LE MANS a novel

Le Mans

by Dakota Franklin

On the track a racer has no friends

Mallory, a crashed-out, half-dead, never-has-been auto racer, gets one last chance when triple Le Mans winner Charlie Cartwright hires her as an engineer at Cartwright-Armitage. Now she’s on the fast track as an engineer, an executive, a driver — in a winning car! She even has a man she can love.

When ambitious tycoon Fred Minster steals the winning Cartwright-Armitage design, Mallory spearheads the investigation which uncovers a traitor inside Armitage.

Threatened by her investigation, Minster orders Mallory abducted by a Detroit criminal to keep her out of the race. Mallory knows that if she doesn’t race at Le Mans, her career is over.

With heart-stopping, realistic race sequences both in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) and at Le Mans, set against an insider’s portrait of the high-tech jet set milieu of amoral predators whose only justification is winning, Le Mans is the key thriller for the new millenium. Here violence is never as much as skin deep, and ambiguous sexuality is merely another facet of power. Le Mans is the first novel launched in Dakota’s great new series

RUTHLESS TO WIN

CONTENTS

Cover & Jacket Copy

Le Mans

Extras

RUTHLESS TO WIN the series

Dakota BIO • Dakota PHOTO • Dakota CONTACTS

Sample chapters from more books published by CoolMain Press

IDITAROD•THE MEYERSCO HELIX•STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress

Series Editor: André Jute

Ruthless to Win

Le Mans

Dakota Franklin

CoolMain Press

Copyright © Dakota Franklin 2011

The author has asserted her moral right

First published by

CoolMain Press 2011

at Smashwords

ISBN 978-1-908369-04-8

Series Editor: André Jute

Editor: Claudine van Wyk

Associate Editor: Sarah Dixon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

Woman on a bed

Directly below, a woman lies spread-eagled on a bed, tied to it, blindfold.

This is confusing. How can I be on the bed and up here, seeing it?

Worse, there is also a woman in another bed, a blue coverlet pulled up to the breast of a blue gown. There is a blood transfusion stand, pipes entering her arm. Not blood, because the IV tube contains clear liquid, either sustenance or medication or both.

Very confusing, seeing two of me at two different times.

I wonder who I am, and why I’m suddenly so important I’ve become twins, no less.

Er, triplets, to count the invisible seeing-me as well as the wounded-me and the captive-me in the beds.

There’s a sense of malice even in the hospital room, but at some low background level that would just about keep a Geiger counter of ill-will ticking over.

In the other room, where the woman is tied to the bed, the malice-measurer is chattering fit to shake itself apart.

Who means me harm? Why? Why me?

Perhaps, if I could only remember who I am, I could tell…

What has the cat to do with it? I don’t have a cat! I’m quite pleased with this revelation. I don’t have a cat! It is something to cling onto.

Not my cat, the neighbor’s cat.

The hospital room is real, an historical landmark in my life. I know that for a fact, though don’t ask me to justify the knowledge with chapter and verse.

Someone held a cloth soaked in chloroform over my nose and mouth while I cubed fresh pork for the neighbor’s cat. I’m in another real, historical scene from my life.

Just Mallory

The white haze was immensely frightening. I breathed slowly, suppressing terror until I could see. Eventually my eyes focused. I lay in a white room. Beside my bed stood a wheeled stand, suspending an upturned bottle and a pipe that disappeared into my arm. I was in hospital, fed intravenously.

No idea why.

My scalp itched but when I tried to scratch it, I banged myself on the temple heavily enough to see stars. When my eyes cleared again, through the tears I could not wipe, I saw that my arm was in plaster. My right leg also itched. My eyes would not focus but I assumed the leg too was in plaster: the out-of-focus white oblong at the edge of my vision.

I closed my eyes and waited.

The panic subsided. Hospitals are safe.

A nurse came.

‘What happened?’ I asked her.

She leaned across me.

‘What happened?’ I said again.

‘Don’t try to speak,’ she said, holding a glass to my lips.

I drank greedily. When the glass was empty I tried again. ‘What happened?’

Even to me, my voice sounded garbled.

She smiled. She was buxom and motherly, about forty. ‘Rest,’ she said. She fluffed the pillows and went out.

After a while a pair of doctors came, accompanied by the motherly nurse. They examined me, talking with professional casualness.

‘How do you feel?’

‘My head hurts.’

Something flitted across the younger doctor’s eyes. They did not understand me either. But they did not ask me to repeat myself.

‘What’s your name?’

I didn’t know. The panic set in again. I must have flailed my limbs, or tried to, because a needle I did not see pricked my arm and I fell asleep.

When I woke dawn shone hopefully outside the window. I noted that I could see better. There was something under the hand with the intravenous feed so, not wanting to pull out any pipe work, I explored it by touch. It was round. A bell. I pressed it.

A young nurse came. ‘How are you?’

‘My head still...’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. Somehow between beginning and end of the sentence I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh yes, my head hurts.

She seemed not to notice. She gave me water. She went out but returned not too long after to feed me a couple of pills and more water. Then she brought a bedpan.

Later the nurse came to ask me, ‘Will you eat breakfast?’

