Then he walked to the second helicopter, the Falcon test bed, and ran his hand along the main rotor hub housing. He pointed to a small notation scratched into the metal in a hurried hand, two numbers separated by a slash. 17 Not 70. He had not understood it the first time he noticed it. Standing there now, he thought he might.
They worked methodically through the remaining vehicles over the following 3 days. Laurel with her measurement tools and tablet, Clay with a flashlight and the quiet patience of a man who had spent his career reading what machines had been through by the evidence they left in their own metal. It became clear within the first afternoon that Cyrus Vane had not assembled this collection out of passion for automobiles. The vehicles had been selected with the deliberate logic of an engineer preserving a chain of evidence. Each one contained components, documentation, or material samples that connected to a single thread running back through a network of suppliers, contracts, and internal approvals.
The cars were not trophies. They were a filing system. The three Vesper prototypes had never been shown publicly there. Design language was a full generation beyond the models that Wyckliffe Aerospace's mobility division had released before the program was quietly shelved. Each one used a suspension control module and a primary structural bonding compound sourced from a supplier called Northstar Dynamics whose name also appeared in the maintenance records of the Falcon test bed alongside the batch number associated with the rotor components.
The two race-configured vehicles contained testing instruments that had recorded load and stress data during high-speed runs. And the data was still present on their internal logging systems in a format that could be extracted with the right interface. Laurel spent the better part of a morning doing exactly that while Clay worked on the roadster. The roadster was the one Augustus Wickliffe had built for himself. The interior was fitted to specific dimensions.