13. Melbourne, Australia

13

Melbourne, Australia

Mira glanced down at the name lit up on her phone screen and groaned.

“Hi, Penelope!” she answered with enthusiasm she didn’t feel, as she approached the Lennox mobile office. Pen was still several weeks out from having the baby and going absolutely stir-crazy in bed, so Mira got one of these phone calls nearly every day. Some days, like today, they were an interruption she didn’t want or need.

Penelope skipped the niceties and launched straight into a monologue of concerns. “Now the thing you must be aware of in Melbourne is that it’s a street track, and that can lead to a whole host of new issues—”

Mira hummed her acknowledgment at various points in Pen’s rapid-fire stream of directions, wedging her phone under her chin so she could retrieve her notepad from between the stacks of folders she was carrying. There was no place to spread out and work here. When they were back in Europe, they’d have their custom-built portable Lennox offices, masterpieces of modular design and overnight construction. But it was too far to transport them to Australia, so they were stuck with the pop-up facilities the venue provided. At least the weather was nice.

After Bahrain, she thought maybe—just maybe—she was getting the hang of things. Setup was a sort of organized chaos, but the Lennox team was seasoned, and it pretty much went off without a problem. The jump to Melbourne, the second race of the season, was proving to be a different beast altogether.

First, there had been the car adjustments. Aerodynamics wanted to rework a body part, Mechanics wanted to overhaul the fuel injector … between the two, everyone had worked around the clock to get it done in time to load into the containers being flown to Melbourne.

Second, Melbourne involved flying all the personnel and equipment to the literal far side of the world. Even though there were people to handle all of it, emergencies arose and she was the one expected to solve them. Keeping track of it all had been a mammoth undertaking.

“Now the next thing,” Penelope continued, not having paused once. “I’m still getting calendar reminders and I’ve noticed we’re almost to the deadline for signing off on the contract with Hintabi for next year’s brake assembly. Paul has gone over the contract, hasn’t he?”

Mira suppressed a groan. “Legal sent it to him last week for notes but he hasn’t sent it back yet.”

“Then you have to get it from him! Remember—”

“Yes, I know. Every issue big and small! I’m on it, Penelope! I’ll take care of it right now. Get some rest!”

She ended the call before Penelope could add a dozen more things to her to-do list, and hurried to track down her father and get the contract signed off on.

Inside the office, the air buzzed with the low-key chatter of half a dozen engineers and strategists discussing the day’s qualifying results. Her father was on the far side of the room, standing in front of a bank of monitors. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt, Dad, but have you had a chance to go over Hintabi’s contract?”

“Ah, right. You need that from me, don’t you? Can we—”

Just then the door banged open and Harry hurried in, with Will right on his heels.

“We’ve a problem, Paul. The front brake duct on Will’s car is done.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

“Fucking track debris,” Will snapped. He was fresh off the track from qualifying, still in his race suit, his hair damp from sweat. He’d never tracked her down after the race in Bahrain to go do “one fun thing.” Demands from the media had consumed his time, which was exactly what she’d expected. And considering the twinge of disappointment she’d felt, it was probably a good thing that he was now too busy for her. Safer that way.

“Street tracks,” Harry growled. “Absolute menace.”

So that’s what Pen meant about street tracks. She might be relentless, but she was rarely wrong.

“Can we repair it on site?” Paul asked.

Harry shook his head. “No. Shredded. It’ll need replacing.”

Several of the engineers who’d been monitoring the race from their desks rose to join the conversation.

Paul groaned. “We don’t have a spare here, do we?”

“Didn’t get it finished in time to make the Melbourne pack out,” David interjected. “It had a flaw. Had to scrap it and start over.”

Harry rubbed his palm over his stubbly jaw. “I can work up some sort of replacement here but—”

“I’ve already run quali,” Will said. “I’m in parc fermé. If we swap out for something different, I’ll get hit with a penalty.”

This was bad. Once a car starts qualifying, no substitutions of parts were allowed before the race the next day. Any replacements needed to match the specs of the original exactly, or the car would be penalized and forced to start from the pit lane.

“Where’s the spare now?”

“Still back at the factory,” David said.

“It’s over twenty hours from Heathrow to Melbourne,” Paul mused. “We’d never get it here in time for tomorrow.”

“Fuck,” Will groaned, turning away to pace the confines of the small mobile office. “I finally have a car I can drive and I’ll be starting from the goddamned back of the grid. This cannot be happening.”

