Grant asked her, in the same even tone he had used all morning, whether she understood exactly who would decide if her company received $400 million or collapsed without it. Sloan insisted, with what little authority she had left, that the final decision belonged to the Holloway Meridian board, not to any single man sitting on a private jet. Grant closed the folder in front of him and told her, without theater, that he was the chairman of that board, and that there was no vote taking place today that did not run through him first. There was nothing left for her to deny. The entire flight, she realized, had been arranged by Holloway Meridian itself, so that Blackthorn's leadership could present its restructuring plan directly to the very investor holding its future in his hands.
For 6 months, Sloan had prepared to impress a mysterious billionaire she had never met without once suspecting that the billionaire was the same man she had once called a failure in front of his own daughter. Grant did not cancel the meeting or delay it until they reached solid ground. Instead, he asked her to present it now, 35,000 ft above the country she had spent years trying to conquer. Sloan opened with the numbers designed to dazzle, an 18% reduction in operating costs, the planned sale of two maintenance centers, and a workforce reduction of 2,400 employees framed as strategic efficiency. She spoke of moving pension obligations to an outside financial partner and increasing executive bonuses once the deal closed, treating each cut as an accomplishment rather than a wound inflicted on people who had spent decades keeping aircraft safe.
Grant, who understood better than anyone in that cabin exactly what those workers did and why their experience could not simply be replaced, asked her plainly who would be accountable when the maintenance chain inevitably failed without them. Sloan answered that personnel were always replaceable, a phrase that struck Grant harder than she could have known because it echoed almost exactly how she had once treated him and their daughter when a more glamorous life called her away. Buried inside the financial appendix, Grant found $86 million routed to a consulting firm whose function nobody in the room could clearly explain. Sloan brushed past it quickly, insisting the decision belonged entirely to comrade Blackthorn and had nothing to do with her. Miles Keaton shifted in his seat uneasy, remembering the afternoon 8 months earlier when he had first noticed the same consulting firm's name attached to a transfer he could not explain, and how he had said nothing then out of fear for his own position.
Grant asked, without raising his voice even slightly, to see the the unedited data behind every figure in the presentation. When Sloan suggested he likely lacked the financial background to interpret structures this complex, Grant calmly identified three miscalculations in the growth forecast, one concealed liability, and a clause that could leave the company's pension fund unable to meet its obligations within 18 months. Miles Keaton, watching from across the cabin, quietly confirmed that every correction Grant made was accurate. While Sloan sat frozen beside the folder that had just betrayed her, a secure message arrived on Grant's phone from Dana Whitlock, his lead counsel, informing him that investigators had finally identified who had signed off on the falsified maintenance reports buried inside Blackthorn's books, and that the signature belonged to Sloan Harrington herself. 12 years earlier, Grant had been an aviation engineer working out of a hangar he rented by the month, pouring every dollar he had into a system designed to predict engine failure before it ever became catastrophic.