I was not hungry but nodded. My grandmother always said that the day does not start right without breakfast. The nurse smiled at me when I jerked as she pulled off the plaster holding the intravenous feed. ‘Good. You felt that.’

She cut up my food and raised me in the bed, with pillows behind me. I fed myself, not worrying about food dropping on the dark blue hospital gown. My right arm and both my legs were in plaster.

At midmorning rounds the doctors prodded me here and there and seemed pleased enough with my responses. They showed no reaction at my inability to finish my sentences. I studied them carefully.

They were already turning away when I said explosively, "Mal-lory!’

‘Good,’ the oldest one said. ‘What’s your first name?’

‘Just Mallory,’ I said, but it came out garbled. ‘What happened?’

That too came out garbled but he understood. ‘Car accident,’ he said.

I was too tired to ask more questions. I lay back and don’t remember what happened after that. I must have fallen sleep.

By the third day I gathered that I crashed at a place called Road Atlanta. By the fifth day I knew I was an auto racer. Hazy memories taunted me. A young doctor told me not to tease at my memory; it would return. But I sensed that they worried about my poor articulation and my inability to finish anything longer than a simple sentence.

When Jackie-Joe Jones, Jnr walked in, I knew immediately who he is. He owns and is the number one driver of the 4J racing team whose number two car I crashed.

‘Sorry,’ I said to him.

His face was horrified at my condition. I wondered what I looked like. Jackie-Joe is in his own way a sly Southerner, but his duplicity does not extend to the good manners of controlling his face in an extreme social situation like this one.

He turned his back on me to put grapes on the counter along the wall, composing his face.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ I tried to tell him. Racers do not expect other racers to visit them in hospital. No one wants to be reminded how dangerous the sport is. I felt inordinately pleased with myself for remembering that.

Jackie-Joe sat on the chair beside my bed. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Luck of the game. Concentrate on recovering.’

A nurse told him not to stay longer than five minutes, and me not to try to talk.

Jackie-Joe nattered on. All I remembered after he went, looking relieved to be out of there, was that some racer from Oregon would drive his second car for the rest of the season.

He didn’t tell me to come see him when I came out of hospital.

That is only to be expected. I drove for him only twice. One undistinguished finish, one crash that, judging by my condition, totaled the car.

There are hordes of competent drivers competing for the few seats. Jackie-Joe gave me a break. It cost him. He owes me nothing more.

That evening my father called. ‘Don’t try to speak,’ he said when I answered the phone on my bedside table. ‘I’ve talked to your doctors and you’re doing well. Better prognosis than expected. That’s more than your own physicians will tell you.’

As he chuckled at his own joke, an image of a tall, thin man with wispy white hair flashed before my eyes. He is a doctor, I remembered.

Mother? I wondered. I recollected a woman in a summer dress at a picnic on a headland overlooking the sea. In this vision I was the little girl with the kite.

I started crying, but softly so that my father should not hear me.

‘I shall come to bring you home you when you are well enough to travel,’ he said before he rang off.

Three days later Charlie Cartwright came.

I recognized him too. Even a half-dead auto racer would know Charlie Cartwright. He is a living demi-god: he won outright at Le Mans three times in cars of his own construction.

He is in his late thirties, a compact man, tall for a top racer at five-nine or -ten but not much taller than me. He is nondescript, average looking, handsome in an unassertive way. The boy next door. Kevin Costner when he was young. If you don’t know that he is a world-class athlete, you’ll pass him in the street and not remember him. He wore a dark pinstriped single-breasted suit, a white shirt and a deliberately undistinguished tie. His leather shoes gleamed.

I raised myself painfully on the pillows. If I were able, I would have stood.

He is an Englishman, his base at Woking in the South of England, which so many of the top European teams call home. I wondered what he was doing here.

He drove in the race in which I crashed, sharing a car with Nicko Sullivan. At one stage I was just behind him when he lay fourth after a pit stop, so I must have been up to fifth.

My God! Fifth in my second race in the highest class I can aspire to.

He put a largish makeup case, the kind that looks like a professional camera case, on the bedside table. To me it looked like real leather, with double stitching in cheerful yellow, irregular enough to be hand stitched.

‘Carolina thought you might like makeup,’ he said. He paused a moment before he added ‘My wife,’ I remembered that he is married to an American who makes racing films, and that her name is Carolina.

He moved the pillows up so that I could sit more comfortably. He focused for a moment on the extravagant bank of flowers on the counter. He must have sent the flowers but said nothing about them.

He pulled my nightdress collar to cover my breasts better. ‘Hospital is so undignified.’

I didn’t know him from anywhere. I saw him at the track, of course, and sat behind him at the driver briefing, but junior journeyman racers like me don’t hobnob with manufacturers and entrants and three-time Le Mans winners, especially not triple threat manufacturer-entrant-drivers like Charlie Cartwright.

I was not offended. His gesture with the collar recognized that I am a woman and dismissed it as irrelevant.

What business could he have with me? Charlie Cartwright!

‘May I call you Daphne?’ he asked as he drew up a chair.

‘No!’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘All right.’

‘Mallory,’ I said. ‘I don’t speak too well.’

