not with Interpol directly, but on assignment from the Bundespolizei — the federal police force of Germany. My background is military and my professional training has been in counterterrorism. There are three thousand colleagues in special units of the Bundespolizei, including my area, which is a Special Directorate based in Koblenz. We collect and analyze intelligence and coordinate international cooperation, such as with Interpol, your FBI, and others. In my role, I coordinate between Interpol and our Federal Criminal Police, the Bundeskriminalamt or Bay Ka Ay, which prosecutes federal crimes, including illegal drug-related activities. When I was younger, I was a sprinter on the German Olympic squad and a product of East German training, so I have personal knowledge of ways young athletes are trained very aggressively with hormones, steroids, EPO, homologous blood transfusions, and the like. You and me, we’re not so different maybe,” Steineger said conspiratorially.
Shamus noted that the man looked extraordinarily fit. Not the typical mid-career policeman resembling an overstuffed sausage as a result of too many years of fast food and sitting on one’s ass all day. Steineger looked like he could don a sweatsuit and compete at pretty much any sport he wanted to. Shamus wondered which particular cocktail of chemicals the man’s East German trainers had pumped him full of in the name of Olympic glory – had to be quite good stuff, because it was still working, he thought.
“Okay, we know your profile very well,” Eve picked up the conversation. “And of course we have been informed about your relationship with Monsieur Jouyet, and want to express our sorrow for the loss of your friend. Please understand that Gerard was an inspiration to many of us, and we are more determined than ever to find the people behind his death and to expose this ugly business that almost caused your own death, as well.”
Shamus had thought of his accident as one of a series of accidents cyclists inevitably have, albeit the most painful one he’d experienced personally, but he hadn’t thought of it as nearly dying. Suddenly he felt less cavalier about his involvement in activities that had already taken Gerard’s life. Nevertheless, he felt his fallen teammate needing him once again to go to the front for a long painful pull into the wind, and he knew he owed this effort to his friend. The debate went no further.
“We were told that you asked agent Ives for proof that Mr. Jouyet’s death was not an accident, so we have brought pictures from the lab, and of course they are date and time stamped, Eve said, pulling out of her handbag a large brown envelope and removing from it a stack of eight by ten photographs.
“These are in order, showing views of all the riders approaching just prior to the accident, and then some close-ups of you and your bicycle before you started to fall, and again as you began to get out of alignment, and you can see from this one the distortion of your bicycle, but the wheels and tires appear fine. From this next picture, which was made in the police lab in Paris, you see that the tires and wheels appear inflated and true. Next you see closeups of the frame of your bicycle, in the area between the deraileurs – the ‘chainstay,’ non? And you see from this view that it had been flattened, as if squeezed by a strong device, making it weak, so that under heavy load there was a good chance it would flex and you would lose your chain, which is dangerous, non? But instead, going around corners at high speed and pedaling as hard as you were caused the frame to flex so much, I am told by my colleagues in the lab, that the chainstay buckled, and then you had one part of the bike pointed one direction, and the other part pointed differently, and down you went.”
“And the lab is convinced that the chainstay was not flattened by the mechanics working on our bikes?” Shamus asked.
“We do not know who did this, but they are confident that it would not have occurred by accident. The technicians in the lab simulated the effort to cause this much distortion of the chainstay by various means, including pliers, hammers, and vices, setting heavy objects on this section, and even dropping the machine. They could not make a similar damage without removing the wheel entirely, and using a hammer and a chisel. Even when they achieved similar effects, the frame had very noticeable damage to the paint, so when they inspected again, they found touchup paint had been applied in that area. This was no accident.”
Shamus was immediately mad that someone had messed with his bike. Racers were funny that way. After a crash the first concern was usually as to whether the bike had been damaged; concerns about the body were secondary. He was also mad at himself for not having been more meticulous in inspecting it. Riders such as Lance Armstrong were notoriously obsessive about every detail of the bike, down to the millimeter, and he suspected Lance would have flagged the distortions in the finish around the chainstay. Shamus wouldn’t be so careless going forward.
“Do you have further questions?” Eve asked.
“I’ve Googled twelve ways to Sunday, but there’s no mention of an investigation into the accident, or that the police are looking for who caused it. Isn’t anything being done to find out who did this?”
“This matter is getting great attention, I assure you, responded Steineger. However, if we inform the world that we think a crime has occurred and we’re seeking suspects, one might expect the suspects to depart quickly. We prefer all players remain nearby while we determine who is of interest in this matter.”
