By morning, Ellis Ward was not at his desk and not responding to his phone and Preston issued a statement to the board noting that Ward's disappearance was consistent with the behavior of a person who had exceeded his authority in the procurement function and was now unwilling to face the consequences of acting without direction from above. Grant did not believe Ellis Ward had acted alone and he said so to Nolan and Mara in the engineering conference room clearly enough that there was no ambiguity about what he meant or who he meant it about. A man running an operation of this complexity, counterfeit component sourcing, camera manipulation, credential theft, digital record alteration, arson timed to destroy specific evidence, was not a procurement director operating on personal initiative. He was an executor, and executors of this precision do not disappear when a piece of evidence goes missing unless someone with authority has told them where to go. One of the storage facility's ground crew, a woman named Patrice, who had worked the overnight shift for 6 years, and noticed considerably more than people assumed she did, told Grant that Ellis had stopped in the parking lot the previous evening and said something she had not fully understood at the time, that if the aircraft stayed on the ground, everyone was going to lose more than money.
Spoken in the voice of a man who was afraid of a specific person rather than a general outcome. Grant proposed using the sabotage scheme against itself. They would place a replica actuator, a genuine certified component modified to look visually identical to the counterfeit unit, inside the aircraft, while the real evidence component, which Dana had fully photographed and cataloged before the theft, was secured in a location only Dana and Mara knew. The announcement that the aircraft was proceeding to a ground run demonstration would be made in a way that reached everyone in the building, including Preston, who would have no cause to believe his component had been removed from the evidentiary chain. Vivian made the announcement with the tone of a person who has recovered her footing, and Preston's response, a measured expression of satisfaction and a request that the demonstration include a high-power engine run to validate the flight management systems throttle integration at realistic power levels.
Was the response of a man who believed Sterling One's control system was still compromised and was positioning himself for what came next. When two board members pushed back on Nolan's insistence on an unmanned ground run and suggested a pilot operated low altitude circuit would be more persuasive to the Orion acquisition team, every certificated pilot employed by Sterling Crown filed a written declaration within two hours stating they would not operate the aircraft without a maintenance release signed by the inspector of record. And Preston recognized visibly that he could not legally compel any certificated aviator to fly an aircraft they had declared unsafe. Because that was one of the few protections in aviation law that no level of corporate authority could override. Sterling One sat on the secondary test runway at Blackridge Field in the early morning light attended by a ground crew of four and monitored from the tower by Nolan Briggs with the board, the acquisition team representatives and a small group of press observers positioned behind the safety barrier near the operations building.