The drive back to Tucson took 7 hours and change, and Cole had the radio off again, though Emma was awake this time and eventually stopped waiting for him to start a conversation and put her earbuds in. The desert moved past them, gray and yellow and vast, and Cole thought about Woking, England, and a year of his life he'd spent mostly not talking about. He'd been 23 when he got the job, fresh off 2 years as a shop technician in Phoenix after dropping out of his second year of engineering school for reasons he didn't discuss at job interviews. He was good with his hands in a way that crossed from skill into something closer to instinct, and he understood composite materials in the way that some people understand music, not just technically, but structurally, at the level where you know what something wants to do before you ask it. The firm that hired him was a small specialist contractor that worked exclusively for high-end manufacturers on prototype development, and they'd sent him to England on a 3-month contract that turned into 14 months.
The project was called, in official documentation, Program 7-X Meridian. In practice, within the team of nine engineers who worked on it, it was just the car. What it was, what it had been designed to be, was an experimental platform for exploring the upper limits of road-legal performance in a configuration that McLaren's mainstream engineering teams had decided was too radical and too expensive to pursue through official channels. It was a skunkworks project in the truest sense. Small team, tight budget relative to its ambitions, operating at one remove from corporate oversight.
The car that emerged from 18 months of work was approximately the shape of a McLaren, but not quite. The way a rumor is approximately the shape of the truth. Cole had worked specifically on the carbon fiber chassis tub and the bodywork panels. He knew every radius, every bonded joint, every stamped reference mark. He'd spent 6 weeks on the splitter package alone.
The project ended abruptly as Skunkworks projects sometimes do. Budget redirected, team dispersed, a memo arriving one Thursday afternoon announcing that program 7-X Meridian was being placed on indefinite hold. Cole had signed an NDA update on his way out, shaken hands with the two engineers he'd actually gotten to know, and flown home. He'd heard through industry channels that the prototype had been destroyed. Standard procedure for experimental vehicles at that stage, competitive intelligence concerns, liability, the usual reasons.
He'd believed it. He'd had no particular reason not to. The splitter stamp on the burned car in Nevada read XP7/MTCR. XP was the project internal designation. Seven was the prototype number.
There had been full design packages for seven configurations, though only one was ever built. MTC was Meridian Technical Center, the informal name for the facility in Woking. R was his own stamp. The letter he'd been assigned for component marking. "R for review," the lead engineer had said, "because you review everything before it goes on. " Cole had stamped that splitter himself.
Damn. Back in Tucson, he had a house that was rented and a workshop that was also rented, a two-bay commercial unit in an industrial strip off I-10 that served as both his business and his thinking space. The business was called Bennett Restoration, and it was solvent in the way small specialized shops are solvent, not comfortably, but continuously. He had four cars in the bays at present and three more promised for Q4 if those clients followed through, which in Cole's experience meant probably two of them would. He got Emma home, made pasta because it was late and pasta was fast, helped her with her reading homework, a chapter about weather patterns that was simpler than the book she read on her own, and got her to bed at 9:15, 45 minutes past her usual time because of the long day.
She asked him to tell her what was going to happen with the car. "I don't know yet," he said. "But you think it's special? " "I think it might be very special. " "Why did you stamp it? " He'd told her somewhere in hour four of the drive about the stamp. Just that. That there was a marking on the car he'd put there himself a long time ago.