Chapter 2 - The Audit Trail
By late afternoon, the expo crowd had thinned out as the heat radiated off the tarmac. The exhibition jets were being towed back to their hangars, their maintenance panels open like resting birds.
Colin didn’t leave. He followed me back to the operations trailer, sitting on an aluminum folding chair in the corner of the briefing room while I debriefed the morning’s telemetry data with the flight-test engineers.
When the engineers cleared out, the small room felt quiet.
“You knew about Hawthorne’s contracts,” Colin said. It wasn’t a question.
I set my tablet down on the steel desk. “I knew Dad’s firm consulted on their logistics framework. I didn’t know they were bundling pilot recommendations into the package.”
“Dad never said anything.”
“Dad thinks aviation is still a matter of how well you handle a crosswind in a twin-engine Cessna,” I said, leaning against the edge of the desk. “He doesn’t see the corporate machinery holding the wings up.”
Colin stood up, pacing the narrow space between the filing cabinet and the door. “Vance told me I was a lock. He said Horizon needed guys with real commercial cargo experience—guys who knew how to manage heavy loads in tight corridors.”
“And you are a good pilot, Colin. Nobody is saying you aren’t.”
“Then why does it feel like I’m standing on quicksand?” He stopped pacing and looked at me, a flicker of genuine vulnerability breaking through his usual armor. “All these years, I thought I earned every rating. Every checkride. Every promotion. Now you tell me my application might be a footnote in some corporate lobbying package?”
“The flying is yours,” I said. “The paperwork isn’t. There’s a difference.”
“And what about your review? If you audit that signature, it triggers an internal compliance flag.”
“It has to. If Arthur Vance signed a government-access document six months after losing his authority, Hawthorne is facing a federal audit. It’s not about you, Colin. It’s about regulatory fraud.”
Before Colin could answer, my secure desk terminal chimed. A priority message flashed across the amber screen from the base compliance office.
SUBJECT: HAWTHORNE FLIGHT SYSTEMS - AUDIT EXPEDITION.
REQUESTING IMMEDIATE CLARIFICATION ON ENDORSEMENT INVALIDATION.
ATTACHED: MEMORANDUM SIGNED BY ARTHUR VANCE, DATED SIX WEEKS PRIOR TO RETIREMENT.
I stared at the screen.
“What is it?” Colin asked, stepping closer.
“Vance didn’t sign it six months ago,” I said, reading the metadata. “He signed it six weeks before he retired. The date on the physical copy was altered.”
Colin’s eyes widened. “Altered? By who?”
I pulled up the corporate directory, searching the routing ID attached to the digital timestamp. The name associated with the modification wasn’t an administrator in flight operations.
May you like
It was our father’s business partner, Robert Vance—Arthur’s younger brother.
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