The hangar's overhead suppression system had been placed in maintenance bypass mode 46 minutes before the fire alarm triggered, a status change logged automatically by the building management system and attributed to a routine test cycle that no scheduled maintenance records supported. A vehicle registered to the Sterling Crown Procurement Department had been captured on the access road camera at 11:17 that night, moving toward the hangar rather than away from it. The camera covering the primary bay door had experienced a 7-minute recording gap beginning at 11:49. Not a power failure, which would have produced a system restart log, but a clean gap, the kind produced by a direct buffer command from someone with access to the recording system's administrative controls. Grant found the final piece not through electronics, but through the work of someone who had not anticipated that a rebuilder would go back to the original structure after everything useful had ostensibly been consumed.
Pressed into a fold of the frame rail, protected by a section of titanium heat shield that had deflected the worst of the thermal loading, was a shipping label fragment bearing the partial name of a supplier, Altair Precision Components, a name that appeared nowhere in the Sterling Crown approved vendor registry Grant had been given at the project start. Mara ran the name through corporate database services her firm maintained and found Altair Precision Components registered in Delaware, modestly capitalized with no visible operations and a single listed officer who turned out to be a paralegal at a trust management firm in Wilmington, the kind of structure built to hold assets at a comfortable distance from their actual owner. The beneficial ownership chain ran through two intermediate entities before connecting to a private equity vehicle whose quarterly returns included a line of income attributed to aerospace component distribution and one entity in that chain listed a silent partner by initials only, initials that matched a name Vivian recognized without being told the full name. She did not say Preston's name aloud in that meeting and Mara did not press her to because Mara had spent enough time in corporate litigation to know that the moment a chief executive names a suspect, every subsequent action is complicated by the accusation. Preston arrived at Vivian's office that afternoon with a prepared summary suggesting Ellis Ward had been running the Altair relationship independently, routing purchases through his procurement authority without upward direction, a story that was structurally possible, factually hollow, and constructed by someone who understood exactly which gaps in the paper trail his explanation would need to span.
Vivian called Grant to her office at 7:00 in the morning before the communication staff arrived and before the board's formal day began in the window when a building full of powerful people briefly becomes a place where honest conversation is possible. She offered him the $650,000 against a provisional release, not a full certification, she was careful to specify, but a documented acknowledgement that the work he had performed met the agreed specifications except for the disputed component. And Grant listened to the entire offer without interrupting, which was not what Vivian had expected from a man whose shop was hemorrhaging contracts and whose loan officer was leaving messages with the urgency of a man approaching the end of his professional patience. He declined clearly and without heat and explained that the payment amount and the technical status of the aircraft were two separate questions that could not be compressed into a single document because signing anything that implied the aircraft was provisionally airworthy while an uncertified component remained in the avionics bay would transfer legal responsibility from the person who had installed the false part to the person who acknowledged the aircraft's condition, which was him, and which was precisely what someone in this situation would want to engineer. What he would accept was straightforward.