The midday office hum rose around the fifth-floor marketing pod as the clock ticked past half-past twelve, signaling the universally observed exodus toward the ground-floor food court. Ryan gently closed his laptop lid, slipped his canvas messenger bag over his shoulder—making sure the dense, illicit bulk of the hidden ledger and notes stayed secure against his ribs—and stepped away from his desk. He intended nothing more complicated than a quiet breath of air by the waterfront and perhaps a plain rice ball, but the narrow corridor near the glass-walled conference rooms proved to be an unavoidable bottleneck.
Greg, his jaw set with the tight, humorless intensity of a middle manager mediating an unwanted audit, stepped out from a side office and blocked Ryan's path. Without a word of preamble, Greg launched straight into a low-toned debrief regarding regional logistics updates for the Mascot and Alexandria depot reallocations, casually tossing around freight codes and capital expenditure figures that Ryan had spent the entire morning scrubbing from the database. It was delivered with the disarming polish of routine interdepartmental coordination, yet every syllable carried the unmistakable, razor-thin edge of an interrogation disguised as office chatter. Ryan kept his expression blank, offering a polite, tired blink—the universal mask of a mild-mannered events coordinator enduring an inconvenient pre-lunch sync—while silently measuring the distance past Greg's shoulder toward the safety of the elevators.