Five in a Row

by Jan Coffey

She said nothing but watched a race car roll out of the paddock and through the pit area, picking up speed as it moved onto the track. Two other cars followed the first.

  “Do you think Conor is in one of those cars?”

  “He’s in the first one that went out.” The rain seemed to have stopped for the time being. Crowds of people now filled the infield spectator area expecting the race to begin soon. Many still held their umbrellas over them as they watched the cars warming up. Some of the people in the chalet were venturing out into the weather. A few were standing on the private deck. “They should be coming around into the esses in a minute. Do you want to go and watch him from the deck?”

  Emily immediately pushed up to her feet. She waved off Ben’s offer of getting her jacket. “This had better be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure for him, Mr. Colter. You’re in big trouble if my son decides that he likes this sport.”

  “Race car drivers, as a whole, aren’t a bad lot.” He smiled, putting a hand on the small of her back and ushering her toward the door. “They’re just seasoned mechanics on the outside and sixteen-year-olds on the inside.”

  “Like you?”

  The accusing look she cast over her shoulder at him made him laugh. At the door, their bodies pressed together as a number of people had the same idea about going out onto the deck. Ben let his hand linger on her back, telling himself he liked the feel of her soft sweater.

  There was only room for one more person at the railing by the time they got outside. Ben pushed Emily to the front and moved in behind her, his hands on either side of her body on the railing. Her silky hair brushed against his chin when he leaned over to explain the route Conor was traveling.

  “Please tell me that they wear seat belts when they’re driving.”

  “Yes, Em. They wear seat belts. There he is.” Ben pointed to his friend’s car racing down the No Name Straightaway.

  “How about airbags?” she asked nervously as the race car sped through the esses. “Do they have airbags?”

  “Why don’t you just relax and enjoy the view?” he whispered in her ear as the car rounded the Big Bend and went out of their view to the left. Ben couldn’t help but notice how good she smelled. “They’ll be back around in about a minute.”

  She looked out at the crowd. The infield was full, and more spectators were continuing to pour into the area. She reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Ben’s gaze lingered for a second on her perfectly shaped earlobe and the soft skin of her neck. The push of the crowd on the deck moved him farther forward, trapping her against his body. She shuddered slightly, and he wondered if she was feeling the same sensations that were going through him.

  “I’m losing my mind.” She pressed back against his chest.

  Ben heard the note of fear in her voice. They were definitely not in the same frame of mind.

  “Conor will be okay,” he whispered reassuringly. “He’ll get one more lap and then be dropped off in the pit area.”

  “No,” she croaked. “Him! I think he’s been watching us.”

  Ben looked at the sea of moving people before them. The chalet was built on the hillside overlooking the track and paddock and infield spectator areas. Another slope dropped off to the track about a hundred yards away. “Where?”

  “By that little grove of trees. The evergreens. There, near the slope.”

  He followed her gaze.

  “He’s wearing a yellow poncho and has a black umbrella. He was standing by the gate when we came through from the paddock. I thought it was weird that someone would be wearing sunglasses on a day like today. I saw him when we were sitting inside a few minutes ago, too. He’s still there. He’s just standing and looking this way.”

  Ben spotted the man. He looked like a permanent fixture where he stood. The hood of his yellow rain poncho was pulled forward on his face, and he was still wearing the sunglasses. He looked to be medium height, slightly built. There wasn’t much more that Ben could see from this distance. All the other spectators were focused on the paddock or the track itself as more cars were warming up. This guy’s attention, though, was definitely glued to the chalet deck.

  Ben knew there could be any number of reasons why he was staring this way. Still, his gut told him to trust Emily’s instincts.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Ben tried to keep his eye on the man as he pushed away from the railing. He took the outside steps leading down from the deck. The guy was still standing in the same place by the grove of trees. It was difficult to tell, but he now appeared to be staring at Ben.

  “I’m coming with you.” Emily was right behind him, and she touched his arm. “If he’s here because of me, then it’s time we met.”

  Ben wanted to argue, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t buy it, so he grabbed her hand. Passing a security guard, he showed his club ID and quickly told the man about the possible situation. The guard immediately got on his walkietalkie as Ben and Emily started across the field.

  Ben could still see the man. He didn’t seem to have moved an inch. There wasn’t much of his expression that he could see yet. The dark sunglasses covered the upper half of the face. Still, there was no mistaking where he was looking.

  Emily was practically running to keep up with him. They were only fifty feet away, pushing through the crowd, when he saw their target move behind the grove of trees.

  Ben broke into a sprint and waved at two security guards who were coming across the field. The men veered toward the direction he pointed. By the time he and Emily cleared the end of the grove of trees, the guards were standing over a yellow poncho that had been discarded. Beyond it, the crowd was even thicker, and Ben scanned the throng lining the slope overlooking the track. The stranger had dumped his poncho and simply melted into the crowd.

  “He must have seen us coming.” One of the security guards picked up the yellow garment and held it out. As he did, a crumpled paper dropped on the ground.

  Ben picked it up and opened it.

