Chapter Text
In California in the early Spring,
there are pale yellow mornings
when the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
like autumn, clarifies
like pain.Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
Robert Hass,
‘Palo Alto: The Marshes’ from Field Guide
Prologue
Sam had not found the California of his dreams. He wondered sometimes why he had come back here. To get himself elected to the United States Senate or to find the childhood he had so carelessly lost in the space of a single phone-call? He could run for office here, and win, and yet his father would never be the man he had once thought him. The reasons why he had not been there, on sports days, and concert nights, and sometimes even on birthdays, could not be ennobled by any act of his son. He could not find a way to make it true that, after all, there had been a case the man was fighting; some injustice he was striving to right. No, in the end, there had been another woman, and too many lies to count. The story was so old that it felt like a re-run on the first time of telling.
He had not won the California 47th. He had thought that something would be bound to take place that made that happen; that there would be a reward for standing up for one’s principles. Defeat had been so bitter, perhaps, because it had been so long since he had tasted it. Even here, in this moment, poised at the break of a new day in which he was determined to be youthful and energetic and to tell people why they should vote for what he believed in, even if it wasn’t, necessarily, what they believed in, he wondered how much he really wanted this. Was this like retaking an exam even though he didn’t actually need the qualification it would give him just because he was stung he hadn’t managed an ‘A’ on the first attempt? Or did he really, truly want this? He wanted to be where decisions were made, policies formulated, in the room with the eagle seal on the floor. Yet, bizarrely, he had never felt so far away from government. Perhaps because he was so far away from government; on the wrong coast, looking out at this pale yellow morning, the sea mist already beginning to burn off the shore. Telling himself that if he won this election he would be a huge step closer to government didn’t seem to have the same resonance when he had stood in the room with the eagle seal on the floor and the secret service agents outside the too many windows, every single day, without being an elected official, and yet policies had sometimes been formulated because of him. How long would it take to get to where he had already been by this route? And how lonely a path was it going to seem when he had once had so much companionship upon the way?
He missed Josh, fiercely, sometimes. Remembered his younger self standing on the sidewalk, telling the man to his face how much he was missed. Their nightly calls felt like a link to everything he had lost. And yet he could go back if he wanted to; he wasn’t sure if there was anything stopping him; if it would be a terrible mistake, borne of cowardice, or the best move he’d ever made. In the meantime, there was this second election to fight, energy to be summoned, a tie to be selected. There was five minutes before Steve would be knocking on the door and telling him the day’s agenda. Sam took a moment just to look out at the sea. It was true that he had dreamed this coast for years; dreamed of taking political office, here, in the place where he was born. He was just not certain if the dream had any substance in the pale lemon-yellow light of day, or if, in the end, it was better burned off like mist.
“Sam…?”
He jumped at the knock on the door, hastily snatching up one of the ties he had been selecting and knotting it. Steve had always been impatient and Sam had annoyed him half a dozen times on the previous day by needing clarification where he had felt none was necessary. It had already been made clear to him that, while it was his job to run in the campaign, it was Steve’s job to run it. And him. So far he had been allowed to write his own speeches, say more or less his own words, but there had been a lot of blue-pencilling all the same. Whoever the people of Orange County voted for in the end, whatever name they thought they were selecting, Sam was not certain, that they would be voting for him. He was not certain that Steven Wynn or the Democratic Party was going to let Sam Seaborn actually appear in this race at all if it could instead put forward a facsimile who did as he was told and said what he didn’t entirely believe, and did all that was required to get elected.
“Seaborn…?”
Steve’s middle school bark. Sometimes he forgot that Sam was the candidate and the one to whom the campaign manager was meant to defer. Sometimes, Sam just knew that what Steve saw when he looked at him, was that annoying kid he’d used to beat up in recess.
You chose this, Sam reminded himself as he opened the door, plastering on a morning smile so Steve couldn’t accuse him of not being in the game. As Steve began to tell him about the day’s agenda, taking Sam by the arm and what felt a little like frog-marching him towards his first public meeting, Sam wondered if he had chosen this, after all, if there had ever truly been a moment when he had chosen to run for this particular office, or if, rather, events had simply overwhelmed him like a shipwreck, leaving him stranded on entirely the wrong coast….
The present
It was the waiting that was so unbearable. Mike Caspar had said it would be soon now, within the hour, and Josh found he was walking the corridors if for no other reason than that he could not stand to sit in his office for one more minute. Over the past six days he had come to associate it with phones that kept ringing with the wrong information; aides and senators and the everyday matters of his office, and for the most part none of it had been quite difficult enough. None of it had demanded so much of his attention that he could forget the other thing; the real reason why he didn’t like to move too far away from his phone, just in case…
If Toby had asked him, angrily or sympathetically – with Toby one never knew – ‘Just in case what…?’ he would have had to admit it was Sam he was waiting to hear from. Not Mike Caspar, not Leo, but a Sam who had somehow got himself out and staggered to a payphone somewhere and needed Josh to come and pick him up. That was why it felt so wrong to be here, on the wrong side of the country. He should have been there, in California, where he could go and rescue Sam if he called him. Knowing it was absurd hadn’t stopped every other call he’d had in the past six days from being a painful disappointment, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth every time he tried to converse.
A few hours ago he’d been convinced that Sam was dead and thought that he was starting to accept it, but now he realized that there was an inner pendulum that kept swinging back to optimism, over which he had no control. Something within him wasn’t able to accept that Sam was probably dead. He wondered if it ever would; even if they brought him proof, if some part of him would always be waiting to see Sam on the street somewhere, thinking when the phone rang that it must be him on the other end of the line.
He walked past Toby’s office and saw that Toby was just sitting there, not even pretending to type or to shuffle papers, the way he usually did when he saw someone was looking. He was just staring into the abyss of all the different possibilities, while simultaneously trying to strangle hope – so that it wouldn’t crush him too completely when they received the confirmation they all feared.
Donna was still doggedly trying to work. Josh saw the droplets splashing onto her keyboard as she did so; she kept blinking to clear her eyes, gamely trying to type up that pointless memo he didn’t remember drafting. But it was something to occupy her; to make another minute crawl past that wasn’t entirely consumed with the horror of ‘what if’. For the first time in his life he envied secretaries. No doubt Margaret and Ginger and Carol had also found themselves something to do. He, Josh Lyman, should have had something to do. There should have been a crisis. If the Senate or the House of Representative or the Republicans had a shred of decency in them they would have manufactured a crisis that demanded all of his attention this week. Instead they had backed off and refused to make political capital out of the fact no one in the West Wing had his or her head in the game. Bastards.
Josh strode into CJ’s office, where she had long since gone past the point of trying to do anything except rock in anxiety.
“Let’s invade somewhere,” Josh suggested.
“What?” She looked up at him and he wondered how long it was since she had slept. Then he remembered that glimpse of himself he’d seen in the mirror this morning as he tried to shave with a hand that shook with anger and fear; that long pause as he told himself that there could still be a happy ending to this story; that it wasn’t necessarily the case that Sam was never again going to stand in his apartment, bubbling over with enthusiasm about something, until a hungover Josh threatened to throw him out of a window if he didn’t dial down the nauseatingly optimistic good cheer.
“Let’s invade some country that’s pissing us off.”
CJ moistened her dry lips. “Just to pass the time?”
“Pretty much.”
“Okay, I’m in. What are you thinking? Canada?”
Josh shrugged. “Well, it’s close. Makes it easier to mobilize the troops when they don’t have so far to travel.”
“A lot of Canadians speak French in a particularly supercilious way. I’m sure we could work that up as an act of treason against the United States.”
“Plus, they tried to annex Donna. Moving the borders like that.”
“I think it was INS that moved the borders actually, Josh, but it’s as good a reason as any. Oh wait! The seal pups. Let’s go to war over the seal pups.”
There was no reason at all why seal pups should have forced that image of Sam into his mind; Sam wasn’t particularly small or fluffy. But now he was seeing the ice red with Sam’s blood, his skull cracked. He staggered and CJ was out of her chair in an instant and holding his arm. “It can’t be much longer now.”
“But then it’s over.” Josh swallowed hard. “And there’s no more hope. At least now we can think he could still…”
“He could still be alive, Josh.” CJ slipped her hand into his. “They may not have….”
“He can identify them. People like that aren’t going to think twice about pulling the trigger. I don’t think Sam being white is going to stop them.” It didn’t stop people like them from shooting me. He snatched a breath that could barely make it past the constriction in his chest. “They’re going to put a bullet in the back of his head, CJ.” Seeing her pale with horror, he realized how appallingly insensitive he had just been. It wasn’t as if he was the only one scared right now. He clutched at her hand. “CJ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll – ” He breathed again. “Mike Caspar’s a good man. He knows what he’s doing. If anyone can get Sam out alive then it’s – ”
She gave a little gasp as she looked over his shoulder and he turned to find that Leo was walking towards them. The air seemed to have become thick and glutinous, all the oxygen sucked out of it and replaced with syrup. He felt as if he was encased in liquid, could only move in slow motion, thoughts sluggish as molasses. Donna stopped typing and looked up, pleading with Leo to have some good news. Toby was standing in the door of his office, fingers gripping the frame so tightly they were white. His voice was rough: “Well…?”
Leo said: “They’re airlifting him to a hospital. He’s not in the best of shape and at the moment he’s unconscious. But he’s alive.”
Josh staggered and clutched at the door. He could hear hissing and felt as if he were falling into a tunnel of white light. Sam’s alive. Sam’s alive. Sam’s alive…. He only realized he was saying it out loud when CJ grabbed at his arm.
“Josh, if you faint like a girl, I swear I’m going to tell Sam the second he wakes up.”
“Sam’s alive….” The floor hit his knees with unnecessary force and he found everything was blurred and smeared and dissolving but he had the biggest, stupidest smile on his face he’d ever known. He had time to think: I need to buy Tracy McAllister the best Junior Prom dress ever before he passed out.
***
Six days earlier
Josiah Edward Bartlet, graduate of the LSE, Doctor of Economics, Professor of Humane Letters, winner of the Nobel Prize, and currently President of the United States, was thinking that today was going to be a good day. It was a cold crisp April day, the kind that always made him expand his lungs and walk briskly and think how much he missed New Hampshire. Definitely the kind of day where he wanted to be watching the greenness coming back into the land, rather than stuck in Washington DC, but even behind man-made walls he still believed he could feel the sap rising in every National Park across the land. This was the kind of day that made him feel energized and ready for anything, and not at all like a man suffering from relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.
As Leo entered the room, Jed started talking about Yosemite, and then, as Leo’s expression reached him, said: “I know that look and you’re not going to bring me down today, Leo, I swear. I have designated this a Good Day, and if I, as the President of the United States, cannot…” Then he got Leo’s expression properly in focus and realized it was much, much worse than he had originally thought. His first thought was for Abby and the girls, but then he realized he had seen Abby and Zoey in the Residence only a few minutes ago. He had spoken to Ellie last night and Elizabeth the previous afternoon. “What is it?”
“It’s Sam Seaborn.” Leo looked suddenly much older than he usually did; the lines of tension around his eyes definitely looking as if they were here for keeps. “He’s been kidnapped, the signs are by white supremacists. They did it at gun point – forced him into the trunk of their car.”
Jed had a memory of himself standing in that beautiful cathedral railing at God. Asking if Josh Lyman had been a warning shot. Apparently he had. Apparently none of his adopted sons were safe from the wrath of a vengeful god; or else, perhaps, more realistically, his adopted sons, Charlie, Josh, Sam, were all the kind of people who never backed away from a fight.
“In California?”
“Yes, in Orange County.” Leo said: “Mike Caspar’s on it. They have the kidnap on video camera. They’re going to find him, Mister President. This is what the FBI do.”
He thought of what they had failed to do in the past and turned away. Leo was there at his elbow in an instant, trying to keep him focused. “Sam had been receiving threats after that speech he gave…. He knew this was a possibility.”
Jed sat down heavily, feeling like a man whose father had never loved him because he had been too smart, and exactly like a man with relapsing remitting MS. “We should have had him handcuffed to Ron a week ago. Insisted he had some Secret Service protection.”
“He didn’t want special treatment just because he used to work for the President.”
“I know.” Jed gazed into Leo’s eyes and saw that he was in just as much pain as he was. “But do you honestly think they would have kidnapped him if he hadn’t once worked for the President?”
“Yes, sir. I really think they would.”
Jed straightened his shoulders. “Get him back, Leo. I don’t care how many men it takes. Get him back alive.”
***
Ten days earlier
Josh was still thinking about Sam’s speech. He never got tired of marveling at how Sam had managed to hang onto his sweetness, his bordering-on-naïve belief in the basic goodness of the human race, but there was something about Sam when he unveiled that steel core of his that always wanted to make Josh stand up and applaud.
White supremacists had fire-bombed a Baptist church in Orange County, killing three and wounding twelve. A six year old boy was still undergoing surgery to repair a ruptured pulmonary artery – Josh couldn’t think of that without putting a hand to his own scar – a seventy-six year old grandmother was still considered ‘critical’. All of the dead and wounded had been black. Reporters had stuck the microphones under second-time congressional candidate Sam Seaborn to ask for his response. Sam was the only person Josh knew apart from the President who could extemporize at the speed of a submachine gun in passionate, poetic, spine-tingling prose. By the end of Sam’s speech, the people of the world could be in no doubt that racists and murderers did not speak for the people of California, they would not know the protection of the people of California, that these bombers were cowards and terrorists who would find no allies in any legitimate political party, and that whether Sam Seaborn or his Republican opponent were elected to congress by the people of Orange County, the outcome for the cowardly murderers who sought to practice genocide upon their fellow Americans would be the same. No one had any tolerance left for the intolerable.
There had been a lot more. Also, like President Bartlet, Sam had never really seen the use of using one word when there were fifteen words enticing him like sweets in a candy store. But every word had been intelligent and lyrical and measured and passionate, carried on by the irresistible flow of Samuel Seaborn’s just rage.
Toby had been angry with him for going all bi-partisan on them when he was supposed to be running for Congress. Donna had insisted some things were more important than party politics. Toby had said – loudly – that being above party politics was a luxury that a Democrat running for office in Orange County didn’t get to enjoy. But the media had been impressed by Sam; most of all, Josh suspected, by his palpable honesty. He wasn’t being Machiavellian; it wasn’t a move to make it look as if the Republicans had been manipulated into having to condemn something they would have condemned anyway; it was someone speaking from the heart and believing that all right-minded people felt as he did, and being right. For once, Sam, my naïve passionate brilliant little friend, being absolutely right. When his opponent in the congressional race had shaken his hand at a fund-raiser for the victims of the bomb, there had been a warmth to his smile that looked unforced. That pat on the arm Hayden Taylor gave Sam as they stepped off the podium hadn’t been for the cameras, although the cameras had managed to pick it up, and neither was their subsequent conversation. Josh had demanded that Joey Lucas read the man’s lips and she had reluctantly done so, talking about the Democrats supposedly being the party that believed in the right to privacy, and Josh telling her – through Kenny – to shut up now and start translating. She had certainly lost no time in pointing out how mutually exclusive those two orders were, but, according to Joey – and Kenny – the conversation had gone like this:
That was a fine speech, Sam, and I appreciate what you said about me. I’m also grateful you probably phrased it better than I would have done. It’s just a shame you’re not a Republican.
No, sir, it really isn’t.
That sweet smile of Sam’s, no wonder Taylor had looked at him more as if he was a favorite – if wayward – nephew than his political opponent.
Come to dinner on Saturday night. Fiona wants to meet you. Next week we can go back to damning each other’s policies and parties. This weekend, let’s have a time out.
I’d be honored.
One more thing, Sam, if my daughter asks – you’re engaged or married. Married would be better but I’ll settle for engaged. On no account can you cross my threshold as single and unattached. I’ve put up with her dating a guitarist and a drug addict, but I draw the line at a Democrat.
Another smile. Yes, sir.
Josh had positively stomped into Toby’s room to complain that Republicans were getting this close to patting Sam on the head and giving him a cookie while he was ‘sir’-ing them.
“Isn’t Hayden Taylor older than Leo?” Toby returned, annoying Josh by failing to get as irritated as he’d hoped. He’d often thought that Toby should be more like Old Faithful and just go off at regular and predictable intervals instead of insisting on all this tortuous complexity of character.
“Yes, but…”
“And isn’t Sam like…twelve…? Thereby making it appropriate for him to show some respect for his elders, which, speaking as one of his elders, is an attitude I personally like to encourage in him. And I don’t care about him being bi-partisan in private. I just don’t think he should give away free sound-bites to the Republican Party.”
“He’s not ‘twelve’, he’s at least…” Josh did the math and then did it again to double check. “You know, people used to assume we were brothers, and not with that big a gap in between us, or anything. I’m not saying twins, but brothers born to reasonably fertile parents with a regular sex life. He has no right looking that much younger than me.”
“He is younger than you,” Toby pointed out unsympathetically. “He’s years younger than you. He’s years younger than everyone in the building. Which is why we banished him to Orange County to stop annoying us all with his full head of hair and still-perfect teeth.”
Donna appeared in the doorway with a clipboard. “Sam has a portrait in the attic, Josh. You should really get one. It could do wonders for your hairline.”
“You’re fired,” Josh assured her. He turned back to Toby. “So, you don’t think I should call Sam and tell him on no account to enter the home of any Republicans this weekend?”
“Do you have reason to believe that Hayden Taylor is in fact a practicing Satanist who needs the blood of young Democrats to fulfill his pact with Lucifer?”
“No, but…”
“Then leave him alone, Josh. He’s flown the nest. Our little boy’s all grown up now and we have to let him fail or succeed by himself.”
Toby might have spoken with mockery but his eyes had been serious and Josh had known he was right. The trouble was he wasn’t willing to let Sam go yet. Sam was naïve and impetuous and brilliant and innocent, and he needed Josh and Toby to extricate him from the troubles in which his brilliance and innocent and impetuousness and naivety landed him. That was the way it was. Sam had no right to just go off to California and grow up and not need them. It wasn’t fair and it didn’t feel…right.
Now, the day after Sam’s speech, Josh was still thinking about it. He still blamed Will Bailey for the fact that Sam was running for Congress in an unwinnable race instead of being here, where he should be, helping Toby write speeches and being there when Josh wanted advice or just to go and have lunch with a friend who could always cheer him up. Will had pulled off a miracle getting a dead guy to win an election; and it would have been nothing other than a triumph for the Democratic party if it hadn’t led to Sam being talked into running; but that bad had evened out the good as far as Josh was concerned.
Because it was emotional blackmail, that was what it was, the widow of a dead Democrat and a guy who had worked his ass off to pull off a miracle, both of them whammying Sam with the guilt trip because Sam had been sent down there to rain on their parade and had felt bad about it afterwards. But as far as Josh was concerned, Will had bailed on Sam when he had left him to the mercies of Scott Holcomb, who hadn’t done a good job, and was, in any case, an asshole. Josh still blamed Will Bailey for the fact that Sam hadn’t won, and knowing it was unreasonable and unfair, that didn’t alter the fact that he blamed him. He had believed Sam could pull off a miracle in the 47th and so had Toby, and the reason Sam hadn’t, as far as he was concerned, was because Will Bailey had lived up to his name and just plain bailed. Which he’d then done again when he’d left them to go and work for the Vice President. And knowing that Will was a guy of vision and integrity, that didn’t really help that much when he hadn’t used his vision and integrity to help Sam, only to sucker him into running before bailing on him. Nor was he doing much to help them right now as he helped to prop up a lame duck Vice President picked by the Republican party.
What Sam had done by scaring the Republicans with how close he’d come in Orange County, was to make them change their candidate. So, Chuck Webb had been leaned on by his party to retire and they had put up a moderate candidate with liberal leanings instead, Hayden Taylor. Josh really didn’t want that to be Sam’s legacy: Sam Seaborn, the Democrat who got the Republicans to field a better candidate than they’d bothered with before.
Josh had known Sam for around twenty years now, since he was a skinny, shiny-haired kid at Princeton to whom Josh, visiting with a group of Harvard alumni friends, had been loftily patronizing, and then been absolutely creamed by in a debate, along with the rest of his team. Because it had turned out that young Sam Seaborn, Abi Hyams’ younger brother Bobby’s absurdly good-looking little friend, had a mind like a steel trap and could argue – in soul-stirring lyrical prose – any point you threw at him. Josh had retaliated by taking him aside at the after-debate party – where Sam was still telling people five years older than him just exactly how wrong they were – and giving him too much beer, so he would stop countering all their arguments and would revert to being a nineteen year old college kid who threw up and fell over, both of which Sam had obligingly done. Which was when Josh had suffered a pang of conscience and taken him outside to walk it off, where he had learned that even when drunk and incapable of navigating a straight line, Sam could still counter an argument even if he had trouble arranging all the words in the right order. Josh had driven away from that first encounter and said to Abi Hyams in the car: ‘That kid is going to do something amazing as soon as he – you know – hits puberty. He just needs…”
“Mentoring?” Abi had suggested. “Encouraging?”
“Regular bullying by trained professionals so he doesn’t get too full of himself. He needs to have his arguments crushed by incisive debate. I’m going to call him as soon as we get home and point out to him all the ways in which he was wrong.”
“But you agree with him,” Abi pointed out. “You were just playing devil’s advocate.”
“That’s not the point. He needs to be able to counter everything the Republican party throws at him when he’s running for…something.”
“He doesn’t want to go into politics, I asked Bobby. He wants to be a lawyer.”
“You have to be a lawyer to work in politics. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be in politics.”
“He cares about politics but I think he wants to change the world through contract law or something.”
When Josh just looked at her, Abi had sighed. “Or possibly his father was a lawyer and Sam has always been expected to be a lawyer and he’s had a very expensive education paid for by his father who expects him to make something of himself because there are other people in the world who didn’t have the privileges Sam did and it would be an insult to them as well as to his father if Sam didn’t…”
Josh nodded. “Yeah, he told me something about playing the clarinet and how if you don’t practice you should give it to a kid who’ll use it, which I gather was supposed to have some kind of broader philosophical meaning. Hard to tell in between the ‘kill me – kill me now’s and the barfing. I’m just saying, he’s a smart kid but he doesn’t know everything yet and he needs reasoned opposition to his arguments so he can hone them. Also, he creamed us in that debate and I really need to kick his ass for that.”
“Lucky for him you do know everything and can share with him the benefits of your great intellect and experience.”
“Yes, it really is….” Josh had grinned at her. And then they had stopped off at a motel on the way home and he hadn’t thought about Sam Seaborn, or anything much that wasn’t to do with how Abi looked naked, until he was home again. Then he had dug out the scrawled piece of paper Sam had thrust into his hand at Josh’s insistence – after he had helped him to throw up in the gutter – with Sam’s telephone number. He had done a little research and dictated some really incisive counter arguments onto Sam’s answerphone, telling him he expected to hear back from him before eight o’clock that night or else he was chalking it up as a score for Harvard. Sam had countered right onto Josh’s answerphone an hour later, beautiful prose and unshakeable precedents, and Josh had smiled in the satisfaction of having found a really first class mind to help nurture. Not to mention a pretty likeable human being to tease, bully, and befriend.
