HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 13 The First Crack

The call came in at eight forty-seven on a Tuesday morning, fourteen minutes before the executive briefing was due to start and forty-three minutes before the supplier in question was scheduled to deliver a shipment that Varek Industries had been contracted to pass through to a third party by the end of the day.

The supplier was not coming.

Ava took the call standing at her desk with her notepad already open because she had learned in three weeks that the calls worth writing down were the ones that arrived before nine in the morning. She asked three clarifying questions, received three answers that confirmed the situation was exactly as bad as the first sentence had suggested, and thanked the caller and ended the call.

She looked at the closed office door.

Valdris was in his morning brief with Colt and two department heads, and she had been told clearly on her first day that the morning brief was not to be interrupted unless the building was on fire. She stood at her desk for thirty seconds, running through the options she had.

Then she sat down and started making calls.

She had the name of the backup supplier from the logistics directory she had spent her second week learning by heart. She had contact with the third party recipient from the contract file she had reorganized in her first week. She spent twenty-two minutes on the phone and sent four emails and made one judgment call about a cost differential that was within the threshold she had quietly established in her own mind for situations where waiting for approval would cost more than acting.

At nine thirty-three, the briefing room door opened and Valdris came out with Colt behind him. He crossed to her desk and held out his hand for the morning messages in the way he did every day after the brief.

"The Kellner shipment has been rerouted through Marcell Logistics," Ava said, handing him the messages and the single sheet summary she had prepared. "There is a four percent cost differential which falls within operational variance. The third party recipient has been notified of a thirty-minute delay to the original schedule. Everything will be on time."

Valdris took the summary. He read it. She watched his eyes move across the page with the speed of someone who read quickly and retained everything.

He looked up at her.

"The Kellner contact told you they were not coming," he said.

"At eight forty-seven."

"During my briefing."

"Yes."

He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was thinking rather than when he had nothing to say. She had learned the difference. "You made the call on the cost differential without consulting me," he said.

"The delay in consulting you would have cost more than the differential," Ava said. "If I made the wrong call I will account for it."

Something shifted in his expression. It was small enough that she almost missed it, a fractional thing at the corners of his eyes that was not quite what she would have called warmth but was in the same general direction.

He handed the summary to Colt and went into his office.

Colt looked at Ava with his steady, unreadable face. "Well done," he said, in the same tone he might have used to note a change in the weather.

Ava sat back down at her desk and let herself feel, quietly and privately, that she had done something right. Not just adequate, but right. The kind of right that people remembered.

She went back to work.