“Will you tell me who may be a suspect at this point?”
Steineger took this one. “Sure, that’s no problem. Of course everybody except maybe yourself is a suspect at this point: Your teammates, mechanics, team staff and your manager for certain, even the driver of your bus. That’s over twenty persons from your team, and riders and staff from other teams cannot be ruled out, either, or anyone else who could have had access to your bikes. Unfortunately, the list is so long at this point, we could not tell you who to be careful around, so you must be careful with everyone, Steineger responded. The good news is that some nut off the road didn’t do this work. It was done carefully and covered up, so we don’t have to think about random lunatics hoping to alter the results of the Tour, or anything like that. So we plan to work outward from the people Gerard had been dealing with in context of the doping, and hope that will lead us to the responsible person, who then would stand for charges of murder. Until we have the right person to match the facts, we pretend as if none of this monkey business had been found.”
Shamus pressed further. “In a month, winter training camp opens for the team in Gerona. Most of the riders and staff will come together there. How would you anticipate that I could get involved with the people Gerard was dealing with on your behalf? I think I have a reputation as a clean rider, so why would someone approach me now?”
Shamus suspected the two agents had spent a considerable amount of time together, since they never seemed confused as to who should speak. This time Steineger made no effort to speak; it was somehow understood to be Eve’s turn.
“We will brief you fully of what Gerard had learned, and other matters and persons we suspected were involved but have not yet confirmed. This will tell you who are the possible bad eggs you will be dealing with. Then, we suggest you bring them to you, rather than seeking them out.”
“And how might that work?”
Eve responded again in Franco-English Shamus found quite pleasant to the ear. “We have discussed that your reputation is one who trains hard and has mental strength. Maybe not yet the lion that Gerard had been, who leads the team with his charisma and can be trusted to rise to win the big races, but maybe the strongest rider day in and day out, who needs nothing extra in order to fulfill his role. Your teammates do not all have such confidence as you and Gerard. Some believe they simply can never train hard enough to compete fully and fulfill expectations - a mental weakness - while others are not as gifted with the physical attributes to compete so well no matter how much they train, and this weakness is not hard to sense either. We believe your opportunity is to go to camp a changed man. The legs are still there, but your confidence has gone. You lack the extra two or three percent at the top of the climb. You get dropped by stronger riders and finish in the back of the pack. You are no longer aggressive on the downhill, and get nervous if other riders box you in. We think that will attract the jackals who know you can be strong, but may need a crutch due to fears lingering from your accident.”
“Ja, someone will maybe offer you a turbocharger for your bicycle,” Steineger chimed in.
“In the end, we don’t know what you’ll have to do to get involved. You will have to think freely, and of course be careful. Gerard was a wonderful actor in this role, but still someone wanted him gone so maybe he did not fool everybody. I would assure you that we will be ready whenever you may need assistance, there is literally nowhere in the world where we cannot get you police support very quickly,” Eve said reassuringly.
“Okay, I’ll need to know everything I can about what Gerard was up to, and whom he was involved with,” Shamus said.
“We have brought a copy of the file we kept on those matters, and I think you will find it quite complete. Gerard was very good with names and dates and such details. Once you have reviewed it, we will visit with you again before you depart for Gerona to answer any further questions you have and to bring you up to date on matters that occur by then, Steineger finished. So, lunch is on us, and we’ll see you soon. Please don’t hesitate to call Eve or myself, or our colleague Miss Ives at any time. We’re all very grateful that you are willing to help with this matter.”
Shamus thought Steineger sounded just like a government letter: We regret to inform you of the loss of your loved one in battle today. Please call if you have any questions. Schoenen tag.
Shamus strolled back to the hut; belly full of mediocre hotel food and a thick file tucked safely under one arm. He was intrigued by the file, clearly it had to have some tasty bits and inescapably his name would have to have to be part of the record, as seen through the eyes of the man he’d looked up to since his first days on the team. He sensed the need to read the file, and to help however he’d be able, but also to be careful not to let this become all-consuming. He still wished for a semblance of a normal life, including a wife and kids and a real job someday when he could no longer compete with the young pups. He also wanted more sunrises and sunsets, and more chances to paddle into the breast of a burgeoning wave and ride it all the way to the short. He craved no opportunities to die prematurely, even if heroically as Gerard had done. The file rested on the bed and at the same time he could spy his board outside, and beyond it waves rolled in sets of three, smooth and glassy and six feet high. He tossed off his tank top, walked outside, grabbed the twin fin and headed for the water.
