Within the last 6 months, maybe less. You can tell by the wear pattern or the lack of one. Everything else on this engine has 20 years of use on it. These four don't."
He stood up. "They're also the wrong parts. Not broken, not low quality wrong. Specifically wrong.
Like someone who knew exactly how this engine works chose pieces that would cause it to throw the shutdown response every time it reached operating temperature." Joker stared at the parts. "You're saying someone put the wrong parts in on purpose." "I'm saying someone who understood this engine well enough to know exactly where to sabotage it did exactly that."
Ethan met his eyes. "That's not a random mechanic who made a mistake. That's someone with deep knowledge of how this specific machine was built. Someone who's been inside this room."
The silence that followed was the kind that changes rooms permanently. Like a temperature drop you can feel in your chest. "How long have you known?" Joker asked.
"About 4 hours," Ethan said. "I found something else, too." He reached into his jacket, pulled out the rolled blueprint, held it out. Joker took it, unrolled it.
His eyes moved across the page and for the first time since Ethan had met him, something broke through the careful control of the older man's face. Not dramatically. Just a tremor barely visible at the corner of his mouth. The kind of tremor that means a man is looking at something he never expected to see again.
"Where did you find this?" Joker's voice had dropped to almost nothing. "Hidden panel in the engine casing," Ethan said, "behind the initials VR." Joker looked up from the blueprint.
The full weight of his attention landed on Ethan like a physical force. "Victor hid this." It wasn't a question. "Yes."
"And you found it." Still not a question. Something else, something trying to become a question, but not yet certain what it was. "Yes."
Joker rolled the blueprint up slowly, carefully, the way you handle something irreplaceable. "Nobody outside this club knew Victor's full name," he said. "We called him Ghost inside the club, on the road. Ghost, because the man could fix anything without leaving a trace."