IV

"Toby."

"Andy." He smiled awkwardly. "You look nice."

"And you look annoyed."

"I was cheerful. Now I am not."

She grinned. "It's good to see you too, Toby." She kissed his cheek briefly, and he reflected that an expression-hiding beard was sometimes a useful thing to have. Especially when you weren't entirely sure what expression it might actually be hiding.

Before they could begin their usual slightly misaligned verbal two-step, the third member of this hellish little setup put in an appearance.

"Ah, Toby! Andrea!" Lord Marbury captured his ex-wife for a kiss on each cheek in typical exuberant fashion. Toby wasn't quite sure what to do with the sudden itch to make fists over it. He shuffled around behind his desk to fiddle with the paperwork.

"John." He gave a brief, put-upon smile. "I hope we can get this misunderstanding sorted out as quickly as possible and count on your country's continued support?"

Marbury flopped back into a chair with a lazy ease that perhaps only his title and accent made seem elegant. "On the contrary, dear boy, Her Majesty's government is very much in earnest, and we fully intend to demand that America increase its spending on foreign aid fivefold in order to bring it line with the rest of the world's industrialised nations."

Andy gave him a wry smile. "Hey there, Toby. Why don't you pull up a chair?"

Josh was losing patience. Not the world's most uncommon occurrence.

They'd been sitting here for an hour, and nothing had been said. Or rather, everything imaginable had been said, and none of it remotely relevant. Jason Jones was still going off at a tangent about freedom of assembly and hate groups, and they weren't even discussing that section of the bill.

Finally, he snapped, and stood up. "Okay. Okay, that's enough of that. This meeting has been going round in circles long enough. And you know what?" He swept out a hand to encompass the room. "He's gay and I'm Jewish and you're black and she's female, so stop pretending this is anything to do with the issues and tell me what this is about."

Jones gave him an apologetic look. "I'm sorry, Josh. You know nobody here wants it this way."

He scowled. "So why are you making it this way?"

Nobody answered. After a moment, he sighed heavily. "Okay, let's wrap this up."

They all stood up. Sarah McMillan hesitated. "Josh-"

"We need your votes on this, Sarah," he reminded her pointedly. "This is too tight for you to walk out on us now."

"Without the sexuality section it'd sail," Ted Hobson pointed out softly. Josh glared.

"Without the sexuality section it's toothless, and who gives a damn if a toothless bill sails?"

"There's plenty more in the bill that'll do a lot of people a lot of good," Jones reminded him.

Josh shook his head. "We're sweeping the board with this, Jason. The president doesn't want to cut out prejudice for 'a lot' of people. He doesn't want to make this country a better place for everybody except gays and lesbians. We want the whole package, and I know you want the whole package, so what, exactly, has changed here?"

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Finally, Josh waved them away with an exasperated gesture. He slumped back into his chair as they trooped out of the meeting room, and looked up at Sam.

"You've been pretty quiet there. What happened to the whole 'how can you deny me my right to live the way I choose' spiel?"

Sam shook his head. "It wouldn't have made any difference," he said grimly. "It's obvious somebody's doing some pressuring."

"Yeah. The question is, who?"

"The question is... what do these five people have in common?" Sam repeated his query from before the meeting. Josh was no closer to having an answer, and they sat silently mulling it over for a few minutes.

Finally, Sam spoke up. "Actually, you know, the whole 'gay' thing, I'm really technically more-"

"Ah, save it for your memoirs, nobody cares," Josh shrugged. He stood up with a decisive motion, and tossed his papers into his backpack ready to head off to the next thing the day decided to throw at him.

Toby massaged his forehead and sighed deeply. "The US policy on foreign aid-" he began.

Marbury immediately leapt in to cut him off again. "In 1970, the US paid just three tenths of a percentage point of its GNP in foreign aid. In 1990, it was down to two tenths. Now, it's barely a tenth of one percent. There are twice as many countries classified by the UN as 'least developed' than there were thirty years ago; why, exactly, is the US under the impression that the need for its aid in other parts of the world is decreasing?"

"Nobody's under that impression," Toby grated into the hand he was resting his chin on. "Obviously we want to earmark as much money as possible to help developing nations-"

"Then why all the cuts?" Marbury demanded. Revealing the sharp diplomatic mind behind the drunken playboy exterior, he'd been casually reeling off figures for the best part of an hour without ever stopping to look at notes. "US foreign aid currently stands at eight billion dollars a year; if your country was paying the same proportion of its wealth as it did in 1965, that figure would be nearly fifty billion."

"This isn't 1965," Toby reminded him.

"Thank you for pointing that out, Toby," the ambassador said dryly, "that distinction had quite escaped me. However, the rest of the world is not living in 1965 either, and they continue to allocate much higher percentage of their Gross National Product to overseas aid than you do."

Toby sighed again, and there was a brief silence whilst they digested the fact that they were no further now than they had been when they started. He glanced sideways at the third, thus far largely silent, member of their little gathering.

"A little input here wouldn't go entirely amiss," he informed her.

Andy smiled brightly at him. "I'm enjoying the show."

There was a knock on the door.

"Maybe that's Ginger with my cyanide," he suggested optimistically.

Sam poked his head in the door. "Hey, Toby. Andy, Lord Marbury."

"Ah, Samuel!"

"Hi, Sam."

The Deputy Communications Director glanced across at Toby. "What do Baker, McMillan, Hobson, Jones and Westall have in common?"

"They're all people I don't care about?"

Andy smiled at Sam. "Toby's being Mr. Grumpy-Pants right now."

Sam's face split into a grin. "I'll remember that. Okay, Toby, I'll be working on the thing for Saturday's dinner." He left.

Toby turned back to Andy. "Remind me why I married you?"

"I believe you proposed in a sudden fit of starry-eyed optimism and faith in the human condition," she told him.

"I got over that."

She smirked. "So I noticed."

With a sigh, he looked back over his notes and got ready to start again.

"Ah, CJ." The president smiled at her as she entered his private study. "What's this business I'm hearing about the British Prime Minister?"

"Britain wants to see more money earmarked for foreign aid," she explained.

"Well, so do I," he pointed out dryly. "It's Congress that won't stand for it."

"I know, sir. Toby's trying to hash out a diplomatic solution with the British Ambassador."

Jed nodded slowly. "We can't afford to look weak in international circles now," he reminded her. "Not while we're this controversial on the home front."

"Yes sir," CJ agreed, although he wasn't telling her anything she didn't know. She hovered, and he looked up at her.

"Is there anything else going on I should know about?"

She looked as if she was about to say no, and then said "There's some talk floating around about a book by a man called Michael Rogers."

He frowned. "Never heard of the man." He was nearly sure he was right, too.

"In that case, I'm sure he's eminently qualified to write your biography."

"Another biography?" Jed rolled his eyes. "I'm fairly sure I'm still living the same life I had in the last one."

CJ grinned, and then turned to go, but hesitated. "Mr. President, is there... is there anything in your younger years I should be aware of?"

"I used to steal cars to finance my crack habit," he said dryly.

"I'll go now."

"You do that."

When CJ was gone, he stood with his hands in his pockets for a few moment, frowning. His eyes fell briefly on the photograph of his father, over the desk where his cigarette case had once rested.

He very much wanted a cigarette right now.