VI
Monitoring websites was a pretty regular part of her daily routine, but since the latest set had been added to her workload, Carol experienced a whole new level of heart-in-mouth when she sat down at her PC. These sites were her responsibility alone; there was no team of interns conducting regular sweeps to catch the minutiae she'd missed.
Of course, they weren't really looking for minutiae - more like nuclear explosions.
Everybody who might have had a chance at so much of a sniff at an advance copy of Jed: Portrait of a Future President was under close scrutiny. Carol began the usual sweep of literary critics, biographers and First Family trivia fans. The latter were a less familiar group - they didn't usually have to contend with situations where the story could break as easily via one of the groupies the president would probably be highly unnerved to know he had as from the highest echelons of Congress.
She clicked onto the next in line of literary websites, and felt her heart lurch. Read Paul Kafka's review of the New Presidential Biography.
And there it was.
Most controversially, Rogers sheds light on a subject so far conspicuously absent from other presidential biographies; the young Jed Bartlet's relationship with his father.
Though short on details, Rogers's work paints the relationship between the rising young academic and his schoolmaster father as a cold and loveless affair. His mother, even before her death just prior to his acceptance at Notre Dame, seems relegated to the status of mere wallpaper, a ghostly and ineffectual presence in the battle of wills between father and son. John Bartlet is by contrast portrayed as an icy monolith, unreachable and unassailable by his academically brilliant son's ever more impressive efforts to win his pride and approval.
With a coyness perhaps befitting its mid-century small-town New Hampshire origins, the book skirts around addressing the issue head-on, but the anecdotes and first-hand accounts gathered by Rogers clearly point to an atmosphere of relentless physical, emotional and mental abuse.
There was more, but Carol was already out of her chair and in the doorway to CJ's office. "CJ? It's here."
CJ didn't need to be told what 'it' might be. Rogers had already opened the can of worms - they'd only been waiting for somebody to come along and slap a label on it.
"Where?" The press secretary marched quickly over to Carol's computer, and her aide had to scurry to keep up with her long stride.
"Paul Kafka's review."
"What are the forums like?"
"Buzzing," Carol could see after just one click of the mouse. She ran her gaze down the list of responses, more interested in who was posting than what they had to say. "Most of these people are anonymous or newly registered."
"They've been pointed here from somewhere else," CJ agreed tensely.
They exchanged a glance. "It's out," said Carol softly.
CJ straightened up, and immediately headed away.
"CJ?" she called questioningly.
"I have to talk to the president," CJ said, without looking over her shoulder.
There were times - many, many of them - when Carol didn't envy her boss's high-profile position one bit.
"Come on, Donna," Ed urged.
"You must have an opinion," Larry added.
"I don't!" she insisted.
"Oh, please. Everybody in this office has got an opinion, you don't have one?"
She folded her arms. "Seriously, I don't know."
"Make a guess!" Larry demanded.
"I give it three days before he snaps," said Ed.
"I say tomorrow."
"Hey, he might go the distance," Donna shrugged.
"Sam?"
"Keep the beard?" Ed and Larry looked at each other.
"Can't see it," they said in stereo.
"I think he might look nice with a beard," Donna suggested loyally.
"I think Toby feels threatened," Ed suddenly suggested on a tangent.
"He's losing his unique status," Larry agreed.
"The interns won't be able to tell each other 'watch out for the guy with the beard, he's the dangerous one'."
"It's damaging to his aura of mystique."
These high-level musings were interrupted by the stomped arrival of Josh, and the cloud of bad mood he was travelling under. Donna gave the two of them a resigned eyebrow flicker in place of a farewell, and followed him into his office.
"What's up?"
He stared at her. "I got stood up!"
She tried to hide her snicker, and didn't quite make it. He scowled at her.
"Victoria Henderson's small potatoes! She shouldn't be pulling stunts like this, she's been in Congress long enough to know the White House doesn't take this amateur crap! Find out what happened."
"I'm on it," she said earnestly, recognising his need to aim his temper at a suitable target. "Senator Bracknell came by to talk about the new gun bill - he's in with Sam."
"Thanks," he said automatically, even as he stormed off.
She wandered back out to rejoin Ed and Larry.
"What's up with the boss-man?"
"Josh's in a bad mood because he got stood up."
Larry blinked. "Josh had a date?"
"No."
"And the world returns to its axis."
She chuckled. "Oh, it's just a Congresswoman didn't make his lunch meeting. Probably traffic or something - Josh has a tendency to mix up his getting dizzy with the world revolving around him. I'll call her office in a while, find out what happened." She shuffled her chair closer. "But first... explain to me the odds on this whole shaving sweepstakes thing again?"
"Leo?"
He glanced up from his work, and nodded at Margaret when he saw Nancy lurking by her shoulder. The National Security advisor stepped inside, and he looked a question at her.
"No news," she told him with a grimace. He slammed the flat of his hand against the desktop in frustration.
"Dammit, Nancy-" Her pantomime shrug cut off the rest of his pointless rant, and he just shook his head. "How can a US ambassador just vanish into thin air?"
"It's some pretty thick air out there, Leo," she reminded him.
"We need to know, Nancy." With things as unsettled as they were out in Cambodia, the problem wasn't finding a suspect, but making damn sure the finger of blame was pointed at the right member of a cast of thousands. The potential for explosion... "So help me, Nancy, if they find a body-"
"Our boys are on it, Leo," she reminded him calmly, with a wry twist to her voice that upbraided him more succinctly than any verbal reprimand. The National Security Advisor didn't need him telling her what was going on.
He subsided, and sighed heavily. "I'm not liking bringing this before the president, Nancy."
"Yeah." There was a moment of silent commiseration. President Bartlet, they both knew, was a man who didn't deal well with incomplete information.
Nancy glanced up at him, with a shred look in her eye. "What's riding the president's ass, Leo?" she asked bluntly.
He shot her a sharp stern look. "Nancy, you know I can't-"
"I don't want you to tell me, Leo," she said softly, looking him in the eye. "I want to know if you know."
He looked down. Yeah, something was riding the president's ass all right - and he didn't have the first clue what, except that it was personal.
And that bothered him more than he could possibly put into words.