Driven

by Toby Vintcent

  As they walked back down the grid, Sabatino turned her head to look up at him. Straker met her eye. For perhaps a minute or two, all the baggage he was cursed to carry around with him was banished from his thoughts. The spunk of this woman was a real distraction. For a moment he had a feeling of liberation. Straker could not help but smile thinking about her tour de force. ‘You’ve got balls, Miss Sabatino, I’ll give you that.’

  Reaching her car in their disappointing P14 on the grid, his mind was returned to the here and now. Straker wanted to throw a second punch at their suspected saboteurs. In the light of the high-speed incident the day before, he had been considering the Trifecta, Benbecular, Michael Lyons connection – particularly that man’s meeting over breakfast, which Straker had witnessed, in Leamington Spa. He thought: how could that, now, not be connected? Handing over to Sabatino her helmet and balaclava, Straker pulled his phone out of his pocket and made a point of drawing her attention to it. In her earshot, he dialled the number Treadwell had found for him. It rang.

  ‘Hello?’ said Straker. ‘Is that Mr Barnett?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the voice on the other end.

  ‘Mr Jeremy Barnett?’

  ‘Yes,’ came a terse confirmation.

  ‘Mr Jeremy Barnett from Benbecular Engines?’

  ‘Yes,’ but this time with a hint of irritation.

  ‘Glad to have got you, Mr Barnett. Olly Wragg, here – I’m calling you from Sabotage Digest…’

  Straker let his words sink in for a few seconds.

  ‘Who? What?’

  ‘Olly Wragg … Sabotage Digest? We’re doing a feature on the sabotage you’ve masterminded against Ptarmigan for the Massarella Formula One team. We loved what you did for them in Spa. That whole remote engine limiter disruption thing – it’s brilliant. We’re wondering whether you’d be prepared to do an interview with us.’

  ‘Who the hell is this?’

  ‘We’re doing a double-page spread,’ Straker went on. ‘We’ve got all the telemetry, and a photo of Adi Barrantes at the very moment he activated your system. It’s all quite ingenious on your part. We’re very impressed … we want to give you full credit. Would you care to give us a quote at all?’

  Straker moved the phone slightly away from his ear and smiled at Sabatino. ‘D’you know what? He swore … and rang off.’

  ‘No kidding,’ she smiled mischievously back. ‘That ought to have put the wind up him.’

  ‘I’d love to be on the call, now, between Barnett and whoever he talks to at Massarella.’

  Sabatino, once again, took Straker by surprise. Walking up to him, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It feels good to be hitting back at last. Now, piss off. I’ve got a Grand Prix to win.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sabatino sat in the cockpit of her Ptarmigan, fully six rows back from the front of the grid, and tried to shut out all thoughts of missed opportunities, missed positions, and what might have been. It could have been galling to think about where her performance should have put her that weekend. But for the intervention by Adi Barrantes, she could so easily have been on pole. By quite a margin.

  Her altercation with Van Der Vaal, though, was proving to be cathartic. She found herself able to focus on what was coming. Instead of jobbing backwards, she focused on the machine immediately around her, the track, and the cars in front of her. She focused on what she saw. A race. Forty-four laps of motor racing round her favourite circuit in a car that she knew to be point-nine faster than any of the others on the grid.

  Psyching herself up, she blipped the engine several times, breathed deeply, and checked in with Backhouse.

  She was ready – she was in the zone.

  Straker heard that short exchange through his headsets in the motor home headquarters truck. He was now also able to “see” it.

  In front of him, this time, Straker had numerous screens set up. He had a split TV shot of the forward on-board views from the two Massarellas – showing both drivers’ hands and their steering wheels.

  Another screen was segmented into four boxes, each a separate display, resembling an oscilloscope. These four showed the carrier wave of their different radio frequencies. The top one was Sabatino’s original voice radio. The next one down showed her second radio. The next box indicated the Ptarmigan’s original data link frequency, while the last box at the bottom of the screen showed the new parallel channel also carrying the engine data.

