Tasha looked at the pass and then at the folder under Imani's arm. "Captain Daniels' incident report arrived this morning. Operations has the gate camera queued, and the reservation history has been copied into a controlled review folder."
She lowered her voice. "Doug Pruitt is upstairs preparing the employee award. Gary Whitlock is already here with his family. They start at two."
"Good," Imani said. "No one tells Gary or Doug what we've found. Not yet. Ask the compliance team to preserve the original video, transaction logs, complaint closures, and any approvals entered by Pruitt's office. I want the ordinary chain of evidence documented before anyone realizes who was in 2A."
Tasha tapped a note into her phone. "You don't want a quiet call to Margaret?" Imani shook her head. "Margaret can know we're coming. The records need to speak before I do."
The car ride to Skyline's headquarters took them through Atlanta traffic past office towers, warehouses, and service roads crowded with delivery trucks. Imani listened while Tasha summarized the board agenda, the pending vote, and the public ceremony planned to recognize several long-serving employees. She did not ask for a special entrance. At the headquarters security desk, she presented her identification and signed the visitor log like everyone else, then took the paper badge the receptionist offered.
Tasha knew better than to comment. Imani had made a habit of entering workplaces through their ordinary doors whenever there was no genuine reason for an escort. She wanted to know whether a guest was greeted, whether receptionists were empowered to solve small problems, and how long someone had to wait before a real person came to help. At one acquisition meeting years earlier, she had spent forty minutes in a lobby watching two receptionists apologize for a broken badge printer while the executives upstairs congratulated themselves on efficiency.
Skyline headquarters felt different in small but revealing ways. The receptionist offered her a seat and asked whether she wanted water, but the visitor screen displayed a warning that new arrivals sometimes needed fifteen minutes for host confirmation. The walls were covered with photographs of executives cutting ribbons, executives shaking hands, and executives standing beside aircraft. Imani saw no photographs of the baggage crews who worked through overnight snow or the cleaners who prepared cabins between flights.
She stopped beside one large picture of an aircraft taxiing under a summer sunset. Several ramp workers were visible in the lower corner, faces indistinct beneath their protective helmets. For a moment she imagined her father among them, counting bags, checking tags, doing the small essential work passengers would never notice. Then Tasha touched her elbow and told her the audit liaison was ready. The meeting before the meeting was about to begin.
Marcus Vale, Skyline's head of operational compliance, waited in a conference room without the glossy presentation that usually accompanied executive briefings. On the table lay a printed transaction log, a laptop with a paused video, and a list of fourteen complaint file numbers. Imani appreciated the absence of decorative slides. "I want everything in the original sequence," she told him. "No conclusions yet, and no one edits the recording to make it shorter."