Grace Bennett stood in the middle of the hangar and laughed at the engineers frozen around a grounded Gulfstream.
"Fix my jet," she said, "and I will pay $1 million."
Lucas Carter, a quiet contract technician finishing another shift, barely looked up. He studied the warning panel, then knelt beside a bundle of wiring near the avionics bay. Ten minutes later, he stood and wiped his hands.
"I only need $20," he said.
Grace simply thought he was joking. But when Lucas pointed to a single connection the specialists had missed for three hours, her laughter disappeared completely.
The morning began quietly at a private aviation hangar on the outskirts of Dallas. Grace Bennett arrived with a rolling case and a schedule that allowed no delays. She was flying to New York that afternoon to close an acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and every minute of the day had already been accounted for. The company Gulfstream had finished a routine three-day maintenance cycle just before her arrival, and by every account, it should have been sitting on the ramp, ready for departure.
Instead, it sat inside the hangar with its access panels open, and a crowd of engineers gathered around the nose.