Anna felt frightened, but she had prepared for that possibility. "I'm following a documented instruction from the audit committee," she said. "If you believe the order is improper, you can take that up with the legal department. I won't destroy records because a manager tells me they're inconvenient." Ben Flores looked at her with an expression somewhere between admiration and alarm, then returned his attention to the departures screen because aircraft still had to leave whether or not a scandal was developing.
Kevin turned to the neighboring terminal and opened the current gate report. He began making changes to the explanation attached to Arthur's booking, describing the passenger as intoxicated, verbally aggressive, and suspected of interfering with the reservation system. The changes affected the working display but not the preserved underlying journal, and their timestamps were automatically recorded. When Anna pointed out that he had no witness statement supporting the allegations, Kevin snapped that the old man must have hacked his own reservation to make the station appear responsible.
"He hacked the system?" Anna asked. "Then why are you changing the record instead of reporting the suspected intrusion to security?" Kevin answered that she did not understand how complicated these things could become. Anna told him a genuine security incident required documented escalation, and she would be glad to report it through the prescribed process. Kevin cursed under his breath and closed the application so abruptly that his chair rolled backward into a cabinet.
Later, when investigators examined the system journals, they would identify the attempts to rewrite the misconduct narrative as a separate set of events from the earlier financial scheme. Not every action would meet the elements of a criminal offense, and the distinction would matter in court. What made them important at the station was that the men were no longer merely concealing money; they were attempting to attach misconduct to a customer who had asked for proof of a reservation. That kind of lie could follow a passenger through future travel, causing additional denials long after everyone at the original gate forgot his face.
Lisa arrived at operations carrying the notice that removed her from Flight 417. She had been instructed to surrender her crew access for the shift, so she remained in the public reception area until Anna came out to speak with her. "They're saying Arthur was drunk," Lisa told her. "He wasn't. I gave him water, spoke to him for nearly half an hour, and watched him cooperate with airport police." Anna said the reservation records were being preserved and that she needed Lisa to report what she had actually witnessed to the independent investigators rather than send private customer information through personal messages.
"I want to help," Lisa said. "But Ryan has already threatened my job." Anna gave a tired smile.
"He threatened mine three times before breakfast. That's not a reason to stop being careful." She explained that the board had installed an independent whistleblower channel and that employees could submit evidence without having to confront their managers alone. Lisa looked down at the notice in her hands, considered what would happen if that channel proved as useless as the ordinary complaint system, and said she would try.