knew the whole shape of it.” “I knew the shape of what I’d found,” Gavin said. “I didn’t know it was this large. I suspected it wasn’t just one component.” He looked at Wesley. “But no, I didn’t know about the incident report template with your name on it. I didn’t know about the forged signatures. Some things you don’t know until you dig.” “And if— if we’d thrown you out, you didn’t.” “If we had—” Gavin was quiet for a moment. “The plane would have flown. Under those load conditions, the TF90 would have started producing false readings somewhere over the water, depending on how long the system compensated before the captain got a true indication of stabilizer position.” He stopped. “The post-incident investigation would have followed the document trail that existed which led to Marissa and Derek Langford would have been the first person on camera expressing grief and shock and calling for accountability.”
Wesley was quiet for a long moment. “30 years I’ve been flying,” he said. “I’ve never—” He stopped. Started again. “You said four words to me in that terminal and I didn’t even think about it. I just followed you back inside.” “You trusted your training,” Gavin said. “I trusted you.” Gavin didn’t have an answer to that. That didn’t feel smaller than what Wesley meant by it, so he didn’t try. Some things you just receive. He turned back to the room. “In terms of next steps, the outside counsel should have a clear path here. The financial records, the supply chain documentation, the forged authorization documents, the fabricated test parameters, the pre-written incident report. That’s a substantial evidentiary package. The FAA notification needs to go today. The aircraft is grounded, which it already is, but it needs to be grounded formally with the inspection findings attached. And the other CS7 units,” Patricia Dunn said. Gavin nodded. “Sterling Crest has three additional CS7 aircraft in various stages of delivery. All of them need to be inspected before they go anywhere. The TF90 appears in the same configuration in all three.”
Marissa had been quiet since the forged signature finding. She was still looking at the page, though her eyes weren’t moving across it the way they move when you’re reading. She was just looking at it, sitting with it. Gavin understood that particular experience, the experience of seeing your name on a document that was designed to destroy you, of understanding that someone had sat down and deliberately constructed a version of events in which you were the villain of a catastrophe you’d had no part in creating. He’d had 3 years with that experience. She was about 4 minutes into it. “Miss Sterling,” he said. She looked up. “The signatures can be refuted,” he said. “The Singapore timeline is airtight. The forensic digital trail on those authorizations, how they were applied, which system credentials were used when your legal team will be able to demonstrate definitively that you didn’t execute those documents. The framing was sophisticated, but it wasn’t designed to withstand serious forensic scrutiny. It was designed to be convincing in the first 12 hours of a post-crash investigation before anyone started pulling threads.” He paused. “We pulled threads first.”
She held his gaze. There was something in her face that wasn’t quite gratitude and wasn’t quite relief. It was something more like the complicated mix of feelings you have when someone does something significant for you after you’ve treated them badly and you’re still early enough in the reckoning that the badness of what you did hasn’t been absorbed yet. It’s just sitting there alongside the relief both things at once. “You came here to stop a plane,” she said quietly. “And you ended up saving me.” “I came here because I should have come sooner,” Gavin said. “And because I have a kid who needs me to be someone she can be proud of. Everything else is just what the day turned into.”
Marissa looked at him for a long moment. Then she straightened in her chair and looked around the room, at the lawyers, at Haw, at Patricia and Marcus, at Wesley, and something shifted in her posture. Not hardness, something more like the return of herself after a brief necessary absence. “All right,” she said. “Legal. I want the FAA notification filed within the hour. I want federal investigators contacted this afternoon, not tomorrow. Rich, freeze everything connected to the Veritech contracts and get me a full accounting of every payment. I want Derek Langford’s system access terminated right now, this minute, and I want everything on his devices imaged before he or his lawyers can request a return of property.” She looked at Patricia and Marcus. “Your firms, I’d like to formally retain you for the ongoing inspection of the three remaining CS7 units. Whatever your rates are, they’re fine.”
People moved, laptops closed, phones came out. The room went from the particular stillness of people absorbing information to the particular motion of people who knew what they needed to do and were doing it. Wesley Grant caught Gavin’s arm as he was gathering his printed reports. “You eating?” he said. “What? It’s 2:00 in the afternoon. Have you eaten anything today?” Gavin thought about it. He’d had coffee at 7:00. Something from the vending machine around 10:00 that he couldn’t fully recall. “Not really.” “There’s a diner across from the facility that’s actually decent. Come eat something.” Wesley said it in the voice of a man who wasn’t offering so much as directing. The same voice he’d used 30 years ago in a flight simulator when he told a student that you can process a crisis better on a full stomach. And that was not optional information.
Gavin looked at the room, at the legal team on their phones, at Haw staring at his laptop with the focused horror of a CFO untangling $86 million of fraudulent contracts, at Marissa standing near the window talking quietly to one of the lawyers with the contained purposefulness of someone running ahead of a fire. She glanced over and caught his eye. Something passed between them that wasn’t quite a nod, more like an acknowledgement, a recognition of something that didn’t have a clean name yet. He turned back to Wesley. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” They walked out together down the corridor through the main terminal where the morning’s chaos had settled into the organized urgency of a company in the early hours of a serious reckoning. The front desk staff were on phones. A man Gavin didn’t recognize was walking fast with a banker’s box of files. Two people in the corner were talking in the low, serious voices of people who’d just found out their department was at the center of something they hadn’t known was happening.