| ‘Clients.’ The thought brought him back to reality and he turned the key angrily, suddenly aware of the time. Zac revved the engine and let the clutch in firmly, scattering the gravel behind him. ‘Bloody clients!’
A horse whinnied and he eased off instantly, hating to scare the animals he loved. Zac took a deep breath and drove down the pot holed track carefully, watching the stable girl’s face recede in the mirror.
He reached the gateway, looked carefully both ways and swung out fast onto the road, pushing the car as hard as the horse now, revving the engine freely to the point where lesser manufacturers would have placed a red line on the tachometer dial. Aston Martin recommended five thousand rpm in the handbook, but left the decision to the owner.
The road was wetter than he’d realised and he nearly overshot the first roundabout, teetering in with the back wheels half locked and the car slewing sideways. It was a tricky turn with lousy camber and he’d once been out with a client, test driving an old Mercedes, who’d skidded straight on, pulling up with a sheepish grin to make a ‘U’ turn further down the road.
Zac turned right, as he’d intended to, by pouring on power, hanging out the tail and spinning the wheel the other way to keep the big car straight and away from the verges. He accelerated away and smiled grimly; his racing days might be over but he could still hold a slide.
It was ten twisty miles to Torsen, seven minutes in the wet, on his own. Today, anger and frustration sliced off another thirty seconds and he was feeling better as the first houses appeared. Zac slowed reluctantly to near legal speeds and was thinking the dual carriageway a waste at eighty five when the lorry pulled out of a hidden side turning, five car lengths ahead of him.
He jerked the wheel right, swerving into the fast lane and then back, his subconscious screaming of a second, fast-moving danger on his outside, in his blind spot. A motorbike. Something he absolutely must not hit.
Suddenly there was nowhere to go but into the back of the lorry, hard.
Or was there?
The red, diagonal letters “Pete’s Removals” were huge in his face as he stamped on the brakes, locked all the wheels and jerked the steering left, full lock, as fast as he could. It took real willpower then to release the brakes but he knew he was right as his neck whipped sideways and the car spun instantly, once, twice, three times, smoke billowing up from four tortured tyres. Then a front wheel caught the kerb and he banged his head hard on the side window, losing his grip on the steering wheel and bruising his fingers on the spinning metal spokes. The last thing he heard was his briefcase sliding off the seat and he hoped vaguely that it wouldn’t scratch the leather; Madeleine had given it to him and he’d treasured it for years. Zac slumped sideways in the seat, his head against the Perspex window, eyes unseeing and a tiny trickle of blood from one knuckle.
Past accidents mingled in his head, echoes of urgent voices, faces peering in, bent, twisted metal and the acrid stench of burnt rubber. Zac wrinkled his nose, separating the dreams from reality and realising that the smell at least was real. He tried to lift his head from the side window but it felt incredibly heavy so he put a hand up to help his neck muscles, and felt blood on the side of his head. His own blood. He looked at his fingers but couldn’t focus on the smears of red so he shut his eyes again and saw instead the marshals with fire extinguishers, a black flag waved furiously at the other racers and anxious faces through the windscreen while they turned the safety switch on the bonnet, isolating the battery.
Zac re-lived the sense of relief at having “got away with it” once more, opened his eyes again and found that he could focus this time. He peered along the bonnet, trying to remember which circuit he was on and wondering where the hell the marshals were, and then turned the ignition off himself, wincing at his stiffening fingers and transferring a small scarlet smear to the soft leather key fob. Reality seeped back slowly; this was a public road and he was alone this time, with a damaged car and a sharp pain in his temple.
That much was familiar; he’d smacked his head on this window before. But last time he’d been wearing a crash helmet. Now the pain was sharper and the circumstances unreal; out on the track the ambulance was never far away whereas here, on the outskirts of a small, uninterested town, the silence was broken only by the tick, tick of the cooling exhaust.
He looked ahead, into someone’s front garden. That wasn’t right. Slowly he worked it out; the car was slewed across the carriageway, pointing almost down the side turning from which the lorry had come. And the bastard hadn't even stopped. Neither had the motorcyclist who, had Zac pulled out into the other lane, would now be spread out on the ground. Ungrateful sods!
Training kicked in then, the racer’s instinct for safety, and he reached down quickly to the battery switch by his side. Click. Safe. He stopped thinking about fire, rubbed the bruise on his temple again, and climbed out to inspect the damage.
One sixteen inch Dunlop tyre, shredded. And one ruinously expensive, centre lock wire wheel, its rim mangled beyond repair, wedged against the kerb. Zac kicked it angrily, climbed back into the driver’s seat and sniffed for petrol.
But the old car smelt only of hot oil now, which was normal after a fast run so he switched on again, re-started the engine cautiously and reversed away from the pavement, parking neatly on the inside lane and wincing at the twangs as the overstretched wheel spokes finally gave way. Then he took stock, replaying the accident in his mind and realising grimly that something was missing; he remembered the spin, the first and second gyrations and the start of the third... but then nothing. In the next frame of the film he was against the kerb with a damaged car and a damaged head.
