"I imagine you will," Imani said. "And I imagine that everyone here will remember what you said, too."
She tilted her head, almost kindly, toward the phone lying near his plate. "Especially since it is being recorded."
Sterling's eyes dropped to the table. He saw it then: not his phone, but another, black and identical, with its small red light pulsing like a heartbeat. His breath caught.
He lunged for it.
CHAPTER 7: THE PHONE ON THE TABLE
Harold Sterling's hand struck the tablecloth with a slap that made the glasses jump.
His fingers closed around the phone, but before he could lift it, a second hand arrived, strong and sure, and pressed down over his. It was Imani's. She had moved so quickly that no one had seen her do it, and she held his wrist against the cloth with a grip that was gentle and absolutely unbreakable. She had been trained to hold a control column steady against a gale. An old man's lunge was nothing.
"Please do not touch that, Mr. Sterling," she said, in the calm, level tone of someone reading a checklist. "It is my property. Taking it would constitute theft, and it would be an excellent addition to the record."
The room gasped, a low, collective sound like wind through a tunnel.
Sterling stared at her. His hand trembled under hers, not from fear but from a rage so intense that it had nowhere to go. For a long moment, the two of them stood bent over the white tablecloth, the old lion and the pilot, their faces only a foot apart.
"You planned this," he said, through his teeth.
"I prepared," Imani said. "There is a difference. A pilot prepares for the worst day of her life every time she steps into a cockpit. I have simply applied the same discipline to a dinner."
She released his wrist and stepped back. He snatched his hand away, rubbing it against his sleeve as though she had burned him.
"Everything you have said tonight is on that recording," she continued, to the room now, her voice rising just enough to reach the back tables. "The threat to end my career. The instruction to fly an aircraft with a known, documented fault. The words 'revenue priority.' I did not come here to humiliate anyone. I came because I tried every proper channel, and every proper channel was closed. I filed reports. I wrote to the safety office. I called the regulator's hotline twice. And each time, I was told, politely, that it would be handled."
She paused, and her eyes moved across the faces of the diners, slowly, one by one.
"It was not being handled. It was being buried."
In the silence that followed, a single clear note rang out as someone, somewhere, set down a glass.
A gray-haired woman at the nearest table, a board member named Margaret Ellison who had said almost nothing all evening, folded her napkin and set it on her plate. "Harold," she said, and her voice was dry and quiet. "Is it true?"
"It is a misunderstanding," Sterling said.
"Is it true that the aircraft has an unresolved fault?"
"It is," Daniel said, before Sterling could speak. "I have the logs."
CHAPTER 8: THE LOGS
Daniel reached into the inside pocket of his navy jacket and drew out a slim manila envelope, folded once down the middle. His hands shook as he unfolded it, but they did not stop.
"I have been carrying this for three weeks," he said. "I did not know what to do with it. I did not know who to trust. I told myself that someone else would speak up, that it was not my place. I think a lot of people in this room have told themselves the same thing about a lot of things."
He placed the envelope on the table. Margaret Ellison picked it up and slid out three printed sheets, covered in small, dense type and stamped with the maintenance department's gray seal. She read them in silence. Her lips thinned. When she reached the bottom of the third page, she stopped, and her finger rested on a line of looping handwriting.