It wasn’t until the next day, after the morning wave session with Pedro, that he sat down to read. He waited until eleven a.m. so as to feel an appropriate drinking hour had arrived. He didn’t want to be bombarded with the types of truths and impressions he’d expected to encounter without the healthy defense provided by a wall of alcohol. A six-pack of Corona, a cooler full of ice, and a lime he’d carefully quartered and then quartered again, stood at the ready. He popped the top off one, stuffed in a lime wedge, took a good long drag and opened the file to page one.
On the inside cover of the file were pictures, with Gerard’s headshot prominently in the upper left hand corner. Other individual shots included Marcel Trusseau, their team manager, and the three Directeurs Sportif, Philip Olivier, from France, Kip McEwen of Ireland, and Lars Swenson of Denmark. Below them, was a group shot of the Continental Tire team, and below that was a group photo of the staff of masseurs, mechanics, soigneurs, and the trusty bus driver. All these faces were like extended family to Shamus; he’d been with them night and day, good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for up to nine months each year. As a young single person who’d spent an inordinate amount of time with one team or another, this was a normal life and these were his people and his support structure. Even the married guys on the team spent far more time within this family than they ever did with loved ones at home.
On the right hand side of the file was a stats sheet with key information: names of team sponsors, names of contact persons at each of those companies, annual team budget, and contact info for each of the riders and team staff, including addresses, phone numbers and emails. Beneath that sheet was a thick transcript with headings stipulating dates and times of each entry. At the end of each entry were signatures of Gerard and of another person, presumably an agent who sat through the transcription of Gerard’s statements. Shamus looked at the date of the first entry, February 10, 2005, and flipped back to the last page, numbered 381, and noted the date, July 15, 2007. Over two years of entries and almost 400 pages of small print, with the final entry logged the day before Gerard had died.
Shamus thought for a moment, and then started reading the entries, beginning with the most recent one. He figured that it made more sense to focus on the freshest thoughts and observations Gerard had found worth recording, then work backward in time to when the information was more likely to be of marginal value. Reading backward in time would also let him develop his own hypothesis about why someone may have done something or not, rather than fall into a path of logic Gerard come to follow. When he reached the earliest entries, he planned to read back again to the most recent ones, so as to commit as much to memory as possible through repetition and to ferret out any details that escaped first reading. With four weeks before he shipped off to winter training camp, there was ample time to scour the entire file thoroughly. After all, somewhere among all those smiling faces on the left cover page might be the person who nearly killed him and successfully did so with Gerard.
For the next two weeks, Shamus read, fed, and surfed sixteen hours a day, then slept the other eight. He covered the thick file from back to front, and front to back. Large portions of it were day-to-day updates, streams of updates relating to earlier thoughts, impressions and suspicions. There were no smoking guns. Perhaps all this information painted a more complete picture to FBI or Interpol investigators who were trained in analyzing this stuff. Shamus sensed that Gerard had floated around the periphery of the doping scene, but since he’d quit doping, wasn’t able to get inside for a full view. It was as if he’d drawn a blueprint for a house that hadn’t yet been built; one had to imagine how it would look put together.
Shamus phoned Mary/Sheila who, for once, didn’t pick up on the first ring – or any that followed – so he left a message saying he’d gotten through the file and wanted to talk before he flew off to Spain. She returned his call the next day, with her Interpol colleagues conferenced in. Very little new information had arisen since the meeting two weeks earlier. It was the consensus of the investigators that Shamus should keep an eye out for any entreaties from Claude Charmaigne, a team sougnieur, which roughly translated to person who does anything they’re told to. In reality, that spanned from ensuring the right snacks and music were onboard the team bus, to assigning hotel rooms to the riders, to washing (twice, with bleach, mind) and refilling hundreds of water bottles nightly, managing the laundry of the racers kits (extra fabric softener, and rinse twice, mind), and so on. The agents had reason to suspect Charmaigne was involved in distributing doping products to racers on the Continental team. They weren’t particularly interested in him from a criminal standpoint; even if their suspicions proved true, he was much smaller fish than what they were after. However, he might prove to be someone who could provide information about bigger fish higher in the food chain.
Shamus listened and was left with the tenuous feeling of grasping at fog.
All he’d learned from Gerard’s notes was about types of activities apparently taking place in the sport. Little of it surprised Shamus; he’d heard it already. The almost universal drug of choice was EPO, or erythropoietin, a chemical form of blood doping from the eighties that boosted red blood cell counts. Since red blood cells carry oxygen to muscles, more cells equaled more aerobic capacity equaled more stamina.