And all the many times since when he had thought about how much Sam Seaborn, no longer a skinny little college kid who puked into the gutter after three beers, but a bona fide magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, qualified lawyer, and Deputy Communications Director for the Bartlet administration – albeit one who did still occasionally fall over from time to time – was going to wow the world some day. At no point had he expected the sum total of his achievements to be making the Republicans pick a more liberal candidate for the California 47th. He wasn’t sure he was ever going to forgive Will Bailey for that.
He didn’t even know he wasn’t alone in his office until the President said: “You’ll be talking to Sam this evening?”
Josh started to his feet. “Mister President, I didn’t hear you.”
President Bartlet smiled. “You were thinking about Sam and that speech he gave. God, I love it when he gets the bit between his teeth. The Williams boy pulled through, did you hear? Six hours in surgery but he pulled through. I just spoke to his father. His grandmother’s going to make it as well. We need to get the people who did this. Sam’s right. In a country with our constitution, how can there be anywhere for people like that to hide? How do they even become like that in the first place?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know how they got like that.” I only know that some music will always sound like sirens to me because some of them did.
“So, you’ll tell Sam, when you speak to him?”
“Yes, sir. Tell him what…?”
“That he did well with that speech. And I’m glad he’s having dinner with Hayden. He’s a good man even if he does have his head up his ass when it comes to immigration, taxation, health insurance, school prayer, the role of government, and the second amendment.”
“Are you telling him that as well, sir?”
“Just tell him I said he did well. And he needs to come and visit us all soon. Tell him we miss him. Remind him what I told him when I was beating him at chess. Tell him, I believe it now more than ever. He’ll know what I mean. What time do you usually call him?”
Josh felt exposed. “I don’t call him every day.”
“Donna said you did.”
“Donna has a big mouth.” As the President just looked at him, Josh rolled his eyes. “It’s a stressful time for him right now. I’m just touching base.”
Bartlet snorted, not unsympathetically. “You think I wouldn’t call Leo every day if he was running for office in Orange County for the second time after getting totally pounded the first time? Tell him what I said.”
Josh waited until the President was on his way back to the Oval Office before sitting down a little sulkily. “Donna!”
She was there in a moment, looking groomed and long-suffering and unnecessarily pretty. “You summoned me, O Master?”
“Not by rubbing a lamp, so enough with the I Dream of Jeannie stich. Why did you tell the President that I call Sam every day?”
“Because you do. You get home, you call him. You do it every night.”
“Yeah, but…you don’t have to tell everyone.”
Donna gave him one of her annoyingly perky little smiles. “I think it’s sweet.”
“I am not ‘sweet’,” Josh complained as she exited the room with a light-footedness that was just plain annoying. Raising his voice he added: “I’m actually a very important person!”
“If you say so,” Donna called back cheerfully.
Josh slammed a folder shut in annoyance and then picked up the phone to call Sam. It was true he didn’t have any evidence that Hayden Taylor was a practicing Satanist, but did that necessarily mean that he wasn’t?
***
Eight days earlier
Donna told him about the appointment as he walked through the door. A nine o’clock with Steven Wynn. Even the name made his hackles rise. He couldn’t tell if it sounded like an insurance salesman or a football player. He just knew he didn’t like it.
He went in to see Toby while Donna was still calling after him: “What are you in such a snit about?’ He felt it was probably best for his dignity if he just refused to engage with someone accusing him of being in a ‘snit’.
“Steve Wynn’s here. Well, he’s not here. But he’s going to be here in a couple of hours.”
“And I care about this why?” Toby enquired.
“Because he’s Sam’s campaign manager.”
“And?”
“And I don’t like him.”
“You didn’t like Scott Holcomb.”
“Scott Holcomb was an asshole who screwed up Sam’s campaign.”
Toby saved the document he was working on and sat back. “Agreed.”
“Sam got creamed.”
“Yes, he did. But we always knew that he would. He went there on a suicide mission, remember? It was to pacify an angry house minority who were going to complain that the President hadn’t done enough to make them the majority, and to energize the state party. That was what Sam was there to do. He did raise the profile. He did quell a lot of complaints from House Democrats. He did make Horton Wilde’s widow happy and proud, and he did make it look as if the President gave a damn about the California 47th. As far as all of those aims go – mission accomplished.”
“I told him I wouldn’t let him look like a fool.”
“I don’t think he did,” Toby returned mildly. “He stuck to his principles. He looked – as CJ kept telling us – youthful and energetic. He could have done with a haircut, but on the whole I think he looked as non-foolish as someone can look whose campaign was mishandled from the outset and whose supporters managed to make the headlines for all the wrong reasons from before they even set foot in California.”
Josh grimaced. “I usually just blame Will Bailey. But that’s so I don’t have to remember that I told him I thought it was a good idea. I told Sam he should run.”
“Yes.” Toby nodded. “Although blaming Will Bailey works for me too.”
“Except he backed out and left it to Holcomb because the DNC wanted Holcomb and he wanted to give Sam the best possible chance.”
“Sam would have done better with Will running his campaign.” Toby dropped his pen on the table, making Josh wonder why he was holding a pen while using a laptop anyway; did he make written notes with one hand while typing with the other? “So, however pure his motives may have been, I’m still good with blaming Will.”
“Me too, because then I don’t have to think about how I alienated his campaign manager five minutes off the plane, how we trapped people in Disneyland, the President insulted the French while the cameras were running, I sent Donna to talk to a Communist, Amy set a place-setting on fire, and you got into a bar fight.”
“I usually blame Charlie for the bar fight.”
“Nevertheless…”
Toby sighed and sat up right. “Look, we both know that Sam lost that election the moment he told some of the richest one percent of voters in the country that he was going to be supporting a tax plan that made the richest one percent pay more taxes. We helped him lose – we helped a lot, but Sam basically climbed up on a cross and crucified himself. But I think we’re all agreed that any campaign manager Sam has is going to work out better for him than you and me.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong. Not Steve Wynn. Who is, frankly, a jock.”
“He’s a graduate of Princeton,” Toby returned. “Do they even have jocks at Princeton? I thought they were a hundred percent nerd?”
“He was a jock and he probably bullied Sam.”
Toby didn’t try to hide his disbelief. “Would that be a chess jock or a calculus jock?”
CJ walked in as Josh was shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “I’m just saying, I’ve met him and I don’t like him.”
“Who are we not liking now?” she asked of Toby.
“Josh has – you’ll be amazed to hear – taken against Sam’s campaign manager.”
CJ rolled her eyes. “Well, shocker.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Josh demanded indignantly.
CJ patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s just say that if you ever thought any campaign manager was good enough for Sam I would probably fall down dead with surprise.”
“He was a jock. He probably used to flick Sam with wet towels in the locker room.”
Toby frowned. “Why do people do that anyway? I’ve never understood it.”
“Repressed sexual desire,” CJ explained helpfully. “You guys are all basically a seething mass of repressed lust for one another and as you’re too hidebound to act on those desires you flick each other with wet towels or hit each other. It’s almost charming, but…not.”
“Why do women think that all male interaction is based upon the sexual urge?”
“Because it is.”
“No, it isn’t.”
CJ sighed. “Why do you guys think that we women are always on the brink of making out with our female friends?”
Josh shrugged. “For the same reason you think ‘we men’ are with our male friends – hope springing eternal.”
“I am trying to work in here,” Toby pointed out. “I know the open laptop, the stack of reference books, and my being speechwriter to the President may somehow have obscured that fact, but if either or both of you had to urgently be somewhere else right now I could probably live with the disappointment.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “Look, seriously, people. Wynn keeps trying to push Sam towards the center. Sam isn’t comfortable in the center. He’s not John Hoynes. This guy isn’t helping to get Sam’s views to the wider public, he’s trying to stifle Sam’s views and make him a mouthpiece for what he thinks will get him elected.”
CJ nodded. “Yeah, Josh. In case you somehow missed it in the however many years you’ve been in politics now, that’s actually what campaign managers do. Last time, Sam got killed in California because he allied himself with a tax plan that was always going to be about as popular in Orange County as bubonic plague, not to mention the fact that every single member of the President’s staff except – let me think, oh yes – me – acted as if they were appearing in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To Newport Beach from the minute they stepped off the plane.”
Josh and Toby exchanged a glance. Toby grimaced. “We’re actually more comfortable with blaming Will Bailey.”
“Okay, you do that then, but here in the real world can I suggest that you, Josh, try not to alienate Sam’s campaign manager or – you know – piss anyone off for a couple of weeks so that Sam doesn’t get asked about it and doesn’t have to defend you, which we both know he would do even if you had told Mary Marsh that her Proposed Policy of Moral Improvement was best used as a suppository.”
“I wouldn’t actually say that,” Josh muttered, although not with a great deal of conviction.
“I’ll try not to get pelted with fruit and vegetables when we go out to campaign for Sam next week. And perhaps this time the President won’t insult the French – or hairdressers, Donna won’t be photographed having lunch with a Communist, and Toby won’t get into any more brawls.”
“I just want to say that I was happy in my blaming-Will-Bailey place,” Josh pointed out.
“Yeah, tough. Take some responsibility for your part in Sam’s downfall and try not to replicate any of the dumb things you did last time.” CJ straightened up majestically, said with great dignity: “I have no idea why I came in here now” and left.
Toby waited until she was out of earshot before saying: “You know, CJ has a point. You could try not to alienate Steven Wynn.”
“Even though he probably used to flick Sam with wet towels in the locker room?”
“Even then.”
Josh sighed and got to his feet. “Okay, I’ll play nice, but I don’t think I get enough credit for my incredible tact and self-restraint or my diplomatic dexterity in the face of provocation.”
“Maybe because you never show any?”
“Could be.” Josh sloped back to his office, in no better temper than when he had left it, although now bowed down with a lot more inconvenient guilt.
***
Two days earlier
Tracy still couldn’t decide which dress to buy. She had worked for nearly a year to get to this point, and here she was, a month before the Junior Prom, trying to tell herself it didn’t matter that much, was kind of silly, some people weren’t even going; the practical side of her warring with the impractical as she gazed and gazed at the strapless burgundy dress that she just knew would go best with the warmth of her cappuccino-colored skin. That was a new dress; it had come out of nowhere – or more likely New York – and thrown out all of her previous calculations. Before that it had been a straight race between the green and the blue; the silk and the taffeta. She acknowledged the blue was more sophisticated; she liked its subtly elegant sheen, whereas the green was more frivolous and frothy and cut a little lower. She had pictured herself in both while all the while saving her allowance, babysitting for various friends of her mother, and working in a store every Saturday while the friends of richer parents were off having fun.
Tracy was smart. That was acknowledged by everyone, even – reluctantly – by her younger brother. She had been born smart while being examined closely for signs of becoming an impractical dreamer like her father, who had also been smart but in a way that had no practical purpose. Her mother was bone-deep practical; a nurse who had raised two children on a wage that was hardly more than the allowance of some of her friends, and who took pride in her children’s brains and commonsense in the way Sharilyn Dempsey’s mother took pride in her daughter’s froth of golden hair. Tracy’s mother had often said that you could never be too smart, not when you had to be twice as smart as a man for another man to acknowledge you were half as smart as he was, and twice as smart again if you happened to be black. Schooling was a gift, her mother said with such ferocious conviction that even Eli had given up complaining about homework in case his mother made good on her threat to demand that the school gave him more. Their father – as their mother never got tired of telling them – had been an impractical man. An idle sort of dreamer who never applied himself to anything, their mother said, usually just before she warned Tracy never to choose a man because of his looks; brains were what mattered, brains and heart and integrity. Also a steady paycheck. And, of course, any choosing of men of any caliber was much better left until one had a college degree. Getting married young was just like giving up a part of who you were, her mother said. Sometimes it was kept for you, and you could get it back when the kids were grown up; sometimes you never did.
Tracy made a lot of fun of her mother to her face. Several times now she had skipped in singing a soppy song and wearing a rapt expression as she told her passionately that she had married Jethro Tulliver, and she was going to move in with him to his parents’ trailer just as soon as she’d raised the bail money to get him off that drug-dealing charge. The first time she’d done it her mother’s shriek of horror had probably reached a note never before registered by the human ear; that was what Tracy had told her anyway. Judith McAllister had sat down and patted her heart dramatically and then told Tracy she would be the death of her and then laughed so hard she had almost choked before calling her sister to tell her about the joke Tracy had just pulled on her. She had appreciated the joke most of all because it was the proof that Tracy had gotten what she was telling her, and why. They weren’t really a family for heart-to-hearts but they had their means of communicating. Not a lot got said, but a lot was understood all the same.
Behind her back Tracy thought her mother talked a lot of sense. It didn’t do to go around telling mothers stuff like that or they’d get even more full of themselves than they already were, but whatever she said to her mother at home, when in the schoolyard, Tracy repeated a lot of her wisdom. She told Deirdre that going steady with a loser like Phil Dugnall was just dumb, and she pointed out to Helen Sachs that babies might look cute in the commercials but the reality was a dead end job and a dead end life, and to use some protection.
Her school reports were something to be proud of. Her mother liked that she got ‘A’s in most subjects, of course she did, but she liked most of all the comments from the teachers about how Tracy stayed cool in a crisis, how Tracy always knew where the fire exits were and the right procedure when the school bus broke down on that sweltering hot day and no one else seemed to know the right thing to do. Tracy didn’t use her cell-phone frivolously. Not because she didn’t want to – she would have loved to spend hours chatting about events they’d all lived through that day in the school with friends in the evening – but because her mother had given it to her for emergencies, and her mother worked hard for her money. So, she carried it always and made sure it was charged up and ready just in case some emergency reached her – she thought of emergencies like something spilled, water or oil, that lapped at the feet and had to be bridged somehow – and she had need of it. And, after Sharilyn Dempsey had had her phone taken along with her purse, she kept it in her bra. It was a small phone and she wore a loose fitting top so it wasn’t obvious, but it did mean that if someone mugged her one day and took her purse, she would still have the means to call the police. The fear of turning into a shiftless dreamer was a constant, so whenever she came up with a strategy like that by herself, she felt a sense of relief that her father’s impractical genes were not yet overwhelming her mother’s side of the family.
But right now she was feeling…pretty much like a sixteen year old girl who wanted a dress she couldn’t afford. The burgundy was the best; no question about it. She could have lost her heart to the blue silk or the green taffeta if she hadn’t seen the burgundy, but now she had, she couldn’t think of anything else. Sadly, she counted her money again. It wasn’t enough, not by seventy-five dollars, and she couldn’t earn that kind of money in time, not at ten bucks a time for babysitting. She couldn’t ask her mother; not because she wouldn’t lend her the money, but because she would. And mixed right in with that breathless, painful wanting of that dress there was a calm, irritatingly practical voice reminding her that a ball-gown that she could use for one night and one night only was a ludicrous waste of her mother’s hard-earned money, especially when there was a chance Eli could go to summer camp, which he would need, being a boy and not having a strong masculine role model, not to mention being fourteen, and so inevitably poised on the brink of doing something stupid round about twenty-four hours a day.
She and Eli joked about who they were as statistics as well as who they really were. “You don’t have a strong masculine role model and so will inevitably bow to peer pressure to become a dumb hoodlum loser I will have to bail out of jail” came up often, as did the statistics on teenage pregnancies for girls of single parents. Confronting statistics seemed like as good a way as any to sidestep the slippery, unfriendly things. Eli wasn’t as smart as Tracy but he was, as his sister often told him, ‘smart for a boy’. She did actually mean it as a compliment but it always made him sulk. One more year, he told her, and he was going to be so much taller than her. “Yeah, but you’ll still be a boy, so probably pretty dumb” she assured him with sisterly kindness.
Tracy was still thinking about the dress as she walked back home, attempting to make herself love the blue or the green dress as much as she had before she’d seen the burgundy one. She was so occupied with thinking about the dress that she didn’t notice the car crawling along beside her until the skinhead with a swastika on his forehead was pointing a gun in her face and telling her to get in. As she was bundled into the back of the car, she found herself thinking that her mother was right, and that dreamy impractical side she had inherited from her father, was in her, after all, and now seemed likely to have just got her killed.
***
Eight days earlier
“Josh.”
“Steven.”
They faced each other for a moment, Josh irritated to discover that Wynn was at least six inches taller than him and had considerably more hair. He looked a lot more like a football player than a chess grand master to him, with those broad shoulders and the square jawed good looks, and the wet towel flicking scenario seemed a lot less like the fabrication of a slightly over-protective friend. It was annoying to discover that, beautifully cut although Josh’s jacket was, Wynn’s seemed to hang with even more style.
“How’s Sam?”
Wynn smirked at him. “Most people ask about the trip to DC.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? I think that’s proof enough your car, plane, and cab didn’t crash.”
“And yet some people think you lack simpatico. He’s well. He’s positive. He’s…”
“Ahead in the polls…?”
Wynn shrugged and took a seat. “He’s doing as well as can be expected at this stage of the campaign.”
“How many points is he lagging behind Taylor?”
Wynn regarded Josh levelly. “A few more than he would be if he listened to his campaign manager.”
“Have you tried flicking him with wet towels?”
Wynn positively smirked. “I’m reserving the wet towels for next week. I need to keep something in reserve in my armory of persuasion.”
Josh narrowed his eyes. “I knew you bullied him at Princeton.”
“I bullied him at middle school too. It was good for him. A guy that smart needs to be reminded that sometimes brains aren’t the solution to everything. Sometimes you need to cough up your lunch money and learn to say ‘uncle’. Are you telling me I didn’t prepare him perfectly for a career in government?”
Josh really hated how perfect Wynn’s teeth were. Thinking over how many concessions they had been forced to make since last month, never mind since President Bartlet had taken office, he had to admit Wynn had a point about the preparation for public office thing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t really dislike his smile.
“What’s your strategy this week?”
Wynn shrugged gracefully. “Chinese burns mostly. The occasional swirly.”
“I’m serious.”
“And I’m serious about getting him elected. And he’s not going to get elected being the good little follower of President Bartlet’s brand of wealth-taxing, business-bashing, liberal do-gooder politics. Not in Orange County.”
“You’re the same as Scott Holcomb, you want Sam to run away from who he really is, and what he believes.”
“What Sam believes isn’t necessarily what the people of Orange County believe.”
“He wants to be elected on a platform of his own beliefs so he can represent the people of that congressional district. Not trick them into voting for him.”
Wynn rolled his eyes. “Josh, be realistic. If Sam wants to play a part in the political life of this country as an elected official, he has to get elected, and you guys decided the place he was going to try was in the California 47th, that means he’s stuck with having to run in the California 47th if he doesn’t want to look like a carpetbagger. He can’t get elected there as someone who backs a tax plan that punishes the people he’s asking to vote for him. Taylor is promising to protect people’s rights to defend themselves from burglars while Sam wants to campaign on a platform of making sure those burglars don’t get the death penalty even if they kill the guy he’s asking to vote for him and then rape his wife.”
“Well, the abolition of the death penalty would also protect those wealthy tax-paying members of the California 47th from getting killed by lethal injection if they killed their old wife to inherit her trust fund before marrying their secretaries. So, there could be a whole boatload of voters Sam would get right there if you let him run on his own issues instead of yours.”
“How many compromises do you and this office make on a week by week basis, Josh? Tell me, really, I want to know.”
Josh sucked in some air. “A lot.”
“Of course you do. Because that’s the price you pay to be an elected official or to work for an elected official. So, how come President Bartlet’s principles can be whittled down, diluted, altered, and compromised, but Sam has to remain a shining beacon of unelectable purity? If you want him to win this race, he has to shut up about some things he feels strongly about, and talk positively about some things he doesn’t like. That’s what it’s going to take for him to get elected in Orange County and if he doesn’t like it, he should get out of politics and get back into law, and you’re not being any friend to him by telling him it’s still fifth grade and he can act out if he doesn’t get his own way.”
Josh gritted his teeth. “Is he ‘acting out’?”
“No, he’s not, because I’m keeping him away from all the people that might encourage him to do so. We’ve had some disagreements but I have a solid team around me and he’s not prepared to hold out against an entire room filled with people allotted to help him by the DNC. Sam’s not that arrogant.”
“So, you’re bullying him! You’re ganging up on him and bullying him into doing what you say?”
“We’re trying to get him elected, Josh. What are you trying to do? Do you want him in Congress or do you want him back here being Toby Ziegler’s lap dog and your racquetball partner? Sam could have a glittering career in politics. He could do a lot of good. But he has to get elected and to get elected he has to do what I say.”
“Any district, California 47th or not, would be lucky to have Sam as their elected official. He will work tirelessly for those people and I resent you acting as if he’s a bad check you’re trying to pass.”
Wynn still, irritatingly, refused to take offence, steepling his fingers and giving Josh a pitying look. “Hayden Taylor has been married to the same scandal-free woman for forty-one years. He has four kids and six grandchildren. Sam is unmarried at thirty-six. At least some of his potential constituents are going to take that as proof he’s either gay or sleeping around or both. Ideally he should have been married for ten years by this point and have at least a couple of kids. Instead, the only woman his prospective constituents know he’s slept with is a call girl, which, at the very least proves that he indulges in casual sex, which in the post-AIDS era is never a good selling point.”
“It was one time!” Josh protested. “He let a woman pick him up in a bar one time after he’d had a very bad day and when he was worried about a friend.”
“But no one believes that you do it once and you get caught. Everyone believes you do it twenty – thirty – a hundred – five hundred times and out of all those times you get caught once.”
“So, because Sam slept with Laurie once, he’s a slut?”
“Yes.” Wynn was unblinking. “An unmarried slut who may also be gay. And that’s before I get onto the many, many ways in which Sam’s political convictions differ from those of the people he is asking to elect him. We both know Sam’s a great guy but as a political candidate in Orange County he’s a hard sell. I’m here to ask you not to make it harder.”
Josh just knew that if he gritted his teeth any harder he was going to damage the crowns but he just couldn’t seem to help himself. “And how would we do that?”
“Don’t come to Orange County. The President can give Sam his endorsement without making a personal visit.”
“It will look as if the President is endorsing him less than he did last time.”
Wynn nodded. “Exactly. And that’s a good impression to be given for Sam right now. He’s got the Presidential endorsement which means Democrats will vote for him but the fact that the President obviously has some reservations, that’s going to help him with floating voters. He’s young and energetic and personable. Women like him. We can get a lot of the housewives and the eighteen to twenty five demographic, as long as he’s not saying anything that is going to alienate them policy-wise. If they can’t stand President Bartlet, the fact Sam used to work in the White House is going to be offset by the fact that he and the President aren’t as tight as they used to be.”
Josh snatched a breath. “That isn’t what Sam wants.”
“How much do you think it helped him last time when you guys rolled into town? Talk about ‘Send in the Clowns’. We don’t need the circus, Josh. We need the endorsement, not the shots of kids trapped in the Pirates of the Caribbean or your assistant having lunch with a Communist. If you really want to help Sam – stay away from California, and keep the President away, too, that’s all I came here to say.”
Wynn rose to his feet, nodded politely to Josh and then was gone, leaving him seething and frustrated and horribly afraid that the man was right. Sam wasn’t going to get elected without compromises. That was a fact of political life. Josh knew that better than anyone. He spent most days making trades to get bills through; agreeing to attach amendments that diluted or altered the laws they were trying to pass. All these years in power and they hadn’t managed to get gays accepted into the military or gay marriages accepted or the price of gas raised or the seas protected from the next spill of oil or Big Tobacco brought to account or public schools turned into models of learning or any of a hundred other things that really mattered to all of them. That was what it meant to be in politics. You cared passionately, you worked tirelessly, and you compromised, every damned step of the way. Except he didn’t want that for Sam. And Wynn was right, and that was what it would take, but maybe he didn’t want Sam to have to do that; to have to compromise who he was and what he believed in, the way the rest of them had to do every day. Maybe he really needed Sam to be the one guy who stubbornly persisted in never giving an inch, but rather in trusting to the greater good, the wider truth, the higher ideal. Maybe they all needed Sam to keep their ideals for them so they knew someone was ensuring they stayed whole and intact in some form or other, however many compromises the rest of them had to make every day.