  On any transmission, now, the display for the frequency in question would change colour from black to orange, helping to catch his eye. Through this form of monitoring, Straker could instantly “see” any traffic across their radio networks, particularly on the carrier wave. He was pleased. Even that brief radio exchange between Backhouse and Sabatino showed the system to be working. If the saboteurs tried to hit any of their frequencies, now, Straker would know immediately they were active and presenting a threat, allowing him instantly to trigger preventative measures.

  The view of the grid changed from chaos to regimented order in a matter of seconds. All extraneous personnel hurried off, leaving only the neat pair of parallel lines – the cars – out on the track.

  Their roar began.

  Moments later, the two Ferraris on the front row moved off on the formation lap round the 4.4 mile circuit. The slighted lower-placed cars followed on, growling their readiness to challenge those up at the front.

  Within minutes, the parade lap complete, the grid re-formed.

  Behind the two Ferraris on the front row was Simi Luciano in the Massarella. Against Sabatino’s 50 points for the Championship, Luciano was lying third on 40. Paddy Aston, lying second overall with 44 points, held P5 in the Lambourn.

  One red light came on.

  The engines’ roar increased.

  The second, third and fourth lights lit up.

  Sabatino checked her steering wheel one last time. She steadied her breathing.

  The roar crescendoed.

  Five lights burned. They were all on. They stayed burning. Then, suddenly, they were out.

  GO!

  The noise was deafening. All twenty-one cars screamed off the line. All that energy and testosterone headed down to the entry of Turn One, the famous La Source.

  Simi Luciano got away well on the clean side of the track from the second row. Ahead of him were both Ferraris. They had pulled level with each other and were racing side by side as they hurtled into the braking zone. No team orders could have been at work between these two drivers. Both Ferraris dived for the racing line into the first corner. The second place man aimed for a tight line on the inside, while the pole sitter tried to come in, claiming the line for himself. A massive test of nerve. The two Ferraris banged wheels, momentarily throwing themselves off pace and rhythm. Both decelerated as a consequence. The whole field was suddenly bunching up behind them.

  Remy Sabatino, in P14, was a long way back from all this. But the field concertinaed quickly. She was able to see the convergence of the front runners – one of the few consolations of being further back. It afforded her more time to try and read what was going on.

  Up at the front the mêlée continued. Compression of speed and space into such a bottleneck gave the drivers little room fore and aft, let alone amidships, to move. A hair’s breadth soon separated the cars, meaning the only protection against bumping the car in front was to lift off.

  The pack as a whole more or less ground to a halt.

  Remy Sabatino, resigned to be patient – because of her unrepresentative grid position – had been ready to play a waiting game in this race. But all that was abandoned in the blink of an eye.

  She spotted Simi Luciano flinch to the outside – an act of evasion, desperate to miss running into the Ferrari squabble directly in front of him. Sabatino saw immediately where he’d been forced to go. With the rest of the pack still to his inside – all fighting for the racing line – she extrapolated the possibilities of Luciano’s move. She thought she
saw a chance. And went for it.

  The Ptarmigan Team looked on, their hearts in their mouths. Was this the move of a champion or an outlandish punt from someone so frustrated that they might have reached the end of their tether?

  Immediately swinging wide herself, Sabatino made to go completely right round the outside of La Source, out to the left. She was going to take herself deliberately off line.

  The moment she started this move, her car struggled for grip. Sabatino’s gamble became all too apparent. The rear end got away from her – twice. Badly. The Ptarmigan then yawed dramatically as she tried to slow and turn in round the outside of the corner on the dirty surface.

  Out on the marbles, she was wrestling frenetically with the wheel.

  Over to her front and right, at the apex of the reflex bend, the leaders were still trying to unravel themselves. There was a collision between Paddy Aston in the Lambourn and a Lotus – the Lotus losing its front wing in the process. Shards of carbon fibre – as it shattered into pieces – were bounced like pins across the surface of the track. La Source was now littered with razor-sharp splinters.

