"Because that's how you track parts," he said. "So you know where they came from and who touched them. " Emma turned this over. "Like a signature. " "Kind of, yeah. " "So it's yours. " "It's No, it's not mine. It doesn't work like that. " "But your mark is on it. " Cole looked at her. "Go to sleep, Em. " She did.
He went back out to the workshop. He'd already unloaded the car from the trailer with the help of two floor jacks and a borrowed engine hoist from the bay next door, and it sat in the far corner under the main lights looking exactly as destroyed as it had in Nevada. He'd bought himself a bag of disposable gloves on the drive home, and now he put one on and started moving around the car slowly. The first thing he needed was access to the chassis tub. The bodywork on a carbon fiber car like this isn't structural in the conventional sense.
It hangs off the tub, which is the load-bearing skeleton of the vehicle. The fire had damaged the bodywork extensively, but the tub itself, by design much more protected, deeper in the structure, might have survived in better condition. Cole needed to know what state it was in, because if the tub had relevant markings, those markings would confirm or kill his theory far more definitively than anything on the bodywork. He spent the first 2 hours on documentation. Photographed everything with his phone before touching it.
Every panel, every visible surface, the stamped marking on the splitter from six angles with different lighting. He wasn't naturally a documentation person. His instinct was always to start taking things apart. But something told him to be slow about this, to treat it like evidence rather than like a repair job, which he was increasingly certain it was. By midnight, he'd removed the surviving front panels, driver's side front quarter, and what remained of the nose section, and laid them carefully on a workbench covered with moving blankets.
The carbon fiber was damaged, but not crumbled, which meant the fire hadn't reached the temperature that would completely destroy the structural integrity of the weave. Salvageable, maybe? Identifiable, certainly. He found the second stamp at 12:40. It was on the underside of the front clam where it met the tub, a surface never visible without removing the panel, which is exactly where you'd put something if you wanted it to survive whatever happened to the car's exterior.
The stamp read XP-7 /M-Tray /B3-LC, which in the shorthand he'd learned in Woking translated to experimental prototype 7, main tray assembly, build three, left center. Build three. They'd had three full build phases on the prototype. This was a stamp from the final build, the one that had produced the actual running vehicle. Cole sat on an overturned bucket in the middle of his shop at 12:40 in the morning with worn gloves on his hands, and the desert quiet outside the roll-up door, and thought carefully about what he was holding.
He was holding the remains of a car that officially did not exist, a car that had been declared destroyed, a car whose existence was covered by non-disclosure agreements that were, at this point, 8 years expired. A car that had somehow traveled from a controlled facility in England to a Nevada salvage auction through a chain of custody that was entirely unexplained. He thought about Victoria Hale bidding at the auction. He thought about her showing up while he loaded the trailer. He thought about the question she'd asked.
You know what that car is? And the specific phrasing of it. Not what do you think it is? Not why did you want it? You know what that car is.