Chapter 11
Olivia froze for half a second. Her fingers tightened around the handle of her portfolio.
She didn't say another word. She turned on her heel and walked out of the conference room, her heels clicking a sharp, hurried staccato against the parquet floor of the executive foyer until the glass door at the end of the hall swung shut behind her.
Marcus Vance stayed in his seat for a moment longer. He looked at me, then at the small, spiral-bound maintenance notebook I had left on the table.
“You had this entire morning mapped out before you parked your truck, didn't you?” Marcus asked.
“I’m an automation engineer, Marcus,” I said, sliding the notebook toward him. “My job is to anticipate every point of failure, calculate the tolerances, and make sure that when the unexpected happens, the line keeps running anyway.”
Marcus picked up the notebook, looked down at the hand-drawn pinouts of the older junction boxes, and shook his head with a faint, wry smile.
“Good luck with the training sessions, Harold,” he said, standing up and extending his hand.
I shook it. “Good luck with your advisory reports, Marcus. If you ever want to see how these machines actually run when the steel is cold, come down to Bay 3 around six in the morning. Dave Halloway makes decent coffee in an old percolator behind the tool crib.”
Marcus laughed once, short and quiet, and walked out the door.
I didn't take the executive elevator down to the lobby.
I took the concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor—the one with the heavy fire doors and the yellow-painted railings that smelled of cutting oil and machine grease.
When I pushed through the ground-floor exit, the noise of the plant hit me like a familiar wave.
The roar of the ventilation blowers. The sharp, rhythmic hiss of pneumatic clamps. The electric hum of three hundred servo motors working in precise, beautiful coordination.
I walked down the central aisle of Bay 2, where the primary stamping presses were feeding blanks into the transfer dies.
Mike was standing near the control console of Press 4, wearing his safety glasses and his grease-stained blue shop apron. He had a digital micrometer in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
When he saw me coming, he lowered the clipboard and grinned.
“Morning, Harold,” Mike shouted over the noise of the line.