“So…?” Toby shrugged as if he didn’t care. “Is Wynn a step up from Holcomb or not?”
Josh didn’t meet his eye as he rearranged pencils on his desk. “If anyone can get Sam elected it’s probably him.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’…?”
“No ‘but’.” Josh arranged the last pencil so it was absolutely straight and absolutely parallel to the one next to it; not meeting Toby’s eye as he said: “I just wonder if this is really what Sam wants. If this is really what’s best for him.”
“Isn’t it a little late to wonder that now?” Toby returned, so quietly that Josh just knew he had been thinking the same thing.
“I keep thinking we got him into this.”
“We actually didn’t. He actually made that initial stupid promise to Will Bailey and the widow of that dead guy with no input of any kind from us.”
“But we didn’t talk him out of it.”
Toby considered the point for a moment and then shrugged again. “I acted out about him taking the Lakers banner. My conscience is clear.”
Josh waited until Toby was out of the room and entirely out of earshot before he said so quietly that even he could hardly hear the treacherous words: “I’m just not sure that I even want him to win…”
***
Five days earlier
Watching the videotape, Toby Ziegler wondered if this was going to be the last sight he ever had of Sam Seaborn; and if so, was this going to be his last memory of Sam Seaborn; the one that overwhelmed and overwrote all others. Was he never again going to remember Sam smiling or writing or even jet-propelled on a wave of righteous indignation, without his memory hitting this image, like a speedboat ripping out its propeller on a sandbank: a grainy black and white image from a gas station security camera?
He and Josh had watched it over and over, trying to see something that would help, some miraculous clue that had been missed by the FBI, but the fact remained there was nothing. There was just Sam walking along the street and that car pulling up onto the sidewalk in front of him, then Sam just standing there, looking bewildered, and then bending down to see if the driver needed help or directions or…or God knows what Sam had been thinking right then, but he had gone towards the car, not away from it. That was the moment when Josh leaned forward and Toby knew – because he was doing it too – that Josh was mentally screaming at Sam to run, run as fast as he could across the street to the gas station. But Sam never did. However many times they watched it, Sam just stood there, mouth slightly open, looking concerned and confused. And then it was the part that CJ and Donna had only watched once before leaving in tears – the men in hooded sweatshirts brandishing a gun at Sam as they opened the trunk and threw its contents clumsily onto the back seat. Sam backing up with his hands raised, probably telling them there was some mistake – the picture was so grainy no one could tell – and one of them grabbing him by the hair and shoving him towards the trunk, the gun held to the back of his head. Toby always held his breath then, in that instant, where the gun was jammed into Sam’s hair to presumably dig in against his skull, because in this version the finger might tighten a fraction further and that might be the end, right there.
There were the little details that Mike Casper had mentioned when he first gave them a copy of the tape; Josh and Toby insisting on it, saying they needed to see it, they knew Sam better than anyone else, they might be able to spot something the FBI hadn’t… But knowledge of Sam wasn’t useful here. Sam was just the guy these sons of bitches had decided to kidnap. They could see there were four guys, who seemed to be young, late teens, early twenties, all wearing hooded sweatshirts; two of them with bottles in their hands, two of them with guns. Not that the bottles seemed to be weapons, there was the definite glint of liquid, beer bottles, half full of beer. The FBI didn’t think it had been planned. They suspected the kidnappers had just been driving around, brains half filled with notions of vengeance for that speech Sam had given, and on seeing him, had decided to abduct him; a drunken impulse, Mike Casper had said, face extra grim because he knew Sam and had known Josh for years, and this was hitting all of them where they lived. Toby had shuddered inside at the thought of Sam at the mercy of four swastika-tattooed hoodlums giving way to their drunken impulses.
Josh persisted in believing it was planned, reasoned, that a ransom would be sent, some demands made. Toby suspected he wasn’t ready to accept that his friend might be lost forever because some moronic thugs had one too many beers and decided to strike one back for the good ol’ boys by shooting a political candidate in the back of the head.
The attack on Charlie had been planned, Josh pointed out. Motivated and reasoned, however adjacent to ethics or decency, minds had been at work behind that intended assassination, that was what Toby suspected Josh meant. Which would mean they would want to keep Sam alive so they could negotiate, using him as a lever. Not just a drunken impulse which would mean they would most probably just beat him to death or blow out his brains then dump his body in a ditch somewhere; a stupid crime by stupid people that would mean Sam’s brilliant mind and sweet nature had made no difference in the end, he would just be another corpse rotting somewhere as it waited for someone to find it.
That was when Toby would get up and switch off the tape while Josh blinked at him owlishly. “There may be something…”
“There’s nothing.” Toby collected himself but turned away. “And I don’t want to keep seeing Sam like that. I don’t want to remember him looking so…small.” Because that was what always struck him when those vicious redneck bastards were looming over him, that Sam had to look up at them because they were all taller than he was; looking like some kid being picked on by playground bullies. He didn’t know if he wished Sam had looked scared or not; it would have been painful to see Sam Seaborn looking scared but perhaps slightly less painful than seeing him not showing sense enough to be scared.
Sam, armed men forced you into the trunk of their car at gunpoint, how much more of a tip-off did you need that these were not nice people?
Toby snatched a breath. “I keep imagining him trying to reason with them. Wanting to…engage them in rational debate about the roots of their racism.”
Josh ran a hand through his hair. “Well, maybe that would…”
“It won’t do any good, Josh. They’re not going to listen to him. They’re just going to get angry and beat him to death with a tire iron.” He exhaled, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“They must have taken him for a reason.” Josh was doggedly persistent on that point. “An exchange for one of their people who’s in prison. Something like that.”
Or they took him because he was there. Toby didn’t bother saying it again. Mike Casper had said it, Leo had said it, Toby had said it. Josh, CJ and Donna didn’t want to hear it; although he suspected CJ and Donna accepted it even if they didn’t want it said out loud. But Josh was in denial. He didn’t want it to be random and impulsive and pointless. He wanted it to be the act of reasonable madmen who were fuelled by twisted hatred yet still oddly practical when it came to Sam. It would make sense to look after him if they needed him to exchange for their own people, Donna had said that, and Josh was clinging to it like an asthmatic with an inhaler. Toby suspected Donna didn’t actually believe it, but it was what Josh needed to hear, so she had said it, with conviction. If they were trying to win public opinion over to their cause, hurting Sam wouldn’t avail them anything – that had been CJ. He suspected she had said it to make Donna feel better because her eyes had been full of pain even as she was saying the words.
“They blew up a church with seventy-eight people in it, half of whom were over fifty, and fifteen of which were under ten,” Toby pointed out grimly. “I don’t think PR is high on their list of priorities.”
Later he had got Donna alone after she had said something reassuring to Josh and said: “You don’t have to do that.”
He’d thought she would pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about, but she only hesitated a moment in moving a file before placing it carefully on the right pile. “It helps.”
“Yes, but this isn’t just something that’s happening to Josh. It’s happening to all of us. It’s happening to you, too, and…”
“It helps.” She looked up at him, eyes ringed with shadows from lack of sleep. “It helps me. The things I say to make Josh feel better make me feel better too.”
Toby sighed. “Whatever gets you through the day, Donna.” As he had turned away he had wondered what Sam was using to get through the day, if there were even any days left for him to get through any more or if, with each passing hour while they waited by the phone, all that was happening was that the corpse of their friend was getting colder and colder.
Josh came to find him just after, updating him on the FBI intel about a place they’d searched with no luck. Insisting it was a positive move all the same because they had names and addresses of meeting houses and perhaps Sam was being held in one of those. Toby had nodded as if he was convinced, while all the while thinking that people always associated a man’s death with a man’s life; as if his life was somehow cosmic foreshadowing for a suitable end, but it didn’t work like that. The briefest perusal of the crime statistics proved it didn’t work like that. Untimely death had nothing to do with who you were as a person, and everything to do with who the person was who killed you. You never even glimpsed the problems of the drunk driver that pushed you off the freeway to fiery oblivion, you were just dead. If Sam ended up dead in a ditch it wouldn’t be anything to do with who he was; it would just be to do with who had captured him, and the people who had captured him were racists thugs; that was the reality; and who Sam was didn’t make a damned bit of difference.
Toby almost said it out loud and then sighed because it might make a difference who Sam was. It might mean that he would never shut up even if they told him they would kill him if he didn’t; he would still keep trying to show them the error of their ways; oh yes, and the other thing about Sam, was that inside the sweetness and goodness, and the unshakeable belief in the goodness of others, was a steely core that was absolutely unmovable. So he would not cooperate with racist thugs; he would not pretend to agree with them or pretend that they had somehow won him over with their moronic rhetoric; he would keep telling them they were wrong and why they were wrong and what had probably set them on the original path of wrongness, and he would do that until they beat him into unconsciousness or shot him in the head.
None of them were actually talking about what it was probably like for Sam right now. The chances were that he was already dead, but they certainly weren’t admitting that. And they were all maintaining a tacit agreement that they weren’t going to talk about the way he was almost certainly being treated either. The difference was that Toby suspected there were things he had thought of that Josh hadn’t; making the inside of his head a scarier place to be. Josh had done the sane and sensible thing of concentrating on all of Sam’s positive traits and projecting them into his captivity; seeing Sam as dynamic and optimistic and impossible to dislike, like a protective bubble around both the Sam in his head, and the part of Josh that would presumably explode with anger or fear if he let in too much reality to his calculations.
Toby hadn’t mentioned one of his fears; even though he would have really liked the reassurance he was wrong; because he didn’t want to gift anyone with that idea if they hadn’t already had it. He had vivid memories of how he had felt before and after he had been told about the President’s MS. Equally vivid memories of that last day Sam had been able to enjoy before he was being told. He’d felt so guilty, not because he was keeping the truth from Sam, but because he hadn’t found a way to protect him from it permanently. He had wanted his own optimism back instead of this sick feeling of anger and betrayal, and he had wanted Sam to be able to go on in blissful ignorance. Right now, it didn’t seem to have occurred to Josh that these people might sexually as well as physically abuse his friend, and Toby couldn’t be the person to give him that thought, not when he knew how sick it was making him feel. It would have helped to talk about it, to be told by Mike Casper why that wasn’t in their psychological profile. But there was no one to talk to because there was no one as yet showing unmistakable signs of having already considered that possibility. Perhaps Leo had and would be relieved to discuss it with someone else, but what if he just looked at Toby with a new horror in his eyes that Toby had put there?
So, he was keeping that particular nightmare to himself right now, festering away, along with all the other horror movie scenarios of what those four thugs could be doing to his friend right now. He had never been so ungrateful that he had been cursed with a good imagination. If there had been a way to have an imaginationectomy he would have been signing up for the procedure at once.
“They could just want to get the attention of the media…”
Josh again. Toby snatched a breath; fought the nauseated sensation back down; tried to pretend that was even a remote possibility that Josh might be right.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, they could. Of course they could….”
***
Three days earlier
Danny was waiting for her after the press conference. She had known he would be. CJ couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that he was there; perfectly conflicted between being grateful for an individual’s sympathy and the fear that if someone was nice to her she was just going to shatter into a million pieces. She imagined herself as fractured crystal in sunlight, her individual fragments forming prisms, people crunching over her in tan leather shoes. Then, as always, she thought of Sam with his eyes open, unseeing, no pulse, no breath, no life. She had never thought there would come a time when she would have been grateful to know that Sam was tied to a chair somewhere, face lumpy and bruised from someone else’s twisted anger, but still alive, still breathing, still someone they could save and who would, in time, be healed.
“Do you know more than you’re saying?”
Danny fell into step with her as if they had been doing this since childhood. Sometimes she thought they had been. Sometimes she thought a boy just like this had pulled her pigtails in junior high while she told him he would always be shorter than her.
“No.”
Danny glanced at her face, reading too much, she knew. She was starting to long for the company of strangers, people who wouldn’t know how close she was to cracking; but unfortunately the thought of being in the company of people who weren’t obsessed with what was happening to Sam was too repugnant to her. She would have ended up hating them for not being consumed with his abduction. If they changed the TV channel in front of her because they wanted to watch sports, she might have to kill them.
“Because I was hoping you might know more than you were saying.” Danny rested his hand on her arm as they reached her office. “CJ, you know I would never say anything that would endanger Sam. I’m not asking as a reporter, I just want to know….”
She closed the door behind them both and lowered her voice to say: “We don’t know anything. We have the tape with four unidentified male Caucasians aged between eighteen and twenty-five, we have a blurry black and white image of the car, a brown late model sedan, no license-plates. We have the direction they drove off in. We have a probable link between them and the Orange County White Pride group that blew up the Calvary Baptist Church. We have a good guess they are vicious racist thugs. Apart from that we’re nowhere.”
Danny searched her face and she could see him positively hoping for signs of concealment, but then he sighed and sat down. “I’m sorry, CJ.”
“I know.” She could feel that lump in her throat getting bigger. “I keep…seeing him, how I think he probably is right now, either dead or being… and then I remember little moments, him smiling and me…bawling him out or teasing him or… Did I ever tell you he was the one that saved my life at Rosslyn? He pushed me out of the way of the bullets. He didn’t tell me. He was afraid I might feel an obligation.”
Danny reached across and took her hand. “You’re doing really well out there. No one would know you’re one wrong word away from imploding.”
“Thank you.” She nodded, not sure what she was agreeing with, but grateful all the same.
“How’s everyone else doing? Off the record. You know I meant off the record, right?”
“I know.” CJ nodded again. “The President and Leo look like they lost a son and if Sam turns up dead I can’t answer for what…” She collected herself, off the record or not, she couldn’t tell a reporter that she didn’t trust the President not to unleash all manner of hell upon every white separatist movement in America if Sam Seaborn was found dead. “Josh is… I think he’s in denial about what these people are, which is ironic, as he’s the one with the surgery scar from where they shot him just for being near Charlie. You’d think he would know better than anyone just how little they care about the value of a human life.”
“Josh thinks they took Sam to negotiate?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Everything’s a possibility, Danny, but I don’t think we should kid ourselves that these people are going to be Mensa candidates any time soon. They were so stupid they abducted him right in front of a security camera. They had to clear things out of the trunk onto the back seat to make room for him, that’s how prepared they were. It was an impulse. A spiteful impulse, and when they realize how dumb it was, I think they’ll probably kill him.”
“What does Toby think?”
“What Toby always thinks, the worst. Only he isn’t saying it because he doesn’t want to upset the rest of us. He just sits in his office, pretending he’s busy, while all these terrible possibilities eat away at him like cancer.”
Danny tightened his grip on her hand. “Sam’s a very resilient guy. And people like him. Look at Hayden Taylor.”
“Hayden Taylor is a sane and reasonable grandfather who just happens to be a Republican. He’s not a white supremacist thug with a gun.”
“I’m just saying, politically, he and Sam are poles apart but he’s been making all those televised appeals to the community to look out for anything suspicious as if Sam was a member of his campaign team instead of his opponent. He has his whole team out there handing out leaflets with Sam’s picture on them, and it isn’t a publicity stunt, you’ve only got to look at him to see the guy hasn’t slept.”
CJ took a deep breath. “Danny, I know you’re trying to help, and I agree with you that Sam is as lovable as they come. But these are not reasonable people, and the other thing about Sam – he’s stubborn. He is not going to try to find some common ground with these people. He is not going to cooperate with them. He is going to argue with them and annoy them and they are going to beat…” She broke off. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she whispered: “I keep trying to negotiate with God on this. I know they won’t be giving him steak pie and blankets but could you just stop them maiming him or killing him….”
“They may just turn him loose. Like you said, this wasn’t a planned abduction. It was an impulse and they have the secret service and the FBI crawling all over Orange County looking for them. If it was me I think I’d blindfold him, drive him to the middle of a cornfield, and dump him.”
CJ drew a shuddery breath, wondering how long you could actually go breathing around that painful constriction of unshed tears. “These are people who care so little about human life that they blew up a church full of senior citizens and children. If they decide Sam’s no use to them – they’ll kill him.”
Danny squeezed her hand. “You’ve got to keep hoping, CJ. Sometimes miracles happen.”
Mentally she was adding And sometimes they just don’t but she was grateful for his words all the same, and even managed to find him a smile and a nod as he left, before breaking down in another violent shower of tears.
***
Three days earlier
Sam was not sure which was the more astonishing, the way the sunlight filtering through that high unreachable little window was so gloriously golden; a shower of dust motes, which, in the stream of drenching light, swirled and glittered hypnotically; or that it should surprise him so much. Why, after all, should the light that found its way into this dank place be more anemic than any other part of California? Yet, he had expected something mean and thin and instead there was this extravagance of light.
The window was at a right angle from where he was sitting – perched uncomfortably on the edge of a rusting plow to try to keep himself out of the sludgy water from the broken pipe flooding the cellar. He could not warm himself in the sunlight, unless he dragged the plow over there, only look at it and wonder if he would ever stand in a beam of light again, yet still it made him feel better. Unfortunately, as the day darkened and turned first bloody, and then gray and granular with twilight, he always felt his hope ebbing with the sinking sun.
Sitting in six inches of filthy freezing water, trying to stop his teeth chattering while blood dripped onto his shirt, Sam had to concede that if Toby had overheard his most recent conversation with his kidnappers, he would probably have been somewhat irritated. No, ‘somewhat irritated’ would probably not have cut it. There was a very good chance there would have been yelling. The words ‘Are you in some way mentally incapacitated?’ might have been voiced at some volume. But what Sam felt Toby wouldn’t be taking into account was that it was, in fact, very, very annoying to be kidnapped, especially by people who were, unquestionably, very, very stupid.
He also found that being annoyed was preferable to being scared. Being scared was, in any case, a waste of time. He wasn’t going to make any impression on anyone through being scared, whereas if he at least voiced his opinion then perhaps there was a chance he might get through to them. Okay, it wasn’t exactly, a good chance, more like the odds of him winning the lottery without buying a ticket first. These people, had, after all, presumably been exposed to the ideas of Doctor King at some point in their lives, might even have heard – if not necessarily be able to spell – the name ‘Gandhi’, and they were still laboring under the comfortable delusion that they were in some way superior to half the population of the globe just by virtue of the color of their zit-covered skin.
And – he would also have pointed out to Toby, and, okay, it wouldn’t just be Toby, there would also be some yelling coming from Josh and CJ – that he had indeed had every intention of not antagonizing these people. And he had swallowed several – in fact dozens – of rejoinders to some of their most cretinous comments in between the few that had slipped out. He was not, in fact, as Toby would no doubt be suggesting by this point, trying to get his head blown off. But, honestly, what was a man supposed to do when an unwashed teenager asserted that the Bible had been written in English and that proved that Americans were the only true Christians?
That conversation had taken place upstairs in the cluttered living room where the walls were disfigured by posters celebrating White Pride and its various xenophobic offshoots and the one bookshelf was entirely filled with various books ranting against miscegenation, and a lone Tom Clancy thriller. Sam had wondered in passing what Tom Clancy had done to deserve their presumed approval, and had spent a moment being grateful he had never written any thrillers that morons could buy and put on their slightly crooked shelves; implicating him with their views by association. Sam had been full of good intentions about being conciliatory and non-committal and not actually telling them they were driveling idiots, but that comment about the Bible from a zit-faced youth slouched in a leaking couch with a bottle of beer in his mouth had unleashed a floodgate he could not have stopped unless physically gagged.
“For a start the earliest books of the Bible were actually written in ancient Hebrew by Jewish scribes, except for the Apocrypha, which were written in Greek, as was the New Testament. The New Testament wasn’t translated into Latin until the fourth century AD. By 500 AD it had been translated into over five hundred languages, but a century later it was restricted by the Catholic Church of Rome to Latin so that the power of the Bible remained with the church and could not be accessed by those who did not read or speak Latin. It was not translated into Anglo-Saxon until AD 950 and if we’re talking about printed copies, the Gutenberg Bible – incidentally the first book to ever be printed – was not produced until AD 1455, oh yes, and it was in Latin, too. So, shall we go over together in just how many ways your assertions are a) factually inaccurate and b) incredibly stupid?”
At which point, the people punching him had somewhat disrupted the flow of his history of the Bible, as had being dragged back to this freezing cellar and dumped in the coldest corner with a chain around his ankle. And, okay, he conceded that it was probably not a good idea to call even very stupid people ‘incredibly stupid’ to their faces when they had the power of life and death over you….
Mentally, he imagined Toby gazing at the ceiling at that point. “Oh you admit that, do you? You concede the possibility that insulting the intellect of people with semi-automatic weapons when you have your hands tied and no possible means of escape might not be the best idea you’ve ever had?”
And yes, he did admit that. He did concede that some of his responses to some of their comments, orders, and assertions, had not perhaps been guided by as strong a sense of self-preservation as others might have wished.
“And did it perhaps occur to you to…say just shut the fuck up?”
He could imagine being a little scared at that point, looking around for some support from Josh and CJ, some reassurance that if Toby really did look as if he was going to throw him through a plate glass window that they would intervene, and probably not getting that reassurance from their glowering faces; probably more of a silent promise that they would be helping Toby to hurl him the furthest possible distance.
He would, however, expect some support from the President, who would, he was certain, be pleased to know that he had remembered the lecture the man had given him on the history of the Bible, even if he hadn’t managed to work in the history of the Apocrypha and how it had been considered part of the Bible proper until as late as the nineteenth century. He could imagine the President asking him if he had managed to reference any of those interesting facts President Bartlet had shared with him about the Scottish island of Iona. Although, the President had been known to look a little grim in the past, and was probably not feeling too happy with any member of his administration – or even a past member of his administration – who got himself kidnapped after what had happened to Zoey. That was likely to be something of a hot button for this President. And Charlie never liked the President being bothered. Mrs. Bartlet, of course, would be very angry about anything that was likely to cause so much stress to the President, especially if she felt it was avoidable. He wasn’t too sure about Leo. There was a chance the man might intercede to prevent the hurling through a plate glass window party, or a possibility that he might lend a hand. He liked to think that Donna, Carol, and Margaret would intervene to prevent any real bloodshed, but he could not be entirely sure. If the people they worked for had been particularly stressed and difficult due to Sam getting himself kidnapped, they might actually be even tetchier than Toby.
There had always been a tendency on the part of Toby, Josh, and CJ to treat him like their naïve younger brother; the person who had to be protected and patronized and patted on the head. On more than one occasion he had been forced to remind them quite sharply that he was actually as much of an adult as they were, and entitled to be heard, even if he did occasionally fall off sailing boats or display a ‘credulous simplicity’ that imperiled himself or the administration. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t made their own mistakes. Okay, so he’d accidentally slept with a call girl and then got himself photographed hugging her, not to mention handed a damaging videotape to the opposition that had then run on every news channel in the world, but at least he’d never saddled the President with a secret plan to fight inflation, or told the world’s press that the President was relieved he might have to put American lives at risk and kill Haitian civilians, or assumed that just because he had once had sex with a woman she wouldn’t screw him later.