He’d knocked himself out. Again. His consultant would not be amused.
Zac decided instantly that his consultant didn’t need to know; he’d be out of the country in twenty four hours and he’d recuperate on the plane. He thought briefly about business class seats with unlimited champagne and decided also that it would be unnecessary information for Madeleine. She’d only worry.
Zac rubbed his temple thoughtfully and tapped the side window with his knuckle. Racing rules forbade glass but Perspex was just as hard. He looked down the road, towards distant parked cars, and found that he could still read the number plates. Just. He felt dizzy, but he was used to that. It would go, as would the stiffness in his neck. Zac mused briefly on the saying that bad luck always comes in threes, wondered what the hell else could go wrong that morning and reached forward to open the bonnet.
The release was wonderfully simple; an enormous tube under the dashboard, running right across the car with a handle in the middle. He pushed it away from him, heard the clunk as the toggles released and climbed out of the car again, more stiffly this time. Zac lifted the bonnet and glanced at the carburettors automatically, checking the float chambers for leaks before unclipping the jack from the bulkhead. A car went by, a modern car, the driver slowing, cruising past and then accelerating hard into the distance. Zac straightened, startled by the sudden noise and grabbed the bonnet as his head started to spin. He was, he supposed, just a very tall, rather dishevelled young man, jacking up an old sports car. He didn’t look like he needed help.
But it took him a long time to change the wheel.
Much later now than he’d wanted to be, he let down the jack, gave the central spinner a final tap with the hide-faced mallet and carried the ruined wheel to the boot. The spare lived in its own compartment, beneath the luggage and reached by winding a key with one end of the wheelbrace. It was a neat arrangement but with two disadvantages; firstly, as he’d found before, the edges of the compartment skinned your knuckles and secondly, the wheel was a very tight fit in the locker. Zac looked at the warped and twisted rim, dangling coarse, black shreds of Dunlop rubber, and dropped the whole lot into the luggage locker instead. It wasn’t going to be his problem.
He lowered himself back into the driver’s seat, wiped the mixture of dried blood and tyre dirt from his fingers and reached forward, pulling the release bar towards him now, engaging the catches and securing the bonnet. Zac started the engine, listened to the low, muscular, six cylinder burble for a few seconds and drove off, thinking ruefully that he was losing his touch; in his heyday he would never have stalled the engine in a spin.
Three cautious miles later, he turned left by the old mill, nosed the Aston in among the weeds at the edge of the gravel, blipped the throttle and switched off. He'd run the car on “hard” spark plugs when he was racing and had found that revving the engine helped clean the soot off, making it easier to re-start. The Aston had soft plugs now, the hard ones stored, for old times sake, in their little compartment under the bonnet but the habit was hard to break and it sounded nice.
He reached across to the passenger seat for his briefcase and found it, inexplicably, on the floor. Zac stared for a second, realising that it must have tipped off the seat during the spin and surprised that he’d not heard it fall. The metal floor, devoid of carpet, was a cruel place for a cherished leather case and he retrieved it anxiously, checking the corners for scuff marks and wincing as he caught sight of his watch.
The advantage, he had often said, of owning the company was that you could turn up late. The snag however, especially in a small concern, was that everyone noticed. But today's news should, he thought, distract them so he climbed out of the car for the last time and locked the door, wondering just what to tell his mechanics.
Zac opened the side door to the factory, stooped under the lintel and stepped into the workshop, his eye flicking automatically along the line of cars, assessing progress after a few days away. The shop could hold six, seven at a pinch and looked bare with just three. They needed more business.
He walked past the first, a 1958 MG with the cylinder head removed, valves laid out on the bench and rags stuffed down the cylinder bores to keep them clean. There was only a couple of days work left there and the owner, while a good friend of many years, was a notoriously bad payer. That job wasn’t going to cure his cash flow.
The next one, an old Jaguar, was potentially more lucrative but a long way from completion. Extravagantly upholstered in fading coffee and cream and owned by an equally well upholstered local business woman with a shine for Zac, the Jag was in for a complete re-trim, carpets, doors and seats. Stooping down, he noted that the headlining was back and he checked automatically for glue smears, the tell tale sign of imperfection. There were none. He breathed a small sigh of relief but the job was still weeks from completion and the owner, sweet though she was on the proprietor, had resisted firmly any suggestion of staged payments, assuring Zac sweetly that her own cash flow was as tight as his own and that weekly lunches, for which he invariably ended up paying, would suffice to keep her informed on the progress of her status symbol.
So the formidable Mrs Almshurst wasn’t going to help his cash problem either. Zac ignored the third car in the row, a Marcos with terminal rot in its wooden chassis, skirted the stacks of rusty wire wheels that formed a makeshift partition and stopped dead, looking grimly now at the hat trick in his morning of bad luck.
