A transmitter unit registered to the operations network of the chief operating officer's suite accessed through a portable device that could be operated from any point within the field's perimeter. Preston was not in his office when the transmission was sent. He was at the safety barrier with the board members watching. And by the time Dana's team traced the signal, Preston was already composing a statement in which Ellis Ward, acting from an unknown location in a final act of desperation, had sent the command in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his own culpability. Ellis Ward reappeared at the field's main gate at noon, not running, not hiding, but walking with an attorney at his side.
And he stood in front of Dana's investigative team and stated that he had sent the command, that he accepted responsibility, and that he was prepared to make a full statement. Grant listened from across the room and watched Ellis's face. And what he saw was not the expression of a man confessing to something he had done independently. It was the expression of a man reading from a document that someone else had written and handed to him that morning with specific instructions about what would happen to his family if he deviated from the prepared text by more than a sentence. Ellis waited until the formal statement was recorded and the legal caution had been read.
And then in the parking lot outside, with the attorney momentarily out of earshot, he pressed a small key into Grant's palm and said, without looking directly at him, that the evidence Preston needed erased was still inside the aircraft, that the fire had not reached everything it was supposed to reach, and that Grant would know where to look. The key was machined for a panel flush lock mounted below the cockpit floor. The kind of installation that does not appear on a standard maintenance drawing because it was added outside the normal engineering change process. A personal modification by someone who wanted to store something in the aircraft that was not documented in the aircraft's official records. Grant had rebuilt the floor section around that lock housing during the reconstruction, leaving it in place because it was integrated into the structural panel, and because he had assumed it was a legacy mount for portable ground support equipment.