To the naked eye, there was nothing wrong with it. Clinton placed the multimeter probes one against the grounding block, one against the chassis reference point, and read the display. He turned it toward Eleanor so she could see the number. Davis leaned forward despite himself.

Hunter didn't move, but his eyes went to the display and they stayed there. The resistance reading was elevated. Not dramatically, not the kind of number that would trip an alarm or generate a fault code, just enough. Just past the threshold at which the ECU trying to complete a start sequence in a cold garage would receive a signal it could not act on.

A car that was in every measurable sense perfectly functional and could not start. "You run your diagnostics after the garage opens," Clinton said. He wasn't accusing anyone. He was simply stating what had happened.

"The building's on a timer. Heat comes on at 6:30. By the time your equipment is connected and running, it's probably 8:00 or 8:30. The temperature in here is already back above 40 degrees.

The metal's expanded. The resistance drops back below the threshold. The software reads everything green." He withdrew the probes.

"But the car was asked to start at 7:15 on a Monday morning, before the heat had been running long enough. This joint," he said, indicating the edge of the grounding block without touching the contact surface, "was sitting at 31 degrees." The service bay was very quiet. The wiring harness inspections, the firmware rollbacks, the transatlantic engineering calls.

The $600,000 not spent carelessly, not spent lazily, but spent with complete and genuine expertise pointed at every part of the problem except the one that was only visible in the cold. Davis sat down slowly on the rolling stool beside the diagnostic cart. He sat down the way a man sits when his legs have decided something before his mind has. Hunter Blake had not moved.

He was standing where he'd been standing when Eleanor handed Clinton the key, and his posture was the same, but something behind it had rearranged. The composed surface was intact. What was underneath it was different. He had been good at this.

He had been genuinely demonstrably good at this. That was not a performance or an inherited reputation. He had earned it in rooms like this one over decades on problems that had beaten everyone else. And he was standing in a service bay in Denver looking at a number on a multimeter that none of his equipment had ever found because none of his equipment had ever been cold.

"The bespoke variant," Hunter said finally. His voice was flat, professional, stripped of everything except the words themselves. "That compartment, that routing, it's not in the service documentation," Clinton said. "It was added at configuration, custom spec."

"How do you know that?" Clinton looked at him. He had answered this once already, and the answer he'd given was the only one he was going to give right now. "I know the diagram," he said again.

Hunter didn't press it. Maybe because he understood in the way a man who has just been taken apart understands things that the answer would only make this worse. Eleanor Chase was looking at Clinton with a different quality of attention than she'd had 10 minutes ago, still direct, still precise, but with something behind it now that had not been there before. Not warmth exactly, but the beginning of a question.

The kind of question you don't ask in front of other people. She filed it away and looked back at the car. "Fix it," she said. Clinton didn't move immediately after Eleanor said it.

He looked at the open compartment at the grounding block and the wire harness terminating into it, and he was still for a beat that had a different quality than indecision. It was the stillness of someone measuring something, not the technical problem, which he had already measured, but the weight of the room, the shape of what was about to happen. Hunter Blake cleared his throat. "Before anyone touches that assembly," he said, "I need to say this on record."

He had recovered the professional register of his voice, though it sat differently now, like a jacket put back on after being soaked. "Any manual intervention on that grounding point bypassing the OEM terminal, splicing an unauthorized conductor, will void the remaining factory warranty on this vehicle. Bugatti's bespoke warranty terms are explicit. An uncertified repair on a non-standard component by an unlicensed technician constitutes grounds for full warranty termination."

He looked at Eleanor. "I want you to understand the exposure before this goes further." Eleanor looked at the grounding block. Then she looked at Clinton.

She said nothing. Hunter continued. "The correct path now that we've identified the fault is to contact Bugatti directly, have them authorize a certified repair through an approved channel. That process takes time, but it protects your asset."

"How much time?" Eleanor asked. "Weeks, possibly longer, given the bespoke spec. They'd need to review the configuration file and identify an approved technician with access to the correct materials."

"Weeks," Eleanor repeated, not as a question. The word landed in the room and Hunter did not pick it up. Eleanor looked back at Clinton. Whatever she was reading in his face, she read it quickly.

"What do you need?" she asked. Clinton crouched beside his toolbox and opened it. "16-gauge primary wire.