His face was still. He showed nothing when he saw my condition, he showed nothing when he heard me struggle to speak, a form of co-ordination most of us take for granted. But he is British and must have seen hurt and even dead racers before. His father is a lord, so he is an aristocrat, and I suppose therefore has better manners than most people.

‘I don’t speak too well,’ I said again.

This time he understood.

‘You don’t like Daphne?’

‘Just Mallory.’

‘All right, Mallory. I’m Charlie Cartwright.’

I nodded. I knew.

‘You look like hell. Are you in pain still?’

‘Comfortable.’

After a moment he nodded, then realized it was a joke and chuckled.

I put out my good left hand. Instead of shaking it he just held it on the bedclothes. Even on first acquaintance he struck me as a very comforting man. I somehow knew he would hold a man’s hand as easily if the man needed a warm presence.

‘The doctors say it will be several months before you recover well enough to know whether you will drive again.’

‘You’re a blunt bastard.’

His face was bland and blank, so I said it again, slowly.

He nodded and shrugged. ‘I was behind you a couple of times out of the pits. I admired your work.’

‘I crashed.’

‘Sure. You were trying to keep up with better cars and more experienced drivers.’

Bitterness flooded me as I remembered.

They have more experience and drive better cars because they are men. I am twenty-eight years old and crashed in my second race in the top class because it took me that long to rise that far, because a woman has to fight so much harder in a man’s sport to be given last year’s halfway decent car, to gain the right experience.

It does no good to whine and blame the world for your failures.

‘Driver error.’ I spoke in short sentences because I tended to forget the ends of longer ones. Before his face could again become especially bland, I repeated myself.

‘Good God! Haven’t they told you?’

I shook my head. Told me what?

‘Your car suffered a brake failure which locked up the front wheels. Then someone nudged you and you crashed into another car. There was nothing you could do.’

‘Is the other driver all right?’

‘He walked away.’

I nodded. My face was composed, though from my heart I shot daggers at Jackie-Joe Jones Junior for not telling me.

Charlie Cartwright nodded as if he knew and understood what I thought. His hand gestured at the room. ‘Insurance?’ He meant to pay the bills.

‘Enough,’ I said.

He nodded again.

‘What will you do when you come out of here?’

I shrugged as well as I could inside the weight of plaster. Then I raised my hand to check that my nightdress was still pulled up at the neck.

Charlie Cartwright lowered his eyes. I squeezed his hand to indicate that I did not think he was staring at my breasts.

What the hell. They were still denying me a mirror. A man might never again look at me in lust. My head bandages were removed a few times and replaced but my request for a mirror was ignored as if unheard. The nurses followed their orders.

‘Father. Doctor. Home.’

‘And after that?’

‘Racing.’ It was all I ever wanted to do. My present condition has nothing to do with it. I always knew I could crash and be maimed or killed. Disfiguration never entered my head. Some things are better not to think about.

‘For whom?’

He didn’t reach the top by being marshmallow in the center. It was a cruel question. In six seasons of scrounging drives I progressed to the 4J team, whose car’s wheels locked up at over 180mph, possibly through a mechanical failure due to human error. No one would give me another chance.

I shook my head, trying to keep my face as bland as his.

‘What are you doing here?’

He understood that immediately.

He grinned at me. ‘I decided before I passed you again to offer you a job.’

I freed my hand from his to gesture at the plaster and the bandage around my head. ‘Still?’

‘Uh-huh. I came by first to see if you need anything, help with the bills, a place to stay when you come out of hospital, suchlike. At Cartwright-Armitage we take a paternal attitude to our employees.’ He waited for me to smile at his joke. ‘You’re a trained automobile engineer with several years of racing experience. Even if you never drive again, that makes you attractive.’

I wondered if Mr Charlie Cartwright lives in the real world. Despite graduating in the top ten in engineering at MIT, I couldn’t land a job in automotive engineering, though I applied. And applied and applied. My auto-racing career was most likely over because I was forever forced to take second-best cars — and try harder with them than is safe. I suddenly realized that I was lucky to survive six full years before having a serious accident.

Charlie Cartwright is manna from heaven, I thought. He may be brutally frank but he displays decent impulses.

I nodded. It was the only offer I was likely to receive. It was beyond any dreams I ever entertained after my first year of looking for a job, any job, for which my education suits me, or a ride, any ride, never mind in a decent car.

He rose. ‘When you recover, call me.’ He put a card from his wallet in my hand. ‘If you need money meanwhile, call Adam Boyle at my office and he’ll send you some.’

I raised my good hand in thanks and good-bye but he was already passing through the door.

Time out

You may reasonably ask, when this is the story of my new life, why I tell you of the involuntary end of my old life.

I never did anything about the incompetent mechanic, in fact I never saw him again.

It is true that Jackie-Joe Jones Junior, features again later in this story. But his reappearance, regardless of its exorbitant consequences, is incidental, an artifact of the tiny compass and tinier population of auto racing. It would have been surprising if I didn’t run into Jackie-Joe. When I saw him again, I didn’t even kick him in the crotch.

I am telling you for two good reasons.

