That night, as she stared at the blurred shape, Marcus Hail called from the garage. He sounded more troubled than angry. "Charlotte, we've completed the component trace you requested. That connector Evan found wasn't part of our approved current inventory. It carries an obsolete internal code from the original Carter engineering division."
Charlotte sat upright. "An old component?"
"Not exactly. A modern connector made to resemble an old one, with the obsolete code incorporated into its label. Somebody wanted it to be associated with that inventory."
"Why?"
"I don't know," Marcus said. "But I can tell you this: it didn't get into a sealed prototype by accident."
Charlotte stood and looked out over the city's late traffic. Below her office, machines were being built by hundreds of people who depended on the company for their paychecks. Twenty years earlier, Daniel Carter had said somebody was changing test data. Now a new component appeared to have been planted in a test vehicle, dressed in the identity of his old engineering department. The coincidence was too pointed to ignore, and Charlotte felt the past moving toward her with frightening speed.
The obsolete code troubled Charlotte for a reason Marcus could not have known. The Carter division had been dissolved two decades earlier in the weeks following Daniel's dismissal. Its laboratories were reorganized, its projects renamed, and its equipment either absorbed into newer departments or retired. Richard had personally approved the transition, explaining to investors that a security breach required a clean break. Charlotte had repeated those words publicly and never questioned why an engineering program important enough to threaten the company had been erased so completely.
Now somebody had placed a modern component inside the most valuable prototype Bennett Automotive owned, and its label pointed backward to that vanished department. It could be an attempt to discredit the current engineering team, a private joke by somebody who knew the history, or part of a scheme she could not yet imagine. The one thing it was not was a harmless clerical error. She asked Helen Cho to bring in an external forensic engineering firm, then instructed Marcus to stop further prototype testing until the safety and security teams reviewed the evidence.
Marcus did not argue, which worried her more than his usual resistance. He sat across from her with a folder balanced on his knees and kept rubbing his thumb along the seam. The strain around his mouth suggested he had something to say that would not improve the situation. Charlotte waited him out rather than demand a confession she had no right to expect.
"My father worked in that division," Marcus said eventually.
Charlotte nodded. "Thomas Hail. I remember the name."
"He was Daniel Carter's colleague. They hated each other toward the end. My father talked about him whenever he drank too much."
"What did he say?"
Marcus looked down. "That Daniel was brilliant. Then he'd say brilliant people always thought the rules were written for somebody else. He blamed Daniel for everything that happened after the investigation. But my father was angry long after Daniel died, and anger like that doesn't always belong to the victim."