Then she picked it up again and read it a third time. She sat very still for approximately 90 seconds, which was a long time for her to sit without doing anything. Then she pressed the intercom button on her desk. "Get me everything we have on Caleb Rowan," she said. "Full employment file, all of it." What arrived was 18 years of documentation.
Not Caleb's 18 years. He had been at Asterion for 14. But the file also contained records going back four years before him, cross-referenced because of certain repair logs where his name had appeared on incident reports generated before his official hire date. Training shift work, informal consulting while he was still completing his certification. He had made himself useful before anyone had decided whether to pay him for it.
Sloan spent the better part of 2 hours going through the file, not skimming, reading. The pattern emerged slowly, the way patterns do when they've been deliberately buried under layers of ordinary organizational language again and again at intervals of 6 months to 2 years. There were incident reports for problems identified and resolved. The problems were always serious. The resolutions were always complete.
And in nearly every case, the report was authored by a manager or senior engineer whose name appeared prominently. While the detailed technical work log buried somewhere in the attached documentation told a different story about who had actually been in the hangar. C Rowan C. Rowan Caleb Rowan CR Caleb. One report from 7 years ago described the identification and repair of a fuel system anomaly in a commuter aircraft that had been approved for a 60 passenger flight the following morning.
The anomaly was found at 11:30 at night. The report listed the discovery time as 6:45 a.m. after the fix was already complete. The manager's name was in large font at the top. Caleb's appeared once in the attached technical log in a line that read, "Repair performed by C. Rowan, Certified Hydraulics and Fuel Systems." Sloan thought about 60 people.
She thought about 6:45 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. and the difference between those two times. She closed the file and looked out her office window at the tarmac below where a ground crew was moving equipment around a parked aircraft in the particular choreography of early afternoon operations. She watched them for a while. She noticed in a way she hadn't quite before that she didn't know most of their names. She picked up her phone and called her assistant.
I need Caleb Rowan's personal contact information, she said. Home address if we have it. Miss Whitmore, he's been terminated. We may not be authorized to find it, she said. Well, she drove herself, which she rarely did.
She didn't tell anyone where she was going. The address was a residential street on the west side of the city. Modest houses on modest lots. A few older trees that had dropped their leaves weeks ago and left the branches bare against the early evening sky. The kind of neighborhood where people had lived for a long time and knew which driveways to avoid in winter because they iced up badly.