The last six years explain why I was so easily seduced by the wealth and power, the arrogance of Cartwright-Armitage. Those six years explain the hurry with which I made myself an insider when the opportunity offered.

And that frightening experience of waking up in hospital explains why I thought I had been in another racing incident (we don’t ever say ‘accident’!) when later I woke up blindfold in the hands of a man who intended to rape me and then to torture me to death.

***

To cut short a long and painful continuous physiotherapy treatment, it was not until five months later that I called Charlie Cartwright. The conversation lasted all of fifteen seconds.

‘This is Mallory. I’m ready to work but I can’t yet drive.’ My co-ordination was still not great and my concentration lapsed easily. I tired quickly. He could hear for himself that I still spoke slowly and change his mind about giving me a job. I would not prompt him. I wanted that job.

I would sweep floors and clean toilets to get on the inside of Cartwright Armitage Advanced Research.

‘I’ll send a ticket.’

‘I still have some money.’ I was staying with my father. What remained of my meager savings would just about cover an economy fare.

‘We’ll refund it. Come to the office straight from the airport.’

He rang off without saying good-bye.

Woking

A uniformed security guard stopped my cab at the chain-link fence. I looked around a prosperous industrial estate with clean buildings and much greenery. After a while a trim woman in her early thirties came to identify me. I paid off the cab at the gate and we walked towards the left-hand of the twin two-storey white buildings behind the chain link fence. My luggage consisted of a battered vinyl carry-on bag and the elegant black leather makeup-case. She insisted on carrying both.

Though it was a bitterly cold mid-November day, she walked at my pace. I still walked slowly so as not to tire myself unduly.

‘I’m Helga Baer,’ she said. ‘I’m Hans Richsler’s administrative assistant. Herr Richsler is general manager of CAAR.’ It took me a moment to realize she meant the firm rather than generic automobiles. ‘Hans and Charlie are the bosses of our division but Charlie is hardly ever in our office. He’s still operations director for the Armitage grand prix team.’ She gestured at the other white building. ‘They both spend a lot of time at a factory going up in Wales to build the new cheap sports car when Piero finishes designing it.’

‘Cheap?’ Charlie sells road cars based on his mid-engined Le Mans racers for over a million dollars each, and a front-engined two-door four-seater with the same engine for two-thirds that much. He also sells precisely the same cars he races to all comers with the money, though my dreams were never so unrealistic as to ask for how much. Probably at least double the price of the road car.

Helga grinned at me. ‘Cheaper. More than twice the price of the most expensive Porsche. We’re friends with Porsche, so we don’t want to step on their toes. They make our engines.’

Hans Richsler pushes seventy. He is shorter than me and slightly chubby, bald and nicely tanned even in November. He wore a white three-quarter length coat over a white shirt and tie. Everyone else I saw, including Helga, wore informal clothes. He shook my hand but didn’t invite me to sit. I said, ‘How do you do, Herr Richsler.’

‘I’m afraid, Miss Mallory, that you won’t be working for the sports car division for the time being. Mr Cartwright is hoping that you will help on the grand prix side until they can fill a position there. Will that be all right?’

‘Of course. But I know nothing of open-wheelers. Please call me Mallory. Just Mallory.’

He smiled and nodded. ‘Willingness is worth more than knowledge. You will learn. I am impressed with your grades at MIT, a school almost Teutonic in its thoroughness.’ It was a joke, so I smiled when he smiled. ‘Mr Cartwright is testing at Kyalami in South Africa but he will be here tomorrow. For today, we’ll get you settled in. Helga will take you to see Mr Boyle, our finance director.’

From the look of Helga’s large office, with a secretary outside, she is much more than a skivvy.

Helga walked me to the other building. ‘Everyone is agog at the coming of the lady racer,’ she said gaily. ‘You look normal, though.’

I chuckled. ‘I won’t be racing for a while. You speak good English.’ There was only the slightest accent, as if she would speak German with a lilt.

‘The lingua franca of racing.’

She led me past the entrance behind which I could see a receptionist and a stairway. ‘Mallory is joining us,’ she said to another guard at a big sliding door. He opened the door for us.

We walked around the wall built across the door so that everything inside is invisible even when the door is open. The space to the sides is large enough for a truck to turn around. Beyond the wall we entered the workshop. At the far end stood four grand prix cars on wheelable easels. Four easels stood empty. I imagined they belonged to the cars being tested at Kyalami, where it would be warmer in the Southern hemisphere’s summer.

The workshop was clinically clean. Literally. A surgeon could operate in it. In the corner by the ramp, men in white coats drank mugs of tea and laughed at a joke.

Helga led me up the ramp to the offices on the second floor. Adam Boyle’s secretary waved me into a corner office with windows on two sides. Adam Boyle is deep into his fifties, sporting an heroic paunch. His hair is still all black.

He shook my hand. ‘You like to be called Mallory? Just Mallory?’

I nodded. ‘If you were christened Daphne...’

He smiled. ‘I’ve forgotten it already. Call me Adam. Let’s sit over here.’

We sat in leather easy chairs around a coffee table. His secretary brought coffee. He introduced me to her and I rose to shake her hand.

‘First things first,’ he said, handing me a check. ‘Your airfare.’