The ZeeSport was still on axle stands.
It should have been back on its wheels by now. It looked uncomfortable hanging in the air but the dull black wheels, with duller black tyres, still drooped from thin metal struts that grew from deep inside the chassis. Zac fingered one of the slender links, thinking what a contrast they were to the bulky, rusty lumps of steel that formed the suspension of the average classic car. The link was scarcely thicker than his middle finger.
And, unlike any classic car he'd ever known, the suspension was also covered in wires, snaking out to the wheel hub, the spring and the brake disc, and clipped carefully to the struts at regular intervals. Except that one of them wasn’t. Zac reached behind one front wheel and pulled out a loose coil with four bare terminals protruding from the frayed end. That was why it was on stands; the wheel speed sensors were still not finished!
He turned, nearly knocking a laptop computer off its precarious perch on a pile of tyres. It was connected to the car by an overstreched lead, and he grabbed at it, anxious not to damage anything. Zac felt his head spin again and stood very still, the computer and he steadying each other until vision and balance returned. Then he straightened up, checked that the laptop cable was still plugged in and turned back to the ZeeSport, stroking the bodywork of his totally unique, ground breaking, mega breakthrough racing car and cursing all the bloody wiring that went with it.
Slim, slippery and with no clumsy mass of tubes and pipes encircling an oily engine, the revolutionary nature of the ZeeSport was betrayed only by the position of the exhaust pipes; four neat tubes, one behind each wheel. Four tubes, each one connected to a tiny, lightweight motor, driving just one wheel. And what a motor! Zac reminded himself once again just how good it was, forgot about the wretched wiring and stood for a moment, imagining his toy at speed.
Stripped of its umbilical cords and standing on the ground, or better still a track, it looked stunning, as any handmade, single seater, open wheeled speed machine should. But here in the workshop, up in the air, it was out of its element, still a teenage techno-spider not quite ready to leave its nest. Zac smiled grimly and rubbed the panel he was leaning on with his sleeve; his baby was about to grow up, and fast.
Appearances had always been important to him and the car had looked good right from the start. Even in the early days, when it didn't work at all and needed a lot more money, he'd always made sure that it didn't drip oil and that the paint was shiny. Yellow was traditional with British racing green so he'd picked out the name on each side, but discretely. The ZeeSport was, after all, a British car and covered by a British patent.
But funded by Americans.
Twelve months ago now, the president of ElectroVee Inc. had run a finger over the slim, elegant bodywork, noted the lack of an engine behind the driver and turned to Zac. 'Come on then, sonny,' he'd grated. 'Get the lid off. Show me what I’m buying.'
They'd grinned at each other then, the keen young entrepreneur and the grizzled old executive, suddenly just two ex-racers itching for the spanners. Harry Malone had watched carefully as Zac turned the Dzus fasteners through ninety degrees to release them and lifted away the curved aluminium panel. Then he'd peered in at the strange, black box mounted directly behind the wheel.
'Thought it would be bigger than that. How much does it weigh?'
‘Ten kilos. Each VapourMotor weighs ten kilos. Twenty two pounds to you, Harry.’
Harry had nodded slowly and done sums in his head, comparing, Zac guessed, four VapourMotors to one conventional engine. And he’d evidently liked the answer.
'Well go on then, fire it up!'
Zac had leant into the cockpit and switched on. The ten second preheat had just built the suspense further until, gesturing at Harry to keep away from the exhaust, he'd pressed the starter button.
And, as the engine had settled to its uneven, nervous idle, Harry had started finally to take serious interest. When Zac had first approached him about this racecar with its revolutionary motors, Harry had seemed dismissive. "No-one's ever gonna watch that at the track," had been his line. But, after Zac had sent him some figures and, more importantly a video, he'd come over, just for “a look-see and a listen”.
For the VapourMotor sounded like nothing on earth and Harry, as Zac knew, couldn’t resist a raunchy motor. They’d talked cars, over beer, many a time in the past, Harry reminiscing about the high compression vee eights that he’d pioneered and won with in California and Zac telling of the sixteen cylinder BRM of the early 1960s that his own father had told him about. "It screamed, that car. It screamed its way round the track, past everything." His father had smiled and added sadly, "Until it broke down, which it always did."
But the VapourMotor didn't scream, it roared, the conventional noise of combustion replaced by a complex cacophony from the red-hot fury inside. Zac had let it warm up for a minute and then, unable to resist any longer, had leant into the cockpit and blipped the throttle in the time honoured manner. He'd watched the grin spread right over Harry's face and, holding the throttle wide open for one glorious, five second burst, had known he’d got a deal.
He'd let go of the pedal, reached to the dashboard and switched off. The silence had been sudden and the whole factory, mechanics, apprentices and secretary, had held its collective breath.
'And don't forget,' Zac had said into the highly charged atmosphere, 'there's a motor for each wheel, so on the track it sounds four times as good.'
'Where,' Harry had asked, unscrewing the cap from his pen, 'do I sign?'
