V
"Hey, Danny."
"Hi, Carol." He smiled at her.
She'd missed Danny. He always had a grin and a few cheerful word for her, treating her as a person in her own right instead of an extension of CJ or just the girl who carried papers around. Besides, having Danny around made for a happier CJ, for all that she'd never admit it. The times he cheered her up far outweighed the number of times he drove her crazy... and besides, Carol suspected that CJ secretly rather enjoyed being driven crazy.
Which was why she was here.
"Hey, CJ was wondering if you've got some time-"
"Sure," he said instantly, standing up.
"Some time this evening," she finished, smiling. "She figured you owe her a catch-up dinner."
Danny's grin widened in pleasure. "Yeah, I can do that."
"Great. Seven okay by you?"
"Seven's great!"
He was still beaming happily to himself as she left the pressroom. She walked back to CJ's office and rapped on the doorframe. "CJ?"
"Oh, hey, Carol." She looked up from her paperwork.
"I was just speaking to Danny." It was fun to watch CJ try so hard to be casual.
"Oh, yes?"
Carol allowed a little of her smirk to show on the surface.
"He said he was wondering if you'd like to have dinner with him tonight. Sort of a chance to catch up."
CJ pulled an odd face, which Carol knew her boss well enough to recognise for CJ trying hard not to look delighted. "He couldn't ask me himself? What is this, fourth grade?"
"Maybe he's shy."
She snorted laughter at that. "Oh, but of course. Okay, Carol. Tell him if I have some free time-"
"You do. He said seven, you should be done with everything by then."
CJ threw up her hands. "Okay! Since you're obviously conspiring against me-"
"I'll tell him you said okay."
Carol left her boss's office, and smiled smugly to herself. Donna was so right. Deviousness did pay.
"Mr. President."
"Hey, Ron." He gave the senior agent a nod and a wry quirk of the mouth. He had a great deal of admiration for Ron Butterfield, but it was a legacy of the job that occasions when they met were not usually good times to smile.
Ron could never be accused of being one to beat about the bush. "Sir, I wanted you to be updated on a new security threat the OPR identified."
"Towards me?" he asked, with a twisted kind of hopefulness. Not that he relished anybody else trying to threaten his life, but better his than any of the possible alternatives.
Alas, it wasn't to be. "Towards Charlie and Zoey, Mr. President."
Jed sighed heavily, and pushed aside his papers to rub his forehead. Only Monday, and already he felt like he'd used up his energy quota for the week. Despite everybody's fussing, this really was only a simple cold he was suffering, but all the same, it was wearing on him. "Ron... is there any particular reason to consider this threat any more seriously than the tens of other hate groups that choose to target my daughter and her husband for reasons past understanding?"
Ron stared straight ahead. "No, sir." Which wasn't at all the same thing as saying they thought the threat was insignificant. To the Secret Service, no threat was insignificant. "However, since the recent announcement we've been receiving letters that indicate a different area of threat-"
"Oh, God. What?" The icy fingers of dread warred with duller exhaustion for control of his body, and the result was an instant migraine.
It wasn't often that you caught Ron Butterfield showing signs of discomfort of any kind, but he was doing it now.
"Mr. President, we've become aware of a group calling themselves the Sons of Herod." The biblical reference made it all too obvious even before he got the rest of the words out. "They're not after Charlie or your daughter, they're specifically targeting the baby."
"The baby? What do you mean, targeting the baby?" he demanded. "There isn't a baby! There's barely even a bump!"
Zoey, little Zoey, really pregnant? When he pictured her in his mind, he still saw pigtails.
Yes, Ron definitely looked decidedly pained; probably at the thought of the explosion his next words were likely to ignite. "The letters make it clear that the group consider it their... duty... to see that the pregnancy be terminated."
"Terminated?" Jed said, with the icily precise tones than anybody with any brains knew for the signifier that it was time to start running.
His Special Agent in Charge was, by necessity, made of sterner stuff. "Yes, sir. By any means necessary."
Jed rolled the words carefully over his tongue, tasting them, as if trying to make sure there was no possibility of mistake. "There is a group - a terrorist group-" never mind the ins and outs of official terminology, to him this was terrorism in its purest form- "dedicated to the... termination of my youngest daughter's pregnancy."
Ron's expression didn't waver, but his gaze was locked somewhere very deliberately away from the president's eyes. "Mr. President."
"Find these people, Ron," he said, with cold finality.
"Yes, sir."
There was a long pause, during which he became aware that Ron was not moving to leave. He looked up again from his paperwork. "Was there something else?" He was not deliberately hostile, but the tightly restrained anger under the surface tempered his tone with darkness.
"Mr. President, there's been some debate over whether it would be in the best interest of Peregrine and Osprey to inform them of the threat."