I looked at the check. ‘About one dollar sixty cents to a British pound?’ He nodded. ‘This is much more than I paid for my ticket.’

‘Eh? That’s the price of a first class ticket and a few pounds for incidentals.’

‘I flew economy.’ I held the check out to him.

He didn’t take it. ‘Don’t worry about it. Did Hans explain to you that we need help urgently in the grand prix division? We’d like you to fill in until we can find someone permanent, at which time you will join the sports car division.’

‘Yes. I’d be delighted to do anything you think I’m suited to.’

‘Good.’ He gave me a sheet of paper.

At the top I read my name, then the word ‘Salary’ and an amount.

‘Er—’ I just could not help the exclamation. No one who graduated with me and won one of the jobs I so much wanted now earns anywhere near that much.

‘We pay well. We expect total loyalty.’

I expected to be interviewed before I was offered the job, to let them study my carefully prepared and beautifully typed CV, to answer questions. Clearly they investigated me, because Herr Richsler knows about my engineering grades from MIT. Perhaps they work differently from American car companies, I thought.

I nodded. The rest of the sheet was a confidentiality agreement. When I put it on the table, Adam held out his pen to me. I signed and gave it back to him.

‘You also receive medical insurance and we pay any balance it doesn’t cover,’ he said. ‘We have a flat and a car for you, but if you don’t like either you can change them.’ A ‘flat’ is a British apartment. He slid some more forms over the table to me. ‘Sign those where the crosses are, and the attached cards. Your expenses on company credit cards are unlimited and unvouchered. We do everything first class. In future, fly first class. Okay?’

I nodded again. I was speechless. Five months ago I was a crippled has-been racer who crashed out of the top class after two races, an engineering graduate who couldn’t find a job without going to court to charge discrimination.

‘You’re on six months’ probation. After six months, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll give you a generous severance payment and we part with no hard feelings. If it works out, we’ll expect you to be here for life.’

For such generosity I would be. ‘Thank you.’

‘I noticed that you read the confidentiality agreement right through before you signed it. I’ll give you a copy. It holds even if you leave us.’

‘I understand.’ The technical secrets of a racing car manufacturer are its lifeblood.

Adam gave me another sheet. ‘The name of a good outside physiotherapist and our team doctor. Both already have your files, forwarded by your father. If you don’t like them, change them. However, you must take a medical every six months with our company doctor if you’re to drive our cars, besides all the official racing license medicals.’

‘Sure.’ I didn’t know they were corresponding with my father.

‘We’ve also signed you up for a good gym with the necessary machinery for your exercises. We have a fine gym on the premises but the problem with compulsory daily exercises like yours is that the in-house physio and the machines are often tied up with the drivers’ and pit crews’ fitness programs. This outside gym is only two blocks from your flat. Helga and many of the women who work at Armitage use it. We pay, of course.’

What is ‘of course’ about such forethought and generosity, I wondered. ‘This is overwhelming.’

‘Wait until you discover the hours we work before you become too grateful. Sign these forms and let’s go settle you in. They’re just car insurance and suchlike. Routine. You don’t need to read them.’

He inspired trust, like a favorite uncle. I signed without reading. Days of administration lay behind this fifteen-minute meeting. No wonder these people win so many races.

Downstairs Adam led me to a red BMW 5 Series a fair way from the front door. ‘This is your car. We ordered you an automatic. If you don’t like the car, exchange it for whatever you do like. Try to keep to something in the BMW range, or a Honda. The British CAAR distributor has several Beemer dealerships. Honda makes our grand prix engines.’

‘Back home I drove a 1967 Camaro. A BMW is beyond my dreams, Adam.’

‘I’ll drive you to your flat.’

‘Is this my parking space?’

‘No. Park anywhere, except next to the workshop door. That’s Jack Armitage’s place. He’s in a wheelchair. The rest of us just park where there is space left. We don’t stand on formality, except it pays to call Hans Herr Richsler until you are as old as I am.’

He slowed in a leafy street and turned into the drive of a two-family house, what the British call semi-detached. With nothing else to do except physiotherapy and exercises, I spent months reading up about Britain.

The building itself struck me as ugly on the outside. The open-plan ground floor entranced me with what seemed to be an acre of teak floor, covered by throw rugs to the glass wall beyond the kitchen. The furniture looked Scandinavian, everything brand new and of the best. Having spent my entire adulthood in college dorms and the cheapest motels, it appeared a palace.

‘Bathroom and bedroom upstairs,’ Adam said. ‘Also a spare bedroom and another bedroom fitted out as a gym.’

‘Can I afford this?’

‘We pay for your flat.’

I looked out through the glass wall behind the kitchen onto the beautifully tended long garden.

‘A professional gardener looks after it.’ Adam gave me a folder he brought with him. ‘We opened a bank account for you. There’s a map in there. Shopping is a few blocks over. Doctor, physio, gym, other useful places are marked. The streets in this area are safe at night if you’re a jogger. There’s food in the fridge. Why don’t you unpack and rest. Tomorrow, come to the works about ten o’clock and we’ll get you settled.’