It occurred to him that the only person he could absolutely rely upon to not advocate throwing him through a window would be Mrs Landingham, who was, unfortunately, dead. But she would not only have put her foot down over the window business, she would have given him a cookie. Which he would have liked because he was actually very hungry.
Sam looked around at his surroundings again. If he were MacGyver he could presumably run up some kind of oxy-acetylene torch to burn through his chain with the soggy debris in the cellar, but being only an ex-Deputy Communications Officer and candidate for Congress, he had no idea how one would do that with a broken crate and some rotten sacks.
He had tried to listen to what was going on upstairs, and, owing to the extremely shoddy construction of the farmhouse, he had heard enough to make him believe that his kidnappers were a few fathoms out of their depth. A call to what he presumed to be their chapter leaders had sounded unsatisfactory; evidently they had not received the praise they had hoped for. As they had sobered up after the night of their triumphant kidnap of Sam, and the morning light had begun to filter through the small window set so high up in the cellar that he could not have reached it even if his ankle hadn’t been chained to what seemed to be the half-submerged skeleton of a plow, they had looked at him in the manner that married men presumably looked at women the morning after; the ones who looked a great deal less appetizing without the haze of alcohol to encourage their infidelity. He suspected that if there had been a way to give him the white supremacist kidnappers’ equivalent of cab fare home without looking stupid then they would have gone for it. But they were more interested in trying to save face than anything else and they were still rather impressed with themselves for successfully managing a kidnap. He could hear them up there at night, drinking themselves even stupider, while buoying one another up by insisting that they had really done it now, that kidnapping Sam had been some significant rite of passage that now made them more admirable men than they had been the day before.
One of the things Sam would have liked to say to the imaginary Toby who kept heckling his strategizing was that he had not actually pointed out to his kidnappers that frankly kidnapping someone was no great accomplishment when it was unplanned, spur of the moment, disorganized, and only worked because they had got lucky. That was just one of the many things he had not said, even when grossly provoked.
Stung by presumably being told that they didn’t have clearance or the blessing of the chapter leader, or whoever it was they were calling, they had tried to retroactively convince themselves – and Sam – that they did actually have a plan of some kind. Unfortunately, beating him up to make themselves feel slightly less stupid, had always been part of that agenda, although they had delayed for a few hours while they thought up a reason for beating him up other than that they were now wishing they hadn’t kidnapped him after all. They had come up with the idea of the speech they wanted him to read into a videotape after a few hours of heavy drinking, which, as he mentioned to them, completely ruined his image of them as the well-trained soldiers of the apocalypse he had, of course, believed them to be. That had got him smacked around more than somewhat, and his refusal to spout several paragraphs of racist crap, which, as well as being ideologically unsound and xenophobic in the extreme was also totally ungrammatical, had earned him the beating they had been going to dole out sooner or later whatever he said or did.
They had dumped him back in the cellar, once more with the chain around his ankle, the rust on its links almost a perfect color match with the blood on his shirt from his split lip, cracked his head against the wall for punctuation, kicked him in the ribs and guts until he doubled up, too breathless to continue the conversation, and then left him there, the filthy water swirling around his knees. They had seemed to have some vague idea about interrogation techniques and had left the light on, which would probably have been effective in aiding his sleep deprivation if he had not already been so cold, wet and aching that sleeping wasn’t a possibility, and if the bulb had not blown on the second night anyway.
He had heard them debating what to do with him a few times and they had made a few more attempts to get him to record the message into the videotape. That was when they tended to spout the most of their hate-filled crap at him and when he had proven so unequal to biting his tongue. As far as he could tell although they would have liked the triumph of getting an unpatriotic, Arab-loving, wishy-washy liberal do-gooder like himself to record their message, it was as much an excuse to have a point of conflict so they could smack him around. And – as he was certainly going to point out to Toby – as they were going to hit him anyway, he might as well get some of his opinion voiced at the same time.
He had definitely got the impression that their group was very much bush-league in the greater scheme of white supremacist nutbars. Sam was supposed to be their entrée to the majors and they were still trying to find a way to prove that kidnapping him had actually been a daring and brilliant strategy rather than the half-witted drunken impulse it had been dismissed as. Damn, he was so tired he was ending sentences in his head with a preposition.
It was difficult not to think about how much he wanted to hear Toby complaining about that or the scarcity of verbs in Sam’s imagery or to start critiquing his punctuation. But that wouldn’t achieve anything. He had to think up ways to get free. He had tried kicking at the links of the chain and twisting it around the plow to try and break it, but either it was a lot harder than it looked in the movies or he wasn’t doing it right, because the chain remained resolutely unbroken and all he’d done was open up spectacular ridged welts across his palms.
There were rapidly getting to be almost no parts of his body left that didn’t hurt. He had been punched pretty much everywhere which made moving difficult and painful, and he really didn’t like the way his lungs were starting to sound. It was spring out there, sap rising, birds singing – through that broken window he could even hear the birds singing – and yet in here it was damp walls and a flooded basement and the only drinkable water from a broken gutter that he could see through a hole in the stonework and which leaked onto the walls and then dripped down them. That water tasted of moss and leaves but it was a lot less likely to kill him than the brown stuff swirling around his ankles. The griping hunger pain in his guts was indistinguishable from the bruised pain of being punched in the midriff for giving his captors too much ‘backchat’, and everything was starting to pale into insignificance when compared with the pain in his chest and back from what he feared were his infected lungs.
He was starting to believe that they weren’t going to shoot him, after all. They were going to just shut the cellar door on him and leave him down here to starve to death. That way there would be no bullet to trace back to a gun registered to them. He had heard them talking about setting the place on fire and then debating whether that would just draw attention to his corpse being found, better to just leave him there to conveniently die off with it not being anything to do with them. Except for them having kidnapped him and left him chained up, of course, but they seemed to feel that just failing to keep him alive would make them less likely to get the death penalty than putting a bullet in his head.
His kidnappers were apparently unhappy that they had been considered too small beer to be involved in the planning of the church bombing and wanted to prove themselves to their chapter leaders. Instead of being their fast track to promotion to the inner circle, he was proving something of a liability. Too much publicity, too many people looking for him, and no way to take him further out of the area with the roadblocks and searches still going on. Only if he was persuaded to make the tape did there appear to be any kind of design behind their snatching him, which was why, three times a day, two or three of them stormed down here, climbed down the ladder and manhandled him up to the house to shove him in front of the tripod once again and hand him that speech he absolutely refused to read.
He liked to think of himself as an optimist, he really did, but it seemed to Sam that as the days and nights went by and he got colder and hungrier and less and less able to inhale without feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the back, and the people who had kidnapped him became drunker and nastier and more and more embarrassed by how stupid they’d been, that his chances of being rescued were receding faster than Toby Ziegler’s hair.
***
Two days earlier
Tracy had spent the car ride with something over her head that meant the journey was reduced to the smell of her abductors’ sweat, the stink of gasoline from a sputtering exhaust, the texture of coarse cloth against her face, and the sound of hate and bird song. She tried to drown out everything except the possible strategies in her head while being so frightened it was taking a tremendous act of will to stop her teeth from chattering. But she had talked about this with her girlfriends. Mary Paton’s second cousin, Marie, had been grabbed by some drunks one night and had managed to talk them down from doing what they had definitely been planning to do to her by talking about her family and trying to engage with them and elicit their sympathy. Tracy had always thought she would be quite good at that too. She usually got on with people. She could talk to people a lot older than her and hold a conversation without it seeming as if she was bored even if she really was. She had to deal with a lot of anxious parents when she was baby-sitting, not to mention managing difficult little kids who didn’t want to go to bed when they were told to. But she hadn’t ever thought of being grabbed by people who hated her just because of the color of her skin. Every conversational opening she thought of seemed to be mined with problems. You were supposed to make them see that you were a person just like they were, but these people didn’t see her as someone like them, just someone like her. She couldn’t see any way to start a conversation which didn’t lead to them calling her a ‘dirty bitch’ or a ‘whore’ as they had already done, which was going to upset her – which would make her seem weak – or make her angry – which would lead to conflict. Keeping quiet seemed the best idea, so that was what she did, all the way along good roads and then somewhere rutted and open, with birds singing and the distant drone of someone working a tractor. She was afraid of the car stopping because she knew when it did much worse things were going to happen to her than her sitting in the back of a car trying not to gag on the stink of gasoline and hate.
They’d put the bag over her head before she’d gotten more than a glimpse of them, but she had seen that there were three or four of them and they were driving an old car which was brown and which her brother would have been able to identify but which she really couldn’t.
When the car stopped, she snatched a breath, worrying that her heart-rate was going up and up. Panic attacks made you feel as if you were suffocating, she knew that from looking through her mother’s medical book when she was trying to identify what was wrong with Abigail Chesney without her having to see the family doctor, who was an old family friend of her father’s, and who Abigail didn’t trust not to tell her father if she admitted she’d been letting Ronny Mather get to third base. You were supposed to breathe into a paper bag, which she didn’t have access to. Or think calm thoughts, perhaps. She couldn’t find too many calm thoughts right now and it was taking all the self-control she had not to make pathetic little whimpering noises of fear that would make it clear that not only was she a victim but she knew she was. They had taken her purse with her hundred and sixty five dollars in it, and she was trying to tell herself this was a mugging, nothing more than a mugging.
They marched her along what felt like an unpaved track and then into a house, fingers pinching spitefully at her arm. She could hear a radio playing that they’d left on, then a door was opened and they pulled the bag from off her head. She had expected to be dazzled by light, but it was still dark. There was the sound of metal grating as one of them kicked down some steps, which unraveled like an arthritic snake, and pointed a gun at her. The steps were the kind used to get into the loft, only old and rusty and not the new aluminum ones that they had in their house, but these went down into a place that looked like a cellar. They gave her a shove and she just grabbed at the steps before she fell, making her way down with difficulty as she realized that both her hands and her legs were shaking. The steps creaked and groaned the whole time, even though she knew she wasn’t heavy, and shuddered like they were weeping the nearer she got to the last rung. She could feel damp air all around her, and was half dazzled by the sunlight streaming down from a window in the west wall of the building. The floor shimmered at her, but it was only as she jumped down awkwardly from the last step that she realized she was ankle-deep in water. The steps were hauled up behind her, a painful grate of metal sounding as the mechanism hitched.
It was only then that her eyes adjusted to the shadows in front of her, the other side of that shaft of light, and she realized that there was someone else in the cellar with her. The fear spiked to panic levels and she looked around for an exit, wondering if they had put her down here with a madman.
“Hello…?” His voice sounded hoarse and he didn’t seem to be able to see her.
She snatched a breath. “Hello?” She stepped forward again, nervously, and this time her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see details. Her first impression was one of huge relief, because this wasn’t some weird guy who lived out of a shopping cart or kept skinned possums hung up over his window or ate people whose cars broke down near his house; this seemed to be a schoolboy. He even seemed to be wearing school uniform. She tried to remember what the uniform was like at that private school nearby. If he was a senior from some fee-paying school then he might be a jerk but he presumably wasn’t dangerous. In fact she was pretty sure she could take a private school boy no trouble at all and have him face down in the dirty water within the minute with her foot on the back of his head. She took another step and got him properly in focus and realized that he wasn’t a senior, after all, he was at least a college student, and he was having trouble seeing her because not only was the shaft of sunlight between them, dazzling him, but he only had one eye he could see out of right now. The other one, and most of the left side of his face, was just a big bruise. There were cuts that had bled, making him look pretty ugly, but on a better day he would probably have been handsome. He looked a little familiar and she wondered if she had seen him around town, one of those preppy students, not the art students who liked to play the guitar and protest a lot, but the ones who wore suits even though they didn’t need to yet, and who wouldn’t smoke dope in case it ruined their chances of getting into law school, and who were all young Republicans. Another pace and she saw there was blood down his shirt too; probably on his jacket as well but it didn’t show on the dark material the way the red spatters had stained his white shirt. He had dark hair that was sticky and untidy and he looked as he if he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His hands had been bound together in front of him, and there was a metal cuff around his right ankle attached to a chain that was presumably padlocked around the piece of rusting metal he was sitting on. He looked as if someone had been punching him for fun and the shadows under his eyes were so dark he looked like a drug addict.
Wincing, she went toward him. “I’m Tracy McAllister. Are you hurt?”
He tried to hold out his hand but was frustrated by the way his wrists were tied together. Giving her an apologetic smile, he said, “Sam Seaborn. I take it you didn’t come here voluntarily?”
His voice was also reassuring. He sounded sane; quietly spoken, Californian accent. And his name was ringing a bell in her mind. Like cold water being emptied over her it was coming back to her where she had seen his face before, and it hasn’t been in a café or waiting at a bus stop. And now she’d seen him and heard his name and no way in a million years were those guys upstairs ever going to let her go.
“You’re the guy who’s on the TV…” She crouched down next to him, trying to assess the damage and what she should do about it. “I figured you were probably dead. Or – you know – doing it as a publicity stunt to get elected.”
“No, oddly enough, I hardly ever get myself kidnapped by white supremacists to further my political career. Did they hurt you?” His gaze was searching, concerned, intelligent. And now she had him fully in focus and he was a man after all; ten years older than she’d first thought, and looking at her not like a college student but like a guy who was used to being in charge of his own destiny. For a moment she’d thought she was going to have to be the grown-up here, and although it wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to it, with Eli, she couldn’t help the rush of relief at the realization that perhaps she wasn’t going to have to be the one to solve everything this time. That there might be an adult here to help her instead of some squeaky-clean private schoolboy who would probably just sit there and cry anyway.
“Miss McAllister – ”
“You can call me ‘Tracy’, Mister Seaborn.” She didn’t add that it would be kind of comforting to have someone saying her real name after the names those guys had called her in the car. Telling herself that they didn’t even know her, and anyway were just thugs and nobodies, didn’t help as much as it should to stop her feeling shaken up by the level of hate and contempt in their voices.
“Okay, Tracy, and please call me ‘Sam’. It will make a nice change from ‘hey, you’ or ‘shut your mouth’. Did they hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No.” She had a handkerchief in her sleeve. It was old-fashioned and stupid, and there was nothing at all wrong with tissues, but her mother always said you should be prepared and a good-sized handkerchief could bind up a wound and no one had ever done that with a paper tissue. She took it out and went to spit on it, as she would have done if it had been Eli’s wounds she was trying to clean up after a fight. Seeing her hesitation, Sam Seaborn smiled, which made his lip break open and start bleeding, but was still a nice gesture. “There’s clean water there.” He nodded at the glistening trickle running down the wall. It had turned the wall green and mossy and looked a little slimy to her, but she dipped her handkerchief in it and then dabbed tentatively at the cut on his cheekbone and by his eye.
“I know what I did to get them pi- angry, what did you do?” she asked.
“I didn’t agree with them. Apparently the Orange County Chapter of Redneck Morons Anonymous doesn’t take informed debate well.”
“My mom says it’s rude to call someone a redneck even if they are one.” Tracy didn’t in any way agree with that point of view, but she thought it was worth running by this particular grown-up.
She liked his petulant little scowl; it reminded her of Eli. “Well, I moved past caring about hurting their feelings one second after they shoved a gun in my face.” He gave her a searching look. “And you know that you’re not in any way responsible for their anger, don’t you? Getting born doesn’t constitute a crime in any civilized society. And last time I checked we were still living in one.”
“On the television they said you were ‘mild-mannered’,” she observed. “They used words like ‘communicator’ and ‘conciliator’.” Not feeling it necessary to add but you just seem incredibly pissed.
Sam Seaborn looked disgusted. “‘Mild-mannered’? Doesn’t that make me sound like a chartered accountant?”
“Or Clark Kent.” She tried to smile but she was feeling too sick and scared. “You just need the glasses.”
“Great, first I’m Batman’s sidekick, whatever his name was, and now I’m the boring side of Superman.”
“Dick Grayson,” she supplied. “And you don’t want to be the Boy Wonder?” She had eased most of the dried blood from the cut on his cheekbone, and although the cut looked deep she didn’t think the bone was broken. If she had been her mother, she would have known for sure. All she could be sure of was that it looked really painful.
“I have glasses,” he offered. “For being Clark Kent. I’m not comfortable being someone called ‘Dick.’ Or wearing my underpants outside of my tights, but that’s a conversation for another time when we know each better. Or perhaps for never at all.” He nodded his head at his breast pocket and she reached into it to extricate them. As she lifted up the frames, the last of the glass fell back into his pocket, tinkling as it did so.
She grimaced in sympathy but tried to keep her voice light too, just the way he was doing. “You don’t think ‘Clark’ makes you sound like a chartered accountant?”
“It’s still better than ‘Dick’.” He blinked at her, as if he was getting her into focus for the first time. “Do girls even read comics, because I always got the impression that they didn’t?”
“Got the impression from whom?” She was proud of that ‘whom’. They had studied its proper usage only the week before and she was almost sure she had just used it correctly in context for the first time. As she was also in a high stress situation she really thought she ought to get an extra credit for that.
“Girls – and the way they sneer sometimes. Quite often really. You don’t happen to have a knife or something of that kind, do you?”
She carefully reached into his pocket and extracted one of the pieces of glass, wrapping it in the handkerchief. “Are we going to kill them?”
He looked shocked. “I meant a knife for cutting my wrists free so I can help you to get out of here.”
She began sawing at the ropes with the edge of the glass. “Or we could use this.”
“Oh.” He looked at what she was doing and blinked. “I should probably have thought of that.”
All brains and no sense, Tracy thought to herself, but didn’t say it aloud, because it was something her grandmother said, which would make her sound very old-fashioned, and also she thought it was probably quite difficult to think straight when you were chained down here in the dark with people upstairs with guns who might be about to shoot you any second. She decided to make conversation instead to keep his mind on less depressing things. The fact it would keep her mind on less depressing things as well, didn’t hurt either.
“If this was a movie we’d probably have to kill them. But if this was a movie you’d be Brad Pitt and I’d be Hallé Berry and you’d be an ex-secret service agent who knew how to make gunpowder out of bubblegum.”
“They didn’t actually cover the gunpowder and bubblegum thing at Law School. It was more about how to limit someone’s liability. Some tort. Quite a lot about learning how to sue people.”
“Pity.” She looked up from the fraying rope to meet the eye he could still see out of. He had nice eyes – going by that one – blue, long dark eyelashes, not unlike Richard Wiley, who still hadn’t asked her to the Junior Prom. But they weren’t going to look anything like as good on a corpse. He was already looking a lot less pretty than he had on the TV news reports. “Why aren’t we getting you out of here as well?”
“Because I’m chained to a plow and you’re not.” He began to cough and didn’t stop for a worryingly long period of time. She didn’t like anything about the sound of that cough; it was wet and dry at the same time. She had waited for her mother in the hospital sometimes and whenever a patient coughed like that someone would say ‘pneumonia’.
“I think you have pneumonia,” she offered.
“Yeah.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “Tracy, how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Okay, so I’m assuming you know why we have to get you out of here very quickly?”
She tried to stop that shudder coming, but the thoughts of hard hands and tearing clothes and their stink all over were too quick for her to duck.
“It’s okay.” He closed his fingers around hers. “Of course, if you had a cell-phone that would make it easier, but we can….”
Her eyes widened in realization that she had been incredibly stupid and she dropped the piece of glass to delve into her brassiere, only remembering to be embarrassed a moment later, when she hastily turned away. She snatched the phone out and gazed at it then whimpered in frustration. “No signal.” She put it under his nose, trying not to weep with the sharpness of her disappointment. “No signal.”
She saw the hope fade in his eyes, saw him snatch a breath that really seemed to hurt him. She wondered if his ribs were broken; just how badly injured he was under those grimy clothes. She noticed he had a shoe missing and wondered how long exactly he had been left sitting in this sludge.
“Hide it again. We’ll get you of here.”
She liked the way he said ‘we’, not ‘I’. She wondered if he had an elder sister who hit him when he said something unconsciously sexist, the way she did with Eli. If so she was going to keep right on doing it because it obviously worked. She felt around in the water for the piece of broken glass, pulling a face as she felt something disgustingly slimy touch her fingers, then hissing as she cut her fingers. She couldn’t even put them in her mouth after touching that water and had to wipe them on her dress.
“Use another piece.” He nodded at his jacket pocket, and she plucked a piece out gingerly.
“I thought you were from some private school,” she admitted as she sawed at the rest of the bonds. They had been bound so tightly his fingers were red and swollen, like the hands of an old man. “Just when I first saw you. Not once I got you in focus…”
He still looked mildly affronted although he was clearly trying not to take offence. “It’s actually twenty years since I was last in high school.”
She was amused by that but thought it had to be a good sign that he could still make jokes. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. I’m actually…” He sighed in resignation and then hissed in real pain as she sliced through the rope and his hands jerked apart. As the pressure on his wrists was suddenly alleviated, he gasped as the feeling came back into them.
She felt a little sick, looking at his wrists. They were apart now but the rope hadn’t fallen away, it was still biting into the skin of his wrists. They weren’t just bruised, the rope had actually cut into him and even though she wasn’t squeamish and his face looked just as bad, somehow it was the thought of the edge of that rope just cutting in deeper and deeper and him hurting himself more every time he moved, that made her feel as if she really might have to pass out.
“Tracy…” His voice was kind but urgent. “It’s okay.”
She looked at his face and his wrists and heard them calling her those names again, even though they didn’t know anything about her. “No, it isn’t.”
He snatched a breath. “No, it really isn’t. But, we need to move quickly. By nightfall they’re always drunk and that makes them…mean.”
“Because they’re such sweethearts during daylight?” She was getting angrier the longer she sat here. She would have expected to feel more scared, and maybe this was what Mr. Jefferson called ‘displacement activity’, when you did one thing because you really wanted to be doing something else, like boys adjusting their clothing all the time because they were really thinking about how the cheerleaders looked doing the splits. But she kept remembering their hands on her and hearing what they’d called her, and seeing the blood on his face and his shirt and now oozing from his wrists, and she was getting so mad she wanted to break something.
“Please, Tracy.” He looked sad now, as if he’d have liked to foster that anger of hers, let her keep her warm with it, but the reality was that she was a sixteen year old girl and in an hour or so she was going to be a raped sixteen year old girl, unless she escaped. “They’ll use you to make me agree to do what they say. That’s why you’re here.” He nodded at the window. It was so high up on the wall, but it didn’t seem to be locked. She supposed they had thought it didn’t matter. They could drag that plow a few feet so he could stand underneath that tantalizing shower of light but he couldn’t climb up with a piece of farm machinery holding him back.
She swallowed hard. “How do I know they won’t…do things to you when they find I’m gone.” She found she was shaking again and didn’t know if it was at the thought of never getting out of here, or escaping and leaving him behind.
He used his teeth to ease the rope out of his wrists, shaking the bonds off once they were loose as if he couldn’t even bear to touch them, he hated them so much, and then took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders, giving her a smile that was painfully sweet and unexpectedly boyish. “I’m not their type.”
She was absolutely sure that she wasn’t taking that jacket away from him when he was the one who was going to be left here in the damp and the cold. “No way.”
But he shook his head. “Your dress is too light. It’s getting dark out there, but if they shine a flashlight you’re going to show up. And there really isn’t time to argue right now.”
Reluctantly she pushed her arms into the jacket and wrapped it around her; it was too big and smelt of sweat but it was deliciously warm. She didn’t even want to think about how cold he was going to be down here without it.
