There was a pause. "Are you all right?"
"Yes. That's not the only question we need to ask."
Elias Chen arrived at the Seattle operations center twenty-six minutes after Margaret's call. He was forty-nine, impeccably dressed even on ordinary workdays, and had spent his first year as chief executive trying to reconcile the airline's proud history with the demands of a difficult market. He had prepared for Monday's board meeting with spreadsheets on fuel hedging, staffing, and route performance. He had not prepared for a call from the founder saying that a senior cabin officer had threatened a young employee into supporting a false report.
He found Margaret in a small waiting room with the door open and a view of the aircraft stands. She was drinking water from a paper cup, her coat folded across the adjacent chair, while Wilson and the compliance director gathered electronic records at the operations desk. Elias stopped just inside the doorway. For a moment, seeing the woman whose portrait occupied the company's main reception area sitting alone in an ordinary terminal chair made him look less like a chief executive and more like a man who had been reminded that titles did not make anyone invulnerable.
"Margaret," he said. "I'm sorry."
"You've apologized before you've heard the evidence. That's exactly how people get into trouble here, Elias."
He sat opposite her. "Are you injured?"
"No. The man next to me had a panic attack during turbulence. He was helped. I was moved without cause, service was withheld, and a false incident report was prepared. Those are the facts I can personally attest to. There may be more."
"I want to understand everything."
"Then start by hearing the people whose names aren't on the building."
Elias nodded. He had admired Margaret for years, but admiration had not always translated into a willingness to question the company he now led. He knew that passenger satisfaction scores remained high and that the airline's largest corporate accounts had renewed. He also knew, though he rarely spoke of it, that internal employee surveys had grown colder over the previous two years. Words like fearful, retaliatory, and unsafe to report had appeared in confidential responses more often than he liked.
"I saw complaints about cabin management last quarter," he admitted. "They were classified as service disputes. We were told corrective coaching had been completed."
"Who told you?"
"The service division."
"And who checked?"
He looked down. "I'm not sure."
Margaret did not look pleased to have found the beginning of an answer. She looked tired. "Then we need to find out."
In a separate room, Chloe gave her statement to Renata Soto, Northridge's director of safety assurance and compliance. Renata had been trained as an investigator before joining aviation, and she disliked conclusions that arrived before questions. She told Chloe that the discussion was being recorded with her consent, that she could request a representative, and that the company would not require her to answer immediately if she needed time to review documents. Chloe asked whether Isaac could be present as a support person until a formal representative arrived.