He had not known what the lock opened until the key was in his hand, and he was crouched on the cockpit floor at 10:00 in the evening with Dana Keene and Mara Winslow watching from the doorway. And the flashlight beam settled on a bespoke data recorder whose thermal protection rating significantly exceeded what the fire had produced. Installed on the order of Vivian's father when he ran the company, maintained without documentation in the years since his death, and believed by Preston to have been destroyed in a fire he had designed to be thorough enough to destroy it. Preston had known the recorder existed. He had been with the company long enough to know everything that mattered, and the single error in his calculation was that he had not been the one to specify its protection rating, and the man who had specified it had been a man who trusted nothing to chance.
The data inside covered 14 months. Grant and Dana worked through the night with a forensic data specialist the regulatory authority had on call, pulling records in chronological order and assembling a sequence that, once complete, was not ambiguous in any of its significant details. There were command logs showing the hangar suppression system placed in bypass mode using a credential linked to the COO's office 38 minutes before the fire's ignition point. There were procurement system entries ordering components from Altair Precision Components on 17 separate occasions across 11 months, routed through Ellis Ward's account, but approved at the COO authorization level required for orders exceeding a certain financial threshold. There were financial records showing transfer confirmations between Altair's parent vehicle and a discretionary account Preston Hawthorne controlled personally, totaling $193 million across the covered period, paid by Sterling Crown as the price of certified components received in the form of uncertified substitutes, with the difference converted to personal gain.
And there was an audio file recorded by the aircraft's own cabin microphone during a meeting held inside Sterling One3 months before the fire in which Preston's voice said plainly that the aircraft did not need to go down. It only needed to be the reason the board lost its confidence in the woman flying it. Vivian stood in the forensic room and listened to her father's recorder give back the voice of the man she had trusted longest, and she was quiet for a long time, and when she finally spoke, it was to tell Mara to schedule the board for first thing the following morning. Preston, who had filed his own emergency board session the previous evening under the provision allowing senior officers to convene a meeting when the company faced imminent material risk had set the agenda as a motion to temporarily suspend Vivian's operational authority pending an investigation into her management of the Sterling One situation. And when Grant arrived at the building the next morning, Preston met him in the hallway outside the boardroom and offered him in a sealed envelope twice the contract amount as a direct personal payment in exchange for testifying that all technical failures traced exclusively to Ellis Ward acting alone and without instruction.