Zac remembered clearly the elation of that moment; it had kept him going through some very late nights. But now, a year later, Harry wanted his toy, which wasn't quite ready and, like a frustrated small boy, was starting to jump up and down. Zac stroked the bodywork of his unfinished racing car once more, winced at the laptop still rocking slightly on its pile of tyres, and headed towards his desk.
The offices were strung haphazardly round the edge of the old mill, none more than a partition away from the sounds and smells of the action. His own, the biggest by a clear three inches, overlooked the river. He'd once cleaned the windows on both sides and revelled in the view for a few weeks until the grime had crept back up. He'd never had time to do it again.
But it beat the sandwich room whose windows, he was sure, had never been cleaned in the five years they’d been there. His secretary, Katrina, a redundancy victim from a much larger company, had, on her arrival, tried to re-name it the “meeting room” but the mechanics just laughed, telling her what she could do with her corporate image. They didn't have meetings in there, they worked out what to do next, often in the middle of the night. Katrina couldn't quite give up though and Zac could see now her symbolic vase of flowers standing, not quite upright, in the middle of the table. It added a tiny touch of serenity to the sea of drawings, cables and switches, the fallout from yesterday evening’s “meeting” and he wondered briefly if they'd had pizza or Chinese. If the cardboard didn't tell him, the expense claim would.
He looked around for Katrina, caught her eye and pointed towards his office. She waved back, a “Yes, ok boss, I'll be there when I’ve sorted this one out”, sort of wave, and said something down the phone. From the look on her face and the gestures she was making, he reckoned she was talking to the bank. Calls to the bank had become more frequent just lately.
Zac went into his office and shut the door. He usually left it open but the shop floor lights were bothering him strangely and he felt a sudden need to look out of the window, so he rubbed a porthole in the dirt, wiped his hand down his trousers and contemplated the grime on the outside, finding that, with his head at the right angle, the river was still just visible.
Katrina knocked once and came in. He knew it was her without looking; no one else knocked.
'And they said?' he asked, eyes still on the river.
'We go cash negative in three days.’
Zac winced at the jargon. Big companies went cash negative; small ones just went broke. He turned to look at her, knowing that she’d look straight back. Still flushed from the call to the bank, Katrina shrugged helplessly.
Zac sighed, fumbled in his pocket and took out his car keys. He looked at the fob once last time and handed them over, trying not to let his hand shake. 'Sell it. Sprinters gave me a valuation about three months ago.' He smiled ruefully. 'The old girl should give us another week.'
‘More than that, I'd have thought.’
Zac shook his head. ‘No. Not this week.’
'Are you sure?'
'Yes. Phone them now, get them to come at once... before I change my mind.’
Katrina fingered the fob, stiffened and examined the leather more closely. Then she took off her glasses and stared straight at him. ‘Where’s the blood from?’
Zac hesitated. 'Better tell them the spare wheel’s a write off.'
'What did you hit?'
‘Just a kerb.'
Katrina looked at him more carefully. Her eyes narrowed and she reached up to flick his hair back from the growing lump on his temple. 'With your head?'
'I banged it on the window. I spun the car...' Zac stopped, not wanting to explain. 'It's no big deal. I've done it before.'
'You know what the consultant said. Any more bangs on the head—'
'I’m fine.' Zac stepped away. 'Please, it’ll be ok. I don’t have time for hospitals. Just keep quiet, and for God’s sake don’t tell Madeleine.'
Katrina kept Zac’s wife company when he was away.
‘She looked tired last night.’
‘You saw her?’
‘She came to the theatre with us.’
‘Us?’
‘Sandy and his wife. The Gondoliers. You were invited. You even had a ticket.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t get back till late. And I hadn’t figured out that new phone.’ Zac paused. ‘Wish I had now. I could have kicked Nigel’s ass… again.’
Exasperation flicked across Katrina's face. ‘He said you’d be cross.’
‘He was right. But not as cross as he’s going to be. Send him over to the sandwich room will you? And Sandy. And come back yourself.’
‘Bad news?’
‘It depends how you look at it.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I thought so. I’ll get your car sold then. What is it exactly?’
He took a deep breath. ‘It’s an Aston Martin. Don’t worry, I’ll buy another one when I’m rich.’
Katrina looked at him, for longer than she normally did. ‘No, you won’t. It wouldn’t be the same.’ She closed the door quietly behind her.
Zac looked back out of the window once more, knowing that she was right; the Aston was the first car that he’d ever restored. It was part of him and now he was selling it to gain time, just a little more time, for a crazy idea that he should probably never have started.
But he didn’t see that he had any choice; his brainchild, so nearly finished, was soaking up all the profits from his business which, inevitably, was going through a slack patch. On its own, he reckoned Zender Restorations would survive. They’d been through dodgy times before. But a high-tech racing car, taking up three people’s time and not bringing in any money, was just too much for a struggling little company. And shipping it to California wasn’t going to be cheap. Zac reminded himself of all the other sports car companies who, in the past, had made it against overwhelming odds, tried not to think about the price of transatlantic air freight, and headed for the sandwich room.