Jed wondered if the slip into Secret Service designations was a deliberate attempt to get him thinking as a president and not a father. If so, it was doomed to failure; his immediate instinct was to shield Zoey from all the horrors of the world, but he hesitated. "Ron?" He requested an informed opinion in that single syllable.
The Secret Service man grimaced. "Mr. President, it's my feeling that the protectees should be made aware of the reasons for increased security. Zoey in particular has-"
"Quite a strenuous objection to a heavy security presence." Jed nodded slowly. Perhaps Ron was right. He couldn't blame the two young people for chafing under the restrictions of their security teams - Lord knew his own felt like it was strangling him most days - but if warning them that it was not just their own lives in danger would encourage them to be more careful... maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
Still, the thought of his young, beloved, five-months pregnant daughter being told that the baby she was carrying was already a target of hate groups... He looked up.
"Let me be the one to talk to Zoey. She'll take it better from me."
"Yes, sir." Ron nodded smartly. "I'll set up a meeting with Charlie later today."
Probably he should have volunteered to take that one too... but one such meeting was going to be painful enough, and he was almost pathetically grateful to Ron for taking the duty off his shoulders. He nodded. "Okay. You do that."
He could feel a cough welling up in his chest, and tried to restrain it until the agent had left the room, but couldn't quite make it. Ron turned back and gave him the appraising eye of a US Secret Service agent with a charge to protect from whatever area danger seemed to present itself. "Mr. President?" He didn't have to fill in the rest of the question.
Jed waved him away, eyes watering slightly from the effort of coughing. "I'm fine." All the same, he was pretty glad he had a pitcher of ice water on his desk. He poured himself a glass, careful not to cause any undue alarm by letting his hand shake, and took a sip. "I'm fine, Ron," he repeated.
The agent stood firm. "Mr. President, would you like to see a doctor?"
Now there was a stupid question. "The First Lady has already had me poked, prodded and examined by a whole team of medical officers," he reassured his agent in charge with a wry twist of his mouth. "Believe me, if there was anything worse than a cold wrong with me, they would have found it." He grimaced in recollection. "They certainly looked hard enough."
Ron nodded sharply and departed, his training, at least, making him obey orders instead of lingering and continuing to bug his Commander in Chief about looking after himself. Jed carefully poured himself more water, and sighed.
It really was just a simple cold. He just wished it didn't make him feel so thoroughly rotten.
Sam wandered into his boss's office. "Toby, I'm still not happy with the D-section."
"It's flat?"
"It's more... bumpy." Sam frowned. "Actually, no. I think the word 'bumpy' implies a fairly smooth transition between levels, whereas this is... crenellated. My speech has crenellations."
Toby looked at him. "Sam, are you totally clear on what I ask you to do here? Have you been studying for an architectural qualification I am unaware of?
He shrugged helplessly. "I'm just saying, my speech has..."
"It has battlements?"
"It has an unevenness in tone you could shoot arrows through."
Toby gave him a long-suffering look. "Sam, do you want me to report you to the US Grammatical Office for metaphor abuse?"
Sam frowned, distracted. "Do we have a US Grammatical Office?"
Probably fortunately for his continued good health, Josh chose this moment to drop by.
"Hey," he said vaguely, hair sticking up in all directions as it did when he was preoccupied. Sam had never quite worked out whether this was due to Josh tugging on it while he was distracted, or some kind of build-up of static electricity from frenzied brain activity. He pointed at the two of them, finger wavering in the air. "Does... either of you two know why Senator McGann would be clearing her schedule to meet with Congresswoman Wells?"
"You mean Congressman Wells?" Sam assumed, correcting him.
"No. Not Liam Wells, Rita."
"Rita Wells?" He frowned in confusion. "She's nobody."
"I know." Josh stood in the doorway blinking for a few moments. "Okay." He wandered off.
Sam glanced at Toby, who had gone back to staring intently at his computer screen. He got the impression he wasn't wanted. "Okay, so I'm gonna go... fortify the battlements."
Strangely, Toby didn't bother to dignify this with a parting riposte as he left the office. Frowning, Sam sidled over to Bonnie.
"Do you know why Andy was here earlier? Toby seems... weird."
"Weirder than usual?"
He gave that the consideration it was due. "Well, you know. Differently weird."
Bonnie thought for a moment. "I don't know, but Andy seemed... subdued about something."
"Oh." He wondered what that was about. Could Andy and Toby's reconciliation already be on the rocks? He hoped not. But still, he supposed it was none of his business. He straightened up. "Okay, I'm just gonna go work on tomorrow night's speech," he explained to Bonnie. "Or, you know, possibly design a castle."
He headed back into his office.