I walked out, intending to drive him back to the office, but a long wheelbase BMW with a uniformed driver waited. He climbed into the back, raised his cigar at me, and was driven away.

I did a little war dance on the gravel of the drive, my drive! Then went in to inspect my new home.

Liaison

I arrived at ‘the works’ at nine-thirty and drove around the industrial estate for twenty-five minutes rather than go in before people expected me. I found big buildings with boards announcing them as the headquarters of Microsoft and IBM. England is not so far from home, I thought.

I was ready to go.

Yesterday afternoon I slept a couple of hours, called the physio who surprised me by saying she would see me that afternoon, spent an hour in the gym, made a meal, slobbed in front of the television watching a high-quality documentary on the BBC, and slept for another ten hours.

For the first time in months I did not rise feeling tired. Even the small scar under my eye did not look livid, as it did until only yesterday. For the first time I believed the doctors who said I would not require plastic surgery, that in time it will become almost invisible. My hair was long enough again to cover the scars left on my head by the neurosurgeons.

At five to ten I drove to the gate and showed the guard the pass from Adam’s folder. ‘Stop here and show this pass to all the men until they recognize you, then we’ll wave you through,’ he said. ‘If you have anyone in the car with you, stop so we can identify them. Always, if you don’t mind.’

I parked at the far end of the full car park and walked into the offices.

Adam came out of his office just as I arrived. ‘Morning. Come with me.’

He led me into another corner office, full of people. A man in a wheelchair shot out from behind the desk.

‘Jack, this is Mallory,’ Adam said, adding unnecessarily, ‘Jack Armitage.’

Jack Armitage is a legend, a grand prix constructor with many driver’s and constructor’s championships under his belt. He is a handsome aquiline man, though his face is lined with pain. He has been in the wheelchair for thirty years.

‘Welcome. Have you settled in?’

‘Yes, thank you, sir.’

‘Call me Jack.’

Charlie came in just then. He held me by the shoulders and looked frankly at my face. Over his shoulder he said to the rest, ‘Last time I saw Mallory her face was a mass of bruises and cuts. She sported so many broken bones she looked like a fire sale in a plaster of Paris factory. I feared she would end up like Jack.’

I swallowed but the men laughed and Jack, the only one who didn’t laugh, turned over his hand on the arm of his wheelchair in what I would later learn is his gesture of amusement. He never laughs or smiles.

Adam said, ‘This is Piero Agnelli, our technical director.’ He is a year or two younger than me, a slender boy in a dark blazer with a white shirt open at the neck, his narrow face topped by straight black hair brushed straight back. He became grand prix world champion at twenty-two and retired immediately. He worked as a designer with McLaren for a few years before joining Armitage. He is married to Charlie’s niece.

Piero bowed over my hand rather than shaking it. ‘I’m delighted and relieved that you are here,’ he said.

‘Ugo Jenssens, our driver,’ said Adam.

A blonde Dane, twenty-nine years old, third in the driver’s championship for Ferrari this past season. He lounged in a chair, leg over the arm, sneakered foot swinging. He waved at me, muscles rippling on his bare arm. Even in mid-November he wore a T-shirt. Over the back of the chair hung a fleece-lined leather bomber jacket.

‘Coffee on the sideboard,’ Jack said, ‘or you can drink tea with me.’

‘I’ll try tea, thanks.’

Jack rolled his chair behind his desk, on which stood a tray. He poured a cup and I walked around the desk to take it. ‘Sit anywhere,’ he said. ‘How’d the car go, Piero?’

‘Well, but not well enough.’

Ugo said, ‘Stable. Excellent turn-in.’

‘But not fast enough,’ Charlie said. ‘We have some numbers we heard by the back door on Williams and McLaren. Their new cars are phenomenal, and Ferrari is right on their heels.’

‘If we could improve the down-force nearly another twenty kilo,’ Piero said.

Jack looked doubtful. ‘What about the engine?’

‘The Honda team went straight to Japan from Kyalami,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s their break.’

‘I’ll call them when they reach home,’ Piero said, ‘see what they can squeeze out. We can’t recover that level of disadvantage on just one parameter. It will have to be an all-round effort. It could amount to a complete redesign. The cost will be enormous.’

‘Let Adam and me worry about the cost,’ Jack said. ‘Get on with it.’

The meeting was over. I leaned over to put my half-drunk tea on Jack’s tray. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the tea, which was excellent, but the meeting did not last long enough for me to drink it. I followed the others out.

Charlie and Piero led me into the design studio, a long, brightly lit room with multitudes of huge drafting monitors at generously spaced stations. No one paid us special attention as we walked through. At the back, through a glass wall, I saw a modeling studio large enough to build a full size car. A glass-walled office was dark. Piero, I read in a magazine interview, prefers to work at a monitor in the studio with the designers.

‘You work for my sports car division,’ Charlie said to me. ‘For the time being however, we need someone urgently to liaise between the test teams and the design engineers on the grand prix car. As you just heard, we have an emergency. Hans and Adam tell me you have no objection.’

‘Not at all. Whatever you think I’m capable of. But I know nothing about open-wheelers.’

‘A racing car is a racing car,’ Charlie said impatiently.

