He felt like a man who had done his job correctly and was now dealing with the consequences of the world not being structured. To make that easy, I thought about retaining counsel. He thought about his bank account better than it had been 2 weeks ago, not as comfortable as it was going to need to be. He called a lawyer he knew in Fort Worth, a woman named Patricia Oay, who had handled two previous contract disputes for Hayes Arowworks and who had the particular quality Malcolm valued most in attorneys. She told you exactly what the situation was without making it sound worse than it was or better than it was.
She picked up on the third ring. He explained the situation in 8 minutes. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Federal deposition potential civil third party claim aviation safety documentation as primary evidence." "Yes," he said. "I need to read your documentation package before I can tell you anything useful." She said, "Send it today.
You'll have it within the hour, he said. He was about to hang up when she said, "Malcolm, one question. Go ahead. Is there anything in that documentation that you're uncertain about? Any entry, any timestamp, any sourced record that you can't fully stand behind?" He thought about it.
He thought about every page, every tab, every cross reference Rachel had pulled and verified. Every entry he'd made in real time, not reconstructed, not edited, not interpreted after the fact. No, he said. Good, she said. That's the only thing that matters.
Send the package. He sent it. The morning moved the way. Mornings moved when the work was real. not dramatically, but with a kind of purposeful momentum that felt like the shop had found its rhythm again. Jerome arrived at 8 and immediately started on a presscheduled inspection for a different client, a small aircraft operator out of Addison Airport, who needed annual maintenance work done and wasn't connected to the Sterling Crown situation in any way.
That job mattered to Malcolm maybe more than it should have because it was evidence that Hayes Arow works was not just a Sterling Crown satellite. It was its own thing doing its own work on its own terms. He spent two hours at his desk reviewing the scope proposal Rachel had drafted for the Sterling Crown safety protocol contract. It was thorough the way everything Rachel did was thorough. She'd built in independent reporting structures, board level notification requirements, escalation procedures that didn't pass through operations management, and a compensation structure that reflected the actual cost of doing the work correctly rather than the minimum necessary to get the signature.
Hymod three changes. Then he sent it to Victoria with a note that said, "Proposal attached. The non-negotiables are on page four. She replied in 11 minutes. not to the proposal. Just two words agreed.
Proceed. He stared at that for a moment. Two words from a woman who had once occupied an entire conference room with attorneys and executives and a pre-position decision to pay him $45,000 and closed the door. He filed her reply in the contract folder and moved on. That afternoon at 2:22, everything changed again.
Susan Okafor called him from the airfield. She didn't start with context. She didn't build toward it. She said, "Aircraft 11, we opened the avionics bay." And Malcolm said, "Malcolm," she paused. "I need you here." He was in his truck in 4 minutes.
He arrived at the airfield at 2:51. Susan met him at the hangar door. "Show me," he said. She showed him the avionics bay on aircraft 11, a bombardier learjet that Sterling Crown used primarily for short hall executive routes had been opened for the standard audit inspection. Inside the bay behind the main avionic stack, Susan's team had found a secondary GPS receiver that was not in the aircraft's maintenance log, not a manufacturer installed unit. an aftermarket device mounted with hardware that didn't match the aircraft's documentation, wired into the navigation system through a.