  Sabatino was still going wide. She soon found herself bouncing along the red and white stones on the outside of the corner.

  A car to her inside nearly hit her as it, too, swerved outwards, taking evasive action. Sabatino was forced to go even wider – to start straddling the kerb. There was a soul-wrenching grunt as her undertray hit and scraped along the ground. Was this now a mistake? Had she really gone too far – taken too much of a risk? Sabatino kept pushing, knowing she was well past the point of no return.

  Somehow, though, she managed to hold it together, even while rallying, her left wheels well and truly on the ungrippy artificial grass.

  Still Sabatino fed in the power, fighting all the way to maintain the balance of the car. She started veering back – back towards the black stuff. Moments later she was fully on the circuit again, with all four wheels, and quickly accelerating aggressively through the exit of the turn.

  She breathed deeply as the car found stability. Sabatino took in her surroundings – and position. The leaders, breaking away down the hill in front of her, were picking up speed heading towards Eau Rouge, while the chaos through Turn One was slowly starting to unwind behind her.

  ‘Amazing, Remy,’ said Backhouse over the radio. ‘You’ve jumped ten places to fourth – quite superb.’

  But to Sabatino’s frustration, that was nearly all the excitement for the Belgian Grand Prix. The race order remained unchanged for a number of laps: Ferrari, Ferrari, Luciano, Sabatino, Red Bull, Aston. There seemed little available to the two Ferraris in front to pull away from Luciano’s Massarella, while Sabatino got more and more frustrated every time she closed in on Luciano. Her Ptarmigan was performing brilliantly and was able to make up ground. But, under braking, any dirty air killed the effectiveness of her front wing. She couldn’t pass, because she never managed to get close enough to mount a serious challenge.

  Sabatino had to settle for a waiting game for twenty laps.

  Then the race-leading Ferrari dived in to the pits. Changing tyres, the crew worked extraordinarily fast, but the fuel rig jammed at a critical moment, taking a full twenty seconds to be disengaged. By the time the Ferrari had regained the track, he’d dropped back down to seventh.

  By default, Sabatino had gained a place.

  Luciano in the Massarella passed the other, front-running, Ferrari two laps from the end and, as a consequence, took the chequered flag.

  Sabatino was confirmed in P3, so even making it onto the podium.

  Paddy Aston, after fending off the rebounding Ferrari, prevailed and retained fourth.

  Straker heard and saw Backhouse’s radio message to Sabatino on her in-lap: ‘Not the cleanest weekend. But third, from fourteenth on the grid, Remy? Much better than we might have feared.’

  ‘Yeah, but without Massarella’s sabotaging of my qualifying, we should’ve been on pole. This race should’ve been mine.’

  Sabatino made it back to the headquarters truck after the TV interview. She took a shower to rid herself of the sticky champagne – a hazard of the spray on the podium – and emerged wearing a large baggy jersey and jeans. She was rubbing down her hair with a towel.

  ‘A great drive, Remy,’ said Treadwell. ‘A disappointing weekend but a great save, considering. After yesterday, six points are far better than we hoped. It keeps us just ahead, by one, in the Constructors’ Championship. While your six points to Luciano’s ten still keeps you at the top of the Drivers’ by six.’

  Sabatino clearly wasn’t warming to any attempt to be philosophical. Trying further, Treadwell said: ‘Also, confronting Van Der Vaal and the guy from Benbecular must have frightened Massarella off today.’

  She slumped down onto the bench in the motor home. ‘Who cares – I should have been on pole. This should have been mine.’

  Suddenly she looked distracted.

  Sabatino had just caught sight of an image on one of the plasma screens. Jumping up, she crossed the floor of the motor home to take a closer look. A live CCTV shot showed the front of the Ptarmigan garage in the pit lane and – and beyond it – Massarella’s. ‘What the hell?’ exhaled Sabatino to the others in the motor home. ‘What the fuck’s he doing?’

  They all moved over to see the same screen. On it they saw Sabatino’s race engineer chatting on the pit wall.

  Andy Backhouse was engaged in conversation with Eugene Van Der Vaal.