Piero grimaced. ‘What we need is someone who understands what the drivers say and can translate it into engineering jargon.’ Piero has not a trace of an Italian accent. ‘You have a foot in both camps. You will be the design department’s representative with the test team and the test team’s representative with the designers. It’s a liaison job.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘It’s a permanent job, if you like it. Otherwise, when the season starts and we have time to find someone else, we’ll give you back to Charlie.’ He meant the grand prix season.

‘She comes back to sports when my V8 starts testing,’ Charlie said with finality. ‘At the latest a month before pre-qualifying for Le Mans. Find your own staff, Piero!’ A secretary came to the door of the studio, pointed at Charlie and tapped her wristwatch. ‘Good luck,’ he said to me and walked away quickly.

‘Motor racing as big business,’ Piero said. ‘When I was a student I thought it was all romance and thrills.’ He had been a careful auto racer, known as The Professor for his cool calculation. That he thought of himself as a romantic was a revelation. ‘Come, I’ll introduce you to everyone.’

The Formula One liaison officer’s desk turned out to be one of the front three, the other two belonging to Piero and the Chief Designer, Ludovico dell’ Mira, quaintly called the Chief Draftsman. When Piero finished introducing me and conducted me to my desk, we found a late thirtyish man in a beautifully cut tweed jacket waiting for me.

‘Your desk, and your laptop,’ Piero said with a sudden weird lack of enthusiasm. ‘This is Fawn Rowan, from Harrington’s, our security consultants.’

‘You may call me Sergeant,’ Sergeant Rowan said briskly. He is a handsome, well-muscled man with a slight smile on his face — until you notice his eyes which give nothing away. I thought it likely he had been a soldier; he lacked the pushy manner of a policeman but on the other hand one couldn’t imagine denying a request from him.

He put the laptop he brought on the desk beside the keyboard and drafting pad already standing before the huge drafting screen. I had never in my life seen so much expensive electronic equipment as in that room.

In fact, I had never in my life seen so many automobile design engineers together. Armitage does things on an altogether overwhelming scale.

Since the Sergeant said nothing but looked at me piercingly as if trying to extract a guilty secret, I asked, ‘Why do I need a laptop as well as all this?’

‘You’ll be in the field a lot. This laptop connects you securely to the mainframe.’ He pointed to the floor, as if intending me to understand the ‘mainframe’ was somewhere below us. ‘First, give me your mobile so I can destroy it.’

‘What?’

‘What you Americans call your cell phone.’

‘I don’t have one.’ I had a cheap one but it was stolen from my effects after I crashed.

‘Just as well.’ He gave me an elaborate cell phone from his pocket. ‘You are not to make any calls whatsoever on any phone but this secure mobile phone. No landlines except from your office here. Use this phone for all your personal calls as well.’

‘Why?’

‘Security. People spy on Armitage. Even a call about travel arrangements is useful information to a spy who knows that you travel to tests. Clear?’

I nodded.

‘The laptop will give you access to all the plans on the mainframe. You don’t want to lose your flash new job by sharing secrets with the opposition, do you?’

‘No. I understand about technical security.’

‘We’ll see if you really do. First, let’s deal with the passwords for the phone and the laptop, then I’ll explain what you are and are not allowed to do.’

It was lunchtime before the Sergeant went. Someone behind me sighed in loud relief.

‘Security consultants don’t need to be popular,’ said the chief designer, Ludo dell’ Mira, an elegant Italian in his late forties. ‘Just effective.’

Someone else said, ‘That Fawn Rowan is from Harrington’s shooting and being shot at unit. He’s a bloody commando. He’s got nothing to do with computer security.’

Ludo nodded. Throughout this exchange he carried on working, his eyes on his screen. ‘He was sent to intimidate Mallory.’

‘That passed me by,’ I said, though I did rather get the idea Sergeant Rowan treated me as if I were some kind of suspect.

I hoped I hadn’t said too much. I would be working for both Piero and Ludo, in fact be the main link between them.

‘Charlie takes security very seriously,’ Ludo said. ‘If he asks, let on that Fawn impressed on you the need for constant awareness and caution, or that pluperfect paranoid Frank Harrington will send a harder man than Fawn to give you a really tough talking to.’

Much later I would come to see my one-sided meeting with Fawn Rowan as a key moment in my entire career at Armitage but at the time I thought it a waste of time, believing that I already knew to be protective of Armitage’s technical secrets.

Right then I would not have believed that the next time I saw Sergeant Rowan I would be desperately glad to see someone from ‘Harrington’s shooting and being shot at unit’.

That week I spent familiarizing myself with the Armitage racing works, staff and the designs of the current car. Then I spent two days each with the tire manufacturer, who is very important to a race car builder, in Japan with the grand prix engine makers, the other outside supplier of supreme importance, and in Germany with Porsche, who make the sports division engines.

Liaison means just that. I was a message carrier, an interpreter, a facilitator. I took some of the weight of detail-work off Piero’s shoulders in the field and off those of Ludo dell’ Mira, the chief designer, who runs the design office, where my desk stood beside his.

It is very demanding work, entailing a great deal of travel. I was often bone-tired.

