When she finished, there was a long silence.
Gideon folded his hands.
"Where exactly is this coming from, Vivien?"
She adjusted the laptop, and Caleb came into view.
Gideon's eyebrows rose slightly. Then he smiled, very politely.
"Ah. The maintenance man."
He let the words sit.
"With respect, we cannot halt a program worth 11 billion because a disgruntled former maintenance technician has a theory. Mr. Mercer was terminated this week for cause. Surely you can see how this looks."
Caleb didn't react. But he understood exactly what was happening.
They weren't arguing with the evidence. They were arguing with him.
Make the messenger small enough, and nobody needs to read the message.
Vivien stood up, which put her face out of the camera's frame for a moment. When she sat back down, her voice was colder than anyone on that call had ever heard it.
"You're right, Gideon. He's not our employee anymore."
She let the silence stretch.
"But I trust him more than every report any of you has handed me in the last 6 months."
No one on the call spoke.
Caleb was watching the screen, and in that silence, he saw it.
In the center square, Gideon Price turned his eyes, just slightly, toward the square in the top right corner, where Dorian Voss sat.
Dorian looked back.
It lasted less than a second. But it was the look of two men who had already discussed this moment, long before it arrived.
Caleb felt the floor shift beneath him.
They weren't surprised. They had known he was looking.
They had known all along.
* * *
Three days after he was fired, Caleb drove back out to Harland Field.
He had one reason to go. Four months of backup logs were still sitting in a locked drawer beneath his old workbench in Hangar 4. Handwritten carbon copies he had kept of every report he had ever filed.
After what had happened to his report in July, those copies might be the only proof that it had ever existed.
The morning was bright and bitterly cold, and the wind had scoured the runway clean.
The guard at the employee entrance, a young man named Brody, wouldn't meet his eyes.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Mercer. You're not on the list."
"He can't," said a voice behind the glass doors. "Because you don't work here."
Dorian Voss pushed through the entrance with his coat unbuttoned and a paper cup of coffee in his hand.
He was smiling. He looked rested and pleased, like a man who had just heard good news.
Behind him, a handful of office workers were drifting toward the windows to watch.