Which stank; they'd had pizza and the cardboard trays were still everywhere. Zac decided instantly that he wasn't going to make a fuss this time so he just opened the window, shoved the worst of the debris into the bin and pushed the spilled tomato sauce into the cracks in the table with some second-hand napkins.
Katrina’s voice drifted in through the doorway. 'Hottest theatre I've ever been in. And did you see that old grand piano? Gorgeous it was.'
'Aye, but they had the bonnet up to stop her overheating.' Sandy chuckled, filling his pipe while he walked and tripping over an old piece of bent aluminium on his way to the teapot.
Zac winced. That nose cone was irreplaceable. Salvaged from a wrecked Formula Junior car, he’d bought it, not for any purpose, but because it was beautiful, and beautifully made, from soft, buttery aluminium sheet. He made a mental note to hang it up somewhere.
Sandy drifted in, grinned amiably at his boss and sat down, his old bones, Zac guessed, creaking with the damp. His cup, full to the brim, landed unevenly on the table, adding a tiny tidal wave to the sauce-filled cracks. Sandy didn’t notice. He was fiddling with a valve. It dripped oil as he turned it over and Zac watched one spot soak into some pizza crust on the worn out carpet. Mechanics, he thought, were all the same; uneasy out of their workshops and awkward without something to play with. Meetings were just a nuisance.
But not to Katrina. Close behind Sandy, she put down her folder, pushing away the mess from around her and challenging the old man with an impatient gesture. Zac grinned as she opened her pad and dated the page, knowing that Sandy would happily make his notes on the pizza cartons, and peered out through the doorway. 'Where’s Nigel?'
Sandy pointed to the far side of the factory. The sandwich van had arrived, with its not unattractive girl driver. She came into view now, backing away from a thin young man with greasy black hair who, fizzy drink in hand, was apparently trying to tell her a joke while looking as far down her blouse as possible. The girl backed rapidly out of the factory, her tray of food keeping him at arm’s length and Nigel closed the door with obvious reluctance. He flapped a hand dismissively at Zac’s call and started to slouch towards them.
'Saved from the punch line!'
'It was probably the one about the camel and the nun.' Zac sighed wearily. ‘He’s told it to me so many times.’
They watched Nigel’s slow progress across the factory.
'Mention Jody; that'll get him moving.' Sandy grinned wickedly, showing a row of gapped teeth.
Zac smiled back automatically and wondered once again how soon he could get rid of Nigel. Admitting, albeit reluctantly and for the first time in his life, that he couldn’t do everything, he’d employed Nigel to develop the electronics for the ZeeSport and had regretted it ever since. Faced with a frighteningly complex technical problem that needed a quick solution, Nigel had proved himself to be bright, sharp and intuitive. But when asked to implement and, worse still, document his design, he had shown himself, equally rapidly, to be a complete pain in the ass.
But he was too vital to lose, at least until Harry had paid up for his toy. Once again, Zac promised himself a personal assistant, if only to deal with the geeks. They'd have enough money soon.
The company geek finally reached the doorway. ‘What? I’m busy.’
‘Come in and shut the door.’
Zac winced as Nigel sat down, unnecessarily close to Katrina. She edged away instantly, wrinkling her nose and taking her folder with her. Nigel leaned his chair back and put his hands behind his head. ‘Well?’
Zac tried not to look at his sweat-stained armpits. ‘The wiring’s still not finished.’
‘Not my fault. The connectors didn’t arrive.’
‘When did you order them?’
‘Sometime last week.’
‘Friday afternoon, actually.’ Katrina waved a dog eared piece of paper at him.
‘Well they’re here now.' Nigel shot her a furious glance. 'I’ll finish the wheel sensors this morning.’
‘Good. Because we’re going tomorrow.’
‘What? That’s ridiculous.’ He kicked the table angrily. ‘I need another week at least.’
Zac caught the vase of flowers and moved it to the window sill. 'It's now or never.’ Suddenly, irritation got the better of him. ‘Or shall I get someone else to finish it?’
Nigel glared back, shrugged and looked down at the floor. ‘Whatever.’
There was silence. Zac stared at the greasy head of hair, admitting reluctantly to himself that he could not afford to lose Nigel just yet. He looked at Katrina, raising his eyebrows helplessly.
She shrugged, again.
Zac thought briefly that Katrina was shrugging rather too often these days. It was starting to get on his nerves. He opened his mouth without really knowing what he was going to say, and closed it again slowly. Suddenly, filtering through the thick stone walls, he could hear the unmistakable sound of an Aston Martin and he winced as the driver, unfamiliar with the throttle, revved the engine too hard and slipped the clutch. There was a faint spatter of gravel against the wall outside and he caught Katrina’s eye again. The revs rose, fell as the driver snatched second gear and Zac listened to the gorgeous, burbling six cylinder exhaust for the last time. The revs rose again, dropped, and faded into the distance.