  “That’s mine.” Emily said, looking over his shoulder. “It was pinned up in my office at the café.”

  It was a photograph of three people, and Ben remembered very well seeing it the day before.

  Since then, one of the faces had been cut out.

  Emily’s.

  Nine

  Since before the kids were born, Saturday nights had always been set aside for eating pizza and wearing pajamas and cuddling up early on the sofa for a movie or two. Of course, the first half of any double feature was a family movie now, and Gina loved the routine. All week she looked forward to this uninterrupted time with her family.

  It wasn’t what they watched that mattered to her. It was just the fact that they did it. She simply cherished their time together. Gina’s husband, Karl, worked in the financial district as an accountant. Most weeks, his hours were crazier than hers. Often, one of them wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. But when it came to weekends, both of them refused to buy into the social aspects of their careers, at least if it didn’t include their spouse and their children. The two boys were six and eight, and Gina and Karl both knew that all too soon their sons would be too old to want to spend their weekends curled up with their parents.

  Gina was in the kitchen making popcorn for their Saturday night at the movies when the phone rang. She saw the Miami hotel number on the caller ID and decided to answer it, if only to berate Adam for calling during family time. Before she could give him a hard time, though, he blurted out enough apologies to cover the entire West Village. Then, without drawing a breath, he got to the point.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of Ben for over an hour now, but I keep getting his voice mail. Do you know where he is or what he’s up to? I have to get hold of him.”

  “He’s in Connecticut. In the western hills. There’s virtually no cell service up there, but he told me he was going to one of the racetracks. Lime—”

  “Lime Rock. Yeah, it’s up in the northwest corner
of the state.” There was a slight pause. “Dammit.”

  Gina had been working with Adam long enough to know something was going on. “You found something?”

  “Yeah, I did. It might be nothing, but it might be everything,” he said. “A common factor in all the accidents. In the vehicles themselves. Actually, I think our technical friends in Detroit and New York have been staring at the same thing, but conveniently decided not to bring any attention to it.”

  Nothing like a conspiracy theory to excite a lawyer, Gina thought, closing the kitchen door to shut out the noise of the TV. “I’m listening.”

  “Drive-by-wire.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “All five cars involved in these accidents had drive-by-wire technology incorporated into their designs.”

  “You’re talking over my head.” Gina grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil and sat down at the kitchen table. “Give it to me in layman’s terms, preferably in ten words or less.”

  “Think of an automobile as a computer network with a car wrapped around it.”

  The pencil paused on the page. “No way.”

  “Now, think of more than four million cars out there with the same kind of system.”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “No, I’m not. Don’t you listen to the car ads on television?”

  “Wait a minute.” She shook her head. “You’re talking about the luxury stuff, like personalized climate control, or surround sound, or navigational things.”

  Dozens of different scenarios rushed through her mind. At the top of the list Gina could only think of how many times her home or office computer had crashed over the past ten years. But how could this make a car go out of control?

  “Not just the extra, add-on features. I’m talking about designs that use electronics and sensors and motors as a replacement for mechanical linkages between the controls of a car and the devices that actually do the work,” Adam explained. He was in his element. Gina knew this was truly his strength. “For example, it used to be when you turned the steering wheel in your car, a series of metal linkages connected that wheel directly with the tires that were being turned. Now, the controls you operate actually send commands to a central computer, which in turn instructs the car what to do.”

  “So when I press the gas pedal…”

  “There are no mechanical cables that wind from the back of the pedal through the engine to a throttle on a carburetor. In fact, there hasn’t been a carburetor on a new car in ten years. Now, when you press your foot on the accelerator, you have sophisticated pedal position sensors that closely track the position of the accelerator and send this information to the ECM.”

  “What’s an ECM?”

  “Engine control module. A fancy term for the main computer.”

  “And the same thing goes for the brakes and the steering?” Gina asked as her pen flew across the paper.

  “Same thing.”

  “But I drive the darn thing the same as I always have,” she argued.

  “That’s right. No joystick controllers for the average Joe Driver, as yet. All these changes are under the hood and more or less hidden from the normal driver, who doesn’t really care to know how a car works, just that it does.”

  “Wait one minute,” Gina said. “Shouldn’t I be told about these changes before I buy my car?”

  “Actually, you are told about it. It’s in the ads and the catalogues, and in the manual. They call it advanced technology. You hear it as ‘independent wheel adjustment for a smoother ride’ and ‘radar sensory cruise controls,’ which slow your car when the vehicle in front of you slows and resumes the desired speed when the traffic clears and ‘variable speed-sensitive steering systems.’ It’s all there if you look. But the truth is, what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

  “Spoken like a true engineer,” she grumbled. “Seriously, this is making me nervous.”

  “It shouldn’t. The system was tested and used by the military for a decade before the auto manufacturers started using it. They called it fly-by-wire back then, and the next generation is already being used in commercial aircraft. How many passengers on an airplane do you think there are that know the details of what’s really going on?”

  “Not this passenger.”

