Naomi looked at the phone on her desk for a moment. Then she looked at Briggs.
"Do you have somewhere safe to be tonight?"
"I can manage."
"That wasn't what I asked."
He met her eyes. For the first time since he'd sat down, something in his face released. Not relief, exactly, but the particular easing of a man who has been carrying something alone for a very long time and has finally set it down in the presence of someone capable of holding it.
"I'll figure it out," he said.
She reached for her desk phone. "Because I'm about to make a call that is going to change the next several weeks of both our lives, and I need you to be somewhere they can't reach you when it lands."
She dialed. The line connected on the second ring.
"Dana," she said. "It's Naomi. I need you in Columbus by morning. Bring your full team."
The footage had been online for six hours when the first major news network picked it up.
By that point, it had already moved through every civil rights network, every legal commentary channel, every community group in a three-state radius, accumulating shares the way a stone accumulates speed rolling downhill.
Camille Ross had uploaded it from three separate accounts to three separate platforms before Crane had even made it to the parking garage.
She had learned that lesson from every activist who had come before her. One copy gets taken down. Two copies get taken down. But by the time you're pulling down the third, the fourth is already somewhere you can't find.
The clip was 2 minutes and 40 seconds long. It showed everything.
The lobby. Voss blocking Naomi's path. The badge case being snatched. The handcuffs. The walk to the back corridor.
The camera angle changed at that point. Camille had moved carefully, keeping her distance, filming through the narrow gap of the security door that hadn't fully latched.
The audio quality was imperfect, but sufficient. Voss's voice. Pruitt's laugh. The sound of the clippers running.
2 minutes and 40 seconds. It felt much longer when you watched it.
By 9:00 that evening, the clip had been viewed 2.3 million times. By midnight, it was past 4 million.
The comments were not mixed. They were not divided along the usual lines of these kinds of videos, where anger and dismissal traded places in rough proportion.
The comments were overwhelmingly, almost uniformly, furious. Because the footage was unambiguous in a way that left no comfortable alternative reading available. And because the woman in the chair, the woman who did not break, the woman who stood up at the end and walked out without running, was a federal judge.
That detail collapsed every available excuse before it could be built.
The smear campaign launched anyway.
It launched because it had been prepared in advance, which told Naomi everything she needed to know about how long this had been in motion.