VIII
TUESDAY:
Donna cradled the phone against her chin and spun around to look up at Josh as he came in. "Did you-?" he began.
"Yes. No. There was nobody there. I'm doing it now."
Josh blinked at her for a few moments, caught halfway through the motion of shrugging out of his jacket. "Um..."
Donna rolled her eyes. "Okay, Josh, ask."
He straightened up, and let the coat slide slowly off his shoulders. "Did you call Vicky Henderson's office?"
"Yes."
"And did you find out why she stood me up yesterday?"
"No."
"Why not?" he demanded.
"There was nobody there."
"Well, did you try again this morning?"
"I'm doing it now."
There was a short pause, and she could see the wheels of thought turning as he mentally replayed her side of the conversation. He tilted his head to smile wryly at her. "Do I need to be here at all?"
"Yes. If you weren't here, we might accidentally become efficient, and that would throw the entire system of government off the rails."
"Well, we can't have that." Equilibrium recovered, he grinned at her and resumed heading for his office. "Any messages?"
"CJ wants to see you and Sam when you've both got a moment."
He came to a halt again. "CJ?"
"Yeah."
"Do you know why?"
Donna had a sickly nervous feeling that yes, she probably did. The tension in CJ's face, the tired eyes and frown lines she'd had to report at this morning's presidential check-in session... But Josh didn't know about that particular unofficial arrangement, and it probably wasn't the best way to drag him into such a distressingly murky subject area... best to let CJ handle it.
"She just said she wanted to see the two of you as soon as possible."
"Me and Sam, together?" he checked.
"Yeah."
Josh's expression slowly melted into a frown of contemplation. "Okay." He headed into his office.
He stuck his head around Leo's door and waited for the Chief of Staff to look up. Behind the miniature shields of his glasses, his eyes were tired.
"Toby," he acknowledged.
"Any news on Cambodia?"
He already knew the answer before Leo shook his head.
"Nobody's claiming responsibility, nobody saw anything. They're still hoping for a ransom note, but they're looking for a body."
Toby nodded slightly. "And if they don't find either?"
Leo smiled wryly, an expression with no good humour in it. "Then we take this to the next level, and we do whatever we've got to do."
"Yeah."
He turned to leave, but Leo called him back.
"Toby... how's things with Andy?"
He shrugged infinitesimally. "They're... progressing. Mostly in a stationary sense, but this is an improvement."
It had been a long time indeed since things with him and Andy had been anything but actively degenerating. Any frustration at her insistence on taking their reconciliation so slowly was more than offset by the vague bemusement that such a second chance existed at all. The pain of the miscarriages and the thousand stresses and frustrations of trying everything that was to be tried might have accelerated the rate of cracking, but he was well aware that the most compliant person in the world would find him hell on earth to live with, and Andy was far from that.
Leo dismissed him with a short nod of acknowledgement. It was difficult to tell if he was lending his tacit support to Toby's efforts because it represented hope of recovery from his own estrangement, or because such hope had long since flown. Most probably, Leo himself didn't know, either.
Toby went back to his office.
"Good morning, CJ." The First Lady's voice was laced with a tension audible even over the phone lines. "Today's the day?"
"Yes, ma'am," she admitted tightly.
There was a moment's silence from the other end, and then Abbey unknowingly echoed her husband's quiet wish of the night before. "There's no chance this could-"
"It's been spreading over the internet since last night. So far they're going with 'unconfirmed allegations', but-"
"Only a matter of time before the press feel like they have enough confirmation to pop the question," she completed.
"Yeah."
"And then-?"
"Then we dig our trenches, and hunker down for a drawn out fight," CJ admitted darkly.
There was no way the press were leaving this little titbit alone - it was just too juicy. The public were always hungry for every little detail of their premier's private life, and so far Josiah Bartlet had provided them disappointingly little in the way of closeted skeletons. He had the kind of love-life that you couldn't dream of in a candidate - thirty-five years of marriage without a breath of scandal, and before that - of all things - a trainee priest. Occasionally rocky relations with various daughters notwithstanding, he was a devoted father and doting grandfather, and his speech about his brand new son-in-law at Charlie and Zoey's wedding had brought tears to more than a few eyes in the audience.