They dragged the plow together. The metal felt slippery and cold and it hurt her fingers, but they managed to drag it without making too much noise, just sending a wake of more filthy wet water to wash over their shins. When they had it under the window, he climbed up onto it, putting one hand on the wall and then nodded to her.
She climbed up, grabbing his arm to steady herself. “You don’t need to be their type,” she pointed out brutally, never feeling less like a teenage girl than she did right now, and at the same time never being more painfully aware that was what she was. “Not for them to kill you if they come down here and find me gone.”
“That’s why I need you to get away so you can call 911 and send someone here to save me.” He laced his fingers into a cat’s cradle and nodded up at that window so high above them. She was going to have to stand on his shoulders to have any hope of reaching it. He gazed right back at her, intent and bruised and that one blue eye looking right into hers as if she was the only person on the planet except for him right now. “I need you to be the Seventh Cavalry, Tracy. You really are my only hope of getting out of here alive.”
There was never really any question after those words that she’d be doing what he asked.
***
One day earlier
President Bartlet was striding down the hospital corridor at a speed that would have put a man to shame who stood a foot taller than him; the secret service agents were having to really hurry to keep pace with him. Leo thought it was just as well that these people ran beside cars for a living. He also thought that it was painfully ironic that they had ended up in California this week, after all; just not to give Sam support in the election. The election had become utterly irrelevant.
“What do we have, Leo?” Jed demanded. “Other than a sixteen year old girl with a bullet wound in her shoulder who is very lucky to be recovering in the St Joseph Hospital.”
“The girl’s conscious. Mike Casper is with her now, trying to get her to tell him everything she remembers.” Leo put a hand on his arm. “Sir, I really think she has enough to cope with right now without us barreling in there….”
Jed Bartlet looked hurt and then sighed and slowed his pace. “Okay. You’re right. Yeah. Was she…? The girl, was she…?”
It took Leo a moment to work out what he was asking; thinking how raw this was for the President, not just as the father of a daughter only a few years older than this girl, but the father of a daughter who had been kidnapped. “No, sir. She escaped before any of them….”
The relief washed over the President’s face. “Thank God. And she was wearing Sam’s jacket when they found her?”
“Yes, sir. She said…”
The doors were thrust open with violence and Josh ran towards them, hair disordered, jacket flapping, shirt wrongly buttoned, tie apparently lost somewhere on route. He had been more or less dressed when he had got onto the plane but he had slept the way people slept when they were too stressed to stay conscious, and had evidently woken up looking like this. “Is it true? This girl really saw Sam?”
“The FBI are just interviewing her now.” Leo rested a hand on Josh’s chest as the man seemed likely to charge straight past them. “We’re trying not to crowd her.”
Josh snatched a breath. “But she saw him? She saw Sam?”
Leo nodded. “That’s what they’ve got so far. She’s trying to identify where she was held, but she was blindfolded for the journey so she’s having to try to remember sounds and smells. And that’s only a few hours round from surgery.”
“Did she say how he looked?”
Leo looked past Josh to the approaching thunder that was Toby, CJ, and Donna, all charging towards them like disparate zoo animals unwisely released into the wild. CJ looked as if she had been sleeping in her clothes. Toby looked even grimmer than he had when there was no news.
President Bartlet answered for Leo: “He was alive, Josh. That’s a lot better news than we thought we’d be getting.”
Josh turned away, clenching his fists. “They’ll know she’s gone for help. They’ll kill him.”
“Not necessarily.” President Bartlet reached for a cigarette, noticed the ‘no smoking’ sign and put it back into the packet with a sigh. “When they shot at her it was dark. They could still be looking for her body.”
“He was alive?” CJ pressed just as Donna asked:
“How is the girl?”
Leo suspected he was going to be doing a lot of repeating himself until Mike Casper came out of that room. “Sam was alive and conscious when she left him. They were able to converse and strategize. The girl was shot in the left shoulder as she was escaping. It was dark and it’s not clear if the people holding Sam knew that they hadn’t killed her. She managed to keep moving, despite a broken clavicle and a lot of bleeding, and got herself through several fields and out onto a road, where she found a flatbed truck with its lights on as the driver – obeyed a call of nature. She got herself onto the truck – which was carrying various sacks of produce – and hid herself amongst the produce. Then she attempted to call 911. Unfortunately she passed out – probably from the blood loss – before she finished dialing. By good luck the truck driver was headed for the Farmers Market on Huntington Beach. She woke up when the truck stopped, and, still not identifying herself to the driver, got down from the truck and tried to walk to the hospital. She called 911 as she was walking away from the truck and the ambulance found her collapsed at the side of the road. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet been able to find the truck driver to find out where he would have picked her up.”
“Why didn’t she identify herself to the driver?” Josh demanded.
Charlie answered before Leo had to: “I don’t suppose she was feeling too trusting of strange men right then.”
Josh ran a hand through his hair. “They’re going to kill Sam for sure.”
“He’s all they have to negotiate with,” President Bartlet pointed out. “She can describe the place. If they shoot Sam we’re going to hunt them down and they’ll know it. And they won’t have more than a few hours to get ahead of the hunt. If they keep him alive they may be able to negotiate their way out of a shoot-out.”
“Or they may be confused enough by their options to achieve paralysis,” Toby suggested.
CJ said: “Was the girl…?”
“No.” The President shook her head.
“Thank God,” Donna said with feeling.
“We’re so close,” Josh breathed. “And so damned far away.”
“We’re going to find him, Josh.” The President was quietly adamant. “And he’s going to be alive.”
“If we do, he doesn’t leave the White House,” Toby said quietly. “I buy that damned chain. I maybe let him out on special release to the senior counsels’ office, but mostly he’s just in his office on a chain. We feed him bagels and coffee. Let him have a couch in there.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Charlie put in.
“Who cares?” Toby countered. “What matters is that he’d be spending twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, in a place with the best security in the world.”
Donna sat down on an uncomfortable-looking chair, clutching her coat to her. “He must be cold without his jacket.”
CJ sat down next to her and took her hand. “That girl in there managed to run further with a bullet hole in her shoulder than I could manage on a treadmill. I don’t believe we’d get cut a break like that unless it was for a reason.”
Josh said bleakly: “Maybe there was only one miracle on offer and the girl got it.”
Donna was the only one who met his eye. “She’s sixteen, Josh. If that’s true, it’s the way Sam would want it.”
“I know.” He turned away to walk back to the window, gripping the sill. “I know that.”
“You’re the one who said they had a plan,” Toby pointed out. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they…”
Josh spun around. “These people are idiots, Toby! They grab a girl off the street in broad daylight? Then put her in a room where she can climb out? And they do it in a state which has a Felony Murder Rule which states that any killing that occurs in the commission of an inherently dangerous felony – such as kidnapping – is treated as first degree murder. That’s twenty-five years to life. Or how about Penal Code 190.2 and its definition of a capital crime? ‘Murder by destructive device such as a bomb. Murder was committed for religious or racist motives.’ That’s the State’s in to ask for the death penalty. These people don’t care about dying. They’re looking to be martyrs. Or else they’re incredibly stupid. Either way, Sam would be safer in a war zone than he is in their custody right now.”
Leo cleared his throat. “The FBI believe that the people who snatched Sam are not the same ones who planted the bomb in the church. They think they’re a splinter group, possibly looking to impress.” He had been afraid at some point that the truth was finally going to make itself known to Josh and this seemed to be the moment when he had caught up with the rest of them in realizing that these people were unpredictably disorganized thugs with guns. He looked at his watch. “Mister President. You have a meeting at…”
As everyone looked at him with shocked and reproachful eyes, Leo gazed back at them levelly. “People might start to wonder who’s running the country right now as we’re all here. Not to mention the fact that there is nothing stopping Margaret from staging a coup d’etat the moment my back is turned. Apparently she has the President’s signature down pat.”
“We only practice it for fun,” Donna pointed out. As everyone looked at her, she grimaced. “A lot of our work is boring and repetitive. Sometimes we have to make our own entertainment.”
“Mike Casper’s already told us that they work better without interference.”
“We’ve come all this way,” the President pointed out. “I really want to see this girl.”
Leo gave Charlie a look and as always Charlie picked up the hint, stepping into the breach at once. “That’s not a good idea right now, sir.”
“Why not? I’m right here. I’m ten feet away from the girl’s room.”
“Because the FBI need her to remember everything she possibly can if Sam has any chance of being saved, and meeting you to tends to make people forget their own name and what they had for breakfast, never mind something that happened to them while they had a bag over their head and a gun in their windpipe.”
There was a moment’s silence as the President mentally wrestled with what Charlie had said, trying to find a flaw in the logic that they all knew was flawless. Then he sighed and conceded. “Okay, but when this is over I want to see that girl. I don’t want her feeling…. She didn’t do anything wrong and she did a whole lot of things right and I want her to hear the President of the United States tell her that.”
Charlie nodded. “And I’m sure she’ll appreciate it, sir. But right now, you’re the last thing she needs.”
“Sam’s here,” Josh pointed out. “He’s probably an hour away from here. I’m not going back to Washington when he’s here.”
Leo sighed. “Josh, in case it’s slipped your notice, we’re the people who run country. We don’t get personal time. We’ve come here, we’ve heard what Mike Casper has to say. We’re updated, now we need to – ”
“I get why the President can’t see her, but I need to see her.” Josh swallowed. “Leo, please…”
Donna gave Leo the begging eyes and Toby’s expression made it clear that he really felt Josh was owed this concession as well.
Leo sighed. “I’ll ask.” As he headed for the room, he wondered if they were ever going to be able to pick up the ball with this administration. He had heard Toby yelling after the news had first broken about Sam’s liaison with a call girl, and how they didn’t need an opposition – they managed that for themselves. With Leo’s alcoholism, the President’s MS, Josh’s shooting, Zoey’s kidnap, the murder of Fitz and hospitalization of Donna, and now Sam’s kidnap; it did feel as if this was the Presidency of the dramatic event rather than the ongoing policy sometimes. He also wondered just how difficult it was going to be to get everyone away from here. Privately, he had no doubt that Josh was right, and by helping that girl Sam had signed his own death warrant, and that was precisely why he didn’t want them to all be in California when they brought his body out. The second they got a message he was alive, the whole damned White House could take some personal time for all he cared, but until then, he felt this was probably the last place on earth where the President or Josh Lyman needed to be.
President Bartlet joined Josh by the window as Leo headed for the private room where the girl was recovering. There were almost as many secret service agents outside her door as when the President had been shot. Bartlet looked straight out of the window.
“I once told Sam he was going to run for President some day. I still believe that.”
Josh looked at him in shock. “When?”
“I’m sorry?”
“When did you tell him he was going to run for President some day?”
“The day we got China to stand down on the war games.”
He had hoped the power of his conviction might give Josh some comfort, but the man withdrew, looking at him with barely-concealed accusation. “That was a year before the whole dead guy running for Congress thing.”
“Yes, it was.”
“So, you planted a seed…”
“Josh…”
“Because I don’t remember Sam ever talking about running for office…”
“Just because he didn’t talk about it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t…”
Josh turned away. “I have to go and… I need to get some air.”
Bartlet watched him walk down the corridor, that arrogant walk of his left slightly lopsided with shock, as if he was no longer steaming along on his own power, but tacking against an unfriendly wind.
“What happened?” Toby asked.
Bartlet sighed. “Apparently it’s my fault that Sam ran for political office and therefore my fault he was kidnapped.”
Toby inclined his head. “Well, sometimes that’s what fathers are for, sir.”
“What?”
“Taking the blame for the decisions their children make.”
Bartlet ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t think I want to be a surrogate parent any more. I think it’s time I put the whole lot of you up for adoption. Well, except for Charlie.”
“Thank you, sir,” Charlie observed.
“Like that was ever in doubt. Leo gets Josh, which means he’ll want Donna, too; you get Sam, I keep Charlie, and CJ, obviously. I’m keeping her, too.”
“Thank you, Mister President,” CJ said dutifully.
Toby shook his head. “I don’t want Sam. He’s accident-prone and I have a son who, judging by his inability to crawl in a straight line, is already shaping up to be as much of a klutz as Sam is. I’m prepared to do an older brotherly thing from time to time, but I refuse to accept surrogate parental responsibilities for someone who looks nothing like me.”
“You think Sam looks like me?”
“Yes, sir, actually I do.”
President Bartlet turned to Charlie. “You don’t think Sam looks like me, do you?”
“Now you come to mention it, I think he kind of does.”
“I have never fallen off a sailboat in my life.”
“Have you ever been on a sailboat, sir?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“If I ever was on a sailboat I would have the sense to hold onto a rope. I don’t think it can even be in question that the leader of the free world would – if on a sailboat – hold onto a rope. Is it in question?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, sir.”
“And if Sam had been my son, he wouldn’t have gone to Princeton. He would have gone to Notre Dame. And he would have been taller.”
“How do you figure that exactly, sir?”
“I just know that he would.”
Donna looked down the corridor where Josh had disappeared through double doors. “Maybe I should…”
CJ put a hand on her arm. “He just needs to work this through.”
“But I…”
“He needs to do this by himself.” CJ lowered her voice: “He’s just so angry with Sam right now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And Sam did the right thing. We all know it. Josh knows it. He had a moral obligation to get that girl out of that place, whatever the consequences.”
“And it probably got him killed,” Toby put in.
“I don’t accept that,” President Bartlet insisted. “I think Sam’s alive and I think we’re going to find him.”
“And I wish I could believe that too, Mister President,” CJ sighed, “but I don’t. I think right after they shot Tracy McAllister in the shoulder they probably went and shot Sam in the head. Then they cleared out so that when the FBI turned up all they would find is Sam’s corpse. And I think Sam had to know that it was a risk when he helped that girl to escape and he did it anyway.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to be angry with Sam,” Donna insisted. “He did the right thing.”
“No one’s disputing that he did the right thing,” Toby returned. “It doesn’t stop us being angry with him.”
Donna looked shocked. “You’re angry with him, too?”
“Of course I’m angry with him!” Toby walked to the window and back and when he spoke again his voice was lower. “He got himself kidnapped and now he’s probably got himself killed. And who cares if it’s unjust and unfair to blame Sam for living in a world where there are racist sociopaths? I don’t want my friend to be dead, and I think he probably is. I think he probably suffered and then he died for nothing, with no point made, or change achieved, just another victim of another pointless crime, and I am so angry with him right now that I kind of want to kill him myself.”
“So, it’s not just me?”
They turned to find Josh had rejoined them from the other end of the corridor. He looked as if he had splashed some water on his face; his shirt collar slightly damp although no less creased.
Toby sighed. “No, it’s not just you. We all feel the same.”
“I don’t,” Charlie put in. “I’ve seen the tape and Sam had no chance to avoid being kidnapped, and as someone with a sister the age of that girl in there – that girl who isn’t dead and didn’t get raped because Sam helped her to escape – the last thing I feel towards Sam right now is angry. You should be proud of him.”
“Charlie’s right,” Donna nodded. “I’m not angry with him either. I’m proud of him for standing up for his principles and being a hero.”
“I don’t want him to be a damned hero!” Josh said angrily. “I want him not to be dead.”
“Well, I think he can be both.”
The President nodded to Donna. “I do, too.”
“The second that girl went out the window that was it. They stopped having all the time they wanted, and they had a few hours before she alerted the authorities. There’s nothing for them to achieve now except to cut their losses and run, and that means killing the guy who can testify against them and heading straight for Mexico.”
“And what are you proposing that he should have done, Josh?” Donna demanded. “What else could he have done?”
“Not get kidnapped in the first place.” CJ looked up. “Right?”
As Josh and Toby nodded, Donna rolled her eyes. “That is so unreasonable.”
Josh sighed as he took a seat next to CJ. “I’m not saying he did anything wrong. I’m just saying that if by some miracle Sam is still alive and we get him back…if Toby buys the chain, I’ll get the padlock.”
Donna gave Bartlet a pleading look and the man held up a hand. “It’s all right, Donna. I promise that I won’t let Toby and Josh keep Sam a prisoner in the White House for longer than…three or four months. Six tops.” He broke off as the door of the hospital room opened and Leo came out followed by Mike Casper.
“What have you got for us, Mike?” President Bartlet asked at once.
“No description of the kidnappers but a good description of the place where Ms McAllister and Mr Seaborn were held. And we have a lead on the driver of the truck. My men are following that up now. Once we have him, we think we can locate the property very quickly. In the meantime, sir, it probably complicates things for you to be here.”
President Bartlet looked down his nose. “Did Leo get you to say that?”
Casper forced a weak smile, his face taut with anxiety. “No, sir. I really think it would be better for you to return to the White House. We will keep you informed throughout the day of any new information…”
Josh had to walk away because he got it; he supposed they all did. Mike Casper was expecting to find the place, certainly, but he was expecting to be taking Sam’s corpse out of it in a body bag and he didn’t want the rest of them around when it happened. Or maybe he thought the President would insist on coming with them to the place where Sam was being held. Maybe Casper was thinking that he wasn’t going to be able to keep a control on an already fraught situation if he was also having to manage a bunch of distraught White House staffers. Maybe he was right.
Josh walked back to find that there was still talking going on, but it wasn’t important, it was them agreeing to go home and wait like good little civilians while Casper and his people risked their necks looking for a guy they were all pretty certain was already dead. “Can I see her?”
Leo sighed and then nodded. “Her mother agreed, so did the girl, and the doctors have reluctantly given their consent. Just keep it quick and keep it… You know.”
He knew. She was a teenage girl who had been through an ordeal. She had shown exceptional courage and resilience. He knew. Blaming her for the fact that Sam was probably dead now simply wasn’t on the agenda.
“So, I can go in now…?”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
That was Donna, of course, worried that he wasn’t going to handle it properly.
“No.” He looked to Leo for permission and the man nodded again, expression concerned as he watched Josh heading for that door.
Behind him Casper and the President were still talking about search areas and the narrowing fields and the certainty of locating the place where Sam was being held very soon. Mike gave Josh a compassionate look that spoke volumes but his jaw had that tense set look of someone who was trying hard not to grind their teeth with anger. Josh remembered that Sam had been so convinced he was right when he went into see Mike about Daniel Galt, but that Mike had protected Sam as well as he could all the same. He’d called Nancy and asked her to let Sam know the truth and he’d never said ‘I told you so’ and the next time he’d seen Sam he’d been polite and friendly and Sam had bought him a drink and no further words about it had been discussed. Mike was invested in getting Sam back; very invested; and yet Josh noticed all the same that he said nothing at all about finding Sam alive.
It was different actually seeing her. She had been hazy in his mind. A girl who had made some wrong decisions while in a stress situation and ended up wasting time which might have saved Sam’s life. Seeing her was suddenly being confronted with the reality of not just what she hadn’t done, but what she had. Seeing a girl this young and slight with her left arm in a sling and all that bandaging around her shoulder and those tubes going into her, and those machines bleeping, seeing how sick and exhausted she looked, that was different.
Collecting himself, Josh said awkwardly, “Hi, I’m Josh Lyman. I’m the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.”
“Mr. McGarry said you were Sam’s best friend.” She looked up at him and he winced from how bloodshot her eyes were. She really did look like hell.
“Yes, I am.” Josh held out a hand to her mother, and they clasped fingers over the girl’s bed.
“Judith McAllister,” she said hoarsely. He noticed she had on a nurse’s uniform.
“You work here?”
“Yes, I was on duty when the call came through. I sent her brother to school. It was just making him angry, being here.”
Josh thought about getting that call, the one that told you that your teenage daughter had been kidnapped; remembered the President getting that exact call; how the world dissolved around you; how the President hadn’t trusted himself to run the country because he had known his mind wouldn’t be where it needed to be; his judgment fatally affected. He noticed the cross at Judith McAllister’s throat and the way she unconsciously reached up to touch it as if it gave her strength.
“I figured that if I did all I could to help someone else’s daughter or son or husband or wife or mother or father, perhaps someone else would help my little girl.” She looked back at Tracy. “And they did.”
“You want to know about Sam?” Tracy leaned forward and then winced as her shoulder obviously hurt her. Now he could see her in close-up, Josh thought the girl looked close to collapse; eyes over-bright, as if she had a fever. She had been out all night, losing blood, then an hour in surgery, and no real time to recover. He felt abruptly ashamed of his anger towards her.
“I should let you rest. You’ve been talking to the FBI all this time. It was selfish of me to…”
“No.” She had to reach across to grab his arm with her good hand. “I’d like you to stay. I want to be useful. I made so many mistakes.”
There was a chair by her bed and Josh sat down on it. “Yes, because we all study What To Do When Kidnapped in high school.”
“I should have told the driver. If I’d just told the driver, he could have called the police right then. I don’t know why I didn’t…” She broke off to wipe tears away, so angry with herself that the last of Josh’s anger dissolved. “It’ll be my fault if Sam dies.”
“No.” He gripped her hand, squeezing it gently. “It won’t. It will be the fault of the people who killed him. Tracy, you got away, even though you’d been shot, you stayed conscious and you kept moving. You did so much better than I would have done.”
“You don’t know that.” She wiped her eyes again.
“I do. Because when I was shot, you know what I did?”
“What?”
“I pretty much sat there and bled. I didn’t even yell for help. If Toby hadn’t found me, I’d still be sitting there. Except I’d be dead by now, obviously. I know what it feels like, the shock of it, all the pain, and the blood, and getting colder and colder while your mind’s still stuck on ‘What the heck just happened to me?’ Tracy, you did incredibly well. And if they get Sam out of that place alive, it will be because of you, and if they don’t, then it means the last thing Sam ever got to do was help save the life of someone else, which, believe me, he would like a lot more than just getting kidnapped and then getting shot.”
She still had tears running down her face. “I should have done better. I should – he should be safe by now. He gave me his jacket.”
He noticed that she had something lying on the bed next to her, his heart lurching as he realized what it was. It had been cut off her by the surgeons and the left arm of the jacket was missing, but the rest of it was there. He reached for it and then hesitated. “May I…?”
She nodded, crying again, wiping the tears away impatiently as if she had no time for them, yet couldn’t stop them welling up each time.
He picked it up and found his fingers clutching at it, unexpectedly as the odor hit him. It smelt of Sam. It smelt of Sam after a long, fruitless day bargaining with people who weren’t going to budge and knew they had the votes in Congress to thwart everything that was proposed. It smelt of sweat, and anger and frustration. He buried his face in it, inhaling, knowing he probably looked crazy right now, but taken aback by how much it meant to be touching something that had touched Sam when he was still alive. It really felt as if this was it; end of the road; and he knew the reason this cloth was still warm was because Tracy had been clutching it to her, not because of any residual warmth from Sam, but the illusion was comforting and heartbreaking at the same time. Everything started to spin and hiss and then Mrs. McAllister was putting her hands on his shoulders and saying:
“Breathe, Mr. Lyman. You need to breathe.”
He snatched a much-needed breath and managed hoarsely: “Please call me ‘Josh’.”
“I’m sorry,” Tracy repeated wretchedly.
Josh inhaled again, deep even breaths, the way he’d been taught when the anxiety climbed higher and higher and the music wailed its way into sirens coming towards him not quite fast enough. And behind that he heard other sirens, fire engines coming too late. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know all about both PTSD and survivor guilt. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”
“He said I was his only hope of rescue.”
