Chapter 2 - Friday Never Reached The Finish Line
By eight-thirty the next morning, Project Aegis was no longer on
schedule to close Friday.
Evelyn Carter sat inside a secure conference room three floors beneath
the acquisition director’s office and watched six people review the same
discrepancies she had spent weeks documenting.
Nobody mentioned dinner.
Nobody mentioned Grant Whitmore.
Nobody mentioned Cole.
That was exactly how Evelyn wanted it.
The acquisition director, Colonel Marcus Reed, tapped one page.
“Walk us through the supplier issue.”
Evelyn did.
Whitmore Defense Systems had certified that several critical guidance
components would be sourced through an approved domestic supplier.
But a technical annex referenced manufacturing tolerances used by a
different company.
A company registered in Delaware.
Its ownership disclosure was incomplete.
Another reviewer pointed to cost projections.
Whitmore’s projected tooling expenses had increased by nearly forty
percent without a matching change in production scope.
None of it proved fraud.
It proved questions existed.
That was enough to stop pretending Friday was guaranteed.
At 10:17 a.m., the contracting authority issued a formal hold pending
compliance review.
Evelyn did not sign it.
She did not have unilateral authority.
Three officials approved the action.
The distinction mattered.
At 10:31, her personal phone began vibrating.
Cole.
She ignored it.
Then again.
Then Grant.
She had never given Grant her number.
That bothered her more than the call itself.
At 10:46, Cole sent a message.
DAD SAYS YOU STOPPED AEGIS. WHAT DID YOU DO?
Evelyn stared at the screen.
Not:
Are you okay?
Not:
I’m sorry.
Not:
I should have defended you.
What did you do?
She typed one sentence.
I performed my job.
Then she blocked him for the morning.
Across Washington, Grant Whitmore received the government notice while
sitting in a board meeting.
According to what Evelyn later learned, he read the first paragraph
twice.
Then he demanded to know who initiated the review.
His general counsel told him the name appearing throughout the
discrepancy memorandum.
Major Evelyn Carter.
Grant went silent.
His son’s supposedly insignificant fiancée had not wandered in from a
government office.
She was the lead acquisition logistics officer assigned to the
six-hundred-million-dollar package he had spent eleven years preparing
to win.
But that was not the detail that frightened his attorney.
The attorney had reached page nine.
There, buried inside a supplier disclosure, was a company Grant claimed
he had never seen before.
Meridian Advanced Components.
May you like
His attorney had.
And so had Elaine Whitmore.
