Sam was awakened the next morning by another frighteningly polite butler rapping on the door promptly at six. He introduced himself as Alexi and explained that he was not a butler but one of the stewards employed by the Navy to attend to the needs of the Vice President. He poured Sam a cup of coffee (inexplicably knowing exactly the amount of cream and sugar that Sam preferred without inquiring it of Sam), offered aspirin (which Sam declined) and departed, leaving Sam to think.
CJ was not in the bed with him, but he had not really expected her to be. She had confessed, one late night during the campaign, to being incredibly unsentimental about sex. "My main goal in the morning," she'd admitted, "is to brush my teeth so I don't drive my partner away." Sam's suspicions of where she was were confirmed when the water in the next room hissed to life. He smiled when he heard what she was humming: "Sit Down, John" from 1776.
Her absence gave him some time to think about his strange dream from the previous night. "Shah-mat?" he wondered aloud. His dreams weren't normally so vivid; this one, though strange, was as clearly remembered as the previous day. Furthermore, he was not a chess player. Although his strategies were normally good, and he could map out a plan to defeat for his opponent 22 moves down the line, he would forget moves 8 through 12 and consequently lose.
He wondered about the beautiful pawn. All the other figures in the dream were easily recognizable, but he didn't recall ever having seen the pawn. She seemed very significant to him; as if when he understood what she represented, he'd understand what his subconscious was trying to tell him with the strangely vivid dream.
Sam sipped his coffee and reclined in the luxurious king bed. After a few moments, the door to the bathroom opened and CJ stepped out, dressed in a suit without a jacket and a towel around her hair.
"Where've ya been, Claudia Jean?" he asked, pronouncing "been" like "bean".
She smirked at him, blew a wayward lock of drying hair out of her eyes with a disgusted puff of air, and told him "Slant rhyme doesn't count. You should see that shower, though! With the kind of water pressure they've got in there, you could open a mill in the bath tub if you wanted."
She looked down for a moment. "I feel like things should be awkward between us, now," she said lightly, though Sam would've had to be a fool to miss the vulnerability in her face. "Sex is power, and a kind that," she cleared her throat uncomfortably, "I don't really understand well enough to predict how it will behave. Are things going to be awkward?"
Sam shook his head. "Please, CJ, please understand that I'll never use any kind of power I have against you," he murmured.
She looked up, and Sam was struck by the fierceness of the emotion in her face. "I know. I'm sorry, I know. It's just, the unpredictable element makes me a little jumpy, is all," she said, keeping her tone light by force of will.
Sam knew the dismissal of a topic when he heard one. He changed the subject to the first new one he could think of. "CJ, do you know what 'j'adoube' means?"
"Hmm, yes," she answered, attending to her hair in a mirror over the dresser. Most of their belongings had arrived the previous day, arranged by some faceless member of the staff. "It's a chess term. If your piece isn't lined up on a square you say 'j'adoube' when you adjust it, so you won't have to move that piece if you don't want to. It's French. Why do you ask?"
"No reason. I just woke up thinking of it. I dreamed about chess last night, actually."
"Really?" Sam poured her a cup of coffee from the elegant porcelain service the steward had left.
"Not a very good dream, actually. People I know were the pieces, and the President was the king."
"Which team were you on?"
"White. With all of you. You were a White Knight. But part of the time I was a bystander."
"At least you were on the same team as your friends."
"That's true. The White Queen sacrificed himself."
"Himself?" CJ turned fully to face Sam, intrigued by the conversation.
"Yeah. Strangely enough, Hoynes was the White Queen."
"I suppose it makes sense. The Queen is second in importance only to the King."
"And in my dream, he sacrificed himself so I could make it to the eighth square."
"And become the new White Queen, just like you became the new Vice President? This sounds like a dream of uncommon lucidity. But the White Queen didn't sacrifice himself, he was assassinated."
Sam shrugged. "I just wonder who one of the White Pawns was. She was the only one in the dream I didn't know."
CJ laughed. "Alice, maybe."
"Alice?"
"From Alice in Wonderland. She was a pawn, always running to stay in place."
Sam thought for a moment, then something about the chronology of the dream struck him. "Do you remember…" he trailed off.
"What?"
"Do you remember, in the weeks before Rosslyn, what stories the press was seizing on?"
She frowned, trying to remember. "Umm…no, not really. There were some hate crimes in Florida, and that was the so-called "Summer of Kidnappings," but I don't really remember much beyond that."
"Ooh, that Summer of Whatever business is absurd."
"I could get Carol to check if you like."
"Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks, CJ."
"Sure." She glanced at the clock. "Mmm! I've got to go. Senior staff's in half an hour."
Sam nodded, and kissed CJ on the cheek. "I suppose I'll see what duties exist for 'his superfluous excellency.'"
"Oh, what the hell did Franklin know?" Laughed CJ as she walked into the corridor, leaving Sam to dress and find something to do.
Somewhat to Sam's surprise, however, there was much to be attended to by the Vice President and the skeletal Senior Staff that Sam had retained. Upon dressing and being conducted by another steward to the Vice President's office, Sam was greeted by Hoynes' Senior Assistant, a wizened old man with steel gray hair and a take no prisoners attitude. He presented Sam with his schedule for the day, which mapped out every minute of his time from seven thirty to a little after five. "Vice President Hoynes didn't care to work too far into the evening," he explained. "He stayed very carefully on schedule to make sure," the little man added, his tone of voice clearly telling Sam "You'd be wise to do the same."
"I have no objections to working late, if it ensures that everything that needs to be done is done," Sam replied blandly.
The schedule was not what Sam had expected. Nor was it exactly what he had hoped for. It consisted mainly of a tediously long roster of Washington's secondaries: those who sought the attention of the President and needed to be placated, and those who needed some good photo opportunities. Many of them were either representatives of big campaign donors, or big special interest groups. Sam was not particularly impressed by the urgency of meeting with any of them, but he held his tongue while the first of them were ushered into his spacious and comfortably appointed office.
The assistant conducted a trio of lawyerly-looking gentlemen in suits into the office. Sam rose to greet them, listened to their grievances (they were unhappy with current federal subsidization of art supplies in the computer gaming industry), labeled them crackpots – or, worse, irrelevant – and tuned out the rest of the meeting, nodding whenever they paused. He promised to speak to the President on their behalf, and ushered back out of the office. The next two meetings were just as bad.
The fourth meeting was a little more interesting, though. Sam could tell from the moment they walked in that the lobbyists weren't; that is to say, they were not policymakers or lawyers who had become highly paid professional lobbyists.
There were two men and a woman, all professionally attired. After the polite greetings the younger of the two men began imploring Sam to consider increasing pressure on local law enforcement to track down missing children. He went through a rundown of missing children, statistics, their histories, and other pertinent information before the older man began a more personal appeal.
"Mr. Vice President, two years ago my daughter was abducted from our very home. The police, however, didn't believe us when we asked them to find her; at first they implied that we were to blame, then they said that she had run away from home! My wife and I love her so dearly…and I know, above all things, she was happy at our home. She loved her school, her friends. Her science teachers all told us she's brilliant. Her chemistry teacher was even trying to get her a full scholarship to UC Berkeley."
The man held out an 8 by 10 photograph to Sam. "Mr. Vice President, this is my daughter. She'd be a sophomore in high school right now, and I know you have a lot on your plate, sir, but please, help us find her. And help the police make sure that this doesn't happen to any other families."
Sam, however, was staring at the photograph in his outstretched hand. It was, without a doubt, the pawn from his dream.