Despite the guilt she was choking on right now, he was abruptly so envious of her it almost hurt. She had seen Sam only hours before. Been able to see for herself that he was alive and still breathing. He was probably never going to get that chance again. “Did he say anything else…?” For once, whatever Donna might have thought, he wasn’t hoping that Sam had mentioned him; he just wanted to know if the guy she had met had been his friend, after all, or if what those bastards had been doing to him for the previous five days had turned him into someone else.
“He said he was sorry he wasn’t Brad Pitt.” She took a deep breath. “I said if it was a film I’d be Hallé Berry and he’d be Brad Pitt and he’d know how to make a bomb or something. That was the last thing he said to me as he pushed me up through the window. He said sorry for not being Brad Pitt.”
“Anything else?” It was making her cry and yet he was so hungry for anything she could remember; anything that would tell him how Sam had been doing.
“He said they were redneck morons and I told him he shouldn’t call people rednecks and he said he didn’t care and he said he didn’t want to be Robin.”
Josh blinked in confusion. “What?”
“He said someone compared him to Robin and he didn’t want to be him. Was it you?”
“What?”
“Who said he was like Batman’s sidekick?”
“No. It was probably Toby. Sam was kind of his…sidekick. Not actually saving Gotham City, but saving oratory for those with an ear for cadence, that kind of thing.”
“You sound like him.”
“I’m from Connecticut.”
“No, I don’t mean the way you sound, I mean the way you talk.” She met Josh’s eye. “He wasn’t scared – in case you were wondering. He was…pretty mad mostly. At first I thought he was a schoolboy. His clothes looked like a uniform and he looked kind of young. But, once we talked I realized he was actually…kind of…magnificent.”
Josh smiled; seeing Sam in his mind’s eye telling Claypool he was a cheap hack and he was going to bust him like a piñata; finally catching up with Josh and Toby and realizing what Steve Onorato had been planning, grabbing for that phone on a red haze of righteous indignation; Leo talking about that Sam Seaborn-sized hole in the wall when Sam had gone after Kevin Kahn. “Yeah, he actually kind of is.”
“He really wasn’t scared.”
Josh rose to his feet. “Thank you.” He didn’t ask her how Sam had looked; that would have been the wrong question; she had told him what he needed to know, which was how Sam had been, and he hadn’t been scared. Softly he said again: “Thank you.”
He went out into the corridor, surprised when Mrs. McAllister spoke to him and he realized she must have followed him outside.
“Mr. Lyman…?”
“Please call me ‘Josh’, Mrs. McAllister.”
“I will if you’ll call me ‘Judith’.”
He nodded. “Your daughter is quite something, Judith. I don’t think I would have done half as well as she did in that situation, and I’m twenty five years older than she is.”
“I know she is. I’m very proud of her right now.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I just wanted to say that what your friend did – you should be proud of him too. He knew what the consequences would be and Tracy said he didn’t even hesitate.”
“Well, that’s Sam for you. He tends to be a Do The Right Thing At All Costs kind of guy. Obviously, being in politics, we’ve tried to knock that nonsense out of him, but so far without success.”
“If it turns out to be the last thing he ever did, try not to be angry with him.”
He moistened his lips. “I’m trying now, Judith. I really am.”
“Everyone in my church is praying for him.”
“Thank you.” He felt humbled by her sincerity even if her convictions weren’t ones that he could share. “I’m grateful. We’re all grateful for everyone who is sending him a positive thought right now.” As he turned to go, he hesitated. “What was Tracy doing when she was grabbed? Was she going to meet friends…?”
“She was going to buy a dress for her Junior Prom. She had a hundred and sixty five dollars saved up. They took it though. She says it doesn’t matter. I really don’t think it does, not in the scheme of things. I just wish that was the only crime those people had ever committed.”
Caught by her expression, Josh had to struggle to get the words out: “You’re going to pray for them too, aren’t you?”
She looked a little defensive and he wondered if she had already had this disagreement with her son. She had said he was angry. Josh didn’t blame him.
“They’re all God’s children. And they all had mothers once.”
“You’re a better person than I am, Judith,” Josh admitted in a tone that made it clear he had no intention or desire to be better than he was right now. He was, in fact, very comfortable with his levels of murderous hatred.
“We all carry the Lord within us, even if we have different names for Him. You just have to find him within yourself.” Then she was nodding a goodbye and going back into the room with her daughter.
Josh turned to find everyone else already gone and Toby waiting for him. “What did she say?”
“Tracy McAllister said Sam wasn’t scared. She said he was angry.”
Toby gave the first glimmer of a smile Josh had seen cross his face since the news of Sam’s abduction had first come in. “That’s our boy.”
“And Judith McAllister said we all carry the voice of the Lord of our individual faith within us.”
“Well, the Lord of my individual faith is definitely a vengeful god. And, if they bring Sam’s corpse out of that place, the first rabbi to tell me that Vengeance is not Jewish is going to find out just exactly how violence begets violence.”
As they walked along the corridor, Josh glanced sideways at Toby, trying to assess him. “You wouldn’t really deck a rabbi, would you? I mean that would be…incredibly not good.”
“I might,” Toby admitted. “It’s been a while since I slept. I’m not really responsible for my actions right now.”
“Tracy said Sam didn’t want to be Robin.”
“I’d already told him we would keep those identities a secret. He was going to be my ward while I was being Bruce Wayne.”
“Dick someone?”
“Yes. No tights.”
“Sounds like you didn’t really sell it to him that well.”
“I may not have stressed the ‘no tights’ thing enough.”
Josh paused. “He was Sam, the guy she met in that place. The guy who helped her. He was still Sam. Whatever else they end up doing to him, they didn’t take away who he is.”
Toby nodded and then patted him on the arm. “Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch.”
Josh stopped in his tracks. “I can’t go back to Washington when…”
”Josh, it’s for the best.” He could read in Toby’s eyes that he thought Sam was dead and that they were all going to need to be there for each other when the news came through. “We can fly back if we need to, but Mike Casper doesn’t want us to complicate things. He wants to concentrate on what he’s doing.”
Reluctantly, Josh got into the waiting car, and then even more reluctantly onto the waiting plane, while all the time wondering if they had found the driver yet, if they were closer.
The call came through when they were over Notre Dame to say that the driver had been found and that with his description of his route and Tracy’s description of the house they believed they had identified the place. Then it was a case of waiting to find out what happened next. And waiting. And waiting….
***
Tracy had been spotted running away by the kidnappers, by Sam’s estimation, about three minutes after her escape. Sam had been standing underneath the window, willing the world to stay still and silent, clouds scudding across distant stars, and Tracy invisible in the darkening dusk, vanished before anyone even realized that she was gone. But it hadn’t gone like that, of course; there had been a few blissful moments of calm when he had just dared to begin to hope that she was safe, and then there was the yelling and the gunfire while he tried and failed – through the debilitating haze of pure panic – to see out of the window so far above his head.
They had been so pleased with themselves too. It had been possible for Tracy to reach that narrow aperture from his shoulders, and it had been fortunate that she was long-legged and slim and agile enough to haul herself up and out through a broken window. He somehow doubted Toby would have been able to manage that particular maneuver, for instance. She had looked down at him and he had grinned in triumph because they had done it, then given her the thumbs up, apologized for not bring Brad Pitt, and waved her on her way. He should never have let himself be pleased, even for an instant. He had forgotten the teachings of Toby and had tempted the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing and he hadn’t remembered to turn around three times and spit, and that made it all his fault that there had been gunfire instead of silence.
Even standing on the plow and trying to jump up and down had not provided a sight of the fields outside. His fear for Tracy had spiked with the first shot and hadn’t really come down, although as time crawled by and then crawled by some more, he had found himself starting to breathe in a more regular rhythm. Then he thought that the long pause could be because they were burying her and if she were dead it was his fault. He was the one who had told her to try the escape. If she was dead…
Some time after the gunshots, the door burst open and the ladder was dropped down, two of them storming down it and coming over to where he was sitting. They took in the plow dragged to its new position and one of them smacked him in the guts with a rifle. Sam went down hard in the filthy water, hitting his head on the edge of the plow as he did so. For a moment the water was over his head, as he tried to snatch some air and got only liquid sucked into his lungs, brown sludge filling his eyes, mouth and nose; and a hand on the back of his head holding him down there as the water rushed in and his lungs screamed for air they weren’t getting. He was yanked out and then shoved back under while things were yelled at him that he automatically mentally tried to punctuate. Despite his fear and the way his lungs felt as if they were going to explode, it really did bother him that he didn’t know if ‘mother-fucker’ was usually hyphenated or not. It wasn’t a word he’d ever had cause to use in a speech for the President.
He was still gasping as he was dragged upright and shaken, cursed, backhanded, and then knocked back down. Through the blossoming pain in his guts, and the water in his lungs, and the hissing sound threatening to send him spiraling into unconsciousness, a part of his brain was still reasoning, and it was certain that they would not have been this angry if they had succeeded in recapturing or killing Tracy. They were acting out of frustration, anger, and fear that the hostage they had grabbed to make him do what they wanted had now escaped them and could bring back help.
They unlocked his padlock and dragged him up to the usual room, to be smacked around some more, while they shouted at him. His head was pounding by that point, a sickeningly regular rhythm, as if someone was running on the spot in the soft tissue of his brain while wearing stilettos. People blurred in and out of focus and the pain was the only clarity, a sudden sharpening of vision, a blaze of light and color that then receded back into dimness. A gun was jammed into his mouth once, the barrel very cold against his tongue and tasting of oil, the ‘click’ as it cocked; his hair was yanked hard and the gun worked in deeper, as if they were going to make him swallow it whole, and then it was abruptly yanked out, clattering painfully against his teeth as it did so, and he was smacked against the wall.
They were all as unstable as nitroglycerine, and he kept quiet, deciding that even mute disobedience was going to annoy them less than him saying the wrong thing. It wasn’t difficult to pretend that he was too dazed to comprehend them with blood pouring from a scalp wound and clogging up the only eye out of which he could comfortably see. When he shook his head to clear it, the blood spattered, like a red mist, and he thought about seeing that as his last sight, his own brains blowing out. Or would he be dead by then, and never see past the point the bullet reached when presumably life was extinct? He tried to do the math, wondering how instantaneous it was, if there was time for it to hurt. He thought about drifting up higher and higher away from his own corpse, and then his knees gave out and he realized he wasn’t drifting anywhere, just crumpling out of a mixture of exhaustion and starvation and probably fear. It didn’t particularly feel like fear, it felt like numbness, but he had to presume there was fear in there somewhere, as he definitely did not feel ready to die.
“We killed her.” The tallest one yanked him back to his feet. “If you were wondering, we blew her stupid whore bitch head off, and we’re going to do the same thing to you right now if you don’t…”
But Sam didn’t find out what it was they wanted him to do, because that was when the pain in his head did its own little thermo-nuclear explosion and he lapsed into blackness. He came to in the midst of an argument; one of them jabbing a gun against his head, another one talking about the need for a hostage, a third insisting he had definitely shot the girl and she wasn’t going to make it to the road, a fourth saying they couldn’t just sit around and wait for the police. Then there was a rapid flow of interruption and them shouting over one another in which scattered phrases alone were comprehensible.
We have to kill him now!
He’s the only thing we have to bargain with!
We don’t even know that they’ll come looking!
With so many conflicting views, Sam couldn’t see anything be resolved any time soon. It was like a Quentin Tarantino-scripted Congress, and he felt an overpowering need to be asleep. He drifted off and came to again to find them dragging him back through the dank corridors of the house, past the broken floorboards they seemed to have been chopping up for firewood. Then there was the clank of the steps being slid down and then he was being manhandled down them, needing all of his powers of concentration to manage not to just fall down. He did a half-slither, half-controlled fall, while they grunted with annoyance and grabbed him by the hair or the collar to slightly arrest his plummet to the ground.
He hit the floor of the cellar hard and felt something in his ankle twinge agonizingly, but then someone was dragging him through the slush by the collar of his once really very good shirt and someone else was dragging the plow back to its previous position, sending eddies of water to ripple around his legs. He heard the clank of the chain and felt the now painful pressure on his ankle and didn’t even care as long as it meant they just went away and left him alone.
Sam winced as a gun barrel was dug painfully into his cheekbone. “You’re dead, Seaborn,” one of them snarled at him, and then they went away.
Sam really felt he should have earned a lot of bonus points from the Toby in his head – who was always so critical – for not pointing out that he was in fact alive. Which almost certainly would have made that guy come back and blow his brains out just to make a point. So, let no one say that Sam Seaborn had no basic sense of self-preservation just because he had, on occasion, forgotten to hold onto a rope while sailing. “Ha…” he murmured not very coherently, before dragging himself painfully up onto the plow and out of the water and then lapsing into a cold, uncomfortable sleep.
Later, Sam thought about how hard he had worked to try to get the message of the environmental lobby out there. He had written several speeches which talked about the little things that individuals could do to try to safeguard the limited resources of the natural world. And yet, ultimately, he owed his life to the fact that the splinter chapter of Orange County White Pride had never got around to fitting long-life light bulbs.
He had been dreaming about watching fireworks light up the sky, then that had turned to a thunderstorm, lightning tearing across the darkness, stars hidden by sweeping drifts of cloud, the ground shaking with the thunder, and then the deluge, big splashy drops hammering down onto him, and he was in a foxhole and it was filling up with muddy water while howitzers roared overhead, darkness turning to brilliant blinding light as bombs exploded, while the water got higher and higher and he tried without success to pull his leg free.
He woke with a gasp to the rat-a-tat of real and present gunfire, the shock of if making him jolt off his precarious position on the plow and into the water. The dousing with freezing filthy liquid did at least wake him up although it left him shivering and coughing. As he struggled back up – the movement sending strobe lights of pain behind his eyes as he did so – he could hear people shouting incomprehensible things through a loud hailer, and people shouting back in between crashes of broken glass and more shooting. The pain in his head was still there but the sleep had helped. He did at least feel as if he had some cognitive function left which was more than he could have said a few hours before. He tried to get his watch into focus and then remembered that they had taken it from him days ago, along with his wallet, keys, and everything else except his clothes that might identify him. There was more noise from upstairs, footsteps thudding and something heavy being dropped. They were setting up more guns. They had rifles, he remembered, and a couple of semi-automatics. They had shown those to him sometime when they had been attempting to convince him of how efficient and dangerous and important they were.
Despite the pounding in his head, his brain was only getting clearer and clearer. The people outside would be FBI; people like Mike Casper, people like the secret service agent, Molly, who had died protecting Zoey, and Simon Donovan, who had died in that store robbery shooting. Good people, and they were being shot at right now, and he wasn’t able to do anything about it because he was chained to a stupid plow in a stupid cellar in a stupid falling down farmhouse in the middle of a nowhere that was probably stupid too.
When the door to the cellar was slammed open sheer instinct made him dive down between the struts of the plow. Everything was in darkness and he guessed they must have doused the lights upstairs to make the job of the sharpshooters harder. Sam heard the sound of the light-switch being pulled and then pulled again and again, and then swearing from what sounded like the tallest of them. All this time and he still didn’t know their names. Of course they had never been formally introduced but he could probably have made the effort to find out; it had just seemed safer not to know, and Moron #1, #2, #3, and #4 had done well enough for him as a mental designation when he was identifying them in his own head. The tallest was the one who hit him the hardest, and had the shortest fuse, overturning all kinds of stereotypes about the bubbling irritation latent in all short men. Tall men seemed to have pretty short fuses too, going by this guy. If it had been the carroty-looking one, Sam would have presumed he was being collected to serve as a hostage as they made their escape, but the carroty one was the one who never blasphemed or cursed because they were the righteous armies of the right hand of God. Which had been kind of amusing because the carroty one was actually left-handed, which Sam had pointed out, although it had become less funny when the guy had hit him quite hard. But the tall one blasphemed quite often and was doing it now, and Sam doubted he was intending to use him as a hostage.
The beam of a flashlight suddenly raked across the cellar, and Sam ducked down lower. Another burst of gunfire from outside and the beam of the flashlight was moving so fast it was a blur, it was only when there was a splash of water that Sam realized the flashlight had been lost. The water looked even stranger illuminated from below, murky strands suddenly backlit by a blue light, the water acquiring a strange beauty of swirling debris.
“Fuck!”
Sam heard the snarl of anger and then the sound of a weapon being loaded and he was snatching a breath, closing his eyes, and ducking under the water between the metal struts of the plow.
Then he was abruptly engulfed by the roar of the rifle, feeling the impact of bullets glancing off the metal and ricocheting off walls and window and tearing up the surface of the water; an explosion of glass sounding as the flashlight was presumably shot; and then a white hot pain lanced through his left shoulder and another pain seared his right side and the breath shot out of him in a gasp and he was swallowing filthy water, and coughing and had to put his head up. He snatched a desperate breath, and then dove back under the surface as another hail of bullets chattered all around him, ricocheting wildly above him while he heard the muffled sound of the impacts.
From what felt like a long way away, he heard the blast of what sounded like wood splintering, and then the bullets moved in an arc away from him and there was the rat-a-tat of more shooting, and then he was surfacing again, spitting out filthy water in which he knew that he had urinated and which tasted as if a lot of other people had done as well, and then there was another chatter of bullets and then a much larger splash than when the flashlight had fallen and everything was momentarily dark and quiet, although visual echoes of the gun-flare were still playing in front of his eyes. His ears were ringing and there was still pain in his shoulder and his side which was building in intensity, and he could feel himself shaking and realized he was probably going into shock now, and was very cold, and everything was dark and if he closed his eyes and laid down as he really wanted to, he was going to pass out and drown.
The beam of a much more powerful flashlight raked across the cellar and he ducked down instinctively, feeling the beam go over him and move away and then sweep back so he was trapped in the blue-white glare of it. Then someone shouted: “He’s here! He’s here!” And there was the clatter of the ladder and other shouts about the suspect not moving, and the suspect being deceased and the area being secure, and then someone was shining a light right in his face. He closed his eyes and turned his head away and then felt hands on his shoulders and a light that was not quite so dazzling.
“Sam…?”
He blinked in confusion because the face looking down at him seemed familiar. He felt a hand touching his shoulder that was gentle and practiced.
“Sam…?”
Which was when he realized that he knew this man. “Mike…?”
Mike Casper’s face broke into a smile of sheer relief. “We really thought we’d lost you for good. Have you been hit?”
Sam almost said that yes, he’d been hit every time he gave them a back answer they didn’t like, and then realized that the man meant ‘have you been shot?’.
“I don’t think so. Except maybe, yes, in my shoulder, and maybe my side, from a ricochet, I think.” Someone was shining a penlight into his eyes and talking about his pupils and how reactive they were and someone else was looking at his shoulder and someone else was shining a light into the water and talking about the plow and the padlock, and then there was the jangle of keys.
Mike said comfortingly, “We’ll soon you have you out of here now.”
With a jolt Sam realized that he hadn’t asked the right question. “Tracy, is she…?”
“She’s alive and being treated in the local hospital. Bullet wound to the shoulder, condition stable. She’s going to be fine.”
Sam looked down at the agent who was unlocking the cuff around his ankle then felt the sudden delicious warmth of a heated blanket wrapped around him, realizing in shock that he really wasn’t dead after all. “I owe her a really big ‘thank you’.” And then the need to pass out become temporarily overwhelming and he lapsed into a much warmer safer darkness than any he had known for days.
***
Josh was getting good at this – waiting by the bedside of someone he cared about while he or she lay there, wired up to machinery, looking pale and bruised and impossibly fragile. He couldn’t help thinking this had to be it for their luck. He had been saved by surgery after the shooting, Zoey had been rescued alive after her kidnapping, Donna had survived the explosion that had killed Admiral Fitzwallace and which, logically, should have killed her, and now here was Sam, stubbornly not dead. The next one of them to trip on a sidewalk was probably going to fracture his or her skull at least.
The room was a mass of flowers. Some of them had arrived before Josh; some had been carried in since. There had been no question that he was flying straight back. No one had said anything except ‘Take as much time as you need’ even though he had been all geared up for an argument and had his answers all lined up in readiness.
“I just think he should wake up to a friendly face…” Josh had offered a little shamefacedly, still trying to have the fight Leo hadn’t given him.
“Two friendly faces.” Toby stood in the doorway with a suitcase in his hand.
“But we… Can you…?” Josh darted another look back at Leo, still expecting an argument.
Leo just nodded. “Good idea. You can stop Josh putting his foot in his mouth.”
“Sam might need to issue some kind of statement,” Toby added. “I was thinking that if I was there, I could help with that.”
“What about CJ? Won’t she…?” Josh felt duty bound to at least pretend that he cared about anything other than being beside Sam’s bedside right now.
“Under control,” CJ insisted. “I’ve got the report from the FBI and from the hospital. Mike Caspar is going to talk to the press after me. Everything’s fine. You two should go.”
And they had. Toby was out getting coffee now and CJ was on the TV again for yet another press briefing. Josh leaned forward to turn up the sound:
“I can tell you that Sam Seaborn has successfully undergone surgery to repair damage from a bullet wound and an injury caused by the ricochet from another bullet. Both bullets were fired by one of the kidnappers, who has now been identified as Carl Hathaway, aged twenty-three, deceased. You already have the names of the other kidnappers. Mr. Seaborn is also suffering from pneumonia, malnutrition, dehydration, and multiple contusions but is expected to make a complete recovery – ”
Josh watched as a forest of arms shot into the air and saw CJ nod. “Yes, Katie?”
“Now that the first elation has had time to fade, how does the President feel about the ordeal Mr. Seaborn underwent at the hands of…”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Katie, because the ‘first elation’ has in no way had time to fade yet. We’re still at the stage of pinching ourselves to be certain we’re not dreaming. Yes, Steve?”
“Would it be accurate to say that the White House did not expect such a positive outcome to the kidnapping of Sam Seaborn by the Orange County White Pride?”
“We think the kidnapping was actually undertaken by a splinter group unaffiliated to Orange County White Pride. Orange County White Pride has, however, been linked to the bombing of the Calvary Baptist Church, but, as to outcome, we always hoped for the best but are still relieved and delighted that Sam Seaborn is only in the hospital right now and not in the morgue. Terry?”
“You mention several injuries, including multiple contusions. Was Sam Seaborn beaten by his captors?”
“Yes.”
Josh admired the way CJ said that without a muscle flickering in her jaw, the way it would have been if either he or Toby had answered that question.
“Can you give us a little more, CJ?”
She referred to her notes. “The preliminary reports from the doctors and FBI say that Sam Seaborn was subjected to repeated beatings by his captors for his failure to comply with their requests for him to…I suppose the word we’re looking for here is ‘recant’ from his position on immigration and marriages between people of different races. Nor was he offered any food or water during the time of his captivity although according to Tracy McAllister he told her that he had been drinking the water that ran down from a broken guttering, not the water in the cellar, which is apparently contaminated. He is being given a course of antibiotics to deal with the infection from that water.”
Steve frowned. “CJ, if he didn’t drink the contaminated water, how come he needs antibiotics to combat it?”
“Apparently they held his head under it a few times, and he was forced to take refuge under the surface of it when Carl Hathaway was attempting to execute him with a semi-automatic rifle. Yes, Danny?”
“What is Sam’s condition now?”
“I spoke to his doctor on the telephone a few minutes before this briefing and he said that Sam was comfortable after surgery to remove the bullet from his shoulder.”
“Is anyone from the White House with him?”