  She asked: ‘What the hell’s Andy doing talking to that bastard?’

  An hour later, Straker kicked himself. With all the other distractions, the showdown with Van Der Vaal, setting up and monitoring the new countermeasures, and the race itself, he’d completely forgotten to tell Backhouse about his surprising discovery, earlier, on the grid: he’d seen an exact copy of Ptarmigan’s Fibonacci Blades – on the front wing of the Massarella.

  And when he finally did remember, it was too late.

  By the time Straker tried to catch up with Remy Sabatino’s race engineer, he was out of reach.

  Not just from Spa.

  Andy Backhouse had had enough.

  He had resigned from the team.

  PART THREE

  LA PARABOLICA

  TWENTY-NINE

  ‘What do you mean he’s defected?’ barked Quartano over the phone. ‘I knew he’d resigned. How’s he defected?’

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ replied Straker. ‘He’s gone over to Massarella.’

  Quartano exploded. ‘What? How could that even be possible? What on earth would’ve possessed him to do that? The Judas, the fucking Judas. Makes him as big a bastard as they are. Hang on, doesn’t that prove once and for all that he was the insider saboteur?’

  Straker stayed silent.

  ‘He’s under contract, for Christ’s sake,’ bawled Quartano. ‘Non-compete. Matt, get onto legal and have them nail this.’ Quartano just seemed to grunt for a moment. ‘Damnit, this has to make him the bastard insider,’ he repeated. ‘All the more reason to slap an injunction on him,’ he little-less-than bellowed. ‘Straker, I want you to stop that arsehole getting anywhere near Massarella!’

  Straker decided to stay on in Spa, over Sunday night – after the rest of the team had left – to try to handle the fallout from Backhouse’s departure. Taking a walk through the race complex as the place started to empty, he looked out over the valleys of the Ardennes in the last of the evening sun, trying to visualize and rationalize the whole sabotage situation.

  He thought through each of the elements he had encountered so far: Michael Lyons. Radio jamming. Jeremy Barnett. Benbecular engines. Adi Barrantes. Massarella. The strange fob-like device. Trifecta. The engine management system.

  Every time he thought of a new incident or person to add to the web of influences in his mind’s eye, he realized an association of some kind could be made straight back to a common denominator: Trifecta Systems. Visualizing all these elements together helped
make the circumstances all the clearer.

  But why were these people all involved? It didn’t seem to make any sense.

  How could he set about rationalizing this? Then he thought of something else. Could there not be something – or someone – behind it all? A controlling mind? That got him thinking.

  What about this Avel Obrenovich?

  Wasn’t he something of a connection between these parties? He was majority shareholder of Trifecta and the principal sponsor of Massarella. Might he be the one empowering all this?

  What on earth, though, was the motivation to launch these malicious assaults on Ptarmigan and Remy Sabatino? This was “just” a competitive sport. It was completely beyond Straker’s comprehension that anyone should go to such lengths – particularly being so invasive, let alone demonstrating contempt for rules, law, fair play, even to the point of risking human life.

  Such malicious intent had to be about more than just winning a few races.

  The following morning Straker was ready to act on his theories. Standing on the platform under Calatrava’s magnificent canopy at Liège-Guillemins station, he called Karen in London. Looking round him on the platform to make sure he couldn’t be overheard, he asked: ‘How’s the research on Charlotte Grant’s iPhone going?’

  ‘Not bad, Matt, but it has been the weekend since you asked.’

  Straker smiled, having lost track of time. ‘Sure, sorry. Any idea how long it’s all going to take, though?’

  ‘I.T. said it should be done by close of business today.’

  ‘Okay, Karen,’ he conceded, and checked the privacy around him again. In slightly hushed tones, he said: ‘I need something else. Can you do me an all-sources search on those involved with Avel Obrenovich: Obrenovich Oil & Gas, the Massarella Formula One team, and its boss Eugene Van Der Vaal? Could you print off the top fifty stories for each, and put them into one of your binders for me?’