Chapter 8

I have thought a lot about what Vivian Cross did next, because there was nothing in it for her. Her father had just hung up on her in front of sixty people. Her career was sitting on the table next to the champagne.

She picked up her phone and opened the archive.

"I pulled these on my second day," she said. "I didn't know what I was looking for. I was chasing an inventory discrepancy on the 1985 prototype, and the file was misfiled in a box of vendor receipts."

She turned the screen around.

The photograph was grainy, black and white once, and taken outside the old shop on East Fifth in front of a garage door with the paint peeling off it. A young man, twenty-eight, dark hair down over his ears, grease to both elbows, one hand resting on the seat of a motorcycle that did not exist anywhere else in the world.

Silver and green. Exposed engine. Chrome handlebars.

The same bike, forty years younger and forty years less careful.

The room made a noise.

Vivian read the caption off the bottom in the flat voice of somebody reading a court exhibit.

"'Elias Ward, 1985, with the first Sparrow. Photograph by Ruthie Alvarez.'"

I hadn't heard that name in twenty-two years.

"Mr. Pike," Vivian said, "I'm auditing this store. I've been auditing it for six weeks. I have your inventory numbers, your deposits, and your buyer in Dubai." She put the phone in her pocket. "You're done. Not at the end of the month. Now."

Desmond Pike did not argue. That's what I remember most about it. He just stood there while Ruben Ortiz took him by the arm - the same grip, the same professionalism, pointed the other direction - and walked him past the champagne table and out through the service door, and nobody in that room said a word until the door clicked shut.

Then Vivian turned to me, and her eyes were wet, and she said, "Mr. Ward. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I said.

"I'd like to offer you the keys."

"You already did," I said, and lifted the fob.

I sat down on the Sparrow.

The seat still fit. Ruthie's stitching was still under my hands, worn soft in the same two places. I put my palms on the grips and looked out at sixty people who had come to drink champagne in front of a machine, and I let myself have thirty seconds, which is exactly what I'd asked for.

Then Vivian's phone rang.

She looked at it, and her face changed - not fear. Something worse. Confusion.

She answered and held it away from her ear like it had gone hot.

"My father," she said.

She listened.

"He says don't let you leave."

The room was completely silent.

"He says you're not just the founder." She swallowed. "He says you're the man who owns the patent on every engine we sell."