When the company restructured in late 2017, Marsh was pushed out. The project was declared terminated. All physical assets were supposed to be destroyed per standard prototype disposal procedure. She paused. Except that Marsh signed the destruction certificates himself, which in hindsight was a significant oversight by whoever let him do that.
Cole felt something cold settle in his stomach. He faked the destruction. That's my conclusion, yes. Why? Because the car is worth a great deal of money to the right buyer.
And because Marsh is not a man who walks away from something he built without getting something back. Victoria picked up her coffee again. He was pushed out without his full severance package after the restructuring. There was a dispute. It was settled privately, but not favorably for him.
And the car was leverage. Or it was his exit plan. I don't know. I never met Marsh. This was before my involvement with Woking.
I've pieced this together from records. She looked at Cole directly. What I don't know is how it ended up at a Nevada salvage auction with fire damage. That part I cannot explain. Someone tried to destroy it and didn't finish the job, Cole said.
Yes. Or someone tried to destroy the evidence that it existed while keeping the car itself elsewhere. Or someone else entirely got hold of it and panicked. She shrugged, a tight controlled movement. There are several theories.
None of them are good. Cole was quiet for a moment. He thought about the shipping manifest she'd flagged, the material batch records, the two years she'd been watching for this. You could have come to me after the auction and told me this immediately. I could have, she said.
And you could have told me what you found under the splitter immediately, but neither of us did that because we're both trying to figure out how much the other person knows before we commit to the conversation. She held his gaze. I'm committing now. Your turn. Cole uncrossed his arms and walked to the far workbench where he'd laid out the printed photographs arranged in sequence.
I worked on this car, he said, directly, for 14 months starting in 2016. Carbon fiber chassis and bodywork. He pointed to the stamps without touching them. These are my marks. Literally.
I stamped these during manufacture. The prefix letter R for review. He looked at her. I know this car the way you know handwriting you wrote yourself. Victoria stared at the photographs for a long moment.
Whatever she was thinking, she kept it contained. You were on the team. Junior technician. I was 23. I didn't know who owned the project or who was running it above the engineering level.
I just knew the work. He paused. I was told the car was destroyed. I believed it. And now?
Now I have 400 photographs documenting the physical evidence, 2 weeks of detailed examination, and approximately zero doubt that what's sitting in my workshop is the only running prototype ever built from program 7-X Meridian. He looked at her. Or what's left of it. Victoria set her coffee mug down on the edge of the workbench. It made a small sound in the silence of the shop, and neither of them moved for a moment.
Outside, a truck passed on the access road. Inside, the overhead lights hummed their indifferent fluorescent note. Cole, she said carefully. Do you understand what this means? If the car is authenticated, if the prototype designation is confirmed through independent verification, this isn't just a remarkable find.
This is a legal and corporate situation of considerable complexity. Marsh's NDA. The original company's liability. Ownership questions that will take years to resolve in court. She paused.
And people who have an interest in this not becoming public. I understand that. I'm not sure you do, she said, not unkindly. You're a mechanic in Tucson with a burned car and a good story. I'm a person with resources and connections and a very specific kind of interest in seeing this car verified correctly.
Those are not the same position. Cole looked at her steadily. He'd heard the hierarchy in that description. The implication that she had things he didn't, which was true, and that this meant something about how decisions got made, which he wasn't ready to concede. "I hear what you're saying.
I also think you're here because you need something from me that you can't get on your own. " Victoria was quiet. "The stamps," he said, "the coding system, the build documentation on the interior of the tub. You can read the codes because you have Westfield's records, but you can't interpret them at the component level. The specific sequence, the build phase designations, the inspection sign-offs. That requires someone who was there. " He paused.
"I was there. " She looked at him with an expression he couldn't quite name. Something between recalibration and something more reluctant than that. "You're right," she said. "So, we work together or we don't work at all. " She was quiet for another moment, which Cole was already learning meant she was deciding rather than hesitating. The two things looked the same from the outside but felt different in the room.
"Equal footing," she said. "You have the car and the technical knowledge. I have the records and the resources. Neither of us moves without the other. And Emma stays out of it entirely. " Victoria glanced toward the door that led to the small office where Emma was currently eating cereal and reading a book about deep-sea creatures.
"Of course. " "Say it plainly. Your daughter has nothing to do with any of this. She stays out of it. " Victoria met his eyes. "I'm a lot of things. I'm not someone who involves children. " Cole nodded once.
"Then we have a deal. " They shook hands across the workbench covered in photographs of a dead man's secret, and neither of them smiled because it wasn't that kind of moment. The next 3 weeks were the most technically demanding of Cole's working life, and he'd had some demanding stretches. He and Victoria fell into a pattern that nobody planned. She drove down from Scottsdale, where she was staying temporarily, every 2 or 3 days, arriving in the morning and leaving by evening. She brought printed documents, material requisitions, internal memos from the Westfield archive, shipping records, engineering correspondence.