She said before you talk to Whitfield. I want to be in the room when you do. Yes, he said. Absolutely. Yes.
He hung up and called Whitfield and pushed the interview to Thursday to allow time for the meeting with Voss on Wednesday. Whitfield agreed without hesitation. The agreement itself told Marcus something. The FAA was patient because it was confident. It had what it needed.
What it wanted was the full story with a witness told in the right way. He spent Tuesday building the complete timeline. Every memo in order, every date, every name, every response he'd received or failed to receive. He organized it the way he'd been trained to organize a mission. Brief, clear, sequential, no ambiguity, no assumption, everything sourced and documented.
It took most of the day and well into the evening. At 9 that night, Diane knocked on his door. She had a container of food. Again. "You forget to eat when you're focused," she said matterofactly, pushing past him into the kitchen and setting the container on the counter.
"How do you know that?" he asked. "Because I've watched you." She turned around and looked at him with that direct patient gaze she had. "You're doing okay? I'm doing better than okay," he said. "I think I'm actually starting to feel something.
I don't know what to call it." "Ready?" she said. He looked at her. Yeah, maybe that. She pulled plates from the cabinet. She knew where they were now, which was a thing Marcus noted without making it bigger than it needed to be, and started dividing up the food.
She moved around his kitchen with a quiet comfort that had developed gradually, naturally, without announcement. "Can I ask you something?" Marcus said. "Sure. When you told me that night on the porch that Callaway might have fired me because he was afraid of me. Did you really believe that or were you just trying to make me feel better?
She set the plates down and looked at him squarely. Marcus, I don't tell people things to make them feel better. I tell people things because I believe they need to hear the truth. That's not the same thing. So, you believed it?
I believed it. She said, "A man who won't stop filing safety reports, who escalates every time he gets shut down, who won't be bought off with a good schedule or a quiet understanding. That man is dangerous to someone who's running a shortcut operation. He can't be managed. He can't be predicted.
The only way to neutralize him is to remove him." She picked up her fork, which they did, but they miscalculated something. What's that? They thought removing you would remove the documentation. She looked at him, but you took it with you. He stared at her for a long moment.