A less popular alternative — because it was messier, more costly, and required assistance of others to do – to get similar benefits, was through blood doping, involving removing red blood cells from one’s self or a compatible donor, freezing them, then reinjecting them when needed. Thickening the blood to carry more oxygen, either through EPO, blood doping, or a combination thereof, not only risked the athlete being tested and caught, but seriously raised the chances of coronary failure when the blood became too thick for the heart to pump.
EPO acts by turning on the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, which enhances athleting endurance. As a result of increased usage of EPO in recent years, haemoglobin levels had been increasing significantly in tests of athletes. The popularity of the drug was due to its effectiveness, ease of use, and the fact that it is very difficult to detect. Under current lab technology, EPO becomes very hard to detect after only a few hours, but its positive effects on red blood cell counts can last for several weeks. As a result, laboratory testing procedures focus primarily on determining if their red blood cell indices exceed certain levels, rather than relying solely on detecting EPO directly. If the specified level is exceeded, then EPO usage is presumed.
Another popular means of cheating involves anabolic steroids, employing any of a number of possible drugs related to testosterone, which stimulates muscle growth in the body. Anabolic steroids were pioneered in Eastern Europe decades ago, when frau and babushka alike were fed testosterone pills and given injections to boost muscle mass, and suddenly the women’s world weightlifting records went to ladies with the arms and legs of a lumberjack, the dark shadows of recently shaved forests of thick facial hair, the ability to sing Soprano and belt out low C’s, and clear signs of male-pattern baldness.
In the mid-eighties, the East Germans were the most dedicated and well-organized practitioners of extreme sports pharmacology. It was known to systematically dope athletes, even minors, without their knowledge. This ability to chemically enable athletes to reach new levels of fitness didn’t remain exclusive to the closed societies of Eastern Europe for long. In the U.S., Florence Griffith Joyner, or FloJo hit the track and field world with style, body-hugging tracksuits, exquisitely decorated nails, and unmatchable speed. Soon she achieved records in the women’s one hundred and two hundred meter dashes that approached men’s times and still stand as records decades later.
When she Joyner died in 1998 at the age of thirty-eight due to a seizure, the New York Times carried an article written by the coach of the woman whose hundred-meter record FloJo had smashed. It stated: Then, almost overnight, Florence’s face changed — hardened along with her muscles that now bulged as if she had been born with a barbell in her crib. It was difficult not to wonder if she had found herself an East German coach and was taking some kind of performance-enhancing drugs.
Decades later, studies were finding frightening damage to the offspring of East German athletes from the doping-infused era. Of sixty-nine children, seven had physical deformities and four were mentally handicapped. Such a rate of abnormalities was much higher than in the general population. More than one in four of their kids had allergies and almost one in four had asthma. Among the former athletes, now aged from forty to sixty, the risk of miscarriage and stillbirth was thirty two times higher than in the normal German population. In addition, one in four of these athletes had suffered some form of cancer and six in ten have had therapy for psychiatric disorders, including almost forty percent who dealt with with severe depression and suicidal tendencies. The reason for this was the forced consumption of anabolic steroids during the athletes’ competitive period, according to the study conducted by the Germany University at Humboldt.
Ironically, what was completely out of fashion was the use of speed. Everybody in the sport knew about Tom Simpson, a Brit who began a perpetual ascent on Mont Ventoux during the ’67 Tour, suffering heart failure due to heat, dehydration, physical stress, and a belly full of brandy and amphetamines. Replacing the speed and cocaine of old, were Starbucks double caps and Coca Cola to keep the mind sharp.
WADA, the World Anti Doping Agency, was created by the International Olympics Committee in 1999 and is based in Montreal, and served as a singular body for maintaining doping controls rules and a continually updated list of prohibited drugs. It served as the standard for sports worldwide. Olympic sports followed the rules explicitly, while most professional sports and the National Collegiate Athletic Association customized them according to their own needs.
WADA’s enforcement rules provide flexibility for harsher treatment in “aggravated circumstances,” such as when part of an organized doping scheme, or milder, in situations involving accidental or unintentional violations.
WADA labs were used by the NCAA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball, and underwent continual proficiency testing, with dozens of samples identified sent to each lab every year, for which were allotted a fixed amount of time to analyze each sample and report their findings. To ensure they were provided no special handling, they were mixed in with regular shipments from sports federations so they could not be identified as WADA test items.
Chapter 3