Chapter 4 - The Terminal Aftermath
The secure waiting room on the third floor of the FAA building felt sterile under the fluorescent glare. Marcus Vance sat on the edge of a gray tweed armchair, his trench coat still damp from the Washington drizzle outside. When Lucy opened the door and walked in, he stood up immediately, his hands twitching nervously against his thighs.
"You shouldn't be here, Marcus," Lucy said, remaining by the door. "If you have something to say, it should be on the record with my investigative team present."
"The record won't matter in twelve hours if hangar four goes up in smoke," Marcus blurted out, his voice cracking slightly.
Lucy froze. "What did you say?"
Marcus took a step forward, his eyes wide with genuine terror. "Arthur didn't just fly to Washington to avoid you, Lucy. He flew down because the Chicago station manager discovered that the secondary parts inventory for the entire Midwest hub was falsified. When I confronted Arthur about it tonight in his office, he told me it was authorized at the board level to prevent a grounding order before the fiscal quarter closes."
"Board level?" Lucy asked, stepping into the room. "Are you telling me Apex CEO Robert Sterling signed off on counterfeit parts?"
"I'm telling you that Robert Sterling doesn't care about parts as much as he cares about the upcoming merger with Trans-Global Airlines," Marcus said, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper. "If the FAA grounds even twelve of our regional jets for non-compliant hydraulic valves, the merger collapses. The stock tanks. The board members lose millions."
Lucy stared at him, processing the immense scale of the deception. This wasn't just a localized maintenance shortcut. It was a multi-million-dollar corporate conspiracy masking structural safety failures behind layers of falsified compliance logs.
"And where does that leave you, Marcus?" Lucy asked quietly. "You signed off on regional safety reports for three years. If the board goes down, you go down with them."
"That's why I'm here," Marcus said, pulling a heavy manila envelope from inside his coat and laying it flat on the coffee table. "Everything is in there. The real inventory logs, the communication threads between Arthur and the aftermarket suppliers, and the internal memos showing that safety warnings were deliberately suppressed."
Lucy looked at the envelope, then back at Marcus. "Why give this to me now? Why not take it to the Department of Justice?"
"Because the DOJ takes months to move, and Arthur has political connections that run deep in the Senate transport committee," Marcus said bitterly. "If I go to federal prosecutors, my name gets leaked within an hour, and I'll never work in aviation again. But if you seize those records under an emergency FAA safety directive tonight, the evidence is secured under federal seal before the board even knows I talked."
Lucy walked over to the table and picked up the envelope. It was thick, heavy with the weight of documentation that could dismantle one of the country's largest regional carriers.
"If I open this file and act on it tonight," Lucy said, looking straight into Marcus's eyes, "there's no turning back for you, Marcus. You become a cooperating witness in a federal fraud investigation."
May you like
Marcus let out a long, ragged breath, his shoulders slumping as the tension finally drained out of him. "I'd rather be a cooperating witness than responsible for a hull loss over Lake Michigan."
Lucy nodded once. She opened the envelope, pulled out the top page, and scanned the signatures at the bottom.
