And Vivian used an executive override to open the lab and directed the building systems team to restore its access credentials to her administrative account without routing the change through the COO's office. Grant said he would be there the following morning and that he was not doing it to help the acquisition succeed. He was doing it because Nolan Briggs and two other pilots had staked their professional standing on the aircraft being grounded. And he was not willing to leave people who had stood for the right thing exposed to the consequences of having done so. Before he left the building, Vivian gathered the Hollis Aeroworks crew who had worked on the rebuild and apologized to them directly in the corridor outside the operations suite for the language she had used in her statement to the board.
Language that had called their work a deliberate delay and their professionalism a financial strategy. Grant waited until she had finished and then said that an apology was the correct starting place and that trust was rebuilt the same way an aircraft was, not by declaring it fixed, but by going through every system one by one until you could account for each of them fully. Vivian nodded and did not argue. The actuator disappeared from the secure storage area sometime between 11:00 at night and 2:00 in the morning during the window when the facilities overnight custodian took his meal break and the secondary access log ran on a 15-minute polling cycle rather than continuous recording. The camera outside the storage room showed Dana Keene's credential used to open the door at 12:43 and the image showed a figure in a dark jacket moving inside for 9 minutes before leaving.
But Dana had been on the other side of the state at a professional conference at that hour with a time-stamped hotel key card and a dinner receipt to confirm it. And the footage had been constructed from a recording of a real inspection visit Dana had made to the same room 6 weeks earlier. A 12-second loop stitched into the overnight recording with precision that required both access to the camera system and prior knowledge of when Dana's legitimate visit had taken place. The actual entry had been made using a badge registered to Ellis Ward whose access privileges had not been revoked despite the ongoing investigation. An oversight Mara had flagged the previous day that the security manager had not yet processed.