By the time the fourth appeared, Gerald had already picked up his radio. Front desk to building security. He said, "We've got a convoy incoming. Main entrance approach. I'm counting."
He paused, watching the screen. I'm counting eight vehicles. No. Nine. 10. There was a brief silence on the other end.
What kind of vehicles? Black SUVs. Professional private plates. Another silence. Gerald, are you sure?
He watched the convoy slow to a precise coordinated stop along the front of the building, not the chaotic stopping of vehicles that arrive independently, but the deliberate rehearsed positioning of a security operation that had planned this approach down to the foot. "I'm sure," Gerald said. He set down the radio and stood up from his chair for the first time in three hours. Outside, Caleb Thompson was standing on the sidewalk and he was waiting. On the fourth floor, nobody had gone back to work.
This was not a conscious decision any individual made. It was more like a collective failure of will. The way a crowd at an accident scene can't quite make themselves look away, even when they know they should. What had just happened on the floor didn't feel finished. It felt like the first act of something that hadn't resolved yet, and every person in that room could feel it without being able to articulate why.
Derek was standing near the window. He didn't know why he'd walked to the window. His desk was nowhere near it, but something in the last 20 minutes had moved him there without his fully deciding to go. And now he was looking down at the street six stories below, and he was seeing something that made no immediate sense to him. "Hey," he said quietly.
Nobody looked up. Hey, he said again louder. Three people looked up. Come here. Come look at this.
One by one, people left their desks and came to the windows. There were six of them. At first, then 12, then more. All of them crowding toward the glass with the particular urgency of people who understand instinctively that whatever is happening outside is connected to whatever just happened inside. They watched 10 black SUVs pull to a stop on the street below.