Nobody could fix the Ferrari. Not the specialists flown in from Italy, not the performance engineers from California, and certainly not the money Victor Langston kept throwing at it.
Under the fluorescent lights of his private garage, the bright red Ferrari 250 GTO sat as immaculately polished as a museum exhibit. Every curve of its body suggested motion, but the car had not moved under its own power in six months.
When Greg Holloway turned the ignition, the twelve-cylinder engine caught for two ragged seconds, coughed as though something had closed around its throat, and went silent again.
Victor stood beside the open hood with his jaw locked. He had spent his adult life in rooms where people lowered their voices when he entered, and he had begun to mistake that habit for evidence that he controlled everything worth controlling. At fifty-two, his investment group owned interests in software companies, industrial suppliers, and a dozen businesses that had once been described as impossible to rescue. He had broken deadlocks involving hundreds of employees and negotiated loans large enough to buy neighborhoods. Yet a car built long before he was born had reduced him to ordering grown men to try the same thing again.
"Again," he said, although everyone in the garage knew what would happen. Greg glanced toward the mechanics beside him, wiped his hands on a dark cloth, and returned to the driver's side. There was a sharp turn of the starter, a brief shudder of combustion, then the same mechanical surrender. The technicians did not look at one another this time. They looked at the floor, the instrument cart, anything except Victor's face.
"Six months," Victor said. "Six months and three point two million dollars. Tell me what those numbers have purchased." Greg took a careful breath and began listing the work: the fuel system inspected, carburetors rebuilt, ignition components replaced, timing checked, and every major reading examined again and again.
Historic specialists had come from Maranello, then restoration experts from Los Angeles and Chicago. One team had even challenged the work of the previous team, charging handsomely for the privilege. Their reports filled two cabinets, but the engine would not remain alive.
"It should run," Greg said at last. Victor gave a short, humorless laugh. "Should isn't running. My father owned this car for forty years.
It ran when he wanted it to run." The sentence was not exactly true, and Victor knew it. Old machines had always required patience and work. But his father's name had a way of making truth feel less important than the anger that followed it.
Edward Langston had bought the Ferrari long before rare automobiles were treated like portable investment accounts. The old man had owned a modest restoration shop at the time and drove to a collector's estate with a borrowed trailer, a mechanic named Lionel, and a check he could barely afford to