Even the biggest scandal of his political career was one that brought about as much sympathy as feelings of betrayal. The fact was that Jed Bartlet seemed almost too wholesome to be true - and as much as the American public liked to pretend that was what they wanted in a president, the truth was they liked a good smear of dirt even more.
The papers knew that truth full well, and there were far too many angles to this story they could play up to let it die quietly. From sensationalistic revelations to the good old 'underdog triumphant' theme that had graced so many TV movies, they weren't going to let this go until they'd mined every last possible source of column inches out of it.
Never mind what it was doing to the man at the centre of it all.
Abbey let out a heavy breath that crackled along the phone line. "You've spoken to him?"
"Last night."
It was hard to tell if the sigh that followed was depressed or angry. "He should have called me."
"It was late," CJ offered, although she didn't really think that was the reason.
"Okay." The First Lady's voice grew stronger as she shifted from things she couldn't control into their course of action. "Who knows, and who needs to?"
"Carol knows," CJ supplied. "And Donna."
"Ah, yes, Donna." Abbey's voice momentarily brightened. "Honestly, CJ, whatever we're paying that young lady, it's not enough."
"I know," CJ agreed. "On the other hand, what they're paying me's not enough, so-"
It occurred to her at the last minute that the comment she would have made automatically to Josh or Sam or Toby was maybe a little less than appropriate, but the First Lady only laughed. "CJ, if any of you people were looking to get rich quick you'd have moved onto greener pastures a long time ago."
"Except Leo," CJ pointed out. "I have it on good authority that Leo's loaded."
"So I've heard," she chuckled, but the jocularity quickly faded. "I'll need to talk to Leo."
CJ didn't envy her that, and in truth was glad she'd accepted the responsibility without being asked; that was one conversation she wasn't sure she could handle. Breaking the news to the others would be bad enough, but Leo... She just couldn't imagine it.
"I'll speak to Josh and Sam later this morning."
"And Toby already knows," the First Lady completed. There was a pause. "You said he figured things out for himself?" she asked, in the tones of somebody on the edge of clicking a few puzzle pieces together.
CJ wasn't entirely sure how to answer, especially considering she wasn't too clear on how he'd done it herself. "Toby has... a sense for things, sometimes."
He never missed the subtle things. Occasionally he missed the thirty foot pink neon signs that said 'Do Not Go There - No, Really, Do Not Go There, Do Not Even Think About Going There'... but he never missed the subtle things.
"Still, he knew... he didn't have his suspicions, he knew." There was a pregnant pause. "CJ... did he say something to the president?"
Now there, if ever there had been one, was a loaded question. Hearing the sheathed claws in the First Lady's voice, she was suddenly very very glad that she wasn't really party to the answer.
"He... I got the impression that there might have been... I honestly don't know."
"There was a time..." Abbey's voice grew distant for a moment as she tried to recollect. "There was a time just before re-election when Toby upset him. He never would say what they'd argued about, but... Toby upset him."
CJ struggled to recall the same incident, but there were just too many times of taut nerves and frayed tempers to try and pick out any one point where relations had been frostier. Unless...
"That would have been about the time that the president started... seeking help for his insomnia."
As opposed to 'talking to a therapist' or 'seeing Stanley Keyworth', which would have quite, quite different connotations which she knew nothing about, no sir. No knowledge of any such arrangement. Never informed. Couldn't possibly be expected to comment on that.
"Yeah." There was a silence, and then Abbey said explosively "CJ, what the hell good could he possibly think that would do?"
CJ winced at the barely restrained anger in First Lady's tone, although she suspected most of it was aimed at a target much further out of reach than Toby Ziegler. She picked her next words carefully.
"Toby... Toby doesn't think parents should be held to a different standard just because they're parents."
"Yeah," said the First Lady quietly. "Yeah."