Mira’s heart started beating rapidly, and her mind raced. This could kill Will’s season—Lennox’s season—before it even started.

Will’s race in Bahrain had been fine; he finished tenth. Not an embarrassment but nowhere near what he was capable of. In a car designed for someone else though, there were limits to what he could accomplish. This was the race that was supposed to change everything. But not if they had to switch out parts while in parc fermé.

Mira stared at her notepad, trying to see a solution to an impossible problem. There were only two matches to the brake duct in Will’s car—the one in Matteo’s, which was no help, or the backup back at the Lennox factory in England. It was no use. There was no way she could get it here in time.

Except …

“Wait!” Every pair of eyes in the room turned to stare at her. “Ohmygod, ohmygod! It’s not at the factory. It’s in Singapore!”

Paul scowled. “What? Are you sure?”

Mira nodded as she flipped through one of her folders. “I thought I saw it on the manifest for the advance shipment to Singapore … Ha! Here!” She ripped the manifest free and handed it to her father.

She’d been cc’d on an email from one of the guys back at Lennox to the shipping department, explaining they’d just finished the spare brake duct, but since they’d missed the last shipment to Melbourne, they’d put it in the Singapore advance container instead.

Paul, Harry, David, and Will hunched over the manifest. “There it is,” Paul muttered. “How long is the flight from Singapore?”

“Seven and a half hours,” she supplied. “Give or take.”

“Can we courier it in?” David asked.

Paul glanced at his watch. “It would take too long to get someone out there.”

“We could put one of our boys in Singapore on a plane with it,” Harry suggested. “It’s not that big. It’ll fit in a carry-on.”

Paul shook his head. “The guys in Singapore don’t have Australian visas—”

Finally the millions of individual bits of information came together in Mira’s head all at once. “Ollie’s there! Or he nearly is. He already has one.”

Harry scowled. “Oliver Hayes? He’s got a visa for Australia?”

Frantically, she flipped through yet more papers until she found the one she was looking for. “Yes, don’t you remember? You originally wanted him on the Australian team, but his sister was getting married and he couldn’t leave until yesterday. So you bumped him from Melbourne and had him go with the advance to Singapore instead.” Stabbing her fingertip on her travel cheat sheet, she traced Ollie’s name. “There. He lands in Singapore in forty-five minutes. He’s got the Australian visa already. If we get him on a plane to Melbourne in the next—” She glanced at the time on her phone. “Hour and a half, he should be here by morning.”

“If he flies through customs, maybe …” Paul said.

Another random piece of information swam to the surface. “The governor-general of Australia is coming to the race tomorrow. We got him VIP passes.”

“Who is it now? Is it still Charles Stapleton?”

“Yes, that’s him. Do you know him? Would he help?”

Paul nodded. “I do, and yes, he might. Mira, get on the phone with the travel office. Have them book a charter flight for Ollie. Then set up a helicopter taxi from the airport to the track. Talk to Francois Bernard with Track Logistics if you need clearance for the heli. I want Ollie off that plane and at the track tomorrow morning before he’s got time to take a breath.”

“Done.”

Paul turned away to consult with Harry, leaving her alone with Will, who was watching her. “I could kiss you right now,” he said, low enough to reach just her ears.

It was just a saying, but she could tell from his face, from the flare of heat in his eyes, that he really meant it. If they weren’t surrounded by people, she half-suspected he’d have just grabbed her and done it.

Ignoring the way that mental image made her feel, she let out a shaky laugh, still buzzing with adrenaline. “I’ve done my part. Now you get out there and do yours.”

“Tomorrow, when I’m on that podium, it’s going to be for you. And you’re celebrating with me.”

There was the cocky Will she knew and loved. “Well, then, you better get on that podium.”

“See you after the race, Mira.” The smile he gave her was criminal.

She watched him go, then turned her attention back to the crisis at hand, scrolling through her phone looking for Jo’s number, the head of Lennox travel back in England.

“Harry,” her father was saying. “Call the track in Singapore and have one of the guys unpack that brake duct and get it out to Ollie at the airport. I’ll track down Sanderson and see what he can do to get us through customs quickly.”

He walked toward the door, but paused when he reached it and looked back at her. She had already dialed Jo and was waiting for her to get out of bed and pick up.

“Mira,” her father said, smiling with a warm light in his eyes she hadn’t seen in years. “Well done, sweetheart.” She was still basking in the glow of his praise when Jo’s groggy voice on the other end of the line muttered hello.