It was exhilarating as hell. I was doing something worthwhile in the vanguard of auto racing. For the first time since college I was professionally fulfilled.

Despite my killing schedule, I healed more quickly than ever in mind and body. Charlie’s operations division, which is responsible for arranging the movements of our caravan of cars and people, never put a foot wrong. Regardless of which country we tested in, Operations somehow brought a physio to whichever test track I was at or to my hotel room to give me the treatments I still received.

Everything worked so smoothly, I came to take being treated as a princess, albeit a working, engineering princess, for granted.

A few of the men at work made polite advances and I equally politely declined their invitations. There was none of the male chauvinist piggery I associated with engineers from my college days forward. Only Ugo Jenssens took my refusal hard, sulking like a child.

‘Maybe you should sleep with him,’ Helga said. ‘I did. He’s like a bull.’

‘He discards women like used tissues.’

Helga smiled her wicked smile. ‘So? He’s a boy with incredible reflexes and great intelligence but no maturity. Once you’ve seen his trick with the snake in his trousers, you’ve seen it. Women have needs too.’

I became fast friends with Helga. She is the widow of a racer who died young. We went to movies or dined out once a week when we could find the time. We went to gym together almost daily whenever I was in England. She is very beautiful, with high cheekbones and lively, smiling eyes. Masses of curly blonde hair.

After a couple of weeks of Ugo treating me with disdain and hardly speaking to me, which made my work hard, I saw Charlie speak quietly to him while we waited for rain to clear at Monza. That evening Ugo came into the gym in the hotel where I did prescribed exercises for my back.

I sat up and wiped my face with my towel, thinking he wanted to speak to me about the car.

‘You’re doing that all wrong,’ he said. ‘That way will thicken a woman’s waist.’ He flexed his arm to show a bulked-up muscle bulging. He wears T-shirts for a good reason. ‘Not attractive.’

I shrugged. ‘I need the strength in my back.’

‘Lie back.’ When I hesitated, he added, ‘I’ll show you a better way.’

I lay back on the bench. He pushed over another bar and lifted my legs to rest my calves on it. ‘Now slowly raise just the center of your back, without the weight of your legs on the muscles. No, no, not so high. Just a few millimeters. Only enough to tense the muscles in the small of your back. Keep your shoulders on the bench. Don’t strain. Slowly. That’s it! Now relax slowly. Slower still. Do that a hundred times, four times a day. It’s a good exercise. You can do it on a floor with just a chair to rest your feet on.’

It is a brilliant exercise. I still do it.

After I showered and changed we sat in the hotel lounge. Ugo told me that his parents did not want him to become a racing driver. He studied to become a teacher of physical education. ‘When I stop racing, I shall teach,’ he said.

I wondered. He earns millions every year and is very rich already. I couldn’t quite see him fitting into life as a humble teacher.

‘In a girls’ school of course,’ he said. ‘A finishing school for the daughters of the rich, perhaps.’

Ah, yes, Helga also said that he is very intelligent. Most racers are. They have to be.

He looked over my shoulder. ‘She’s nice.’ He rose and approached the girl sitting alone at another table. He spoke to her but she shook her head.

When he returned he again wore that sulking pout on his handsome face.

I rose and went to her table. ‘I’m Mallory.’

‘I’m Anna.’ Middle twenties, black business suit and high-heeled shoes, attractive in a thin, fashionable way. ‘Your friend is crude.’

‘He can’t help it. He’s a grand prix driver.’

She smiled. ‘I thought he is perhaps a bricklayer. He should try to smile.’

‘If you’re not waiting for anyone, join us.’

After a while I left the two of them at the table.

The next day, while we stood behind Jack at the monitors, watching the two drivers circulating in yet another revision of the grand prix car, I said to Charlie, ‘Thanks for the help with Ugo.’

‘You helped yourself.’

By now I knew that I work for people who find out things almost by osmosis. What Charlie knew no longer surprised me.

Charlie took the phone away from his ear and said to Jack, ‘Rain will fall here in five minutes. A torrent for half an hour. Then the sun will appear and stay out.’ Every track day Charlie posts a weather watcher in the direction of the prevailing wind, and one of his operations staff is a meteorologist permanently aloft in a helicopter assigned solely to weather service, plugged in by laptop and modem to the local and international weather bureaus. Helga told me that Jack and Adam, the original owners of Armitage Racing, gave Charlie a partnership and a division to develop his Le Mans racers and road cars on condition that he stay on as operations director of the grand prix team.

Jack told the team manager, who keeps radio contact with the drivers, to call them in for a change to wet weather tires.

The second driver, Alain Joubert, stepped out of his car and carried the steering wheel to where I stood. ‘Can you move the gear change paddles two millimeters closer to me?’ He gestured with his finger over the control.

‘Sure.’

The team manager compared a stopwatch in his hand to a television screen showing digital numbers and said to Jack, ‘Half fuel and tires, six-nine. Not good enough.’ The pit crew practiced its routines as if under racing conditions. Alain drove his car out of the pit, unhurriedly snaking it from side to side to warm up the tires before the rain fell. He was on a different agenda to that of the pit crew.

On my laptop on the counter I punched up the relevant section