  Karl poked his head into the kitchen. Gina smiled guiltily and mouthed “five minutes” to him. She motioned to the popcorn about to finish in the microwave.

  “Drive-by-wire—they call it DBW—has been around since the 1980s,” Adam went on. “But it wasn’t until three or four years ago that auto manufacturers started using it in all of their models.”

  Gina frowned, thinking suddenly that these five accidents could be the tiny drops of water that leak through just before the dam breaks. There was a lot that she wanted to learn about all of this before the three of them met Monday.

  “Why?” she pressed. “Why did they go this route? I’m talking about the manufacturers. Wasn’t this a radical change?”

  “Yeah, it was. The decision to use and develop these systems, though, was a response to tightening emission standards. As with computer-controlled fuel injection and integrated engine controllers, a DBW system improves engine efficiency while cutting vehicle emissions. They do this by replacing clunky mechanical systems with highly advanced and precise electronic sensors and motors.”

  Gina fought her usual tendency to get glassy-eyed whenever Adam got this technical with her. She could still follow him. This was good. “Go on.”

  Karl left a handful of popcorn on her pad and pressed a kiss on the back of Gina’s neck before leaving the kitchen. At the other end of the phone, she heard the shuffling of papers.

  “Fewer moving parts, greater accuracy and efficiency, reduced weight, theoretically less service requirements. Stay with me, a lot of this is new to me, too, especially when we get past the initial application.” More papers rustling. “Here it is. This thing is the piece of information that got me. Ready for this?”

  Gina was ready. Wouldn’t it be something if this case could get resolved in less than two weeks?

  “The manufacturers use this in their sales pitches as one of the great advantages of developing a more comprehensive DBW system. Here it is.

  “The ‘ECM is able to make the steering, suspension and brakes work together to give the car better handling, especially in bad road conditions, to give better fuel consumption and to react to emergencies faster than a human driver could.’”

  Gina was no technical expert, but this wording got her excited, too. “Do you know what this means? If we go on the hypothesis that there was no operator error involved—”

  “Then we have to find out what happened to make these cars’ computers go haywire.” Adam finished for her. “Maybe the computers crashed, or some of the signals got mixed up.”

  “They’re not going to want to hear this in Detroit.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Wow! This is pretty major.” Gina sat back in the chair. “But wait a minute. Didn’t the diagnostic testing that was done after each of the accidents check out this DBW system?”

  “Yeah, it did. But we haven’t seen all those reports. And frankly, I’m not sure we can trust what they give us. These manufacturers have too much at stake. Imagine if we’re right,” Adam conjectured. “The magnitude of the recall could shut down most of the transportation in this country. And think of the damage to the auto industry.”

  “Are you accusing them of a cover-up?”

  “I don’t know what I’m accusing anybody of. And maybe there’s no reason to blame anyone. The fact is, there are different ways of looking at things,” he admitted. “For one thing, these systems are pretty much manufactured independently by the different automakers.”

  “And we’ve had accidents in different kinds of cars.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “We still need to do our homework. We have to follow the step
s they’ve taken. From my own experience in the industry, the diagnostic testing that would have been done ensures that the system behaved as it should have—before, during and after the accidents. But those parameters are limited. If everything checks out, they don’t look any deeper.”

  “We need to get more data on the system, if I’m hearing you correctly.”

  “Right. But again, this is over my head. I’m thinking we’re talking about the central computer system. Programming. Security. Encryption. I want to be able to get inside those cars’ brains and talk their language and see what the hell might have gone wrong. The DBW is designed to be an extension of the driver, but maybe it took charge.”

  “And if it did, it could happen to any car.…” Gina’s words trailed off.

  Adam’s frustration was audible. “I want an expert. Someone whose brain I can pick. We need that person working with us.”

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that our boss has been working on exactly that since yesterday.”

  Gina enjoyed the long pause as Adam actually was struck mute for a couple of seconds.

  “What do you mean?” he said finally. “How did he know?”

  She relayed what Ben had told her last night about running into Emily Doyle. Gina and Adam had both been with Ben at the computer expo in Philadelphia the previous summer. They had all heard the computer expert speak and were very impressed with her credentials. They’d all agreed that Emily Doyle would be a perfect fit for their group. But she had shown no interest in them, and that had been the end of it. Or so they’d thought.

  “So, is she considering coming on board?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Ben today. But he sure sounded hopeful last night.”

  “Why the hell did he take her to a racetrack? There are much better ways of impressing a potential employee—especially a woman—than taking her to watch cars zoom around in circles,” Adam continued, not letting Gina get a word in edgewise. “I should have taken the red-eye and flown back tonight.”

  “What about our dot-com multimillionaire?”

  “There is no chance that I’m going to get past his secretary. Jay Sparks has a battalion of lawyers that he’s using as a buffer. The guy has police reports and sobriety reports and dozens of sworn statements ready to hand out that explain what happened, where it happened and what their official stance is regarding the accident last month. He refuses to see anyone who has anything to do with an insurance company. I think he’s too busy chasing swimsuit models around the pool in his electric wheelchair, but that’s just my professional opinion.”