‘Someone else at the wheel of yur motor?’ Sandy was incredulous.
‘I’ve sold it.’
His chief mechanic looked at him for a long time. ‘The brass is that tight?’
Zac nodded.
Sandy turned to Nigel. ‘Well, you can no’ let him down now. Ye’ve to finish what’s started! And young Jody,’ the old man added casually, ‘will surely struggle without ye to show her the wires.’
It was, Zac thought, as though someone had flicked a switch. Nigel’s expression changed, from defiant to sly in an instant. He nodded thoughtfully, as though weighing up Sandy’s words, and looked back to his boss.
‘Ok. I’ll stick it out. But don’t count on me afterwards.’
Zac breathed a cautious sigh of relief and watched the reaction develop. When Nigel’s sulk had hardened to a bitter acceptance of some late night soldering and Sandy had phoned his daughter to ask if he might mebbee borrow her new camera, he slipped from the room. Katrina, selecting a different colour pen for each, was bullying them into making lists, far better than he ever could, and he had a call to make; he'd forgotten to phone Madeleine after his ride and he knew she’d be worried. And Zac had a funny feeling he was going to be very late home that night.
Six hours later, in northern California, Harry Malone ambled into the president’s office at ElectroVee and sat down behind his long, cherrywood conference table. The vase of flowers in the centre rocked slightly and his team of engineers, spaced evenly in their deeply upholstered chairs, put down their stainless steel, double insulated mugs, careful to position them in the exact centre of their coasters. Harry was very particular about his table. They opened their logbooks, dated the pages, and looked at their boss expectantly.
'The ZeeSport is on its way at last. Zac's shipping the car tomorrow, so I want that workshop ready and waiting.' Harry looked around the table and grinned. ‘He may just be in a bit of a hurry!’
Jody Leason's heart missed a beat. As far as she was concerned, getting ready for Zac Zender's arrival meant a hair cut, a manicure and some new high heels. And, as Harry fumbled open his new laptop computer and attempted to project his list of jobs onto the screen at one end of his office, she allowed her mind to wander. Harry was a great guy but not really up to computers and she knew it would take him a good ten minutes to make it all work.
She’d been looking forward to this day for a year now. A year since Harry had decided to buy the ZeeSport and had sent her to England for a scout round.
‘There’s often a weak link, Jody. The car’s a good ‘un and I love Zender’s crazy motors but...’ Harry had trailed off, marshalling his thoughts. ‘There’s a real strange guy there, wiring the thing up. Go take a look, will you?’
‘At the wiring?’ Jody’s degree was in software engineering.
Harry had looked faintly impatient. ‘At the code, Jody. At the code they’ve written to control the car. The code that sits in the onboard computer and gets the thing round corners. I reckon they’re making it up as they go along.’
‘Spaghetti code?’ She’d been warned of this by her lecturers, lines of code tagged onto other lines with no structure or form. The sign of an amateur. Or, worse still, a bunch of amateurs.
Harry’s face had softened. ‘Could be. I dunno. I just want a second opinion. Got a passport?’
‘Sure. I went round Europe after my degree.’
‘Well go, girl, go.’
So the most junior engineer, after just two weeks at the company, had flown to England for a week to second guess Harry’s latest crazy investment. Talk about the deep end!
But it hadn’t taken her a week; she’d read all the software listings in one morning. And been appalled. There were bits written by Zac and bits written by Nigel. And bits written by Zac and then modified by Nigel.
She’d called Harry on Monday afternoon, as soon as the time difference allowed, crouched over the phone in the scruffy little snack room, the door wedged shut and her voice low. ‘It’s downright dangerous, Harry. This code controls everything. It drives the motors and steers the car. But it’s spaghetti, real spaghetti and it’s unstable. Sometimes it won’t run, other times it won’t quit. I can’t fix it now, they’re in too deep.’
Jody had hesitated, not knowing how to say this to her boss. ‘If you’re really going to buy this car, I think we should start over and write some real code ourselves.’
She’d waited, listening to Harry’s rasping breath at the other end of the line, and gulped at the answer. ‘Way to go, Jody! But don’t let them know you’re on it. Not yet. Learn as much as you can, especially about those godamn sensors, and then get back here and write it. I’ll take a discount off Zender for your time.’
So Jody had spent the week under cover, designing software in her hotel room every evening after days spent learning how to couple the sensors to the computers. Which also hadn’t been easy; the weirdo, Nigel his name was, had seemed keen on another sort of coupling and she’d had a hard time fending him off while trying, unobtrusively, to make an impression on his boss.
Who was just totally gorgeous. She lost track of what she was saying every time she looked at Zac and had blushed more in one week than in the rest of her twenty four years put together. They’d sat in the snack room on Thursday afternoon while he’d dismantled a VapourMotor for her to see, and she’d just swooned, taking meaningless notes and nodding at his every word.
