There were maybe $300 in it. He'd never told her what it was for. "That's not what this is," he said, which was true in the most technical sense. Emma looked back at the burned car. "Okay," she said, trusting him in the uncomplicated way that eight-year-olds trust their parents, which is the kind of trust that feels like a weight across the shoulders.
Cole crouched down in front of the car and started looking. Stopped. He went over the accessible surfaces in a grid pattern, the way he'd been trained to inspect bodywork. Not looking for anything specific, just letting his eyes track the lines and his hands stay at his sides. The heat-affected carbon fiber had a particular texture, roughened and oxidized.
The weave pattern partially obscured beneath a layer of carbon char. He moved along the driver's side, crouching, standing, crouching again. Looked at the roofline from the rear corner, stood back and looked at the car as a whole from 20 ft. The silhouette was wrong. Not wrong bad, wrong different.
The proportions were slightly off from any production McLaren he knew. The windscreen angle was a hair shallower. The rear deck had a double radius to it that production cars didn't carry, and the surviving rear quarter panel had a lateral duct that no road-going McLaren had ever been offered with from the factory. He moved to the front of the car and crouched in front of the nose section, which had survived better than the rest. The fire hadn't traveled this far forward with full force, and the carbon here was scorched but not destroyed.
He ran his eyes along the splitter lip. There. Right there. He almost missed it twice because it was so small and because the char had partially obscured it. But the shape was correct.
He pulled his phone out and used the flashlight, angling it low across the surface until the texture differentiated clearly. Beneath a fold of carbon fiber at the left edge of the splitter, a fold that existed because this section of the splitter was a separate bonded panel from the main nose section, which itself was unusual. There was a stamped marking. Eight characters, a combination of letters and numbers pressed directly into the carbon substrate. Not a label, not a VIN plate, not a sticker.
A production stamp, the kind you put on components during manufacture so you can track them through the build process. The characters read XP-7/MTC-R. Cole sat back on his heels in the dust and stared at those eight characters until his vision started to blur at the edges. He'd last seen that prefix, XP7, on a set of engineering drawings in a facility in Woking, England eight years ago. He'd been 24 years old working as a junior technician on a project that officially didn't exist under an NDA thick enough to use as a door stop.
The project had been called internally by the engineers who worked on it various things. He'd heard the ghost, he'd heard project Meridian, he'd heard people just call it the car, spoken with a particular gravity that made it sound like a proper noun. The car had never been finished, or so everyone had been told. Cole stood up slowly. His knees were stiff from crouching and his mouth was dry from the Nevada heat and from something else, something that sat in his chest and made it hard to take a full breath.