A supervisor deciding not to investigate.
A manager deciding a complaint wasn't worth escalating.
A system administrator deciding a warning could wait until tomorrow.
One small decision.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually, the small decisions became a culture.
And that was precisely what had brought Daniel to Counter 17.
For the past two months, his office had received an unusual number of passenger complaints from this terminal.
Not complaints about delays.
Those were normal.
Not complaints about baggage.
Those were normal too.
These were different.
Passengers claimed employees had treated them differently based on the way they looked, the clothes they wore, the class of ticket they had purchased, or how much money they appeared to have.
An elderly passenger had reportedly been laughed at after asking for help with her luggage.
A young father traveling with two children claimed an agent had told him that if he couldn't afford the baggage fee, he shouldn't be traveling.
A woman with a hearing disability said an employee had waved her away instead of providing assistance.
And one passenger had written something that caught Daniel's attention.
"The employee didn't know who I was, so she treated me like I didn't matter."
The small notebook had no title. Daniel Cross had found it two nights earlier inside a padded envelope addressed to an office he no longer used. Its pages were ruled in blue, and its columns looked like ordinary customer-service statistics until he noticed the same passenger numbers appearing twice: once beside a complaint, once beside a notation that said CLOSED WITHOUT CONTACT. Someone had been keeping a second record of the terminal’s decisions. Daniel had brought the notebook to the airport, but he had not brought it to the check-in desk. He wanted to find out whether the names in it meant anything to the people working there. On the inside cover a sentence had been written in careful block letters: YOU CAN ERASE A SCREEN. YOU CANNOT ERASE A WITNESS. Beneath that line was an old engineering mark Daniel had not seen since childhood. His father used to draw it on the corner of every diagram.
Daniel had read that sentence three times.
Then he had decided to come personally.
He could have ordered an investigation.
He could have summoned managers.
He could have reviewed security footage.