Gorgeous, but not infallible. Lying in the bath that evening, she’d gone over the conversation again, without his eyes to distract her, and found that he’d said something she didn’t quite agree with.
It was a year ago now, but Jody could remember every detail of the following morning. She’d watched him arrive, whirlwind his way through the workshop and put his case down carefully on his desk, while talking to Katrina and dropping his cellphone on the concrete floor. The screen had flown off and he’d been trying to sellotape it back on as she’d finally plucked up courage and tapped on the half open door.
‘Can I ask you something? I’m still not convinced about that control algorithm.’
‘Sure.’ He'd given up on the phone in disgust, thrown her a whiteboard pen and put his feet up on the desk. ‘Fire away!’ The sole of his left shoe was worn right through, showing a yellow sock, and his right trouser leg had slid slightly up his calf, showing a green one.
She’d started in the top left hand corner of the whiteboard, drawing out the control loop, piece by piece like they’d done at college, talking over her shoulder and then, as she drew in the final box, looking nervously back at him.
‘So there’s no need for an integral term. The system’s continually disturbed; the error’s never going to wind up, even with a long time constant.’ She’d fiddled with the pen and held her breath.
‘Maybe you should be writing this code, not us?’ But he’d grinned as he said it.
Jody had frozen, and stammered. ‘I’m just trying to get it all straight in my head before I go back.’
‘Well you have. You’re right and I was wrong. And that’s the best summary of the problem I’ve seen yet.’ He’d taken his feet off the desk, grinned broadly at her and she’d felt wonderful. ‘Leave it there, I’ll show it to Nigel. It’ll help a lot when we’re tidying up the code.’ He’d taken the pen from her, drawn a big, bold square around the outside of Jody’s diagram and written “Please leave” in capitals across the top.
And at that moment, guilty as hell over Harry’s instructions, she’d slipped beyond pure physical attraction and, for the first time that week, avoided his gaze completely. Jody had felt awful as she’d said goodbye, had got extremely drunk on the plane home and had spent a miserable weekend, arriving at work the following Monday with bags under her eyes that were little to do with jet lag.
‘You look lousy. What’s wrong?’ Harry had handed her strong black coffee and pulled out a chair.
So she’d told him half the reason, sipping her drink as she’d stumbled out the story and her concerns about loyalty, increasingly aware of a smart, middle aged woman behind her, hovering quietly with some papers for signing.
Harry had nodded slowly at her tale, penning his name while thinking and handing the forms back to his personal assistant with a nod and a question. ‘You know this guy. How will he take it?’
The woman, fortyish, Jody thought, with brown hair going grey, had smiled and looked into the distance. ‘He’ll take it. He hates computers. I’ll guess he only wrote the program himself because there was no one else to do it. You give him a better solution, he’ll take it.’
‘Sell, Sam, sell! I’m not giving the guy anything.’
‘Then,’ Sam had said, the smile reaching her eyes now, ‘He’ll haggle!’
And Sam had, apparently, been right; the haggling, or horse trading as Harry preferred to call it, had gone on for days, each round held up by the nine hour time difference, and Jody been starting to lose hope when, on Friday evening, Harry had stopped by her desk.
‘You’re on.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The ZeeSport. Deal’s done. Guy’s a helluva trader. Took me all week but I’ve bought me a racecar, discounted for your time to write some real code. So email him Monday and get your finger out.’
Jody had driven home exuberantly, had made up for the misery of the previous weekend and had spent most of the next twelve months crafting the finest piece of vehicle control software that she knew how.
Which now, finally, was about to be tested. She jumped back to the present as Harry, his project plan displayed triumphantly on the screen, looked directly at her. ‘Jody, can you drive the rolling road?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really. I’ve sat at the console and collected data but I’ve never actually run it.’
Harry smiled. ‘Time you did then! Come on.’ He stood up, rocking the flowers again and dismissing the rest of the group with a wave.
Jody followed him down the corridor, liking the way he didn’t touch her. Some men might have put an arm round her shoulders at a moment like this but Harry was a real gentleman.
Harry opened the door flamboyantly; this was his baby, his legacy to the world of vehicle testing and he was damn proud of it. And at his age, the opportunity to explain something to a pretty young woman was not to be missed, even if he did have to concentrate quite hard on not touching her.
Harry didn’t really think of it as a rolling road. Garages had rolling roads, just a pair of metal rollers that the tyres rested on while the brakes were tested. A rolling road wasn’t very exciting. With the brakes plastered on hard, wheels could occasionally lock and lose grip, jumping the car off the rollers and maybe forwards a few inches. As an adrenalin rush, it wasn’t much.
