I looked Evelyn straight in the eye. She wasn't just stalling a flight to protect divorce assets. She had someone inside our remote system copying the data while she kept me pinned to the check-in floor.
Waiting for an apology, an explanation, or a routine supervisor review was going to get Marcus destroyed and our entire engineering wing shuttered by sunrise. If I let Reynolds take my bag for an administrative hold, the telemetry would never reach San Diego.
"Officer," I said, tightening my grip on the canvas strap. "Call the federal duty officer on Concourse E right now, or step aside while I walk to his office myself."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"Officer, this man has an invalidated boarding pass and is creating a disturbance in an active gate-access corridor," Evelyn said. She didn't drop her hand. Her knuckles remained white, rigid, and poised over the toggle switch. Her voice had lost its earlier polished customer-service sing-song; it sounded thin, stripped of charm, and dangerously tight. "Company regulations require a reset when terminal software locks up over payment arbitration. If you allow him to challenge our security protocol, you will answer to regional management before third shift ends."
"I don't answer to Delta regional management," Reynolds replied without blinking. He lifted the radio from his shoulder strap and keyed the mic. "Dispatch, this is Unit Fourteen at South Terminal priority desk. I need Supervisor Miller and the on-duty port captain at counter four immediately. We have a flagged FAA avionics marker and a server conflict on an active departure. Log the timestamp as twenty-one forty-two."
The radio crackled back with a clipped confirmation. Evelyn’s jaw clenched. The muscles along the side of her neck corded, and for a half-second, I thought she was going to slam her palm down onto the circuit breaker anyway, wiping the volatile terminal cache right in front of him.
My phone buzzed again against my hip—three short, frantic pulses. I lifted the screen just high enough for Reynolds to see the incoming text without letting the canvas bag slip an inch from my shoulder. Marcus had sent a screenshot of the Huntsville laboratory's active server log. The outbound connection IP was mapped directly to an internal hub registered at Hartsfield-Jackson’s North Cargo logistics annex, routing through a secure administrative proxy named Vance-E-Logistics.
"Look at that timestamp, Officer," I said, holding the screen steady between us. "The download began at twenty-one thirty-eight. That was three minutes after she ripped my physical ticket in half and refused to scan the replacement boarding code on my phone. The server they're pulling from contains proprietary FAA certification logs for the thrust-reversal retrofits on the regional commuter fleet. If that data packet leaves Georgia without the signed cryptographic key stored on the twin solid-state drives in my shoulder bag, the system flags the telemetry as stolen intellectual property. Marcus gets fired, the patent defaults to the carrier's salvage pool, and our testing contract is voided by sunrise."
Evelyn let out a sharp, mocking laugh that sounded brittle enough to shatter. "It’s a divorce proceeding, Officer. He’s weaving an absurd corporate conspiracy out of common marital property division. He transferred those files out of our shared LLC cloud storage last week without my consent. My attorney advised me that any technical hardware he attempts to transport out of state falls under the freeze order issued by Fulton County Family Court."
"A family court order does not trigger a federal air-traffic hold," Reynolds said, cutting her off. He pointed his heavy index finger directly at the glowing red line across her screen. "And Fulton County judges do not have clearance to append an automated dispatch lock on an interstate commercial flight. How did that prompt get on this terminal?"