“Josh Lyman and Toby Ziegler are both with him. I’m not sure if that’s the two faces I’d want to wake up to but as Sam was unconscious at the time they got on the plane he wasn’t given a lot of choice in the matter. Yes, Wendy?”
“Is the President aware of the efforts made by Senator Taylor to assist in the release of Mr. Seaborn?”
“The President is indeed aware of and grateful for the efforts of Senator Taylor and has privately communicated his gratitude to the Senator.”
“Will Mr. Seaborn still be running for office when he recovers?”
“I think that’s a question for Mr. Seaborn, although listening to my colleagues in this building I think he may have some trouble doing so on account of the ten foot chain it has apparently been unanimously decided will now be tethering him to Toby Ziegler’s desk.”
The laughter from the Press Corps sounded genuine and warm and Josh was reminded again of just how many people had been out there praying for Sam’s safe return.
Danny nodded. “You’ll tell Sam we were all asking after him?”
CJ smiled back. “I’ll do that, gladly. Now, I’m sure you’ll want to make a note of these projected yields for beets and green beans…”
When he looked back at the bed, he saw Sam stirring, and pulled his chair closer, leaning forward to watch him intently. It was still a shock to see Sam like this. His face was badly bruised, purple, blue, and yellow contusions under newer, redder ones. His left cheekbone had been padded but was apparently not broken, just cut and bruised. His dry lips were cut and swollen and a thick scab was still healing across the lower one. According to the doctor, the other cuts at the side of his mouth had been caused by hunger rather than a gag, which was something, Josh supposed. Denying Sam a voice seemed crueler than denying him food, although perhaps he wouldn’t have so many bruises right now if they had shut him up. His wrists also showed blue-black bruises around the edges of the bandage. Two of his ribs were cracked and had been strapped up. Josh had lifted the sheets to look and been shocked by the clear imprint of the boot-soles on Sam’s skin and how visible those ribs were, even through the bandages. They had told him Sam had lost weight but that the fluids being fed into his system through an IV were already dealing with that. The doctor had assured him and Toby that there had not been time for any kidney damage and they expected Mr. Seaborn to make a complete recovery. The bullet was out of his left shoulder and the wound well bandaged. His arm would be in a sling for a while but he would heal. Everything was temporary, fixable. Josh kept swinging from shock at the sight of Sam, the epitome of sickeningly vibrant good health, looking so thin and pale and battered, and these waves of mingled relief and panic because Sam was alive, alive, alive, and yet had so nearly been dead, dead, dead.
Mike Casper had told them that Hathaway had only failed to kill Sam when he had been trying to because the bulb in the cellar had blown, meaning that he had been forced to spray bullets around indiscriminately instead of getting in some well-directed fire. As it was, the wall behind Sam had been pock-marked with bullets, some of which had lodged but a lot of which had rat-a-tatted all around the cellar, pinging off everything they hit, including the plow under which Sam had been sheltering. If Sam had not shown sense enough to get down low, even though that meant submerging himself in contaminated water, then he would have been riddled with bullets. As things were, he had only been hit directly once, and had a cracked clavicle and shoulder bone to show for it, and had been hit a second time by a ricochet that had grazed his side.
“Sam did everything right.” Mike Casper had nodded at the bed with a hint of pride. “There was nothing he didn’t do that was sensible.”
“Except for mouthing off to people with really big guns?” Toby countered.
Casper half-smiled, trying to repress it but with a definite twinkle in his eye. “Okay, except for that. We probably wouldn’t have advised him to do that.”
Josh was still talking to Casper when Toby had tentatively asked the doctor who had examined Sam when he was first brought in if Sam had… that was, had there been any other kind of…assault. Had he been…? Or rather, could the doctor assure him that Sam hadn’t been…?
Turning in shock, Josh gazed at Toby open-mouthed as the doctor assured him that no, Mr. Seaborn had not been sexually assaulted in any way.
“You were thinking…?” He was horrified by the possibility of that thought; feeling a wave of sickness flood through him not only because he was now thinking it and it hadn’t occurred to him even for a millisecond until this point, but because Toby had been carrying that thought for presumably a week now; having that eat away at him along with all the other horrors Josh had been able to imagine.
“I just…” Toby turned away. “It was a possibility. They weren’t nice people and Sam’s… You know.”
“Yes.” Still feeling sick, Josh reached for a chair. “I do. Oh God, they could have… Why didn’t you say something…?”
“Because I didn’t want to put the look on your face that’s there right now.”
Josh held onto the arm of the chair. “They could have…” He snatched another breath. “They really could have… And I didn’t even think….”
“Josh, them killing him would have been a lot worse and you were already thinking that.”
“It’s the fact I wasn’t thinking about…that other possibility. He could have been in that place with those four guys…. I never even imagined….”
“It didn’t happen.” Toby was reaching in his pockets. “Just try to focus on the fact it didn’t happen.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t even think they could have been… I mean, everyone knows Sam is…”
“I know.” Toby nodded, still feeling in his pockets with increasing agitation.
“We don’t talk about it because he doesn’t like it.”
“Well, no… though actually, I think there are worse crosses to have to bear in life than being too good-looking, myself, but…”
“He was beaten up in school. You know how he is.”
“Don’t you think he was probably beaten up in school because he was a freakish little nerd who always did his homework on time and probably asked for more, rather than because he was a little too pre-”
“Don’t say it!” Josh held up a hand. “We don’t say the ‘p’ word. Even CJ doesn’t tease him about that. And what are you looking for anyway?”
“A paper bag.” Toby said it as if it were obvious. “I thought you were going to throw up or need to breathe into one, whatever it is you do when people go into hysterical hyperventilative states.”
“‘Hyperventilative’ isn’t a word.” Josh sank onto one of the uncomfortable waiting room chairs.
“Well, it should be because it’s what I need for this particular sentence.”
“So, we’re just making up our own words now?”
“Why not? It works for the Vice President.” Toby snatched a breath and took a moment to let the truth wash through him. “Josh, what we need to be focusing on right now is that it didn’t happen. Sam didn’t get…you know, he didn’t get maimed, and he didn’t get killed. He isn’t lying on a slab somewhere, he’s out of surgery and into recovery, and he’s going to be okay. And, at some point in the dim dark distant future, when we’ve both had therapy and possibly been prescribed some very powerful drugs, so are you and I….”
Now, a few hours later, Josh reached out and slipped his fingers between Sam’s, just needing to feel the warmth of his skin against his hand, the way someone felt when they were alive and their blood was circulating correctly, rather than pooling on the ground. Thick dark eyelashes flickered and Josh leaned further forward, wanting his face to be what Sam saw when he woke up, not the scary impersonal wall of a hospital or all those flowers that might make him think he was dying.
“Hey…” he breathed.
Sam’s eyelashes flickered again and he opened his eyes, wincing at the brightness of the room. The brilliant blueness of his eyes was a shock after the bruising around them and shadows beneath them. Sam tried to moisten his lips and then managed a weak smile. “Hey, back…”
Josh couldn’t stop that idiotic grin breaking out. He reached out with the hand that wasn’t gripping Sam’s and stroked a few strands of untidy hair back from his forehead, trying to keep his voice steady and normal and not all quavery and tearful and choked up with relief: “Your mother and I were very worried.”
“Sorry.” Sam tried to moisten his dry lips with his dry tongue, still blinking owlishly at the light. Josh remembered how that felt, waking up with a head full of anesthetic and that muffled sensation coursing through your body from the morphine.
“You’re all in one piece and you’re going to be okay. But you scared the hell out of everyone, so don’t ever do it again.”
“Is Toby angry with me…?” Sam croaked out hoarsely.
“You’d better believe it.”
At the sound of that grim pronouncement, Josh looked around to see Toby had come back into the room and was also gazing at Sam with a big stupid grin on his face. He strode across to the other side of the bed and also reached out to touch Sam’s hair, seeming to need that same reassurance that he was still there and still whole.
“You got yourself kidnapped. Of course I’m angry with you.”
“In my own defense, I did not, in any way, do it on purpose…”
“Well, you’re no longer allowed to walk the streets of California by yourself. Or indeed any part of America. Or any other country. From now on, you get a chaperone to go to the bathroom.” Toby picked up a carton of water with a straw and held it where Sam could drink. “You need to concede to Taylor and come back to the White House where we can all keep an eye on you.”
Josh looked at him in shock. “I thought we weren’t going to spring that on him the second he opened his eyes.”
“You weren’t going to spring that on him. I always intended to.”
“Can we establish that he’s okay first?”
“No. I have a lot of anxiety I need to displace. Also, no one to help me write speeches. I don’t think it needs to be discussed. I think Sam needs to nod his head and do whatever I tell him. Forever.”
Josh gave Sam a rueful smile. “I don’t want you worrying about us overreacting or anything. In fact I just want to take this opportunity to assure you that we’re going to be reasonable and fair-minded about you putting us through a week of unmitigated hell, and will not in any way hold it against you.” Looking across at Toby’s face, Josh grimaced. “Except for Toby. Who probably is going to hold it against you for a while.”
“Make that a lifetime.” Toby gently supported Sam’s head as he gratefully gulped down the water.
Sam swallowed and then grabbed some air. “You sounded just like that in my head.” He grinned at Toby as if he was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. “When I was in that cellar I had some – actually very interesting – conversations in my head, and I kept imagining you commenting on everything I did, and you sounded exactly like that.”
Toby put down the water, a little nonplussed. “I was haranguing you in your head through your time of imprisonment?”
Sam nodded eagerly. “Yes.”
“I didn’t offer you sage words of advice and comfort?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t say nice things to you about how much I missed you and how we all knew you could pull through this thing…?”
“Not so much,” Sam admitted. “You mostly just yelled.”
“I was nice to you, right?” Josh squeezed his hand. “I said nice things to you in your head?”
“You mostly yelled too.”
Toby and Josh exchanged a glance. Toby sat back, a little hurt. “Did any of us not yell?”
“President Bartlet was interested in my lecture on the history of the Bible. And Donna was very sweet.” He turned to Josh. “Can you thank her for that when you see her?”
Voice rising a little, Toby said: “Can I just point out who it is, out of all the people with whom you used to work, who are currently sitting at your bedside, having flown across the country in the middle of the night to be here when you opened your bloodshot little eyes?”
Sam bit his lip in an attempt to stop a smirk. “It really is indescribably good to see you both again.”
“And you have no idea how good it is to see you,” Josh said with feeling.
Sam gazed at him with undisguised sincerity. “I was there when you were going through surgery, Josh. I know what it’s like to be the one waiting for news.”
Toby got up and walked over to the window. “I may be prepared to extend the length of the chain to twenty-five feet. Let no one say that Toby Ziegler is not willing to negotiate.”
“I think everyone does say that who…knows you,” Sam pointed out, apparently more in the interests of total accuracy than to be snippy, as he looked suitably penitent when Toby glared at him.
“If you made it fifty feet he could reach the Oval office and attend the Senior Staff meetings,” Josh pointed out.
“I was thinking perhaps a leash would be appropriate for that. I think you can buy retractable ones these days.”
“I just spent a week chained to a plow,” Sam pointed out. “Which is a lot less fun than you might think. I’m off bondage for the foreseeable future.”
Toby blinked. “You were on it before?”
Sam paused and moistened his lips. “And there’s an outside chance I could have phrased that better.” He focused on the bouquets. “I see lots of flowers.”
“Yes.”
“Is there a fruit basket?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about chocolates?”
Josh indicated his IV. “You’re having your fluids replaced.”
“I don’t want to have my fluids replaced. I want to eat lots of food. A Snickers bar would be a good start if you happen to have one about your person. Otherwise I’m sure there’s a vending machine somewhere down the hall.”
“You don’t eat chocolate. You eat healthy snacks that don’t affect the integrity of your scarily white teeth just to annoy and perplex the rest of us,” Toby pointed out.
“That was before I got left in a cellar with no food. Now I eat anything that isn’t moving fast enough to avoid me biting it.” Sam eyed up Josh’s leg. “What’s the Democratic position on cannibalism, anyway?”
Josh shifted his leg away. “The same as the Republican one. You have to be in an airplane crash first and you should preferably be…foreign. Eating other human beings is generally considered un-American.”
“What about the Donner Party?”
“We like to think of that as an anomaly.”
“Well, I think it’s a position that we should rethink. We’re naturally omnivorous and I think it could be some kind of denial of our first amendment rights not to let us eat human beings who don’t give us chocolate when we really, really want it.”
Josh got to his feet. “I’m getting him a Snickers bar.”
“The nurses will have you down like a roped calf before you’re halfway to the vending machine,” Toby pointed out.
Josh reconsidered. “I’m getting a nurse. She can tell Sam-I-was-starved-for-a-week-Seaborn why he isn’t allowed chocolate. Let’s see how she does against the big blue eyes and quivering lower lip treatment.”
“If he bats his eyelashes to get his own way, I’m going to use the ‘p’ word.”
Sam looked down his nose at him. “You can use the ‘f’ word for all I care. I want chocolate or sugary food of some kind and I don’t care how I get it and I think it’s only fair to warn you that I would sell you both to white slavers for a Twinkie right now.”
Toby looked across at Josh. “He’s turning into my ex-wife right before my eyes. Any minute now he’s going to be making me defend my government’s compromise on the school voucher system in Washington and then insisting on organizing a fact-finding mission to a refugee camp in Somalia.”
Sam waved a hand in his direction. “Actually, I don’t agree with your compromise on school vouchers and I don’t think we should have pulled out of Mogadishu when we did. What do I press, pull or shake to summon a nurse?”
As his phone rang, Josh stepped outside to answer it, nodding to a nurse as he did so and indicating that Sam was awake. He had left the door open and could still hear Toby and Sam wrangling over the school vouchers and what the mayor had said about them, and why Charlie had supported him.
CJ’s voice sounded reassuringly clearly on the other end of the phone. “How is he?”
“He’s awake. I was just about to call you.”
“And how is he…?”
He got what else she meant; not just how was he physically, but mentally, emotionally. Needing to know who exactly had woken up in that hospital bed. Josh couldn’t help that grin breaking over his face as he heard Sam telling the nurse what he was willing to give for a Snickers bar right now and how it included his entire collection of Gilbert & Sullivan CDs except possibly for The Pirates of Penzance, and perhaps The Mikado.
“He’s Sam, Claudia Jean. He’s a hundred percent, accept-no-substitutes, the genuine article, Sam Seaborn.”
He heard her snatch a breath of relief. “He’s…he’s okay…?”
“Well, he looks like crap, but he’s sitting up and taking notice and demanding chocolate.”
“Tell him I’m sending him chocolate. Tell him I’m doing it right now. Carol…? Sam needs chocolate. Can you arrange…? Yes, Godiva, the biggest box they make. No, make it the gift basket – the one with the biscuits and the truffle assortment. Right away. Josh, will you tell him…?”
Josh grinned. “He won’t be allowed to eat them. They’ll put him on protein shakes and energy bars.”
“You make sure he gets the chocolates. And if you and Toby eat them, I’ll know. And tell him I’m coming to see him as soon as I can. And tell him I love him and give him a kiss from me.”
“Uh – no,” Josh assured her. “I really won’t.”
“You’re worrying about your machismo now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“No, it’s what makes Man…Man.”
“It’s beyond pathetic.”
“Look, I already held his hand and stroked his hair and probably said some fairly soppy things to him. I think that’s as wet as I can be without – you know – looking like a complete girl.”<7/p>
“Sam didn’t care what he looked like when you were in surgery. All he thought about was you.”
“That’s why Sam used to get beaten up every recess and never saw his lunch money for dust. You wouldn’t ask Toby to kiss him.”
“Josh, you complete idiot, he nearly died and I haven’t been able to see him yet, I’d ask the Majority Leader to give him a kiss from me right now. Now go and do it and don’t forget to tell him I love him or the next time I see you I will put my stiletto right through your foot.”
Josh sighed, put away his phone, and went into the room where Sam was ravenously gulping down a protein shake.
“It’s chocolate-flavored,” Toby explained. “The art of compromise. I brokered the deal.”
Josh walked over to where Sam was sitting in the bed and kissed him on the forehead. “That’s from CJ, who loves you, apparently.”
Sam gulped down his mouthful of shake and looked up at Josh open-mouthed. “You kissed me.”
“It was from CJ.”
“You kissed me in front of Toby.”
“It was from CJ.”
Sam grinned and stuck the straw from the protein shake back in his mouth. For all the bruises, he already looked a lot less fragile than he had when he had still been unconscious and Josh had been willing him to wake up. Through the straw and the sipping, Sam said triumphantly: “I have to tell you, Josh, that it is my carefully considered opinion as a lawyer that you totally look like a girl right now….”
Josh’s repeated insistence that the kiss had been from CJ met with a snort of derision from Toby and something that was very close to a titter from Sam.
“I’m cutting off your morphine,” Josh told him. “That’s it for you. No more pain relief.” Then as his grin of relief threatened to split his face in two, he leaned back over Sam, pulled him into an embrace, pressing a kiss into the soft dark tangle of his hair. “Okay, that was from me.” He leant his forehead against Sam’s feeling the warmth of that slightly feverish skin against his while he tangled his fingers in Sam’s hair. “It’s good to have you back, Sam.”
When he pulled back, Sam was gazing up at Josh with damp eyes, moved by the obvious sincerity in Josh’s words. “It’s good to be back.”
Josh reached across to wipe under his bruised eyes gently with his thumb. “Now who totally looks like a girl?”
As Sam smiled, Josh sat down next to him on the bed, putting an arm around his shoulders carefully and then pulling him in against him, so there was no doubt that Sam Seaborn, in his silly little hospital gown, was a living breathing miracle of warmth against his body. When the adrenaline ebbed and the shake hit home and Sam’s eyelids began to droop and then to close and his breathing evened out into a slow even rhythm, Josh gently lowered him back onto his pillows while Toby stood and watched. Josh carefully covered him with the blanket and then leaned across to kiss him on the forehead again. “That one’s from Donna,” he explained to Toby.
Toby just nodded, trying and failing not to look a little choked-up himself. “We got him back, Josh.”
“Yeah.” Josh stood up but kept gazing down at the bruised face of the friend who had come back to them the same man he had been when he was taken. “We really did.”
***
Hayden Taylor was in the room with Sam when CJ arrived. Although she was bursting to go in there and hug him breathless, she waited to give him a few moments with the man.
“I wish I could persuade you to reconsider, Sam…”
“I don’t see how either of us could campaign on the issues, right now. If I ever get a seat in Congress I want it to be because of what I believe in, not because I got kidnapped and people feel sorry for me.”
“There’s no reason to suppose that we can’t still run a campaign on the issues.”
“The polling data says otherwise. I haven’t been campaigning for the past ten days and my popularity has doubled. Tell me that’s because of the issues?”
Taylor walked across the room. “I’ve wanted to be a Congressman for a very long time but I see the same fire in you. I know this is what you want. And you can win it. For your party, for yourself.”
“Sir, with all due respect, why do you care?”
Taylor turned to look at him. “You don’t want to win because you got kidnapped, Sam? Well, I don’t want to win because you got kidnapped either. Those…people wanted you out of this race. They took offence at what you said and they bustled you into the back of a car at gunpoint because of it. If you stand down, how did their agenda not win? How are we not giving them what they want?”
Sam shook his head. “You’re not what they want, sir. You’re nothing at all like what they want. You said it yourself, you’ve wanted this for a long time. You want to represent the people of Orange County. You think you can do what’s best for their needs. I think I can too, but what I can’t get in this County right now is a fair election. I am never going to know if I have a mandate from the people who voted for me or if they just felt sorry for me and are relieved I didn’t die.”
“Either way you’d be in Congress, and it’s not as if your party doesn’t need every vote it can get there right now. And I wouldn’t be standing here right now, encouraging you to run against me, if I didn’t think I could beat you on the issues and that if you got elected that you wouldn’t do a good job.”
“I wouldn’t know and it wouldn’t feel right to me. I appreciate you coming in here, but my mind is made up.”
Taylor sighed and then nodded. “I’m sorry that it’s going to be resolved like this and I can’t help feeling those thugs scored some kind of victory here that neither of us really want to hand them, but I’m not going to harangue you when you’re wired up to all that machinery. You do know the Democratic Party is going to skin you alive though? You are throwing away a seat for them and I’m saying it because I know they’re going to and they’re going to say it a lot louder.”
Gazing through the half-open door, CJ was in time to see Sam cough weakly and look pathetic, eyes fluttering with exhaustion. Then he gazed up at Taylor and smiled. “They wouldn’t berate the sick.”
Taylor laughed, and squeezed Sam’s good arm gently. “Get better, son. It’s very good to see you alive and relatively well.”
Sam gazed up at the man, no humor on his face now. “Thank you for everything you did, sir. Josh and Toby told me about the TV appeals and how you had people leafleting…”
Taylor shook his head. “Enough of that. You would have done the same for me and anyway for all you know it was just cynical electioneering to make me look good.”
“I know it wasn’t.” Sam’s blue gaze was unwavering. “And I’m grateful and I have to tell you that so is my mother. She’s definitely planning to vote for you. Of course, I also think you’re reaping the benefit from the fact that I’m kind of in the dog-house right now on account of getting myself kidnapped.”
“She wrote to me.” Taylor half-smiled. “As did the President and all of your colleagues. I appreciate that very much but I still maintain I only did what any halfway human being would do. And, incidentally, your friend, Josh Lyman, has unreadable handwriting. Tell him I said so.” He clapped Sam gently on the shoulder and headed out into the corridor.
CJ didn’t usually smile at Republicans but she couldn’t help making an exception in his case. “Mr. Taylor, I’m CJ Cregg of the…”
“I know who you are, Ms Cregg,” he smiled in amusement. “Despite being a candidate for Congress, I do take the occasional interest in politics.”
“I just wanted to thank you for…”
He held up a hand. “You don’t need to say it. The important thing is we got Mr. Seaborn back where he can no doubt continue to fritter away his undoubted talent in making policies that give power to the government at the expense of the individual sound lofty and inspiring.”
“Yes, that’s pretty much what we’re hoping, sir.” Impulsively, CJ leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you so very much for everything you did to help find Sam.”
Touched, he bowed his head to her. “You’re welcome.”
And then she was free to speed into Sam’s room and throw her arms around his neck and give him a resounding kiss on the cheek. “Sam-Sam, the sunshine man, my little Schmutzy Pants, I am so glad to see you.”
She had thought he would object to the ‘schmutzy pants’ comment, but he was too busy hugging her right back with such intensity that she was the one who was breathless. He felt warm and uncharacteristically bony with that weight he’d lost. She gently disentangled herself and then got a good look at his bruised face, gave a cry of dismay and pulled him in for another hug. “My poor little Sam.”
“CJ, that’s two ‘little’s in two sentences…” he murmured a bit indistinctly, his mouth somewhere around her shoulder. “You’re stepping all over my fragile masculine ego with hobnailed boots right now.”
She sat back and combed his hair back from his forehead with her fingers. “I don’t care about your fragile masculine ego, Sam. No woman does. We just think you should get over it and be more like us. But back to business – from now on you don’t go anywhere by yourself after dark, is that clear? Or during daylight hours.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely fair, just, or reasonable.” He patted ineffectually at his hair to try to undo whatever she had just done to it.
“Tough.”
Evidently seeing that she was in implacable mode, Sam tried again: “You let Josh go out by himself after he got shot.”
