After Thursday, he's got the Cessna. Caleb looked at Garrett with an expression that communicated several things simultaneously, including that he had not asked for that information to be offered, and that he was not entirely displeased that it had been. "What's the rate?" Caleb asked. He was looking at Sloan again now. His voice was professional.
"Whatever else this was, that part of it was going to be clean and simple." "Whatever your billing," she said. "Plus 20% for the turnaround. Plus 25," Garrett said from the doorway. Garrett, Caleb said. I'm just doing math, Garrett said.
Caleb looked at Sloan. Plus 20%, he said. And I work with your engineering team, not for them. I'm not taking direction from Howell. I'll consult.
I'll run the diagnostic. I'll tell them what I see. They do the repair. Agreed, Sloan said immediately. He pulled out his phone and looked at the time.
I can be there by 1:00. Booked. He arrived at 1:14, which Sloan registered from the window of her office, but did not go down to meet. That was deliberate. He didn't need an audience for his arrival, and she had learned slowly that the instinct to be present for everything that mattered was sometimes its own form of making things about herself.
Howell came to her office at 1:45. He sat down in the chair across from her desk with the expression of a man who has just witnessed something that rearranged some portion of his understanding. He ran the elevated thermal diagnostic. Howell said. Took him about 22 minutes to get the fault to present consistently.
And wiring bundle behind the secondary avionics panel, not the primary one. There's a section where the shielding braid is pinched against a structural rib. Probably happened during the last cable routing update. Someone pulled it too tight. Under elevated heat, the insulation softens just enough to let the interference bleed through.
He paused. We've been looking at the wrong panel. If we'd pulled the primary panel, we'd have found nothing and lost 2 days. Can you fix it? 3 hours, maybe four.
It's accessible once you know where to go. He looked at her. He walked through the bay once and pointed at the secondary panel. Just pointed at it. Said the fault signature on the diagnostic was consistent with a ground loop from that location.
Another pause. He hasn't worked with that specific avionics configuration before. He looked it up on his phone on the way over. Sloan looked at her desk for a moment. "Okay," she said.
"Okay," Howell agreed, though he seemed to be saying something slightly different by it than she was. She went down to the hanger at 3:00, not to check on the repair, but because she needed to see it. Not Caleb specifically, the work. She needed to see it in context. She stood near the secondary electronics bay access panel and watched Howell's team work and watched Caleb standing slightly to the side with his arms crossed and his work light in hand, not interfering, not hovering, answering questions when they were asked and not otherwise.
He caught her eye once briefly and she nodded and he looked back at the open panel. Reyes was working at a bench nearby, something unrelated to this aircraft, and she looked at Caleb and then at Sloan, and her face held something complicated in private that she didn't say out loud. The repair was completed at 6:57 in the evening. The diagnostic ran clean at standard and elevated thermal load both. Howell signed the repair documentation and shook Caleb's hand, and Caleb gathered his things.
He had a school pickup to make, Mia's Tuesday evening activity, which Sloan had somehow registered from a conversation she'd overheard fragments of between him and Garrett on her way through the workshop. She walked him to the side door. "Delivery is Friday," she said. "If the client runs a pre-acceptance check, it'll hold." "It'll hold," he said. He said it the way he said things he was certain of, flat and simple, without inflation.
She opened the door for him and they stood for a moment in the gap with the cold air coming in from outside. She had a number of things she could say and she was sorting through them with less efficiency than usual. I want to ask you something, she said. Not about the aircraft. He waited.
The board is going to ask me probably next quarter whether the changes I'm making to HR policy and the maintenance review protocols are a long-term strategic direction or a short-term response to an isolated incident. She looked at him carefully. They're going to frame it as a question about brand risk, and I'm going to have to give them an answer in those terms, but I want to know what you think the real question is. Caleb was quiet for a moment. He shifted the weight of his bag on his shoulder.