Audit Day
Chapter 14 - Audit Day
The board meeting was scheduled for ten in the morning, but Inspector Cho's team arrived at eight, unannounced in the sense that mattered, though Marcus had known for two days it was coming.
By the time Grant walked into the conference room, three FAA officials sat already seated along one side of the long table, folders open, expressions carefully neutral.
He stopped in the doorway a half second too long.
"I was told this was a board meeting," he said.
"It still is," Marcus said. "It's also an audit. Both things can be true in the same room."
Grant's lawyer, a sharp featured man named Castellano, took the seat beside him with the stiff posture of someone recalculating strategy in real time.
Kayla sat across the table, her father's pen resting on a legal pad in front of her, badge clipped neatly to her vest even though she hadn't worn the uniform to a board meeting before. She wanted him to see it. Wanted him to remember exactly who he'd shoved.
Inspector Cho opened with the KA712 incident report, the hydraulic warning dismissed three years earlier, the maintenance note logged off the books two days after.
"This report was never submitted to the federal database," she said. "Can anyone in this room explain why."
Silence stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer.
"I can," Dale said, from a seat near the back where he'd insisted on sitting, close enough to be present, far enough to not look like he was performing anything for anyone. "I logged it that way because I was told to. By a man calling himself Ray, working through Halsted Aero Services, using threats against my family to secure my cooperation."
He laid it all out again, calmly this time, the fear largely burned off after three prior tellings.
Castellano tried twice to object to relevance and was overruled both times by Inspector Cho with the same patient, unbothered tone she'd used with Dale in their private interview.
"Mister Ashworth," she said finally, turning to Grant. "Fourteen of the fifteen aircraft with falsified sign-offs in this investigation are either owned by or chartered primarily through your holding companies. Can you explain the relationship between your operations and Halsted Aero Services."
Grant's jaw worked once, twice, before words came.
"I never contracted Halsted Aero directly," he said. "That relationship existed at the operational level, arranged through Meridian's maintenance department."
"Convenient timing, then," Kayla said, before she could stop herself, "that the operational level in question started forging sign-offs specifically for your jets around the same time you began pressuring dispatch for faster turnaround on delays."
"That's an accusation, not a fact," Castellano cut in.
"It's an email," Kayla said, and slid a printed page across the table. "From eighteen months ago. Your client to Meridian's former operations director, asking why his jets couldn't turn around as fast as, quote, other charters that don't waste half a day on paperwork nobody reads anyway."
Grant's face had gone the same pale it went the night in the rain.
"I meant that generally," he said. "About regulatory overreach. Not, I never asked anyone to skip a real inspection."
"You asked for faster," Kayla said. "Somebody heard faster and decided the fastest way to give it to you was to stop actually doing it."
Inspector Cho made a note, unhurried, and looked up at Grant with an expression that had already, quietly, made up its mind.
"We'll need full access to Halsted Aero's operational records," she said. "And a formal statement from you regarding your communications with Meridian's maintenance department over the past two years."
Grant sat very still, the room's attention weighing on him in a way three hours of shouting into a phone never had.
"I want to speak to Ms. Reyes alone," he said finally. "Before this goes further."
May you like
Kayla looked at Marcus. Marcus gave the smallest nod.
"Ten minutes," she said. "In the hangar. Not this room."
