The Bribe
Chapter 15 - The Bribe
They stood near the cordoned off jet, the same spot, though the rain had given way to a gray, still afternoon that felt almost too calm for what was happening.
Grant didn't waste time on pleasantries.
"Name your price," he said. "For dropping the personal angle. The shove, the assault claim you could file, all of it. I'll make it worth more than you'd ever see from a settlement."
Kayla studied him for a long moment.
"You think this was ever about the shove," she said.
"It was the start of it," Grant said.
"No," Kayla said. "The shove is the least of what you did. You created the conditions where fifteen aircraft flew for two years on forged inspections because asking real questions was inconvenient for your schedule. A man named Ray threatened another man's daughter to keep him quiet. Somebody broke into our building and stole a folder to prove they could. None of that started with you shoving me. It just ended with you finally getting caught."
"I'm offering you a way to make this simpler," Grant said. "For everyone. Including you."
"You're offering me a bribe," Kayla said, "in a hangar, in front of a grounded jet, three feet from the exact spot where you first found out I owned half this place. Do you understand how that looks."
Grant's hands, for the first time since she'd met him, weren't steady.
"I have a family," he said, quieter now. "A wife who's starting to look at me differently. Investors pulling out. Do you have any idea what happens to a man like me if this becomes public in the way it's about to."
"Yes," Kayla said. "The same thing that would have happened to fifteen planes full of passengers if that hydraulic warning three years ago had been real instead of a sensor fault. Except you get to walk away and still have a family to disappoint. Those passengers wouldn't have gotten a second conversation."
Grant flinched, actually flinched, like she'd shoved him this time.
"I didn't know about that specific incident," he said. "I swear to you, I didn't know."
"Maybe not," Kayla said. "But you built the pressure that made it possible for someone else to hide it. That's not nothing, even if you never signed a single forged page yourself."
She reached into her vest pocket, pulled out her phone, and set it on the wing strut between them, screen lit and recording.
"I turned this on the moment we walked out here," she said. "Everything you just offered me is on the record now. I'm giving it to Inspector Cho along with everything else."
Grant stared at the phone like it might detonate.
"You set me up," he said.
"You offered me a bribe to bury a federal safety investigation," Kayla said. "I just made sure it counted for something."
She picked the phone up, turned, and walked back toward the conference room without waiting to see his face crack all the way open.
Behind her, she heard him say something low, almost to himself, words she didn't quite catch and didn't turn around to ask him to repeat.
May you like
It didn't matter anymore what he said when no one but the rain was listening.
It only mattered what was on the record now.
