‘That’s extraordinary,’ breathed Straker.
‘He’s been up here on the simulator a couple of times — he’ll be fit to race again soon.’
The two men walked in among parts of the wreckage, and Straker looked at the twisted remains. ‘How much of the car do you think you’ve recovered?’ he asked, as he watched five men working intensely across the floor, measuring, scraping and weighing components, while a colleague was busy recording their findings into a computer to one side.
‘About eighty per cent.’
‘Will that be enough? What if we’re missing key bits?’
‘We won’t get an answer,’ replied Nazar flatly.
‘And there’s no indication, so far, of what caused the crash?’
The team boss shook his head. ‘Not yet, but these things take time, and they really only come together once the initial — time-consuming — recording is completed. We’re still in the assimilation phase.’
Nazar led Straker away, and up to his office. Treadwell was waiting for them there.
‘How’s Remy taken the news of Backhouse’s defection?’ Straker asked.
‘She’s mighty pissed off,’ replied Treadwell in surprisingly soft Australian. ‘She and Andy were incredibly close.’
‘How will you handle his departure?’
‘Ollie used to be one of our race engineers,’ offered Nazar.
‘Yeah, I’m going to work with her.’
‘Will she be okay with the disruption?’
‘Hope so.’
‘Good,’ said Straker sounding a little relieved.
‘How the hell did this happen?’ Nazar asked. ‘How did Backhouse crack — then defect?’
‘Maybe he never left Massarella,’ offered Treadwell suspiciously. ‘You know he was with them for ten years before he came here.’
Straker shrugged. ‘I do know he was pretty cut up about the threat to safety from the saboteur.’
‘That doesn’t wash,’ replied Nazar dismissively. ‘It might explain the resignation — but is completely inconsistent with his going to the team that we think’re behind the sabotage.’
‘Unless he only left Massarella in the first place to infiltrate us as part of some long-term deception?’
Straker shook his head. ‘It could just be more prosaic than that. When I came up here before and stayed with him, Backhouse was pretty open about his domestic affairs. He’s recently divorced. His wife cleaned him out financially as well as emotionally, taking the children. He lives in a pokey little terraced house in Tysoe. Drives an ancient Ford Focus. I can imagine Massarella would have offered him an appealing solution to his money troubles.’
‘We’ll only know for sure when we get to ask him, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.’
‘Right,’ said Straker, taking the comment as a welcome cue to change the subject. ‘Can we talk about protecting ourselves, from now on, against Backhouse’s defection — and against Trifecta?’
‘I thought the Big Man was serving him with an injunction, even if it was only a phoney one?’ replied Treadwell.
‘What Backhouse knows about our cars — now — is going to be out of date pretty quickly,’ said Nazar. ‘I’m not that fussed.’
‘Really?’ said Straker a little surprised. ‘Remind me to talk to you about our Fibonacci Blades when we’re done.’
‘I thought you said on the phone that you wanted to talk about Trifecta?’
Straker nodded. ‘I do. Our sabotage experience is becoming extensive. We’ve uncovered a number of people who seem to be involved in this. But I believe there is a clear common denominator. Somehow every incident we’ve suffered links back to Trifecta. Every one. It strikes me that we’ve either got to stop them, which would not be straightforward — or we have to remove them, completely, as any form of future threat.’
‘Couldn’t we just confront the senior management?’ suggested Treadwell. ‘Do we really believe the board are behind all this — even aware of, let alone sanction, these incidents? It’s a grown-up firm — with grown-up directors. Surely a word with any of them would cleanse the firm of any roguish activity?’
‘Fair point,’ Straker replied. ‘How big’s the company — how many staff?’
‘About a thousand.’
‘A security nightmare,’ observed Straker with conviction. ‘Far too big for us to be sure they’ve flushed out every rogue employee. And we’d still have the influence of Obrenovich, as a shareholder. I was thinking — can we not be more surgical? Can we not switch everything to another provider? That way, we would cut Trifecta out as a risk — once and for all.’
Treadwell scoffed. ‘Okay for things like our radios and data links, but Trifecta are integral to our engine management system. Starting again — in the middle of the season — could set our performance back months.’
Straker had already considered this difficulty. ‘Aren’t there other ECM contractors in the swim? Don’t other Benbecular runners use different firms?’
‘Yes,’ said Nazar. ‘Valentines would be the biggest. Cohens are probably the more specialized.’
‘Can we not at least ask them some questions about their capabilities and discuss a possible switch to them?’
Treadwell looked decidedly unhappy.
‘We’ll look into it,’ said Nazar, with a hint of an overruling.
‘Good,’ said Straker. ‘I think that’s it, then, for now.’
‘Thanks for your help, Matt,’ said Nazar. Then, sounding slightly intrigued, he said: ‘Hang on. You asked us to remind you about our Fibonacci Blades?’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Straker, ‘should I be surprised to see precisely the same design on the front wing of the Massarella in Spa?’
‘What?’ asked Nazar, sounding genuinely taken aback. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Completely.’
‘How the hell did they get there?’
‘What about Andy fucking Backhouse?’ offered Treadwell, slumping back in his chair. ‘If he was only ever with us as a Massarella plant, why wouldn’t he have leaked our modifications and ideas back to them as well?’
THIRTY
Straker returned to Fulham.
But the empty flat didn’t do it for him. His sense of loss nearly prompted him to move out and stay in one of the shockingly retro bedrooms in his beloved Brooks’s.
In the end, though, his tiredness prevailed, and he fell asleep. But the talk of treachery and betrayal had clearly triggered Straker’s subconscious.
During the night, his psyche harked back to the last time he felt betrayal — his last encounter with Charlie Grant. He relived every moment of the night he had spent with her, in this flat, in London.
His mind swirled back to the morning after. It was all so vivid still. Leaving her sleeping, Straker had gone through to the kitchen to make breakfast for them both. He was wallowing in the afterglow of intimacy and first sex with this amazing new woman in his life.
But that feeling didn’t last.
Heart-stoppingly, he came across, entirely by accident, the woman’s ID card, lying on the floor, having fallen from her bag — collateral damage from their frenzied passion of the night before. He realized immediately that this serene beauty was not with him by accident. It was clear that she had deliberately targeted him, aiming to exploit information about his assignment — so as to thwart Quartech’s defence contract with Buhran and Quartano’s relationship with that regime. She turned out to be nothing less than an — as-yet-unmet — colleague in Quartech’s Competition Intelligence, his own department. Charlie Grant, he had discovered through her own proximity to him, turned out to be the traitor he had been tasked to uncover. She had been the one leaking highly secret and commercially sensitive data to outsiders. She was the reason the weapons contract with Buhran needed salvaging. She had been the one betraying the company.