Before Amanda could form an answer, the office door opened. Kelsey appeared in the doorway. Her expression was the expression of someone delivering news they would rather not be delivering. He's here, she said. Richard Coleman is here.
He's in the main conference room on 12. She paused. He's asking for you. Victoria was very still. Is Thompson with him?
Yes. She looked at Amanda one more time and in that look was something Amanda had never seen from Victoria Harrington in four years of working closely with her. Fear, not panic, not desperation, just the clean fear of someone who is very good at their job and has just realized with absolute certainty that they have made a mistake so significant that their competence may not be sufficient to address it. Go back to your office. Victoria told Amanda.
Don't talk to anyone. Amanda nodded and left. Victoria straightened her jacket. She had walked into rooms where she held every advantage and rooms where she held almost none, and she had learned over the years to look the same in both, to keep her face from broadcasting the internal calculation, to carry her posture with the same deliberate confidence regardless of what she knew or didn't know. She walked to the door.
Then she stopped. She turned back to her desk. She opened the bottom drawer. Inside was a framed photograph she kept there rather than on the surface of her desk. A habit she'd always explained to herself as professional minimalism, never wanting the personal to intrude on the workspace.
The photograph was of the day Harrington International had gone public. The ringing of the bell, the gathered team, the cameras, the moment the company she had been trusted to lead had announced itself to the world in the most definitive way a company can. She had been so proud that day. She stood there looking at the photograph for several seconds. Then she closed the drawer and walked out of her office toward the elevator that would take her to the 12th floor.
The main conference room on 12 had glass walls on two sides, which meant that the executives gathered in the hallway outside it. And there were many of them now drawn by the same gravitational pull of impending significance that had emptied the fourth floor of productive work could see what was happening inside without being able to hear a word. What they could see was this. Richard Coleman sat at the head of the table. To his right sat Caleb Thompson, who had not changed his jacket, who was still carrying the notebook he'd picked up from his desk on the way out, who looked exactly as he had looked every day for the past month, unhurried and quiet, and completely himself.
Around the table were four other people, two men and a woman from Richard's legal team, and a fourth individual that several of the watching executives recognized as the company's primary outside counsel. The watching executives exchanged looks. None of them spoke because outside counsel didn't come to a building in 30 minutes without having been prepared well in advance. And no one called outside counsel into a conference room over the firing of an operations associate. Unless the operations associate was not what anyone had believed him to be.