It was, Howell said afterward, the most specifically protected consulting arrangement he had ever seen. He knows how these things expand, Sloan said. Clearly, Howell said. Did he write that clause himself? He sent me the language, Sloan said.
I recognized it as accurate and didn't change it. Howell looked at her with the expression of a man who was updating his understanding of multiple things simultaneously. You know, he said carefully, "Some of us who've been here a while, we've been watching what you've been doing, the breakroom visits, the protocol revisions, the policy filings." He paused. People were skeptical at first. A lot of people.
I know, she said. They're less skeptical now. He said, not completely, but less. That's honest, she said. I'll take it.
He stood to leave and then stopped at the door. That morning, he said when he walked in on Tuesday and found the secondary panel in 20 minutes. I've been doing this for 23 years. She waited. I wouldn't have found it.
Howell said. Not without running the thermal load test, and even then I would have gone to the primary panel first. He looked at the floor and then back at her. I just thought you should know that. I know, she said.
I've known that for a while. After he left, she sat at her desk for a moment in the quiet of the late afternoon. The tarmac was visible through the window, the ground crew finishing up the last movements of the day. She could see the main hanger doors from here slightly open, the warm interior light spilling out into the fading afternoon. She thought about this hanger that morning, about the room full of people who had stood there and listened and then walked back to their work carrying whatever they were going to carry from it.
She thought about Carmen Reyes, who had nodded at her on her first morning visit, and who had at the end of the hangar address caught Sloan's eye from across the room and held it for a moment with an expression that said, "I saw it. I heard it. We'll see what comes next. That was fair. That was exactly fair.