Harry had decided he could do better. It would be, he had suggested, far more useful (he had been careful to avoid the term “fun”), if an entire vehicle could be driven along a huge recirculating belt, itself travelling at precisely the same speed but in the opposite direction. For the first time ever, he argued, cars could be properly tested without ever leaving the shop. Acceleration, braking and top speed could all be measured at the touch of a button. Even the steering could get a workout, just by swerving from one edge of the belt to the other. It would be spectacular, and spectacularly useful, the most advanced vehicle test facility in the world. Other vehicle manufacturers would queue up to use it and the charge out rate could, he concluded, be substantial.
His accountants who, Harry suspected, might just have glazed over during the technical explanation, had woken up abruptly at the last sentence and asked for detailed specifications, in dollars. Figures had duly been prepared, worked over by the vice president of engineering to avoid any possible traces of optimism, and presented. The accountants had studied them carefully and, in the finest traditions, challenged the assumptions. All of them. Harry had groaned, and defended his figures. Then he’d revised them and defended them again. And, after the third time round, the accountants had been forced to agree; even with the engineers’ gloss removed, it was still a damn good idea.
Work had started immediately on the largest running machine in the world, a running machine for cars. But they’d still called it a rolling road.
‘This thing really is huge.’ Jody looked up and down the belt from the doorway.
‘One hundred feet long and forty feet wide, with a solid back wall and energy absorbing doors at the front. Like a huge crumple zone! If you hit them really hard, the hinges break off and the car goes into the sand drag outside. The belt weighs five tons and has a peak surface speed of one hundred and seventy miles per hour.’ Harry reeled the numbers off proudly.
‘Some motors.’
‘They’re hydraulic. A thousand horsepower each.’ He saw her hesitate. ‘They were made for cable laying across the Atlantic.’
Jody peered into the chamber. ‘And you can change the weather in here?’
Harry pointed to a square blue button on the console marked “Driving Rain”. ‘One hundred gallons of water every minute.’
‘Where from?’
‘The lake out the back.’
Jody looked impressed and peered at a white button further along the row. The label, “Antarctic Night”, was still legible but now partially obscured by a tiny drawing of a monkey.
Harry grinned. ‘That’ll chill all the Budweiser in California.’ The monkey was brass coloured. He pointed to an orange button at the end of the row, marked “Hot sunshine”. ‘And when they press that baby, the lights go dim in my office.’
Jody looked slowly round the console. ‘And that one?’ She touched the big red button in the middle.
Harry looked serious for the first time. ‘That, my dear, is known as the “Laser Killer”. And I’ll show you why.’ He picked up a tapered black tube from a rack and climbed the short flight of steps to the chamber door.
They stopped in the middle of the rubber road, Harry looking thoughtfully up and down before handing her the tube. ‘The laser’s inside.’
Jody stroked the sleek, streamlined pod. ‘Smart. Didn't Chuck make this?’
Harry grimaced at the memory; Chuck Fullard, the vice president of engineering, had indeed designed it on his fancy computer. The drawing had then been sent downstairs to the machine shop, who had crafted it from a solid block of aluminium alloy, aircraft grade. The finished, shiny component had then been passed along the line to the paint shop, who had covered it in their hardest, most durable black sheen. Shrink wrapped, encased in foam and sealed in a blister pack, the package had been stamped “Urgent”, “Delicate” and “High Priority” and hand delivered to Chuck, who had fought his way through the protective layers with a rather blunt penknife before handing the work of art proudly around the office. His minions had admired the sculpted curves, the delicate ribs and the toolroom finish.
Finally, when he was sure he had everyone’s attention, Chuck had nonchalantly clipped the laser into the pod. Or tried to.
And, ten minutes later, the superb finish had taken on a faintly scuffed appearance as the surfaces of the pod, gripped brutally in the serrated jaws of a large vice, were filed away in a desperate attempt to make the laser fit.
Jody hefted it in her hand. A tiny shaving of aluminium fell out and landed at her feet. Harry sighed, took the pod back from her and blew carefully onto the highly polished mirror at one end.
‘Runs better without swarf.’
‘How does it work?’
‘The pod’s mounted on the car with the laser pointing at the back wall of the chamber. The solid one. See the reflective strip round the edge?’
He pointed, and Jody nodded.
‘That reflects the laser light back and the pod works out how far away the wall is. Then it transmits the signal to the console in the workshop. That’s how it knows whether to speed the road up or to slow it down. The road changes speed to keep the car in the middle.’
‘And the red button?’
‘Quits the test if the laser has a glitch.’
‘Has it ever happened?’
Harry looked vague. ‘Yeah, once.’
But he remembered the day only too well. Choosing, with unerring accuracy, the test day for a million dollar prototype of a new luxury saloon car with multiple airbags, the momentary interruption to the stream of laser light had resulted, seconds later, in the unexpected addition of crumple zone testing to the rolling road’s repertoire. The airbags had deployed faultlessly. All of them. But they’d had to make some new front doors for the chamber.
Harry shook his head at the memory and pulled himself together. ‘But no one got hurt. And Chuck cleaned the pod out afterwards.’
Please click here if you'd like to buy the book or here to read another extract. Mike
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