Three new inquiry calls. Companies asking if Hayes Arowworks did fleet audits. I thought about what a fleet audit program run independently with a federal investigation as proof of methodology would actually mean for his operation. He thought about Jerome, 22 years old, asking intelligent questions about tolerances and material fatigue. He thought about the hanger with his name on the door.
I'll need to bring in more people, he said. I know, she said. It'll cost you more than the restoration did. I know that, too, she said. I own 11 aircraft and I just found out I can't trust my own maintenance program.
Cheap is not what I'm buying. He nodded once. I'll have Rachel put together a scope proposal by Friday, he said. Victoria extended her hand. He shook it.
It was a different handshake than the first one. The one in the conference room that hadn't happened because she hadn't offered it. This one had weight to it, not the weight of money, the weight of what it had cost both of them to arrive at this moment. Malcolm looked at aircraft 6 one more time before he left the hangar. The fuel valve that had flown 41 flights upside down, the NL taped shut, the system that would need to be rebuilt from scratch.
He thought about 41 flights, about the people on those flights who had no way of knowing that the machine carrying them across the sky had been quietly, deliberately compromised. He thought about his daughter, about the question she'd asked him on the phone in that steady, too adult voice. Was the plane safe when you fixed it? He'd answered no. That's why I walked away.
He'd been right about the primary aircraft. Hi. I hadn't known yet about aircraft 6. He hadn't known yet about aircraft 9. He hadn't known the full shape of what he'd stepped into the middle of, but he'd walked away anyway because the job wasn't to make the flight happen.
The job was to make sure it came back. He picked up his tools and walked to his truck in the early evening air. Behind him, the hanger lights were still on and Susan Okafor's team was still working. And somewhere inside a federal building downtown, a warrant was being executed and a name was being processed. and the thread Malcolm Hayes had found inside a $ 48 million jet was being pulled carefully and methodically toward everything it was attached to. He drove home.
Maya was at the kitchen table again. He sat across from her. She looked up over her homework glasses. "How was work?" she asked. I thought about the fuel valve about 41 flights.
About Victoria Sterling's face in the hangar. Important, he said. She looked at him for a moment. She had her mother's eyes precise and quiet and capable of reading things that hadn't been said yet. "Good important or hard important?" she asked.
He thought about it. "Both," he said. "Same thing usually." She nodded as though that was exactly the answer she expected and went back to her homework. He sat there for a while in the kitchen light. And for the first time since the morning, he'd walked into Victoria Sterling's conference room with a six-lb binder and an invoice.