“That was different. We were all there when Josh got shot. I would have been shot too if you hadn’t pushed me out of the way, proving that getting shot can happen to anyone and has no possible blame or censure attached to it. Unlike getting kidnapped, which immediately proves some kind of reckless negligence that I haven’t entirely sorted out in my own mind yet, but which I nevertheless know exists.”
“Do you have Carol researching ways that you can blame me for being kidnapped?”
“No, Josh already has Donna working on that. I don’t think her heart’s in it, though, she seems to think we ought to be nice to you or something just because you went through a hideous ordeal. People from Wisconsin, eh?”
“Salt of the earth and I’ve always said so,” Sam returned with spirit.
CJ reached into her purse for a comb and began to gaze at his hair critically. “We probably need to get you on TV soon. Once we’ve arranged for you to get a hair cut and when you’re looking a little less bruised, pasty, and sick, and – you know – as if you’re carrying one of those TV movie plagues that wipe out everyone except a handful of B list actors.”
“I don’t think I want to go on TV with or without my tubercular-sounding cough.”
“You used to be fine about it.”
“Well, that was because when I was going on TV before it was to discuss issues, not to be paraded up and down like some kind of thing that…gets paraded thing.”
CJ began to comb his hair. “Well, I wasn’t going to tell you, Sam, but the truth is we always sent you because you’re just so gosh-darned…you know, and it could make housewives vote Democrat if they saw your big blue eyes and chiseled jawline.”
He looked at her in shocked betrayal. “That’s a lie,” he said breathlessly.
She grinned at him. “Yes. But you were worried for a minute there.”
He slumped down in his pillows. “I think I feel a sulk coming on.”
She shook her head. “The trouble is that when you pout like that you just look…”
“Don’t say it!”
“You just look…adorable.”
Sam glared at her through narrowed eyes. “Kittens, fluffy chicks, and babies are ‘adorable’. I am a grown person who has had sex and can parallel park a car that doesn’t even possess power steering.”
“I don’t think so. Not without power steering. Not unless there was enough room to park a ten wheeler and no oncoming traffic.”
“Okay, maybe I overreached a little there, but I have definitely had sex.”
CJ nodded. “Occasionally with high-priced call girls, I know. I distinctly remember yelling at you about it. This prevents you from looking adorable when you pout, how, exactly?”
Sam looked yet more pouty and adorable. “I just know that it does.” There was a pause before he said: “You know what would cheer me right up right now?”
“Does it involve me, Carol, and a couch?”
He grimaced. “Well, yes…”
“Give me chocolate and I might pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Sighing in resignation, Sam pushed across a half-empty box of Godivas. “I didn’t eat all of these. Toby and Josh ate a lot of them, even though they said that they didn’t eat chocolate because they weren’t girls.”
“You’ve been in here, vegging out in front of chick flicks and eating all the soft centers, haven’t you?” CJ observed conversationally as she hunted for the key lime truffles.
Sam looked evasive. “I’m not sure that they would count as ‘chick flicks’?”
“Did anyone get a terminal illness? Did any children have to be rehomed?”
“There may possibly have been some rehoming of soon-to-be-orphaned children involved.”
CJ shook her head. “I don’t believe it. You, Toby and Josh have been sitting here, passing around the Kleenex and the Godivas while sniffling over ‘Who Will Love My Children?’”
“I’m wired up to a lot of machinery. It wasn’t actually possible for me to move. And we were trying to find sports to watch. And we’re all still in a very stressed and emotional state and naturally more inclined to respond to emotionally manipulative imagery and that music they play with the violins. Also, there were soon-to-be-orphaned children.”
“You’re all girls,” CJ told him, through a mouthful of chocolate.
“I think that has actually already been established,” Sam admitted with a sigh. “So, what’s happening with the…?”
“No.” CJ gave him a stern look. “I’m under strict instructions from Leo and Mrs. Bartlet. No one is allowed to talk to you about policy.”
“But, I’m just sitting here all day, I could…”
“No. Absolutely not. Sam, Toby has been told in no uncertain terms that if he even thinks about giving you a speech to polish, there will be bloodshed. You have to rest and recuperate.”
“Writing speeches is how I rest and recuperate. When I can’t go sailing or do anything, you know…fun.”
“We can play poker with you, for money. We can mock you, should we feel so inclined. We can also eat your chocolates, grapes or any other foodstuffs you may have hanging around, but we are absolutely not allowed to put you to work.”
“You’re scared of the First Lady.”
“More to the point my boss is scared of the First Lady and he’s the guy giving me orders.”
“I saw in the paper that there is talk of Harrison trying to attach an amendment to the…”
CJ made zipping motions across her mouth and Sam rolled his eyes.
“If I can’t talk about this stuff I’m just going to get frustrated and…sick, really, really sick, and it’ll be all your fault.”
CJ sighed. “If you want, I could get you transferred to a different hospital. In Washington. And then we could all visit you a lot more and there could be more mockery, and eating of your foodstuffs.”
“Well, I’ll be out soon anyway…” Sam’s voice trailed off as he saw her expression. “How long do I have to stay in the hospital?”
“Until you finish the antibiotics for your pneumonia.”
“Ten days!” Sam’s eyes looked like saucers in his face. “You can’t be serious?”
“Sam, I know this must come as news to you, but pneumonia is actually a serious illness, people die from it. And, oddly enough, given that you were kept in a stinking cold cellar in eighteen inches of dirty water, given no food or water, lost two pints of blood from a bullet wound, and were already suffering from borderline hypothermia, are now still in the process of being re-hydrated, are on morphine, and have an infection in your lungs that I can hear in the corridor, the hospital doesn’t feel comfortable about patting you on the head and sending you home with an aspirin. So, yes, you have to stay under the care of qualified medical practitioners for another ten days, preferably without whining about it.”
“Please let them transfer me to Washington.” Sam gazed up at her pleadingly. “And let me have a notebook and a pen.”
“I can get you a pack of cards and any books you want to read. The complete works of Dickens if you’d like.”
“I want to read a spiral bound notebook, lined if possible.”
“How about those talking books? I can bring you in a CD player.”
Sam was implacable. “Spiral bound notebook, please. I’ll need a pen to read it with, preferably one with black ink.”
CJ sighed. “You have to hide it if Doctor Bartlet visits you – which she will.”
“I promise.”
She leaned across to kiss his forehead. “You scared me so badly. Don’t ever do that again.”
“I promise,” he said.
“Because you need to run to the gas station next time. If a car pulls up, don’t assume it’s someone asking for directions, assume that it’s white supremacists with really big guns and run away. Okay?”
“Okay.”
CJ sighed. “You’re going to lean in the window and give them directions, aren’t you?”
Sam grimaced. “Probably.” There was a pause before he said: “That whole joke about the chain and the padlock and having to live in Toby’s office. It’s…it is a joke, right?”
CJ looked impassive. “Oh yeah.”
“Because you wouldn’t actually do that to me, would you?”
“Gosh, no. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Sam gave her a look of outrage. “You’re trying to lure me into the White House on false pretenses so you can keep me prisoner!”
“It would be for your own good,” she assured him. “And it’s only for a few months while Toby and Josh’s nervous systems return to normal. And think of all the fun we can have – like throwing you food and seeing if you can catch it in your mouth.”
“If I’m chained to Toby’s couch then you and Carol had better be making out on it, that’s all I’m saying on the subject. Except that it would be wrong of you to be an accessory to an act of unlawful imprisonment, and it would be bad for the White House and the President, and I also think that the House of Representatives would jeer and point. And I would tell my mother and she would scold Josh and Toby – and you too, if you were a party to it – and she can actually be quite shrill.”
“Sorry to be the one to break it to you, bucko, but your mother thinks it’s a great idea. She offered to chip in on the cost of the chain. Even Donna has come round to thinking it’s not such a bad idea since we talked up the safety first angle. Charlie’s the only one who’s still not completely convinced and I think we’ll have him on board by the end of the week.”
“Debbie wouldn’t let you. I have faith in Debbie.”
“Debbie’s already knitting you a nice sweater out of some of her leftover alpaca wool in case there’s a draught in Toby’s office.”
“I know that Margaret and Ginger would never…”
“Already baking cookies. They’re looking forward to getting a chance to feed you up. Apparently your healthy diet was driving everyone nuts, not just me.”
“You have no possible justification for blaming me for the fact that I was kidnapped. It’s unjust and unfair and…”
“And we’re doing it anyway.” CJ grabbed him by the front of his gown and yanked him forward. “You scared the living crap out of us, Sam. So, you’re grounded until further notice. Perhaps when you’ve convinced us that you’re safe to be let out without a keeper we may consider it. In the future we may even permit you to move more than five miles away from Washington. Until that day you can consider yourself under house arrest.”
“That’s not only completely unreasonable but also completely unenforceable, as well.”
“You go right on thinking that, Spanky.”
Sam looked suitably crushed. “Please may I have a notebook, CJ? I have never been without a notebook for this long before and I think I may be going into withdrawal. I’m experiencing tremors and I think I may be starting to hallucinate evenly spaced lines.”
She rose to her feet. “I will bring you a notebook.”
“And a pen, please.”
“And a pen. But – and this is a huge ‘but’ – if you try to write a speech, and even if you manage to write a speech while still on morphine, and smuggle it to Toby through some nefarious underground hospital barter system, everyone will recognize the passages that you wrote, and there will be yelling.”
“I’m going to get yelled at anyway as soon as I withdraw my nomination.”
“Anyone gets to yell at you about that over my dead body,” CJ said flatly.
He lit up. “So, you agree with me?”
“No, of course, I don’t. It’s the Quixotic impulse of a hopeless idealist. It’s bad for the Party. It’s bad for the President. And it’s going to be the kiss of death to your political career. You should grab those sympathy votes and run like hell for Congress. But – and this is an even bigger ‘but’ than the other one – no one, and I mean no one, who isn’t your mother, the President, the First Lady, Leo, Josh, Toby, Donna, Charlie, Debbie, or myself gets to yell at you right now. They absolutely don’t.”
She liked his smile. She liked it when he didn’t get something straight away and then he did, and he smiled like he couldn’t even help himself, and it went straight to that touched look in his ridiculously blue eyes. Pausing by the door, she gazed at him for a moment, still drinking him in. Sam Seaborn. Alive. Alive. Oh.
“I think I would have liked you as a sister,” he said, as if he had never considered the idea until now but was now giving it a great deal of thought. “I think there would have been downsides. I think there may have been some pinching and hair pulling and possibly some verbal and physical abuse, but I also think I would have liked it, on the whole, really a lot.”
“I think you would, too.” CJ smiled at him. “And I can tell you – those guys at your fancy-shmancy school who used to beat you up every recess? They might have done it to you once. They would absolutely not have done it twice.” And then she was walking along the corridor with the biggest smile on her face as she pulled out her cell-phone and began to make the call to Leo to arrange for Sam to be transferred to the nearest hospital to the White House for the urgent and important reason that they just all really needed him close by.
***
Tracy had paid him a visit to say goodbye. He’d looked up at the sound of her tentative knock on the door and he’d had the shock of realizing that he recognized her more from the news reports about his continuing recovery than from their real life encounter in that dark cellar or their confused reunion in the hospital when they had both been too full of morphine to make a great deal of sense. This was really the first time they had seen each other by daylight and not through a haze of drugs.
“Hey…” she said awkwardly.
Sam took her in, the way her arm was in a sling, the cut on her forehead, but also the way she was out of that hospital gown now and wearing normal clothes, and, unlike him, was allowed to go home on account of not having pneumonia. The way she wasn’t dead. He grinned at her. “Hey, yourself.”
She came forward and sat by his bed. “They said I could see you before they…took you away.”
“They’re just transferring me to Washington, not hauling me off to the cuckoo’s nest.”
“Don’t be so sure. Your friends are all crazy. They’re probably going to lock you up in the basement of the White House and never let you out.”
Sam considered the point. “It would in all probability be the Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution room. I wonder if my Gilbert & Sullivan posters are still up.” He flapped his own sling at her. “Hey, we have matching slings.”
“Perhaps we can start a fashion.” She craned her neck to look at the information at the end of his bed. “I told you that you had pneumonia.”
“No one likes a smartass, Tracy, trust me, I know.”
Tracy gave him a pitying look. “Other kids used to stick your head down the pan and give you a swirly, didn’t they?”
“No,” he returned with dignity. “I’ll have you know that I was very popular.”
She snorted. “I’m so not going there.” As he blinked at her in confusion, she bit her lip. “You really aren’t safe to be let out without a keeper, are you?”
“Would this be a good moment to point out that you were just as kidnapped as I was?” He met her gaze and saw her remembering it too, the cellar, and the fear, and the bullets, and the pain, and the shock of the impact and then the cold as the blood flowed out of you much too fast. “It’s a miracle you’re not dead. I thought I’d got you killed.”
She sat down on the bed next to him. “Yeah, well, you didn’t. You saved my life. And if it comes to that, I thought I’d got you killed.”
“Well, you didn’t.” He reached out awkwardly with his right hand to take hold of hers. “You saved my life too.”
“I did so many things wrong.”
As she tried to pull her hand away, he tightened his grip on it. “And you think I didn’t? I should have waited until it was dark.”
“And what if they’d come in the second it was dark? Then you’d be kicking yourself for having waited.”
“You could have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“I should never have let you go up there alone. I should have tried harder to get free and gone with you. I should have…”
Tracy sat back. “Okay, very clever. I get it. Everyone goes over it and over it and wonders what they should have done differently, but that doesn’t alter the fact that some of the things I did were dumb.”
“And the fact that some of the things we did were dumb doesn’t alter the fact that we’re both still alive as a consequence of the choices that we made and the actions we carried out, and that if we had acted differently there is no guarantee that one or both of us might not be dead now.”
Tracy gazed at him for a moment, not pulling her hand out of his and then sighed. “You know, you look really crappy with those bruises and everything.”
“And may I take this opportunity to point out that you can’t go to your Junior Prom with your arm in a sling.”
“Says you. Because it’s a few weeks away still and by then my arm will be out of the sling and I’m going.”
“Do you have a date?” Sam asked.
She removed her fingers from his. “None of your business.”
“Well, if you don’t have a date I don’t think it’s fair of you to blame me. I don’t think that it’s your public association with me that will be ruining your social life, and I just want to make that clear from the outset.”
“It’s certainly not going to help my social life. How stupid do you think it makes me look that I got kidnapped the same way as some ditzy politician who went to Princeton and doesn’t even have the sense to run away when a bunch of neo-Nazis stop their car right next to him?”
“So, how were you kidnapped?” Sam challenged.
There was a pause while Tracy was clearly looking around for an excuse. She settled on a lofty: “I had my mind on higher things.”
“You were daydreaming about Prom dresses.”
“I’m a teenager, what’s your excuse?”
Sam made like a goldfish for a moment before triumphantly insisting: “I was thinking about policy.”
“You were thinking about supper. You couldn’t decide if you wanted The Kung Pao Chicken or Moo Goo Gai Pien.”
“Actually, it was the Moo Shu Vegetables or Szechuan Shrimp, and have you been talking to my friends?”
Tracy said gently: “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“I’m glad I’m not dead, too.” He held her gaze. “I thought they’d killed you. I heard the gunshots, I thought…”
“But they didn’t. We’re both alive and they’re all dead and I think we must have done something right.” Tracy spoke with confidence but her eyes sought reassurance, from a grown up to someone who still really wasn’t, even if she had been forced to assume that mantle for a while.
“Yeah, I’d say that was a given,” Sam nodded. “Thanks for saving my life, by the way. I’m glad you did that, rather than, I don’t know, going shopping or, say – bleeding to death by the side of the road.”
“Yeah, me too. Thank you for saving mine as well. I’m not saying I’m going to always be grateful, maybe I really won’t be if my SAT scores suck, but at the moment…” She snatched a breath. “At the moment, I’m glad not to be dead.”
“Are you going to come and see me in Washington?”
She snorted again. “Are you kidding? I’m not going to a place where it snows.”
“On some maps Washington DC is actually much closer to Florida than it is to Massachusetts.”
“Which maps?” she demanded cynically.
“Well, inaccurate ones, obviously. But we’re really not as cold as say – Maine, or most of Canada – a country where we are led to believe that many people live out useful and productive lives – although I’m willing to concede that could just be propaganda. Also there are sweaters. You’re familiar with the knitwear of Tommy Hilfiger?”
“Didn’t he go on Oprah and say…?”
“That’s an urban myth,” Sam assured her. “And if you came to Washington I have it on good authority that Donna and CJ will take you shopping for a prom dress, which, frankly, would be my idea of hell on earth, but I am given to understand that for teenage girls it’s a less horrifying prospect.”
“I think you’d look good in a prom dress,” Tracy assured him.
“I think having an older sister may possibly be of some use and comfort but I am canceling any outstanding orders I may have placed in a moment of weakness for a younger sibling, of any gender, but especially a sister.”
“If you’d had a sister growing up you wouldn’t talk the way you do and you would know how to get girls,” Tracy assured him.
“What makes you think I don’t know how to ‘get’ girls?” Sam countered, stung.
Tracy looked abruptly bashful. Coughing quickly, she said, “No reason.”
Sam regarded her for a moment while she squirmed uneasily. “You Googled me.”
“I never laid a finger on you.”
“You know what I mean.” He gave her a very level look. “So…?”
“So, I Googled you. Are you going to tell me that’s an invasion of your privacy?”
“I think it probably was.”
“I think everything I read was in the public domain, and anyway, it’s nothing important. Lots of people aren’t married at your age.”
Sam had so many alarm bells going off in his head that he wondered why he wasn’t deafened by them. “It didn’t happen to mention…? No, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to know if you’d read some… Because there are some things that aren’t how they might appear to be, and if you had read them, then, in my defense, I would just like to make it clear that at the time when I spent the night with Laurie I actually had no way of knowing that she was a…” He realized there was no way to end that sentence that was in any way appropriate to the age of the person with whom he was conversing.
Tracy grimaced sympathetically. “A hooker?”
“It was not at the time of our first meeting known to me that Laurie was a high-priced call girl and I did not at any point solicit her for…” Sam broke off. “I don’t think I’m allowed to talk to you about things like this on account of you being…not over eighteen. And how much did you actually read?”
“Hardly anything,” Tracy assured him in a way that was not remotely convincing. His face must have revealed his cynicism as she looked uncomfortable. “Nothing that makes me think any less of you. I think it’s kind of sweet that people call you the ‘White House Pin Up Boy’.”
“What?” Sam looked at her, aghast. “It says that? It actually says that?”
“And lots of people have broken engagements. And get fired from their jobs.” It didn’t help at all that she was so obviously trying to make him feel better.
“I wasn’t fired,” he protested. “I left Gage Witney of my own volition.”
“Did you really get up in the middle of a meeting and run off with Josh Lyman?”
“No, I…” Sam thought back to that day. “I would call that a very misleading interpretation of events.”
“So, it didn’t happen?” Tracy nodded. “I know half the stuff on the Internet is just made up.”
“Well, technically speaking, it did actually happen but not in the way they’re implying.”
“It’s really LemonLyman dot com that has most of the threads about you and Mr. Lyman and how…” She turned the end of her sentence into a cough and then gave him a reassuring smile. “You don’t really need to know any of that stuff. Or any of the things it says on there. It’s actually a very amateurish sort of forum. And seriously over-moderated. White House Gossip dot org is much better. Although you probably shouldn’t read that one either.” In a hasty change of subject she said: “Are you going to be billing me for saving your life, by the way? As you’re a lawyer.”
“No, although I may be suing you at some later date, just because I can. What else did it say about me?” Sam demanded.
“You talk too much.” Tracy smiled at him. “And you’re okay.”
“It says that on Google?”
“Yeah, only a girl has to read a whole bunch of your speeches first, but yeah, that’s pretty much what it says. It says you’re okay. It says it’s probably better for the world than not that you’re alive and not getting laid any time soon rather than dead in a stinking cellar with a bullet in your head.”
“You know, as a professional speech-writer, I would just like to point out how much more heart-warming that last comment would have been without the ‘not getting laid any time soon’ section.”
Tracy bit her lip to stop a grin. “I think that was what made it myself.”
“When I was at school, no one wanted to date the smart girls. I’m just letting you know that as a favor.”
“Yeah, because the nerds who wear glasses and always put their hand up to answer all the questions, they’re just beating the girls off with a stick at my school.”
“I was not a nerd.”
“You were President of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society and a member of the chess club. You were also a member of the Astronomy Society, the Debating Society, the Guys Who Never Get Laid For Social Reform Society – ”
“That was not what we were called,” Sam insisted. “We were the Students for Progressive Education and Action, and I only joined the chess club because a girl I liked was a member too.”
“Bet she dated another girl before she dated you.”
“Actually she did, but there is no possible way that you could have deduced that, meaning it was just a lucky guess and therefore shouldn’t count in this debate.”
“Have you ever looked at the Princeton website? Everyone on it wears corduroy and has glasses. Didn’t you ever look around at the other students and at least wonder if you weren’t a total dweeb?”
“No, I did not,” Sam retorted, although in a way that he feared probably betrayed that if he hadn’t wondered about it then he was certainly wondering about it now.
Tracy straightened his coverlet for him. “Is Charles Young still dating the President’s daughter?”
“No, I think they split up. Why, were you…?” Sam broke off. “You like Charlie?”
Tracy shrugged. “He just seems more sensible than…all of the rest of you put together.”
“Well, he is,” Sam conceded. “But, he’s… Well, he’s… I’m trying to think of any fault Charlie has and basically I’ve got nothing except that he’s older than you and lives in Washington, where it does occasionally snow.”
“If I was to come to Washington to see you, is there a chance I might get to see him too?”
“Most people ask for a trip to the White House for a chance to shake the hand of the President.”
Tracy just looked at him and Sam shrugged. “But flying to Washington because there’s a boy you like the look is a valid lifestyle choice, too. Although I do think I get to reserve the right to possibly tell your brother, who will definitely tease you.”
Tracy narrowed her eyes. “Tell Charles Young that I like the look of him and I will smother you with a pillow and say you had a relapse, and that goes double for you telling Eli.”
“You’d smother me twice? Because, wouldn’t the second time technically be redundant as you’d effectively be smothering a…?” As Tracy snatched up a pillow, Sam held up his hands in a placatory fashion. “I won’t say a word to Charlie or your brother but I do reserve the right to annoy and ridicule you in private.”
Tracy held out her right hand. “Done.”
He grasped her hand in his, gazing at her, this girl who was not dead because of him, and was even perhaps alive because of him, and couldn’t stop it showing in his eyes, how very relieved he was that she was okay. “Done.”
Removing her fingers from his she leaned forward to stroke his hair back from his forehead, a sisterly action, in no way self-conscious despite the twenty-year difference in their ages. Almost to herself, she murmured: “You really need to get a haircut.”
***
Josh could hear the yelling as he stepped out of the elevator. It took him a few more seconds to realize that the yelling was actually coming from Sam’s room and to recognize the voice doing the yelling. He looked at Toby, saw him also comprehend what was going on, and then they both reached out to restrain the other in the same instant.
“You can’t…” Josh gasped.
“I was just going to tell you the same thing,” Toby managed a little breathlessly.
Josh looked at his expression. “You do want to, though?”
“Like you don’t?” Toby countered.
Then they were striding down the corridor towards the sound of Steven Wynn’s roars of rage.
“It’s a walk over! It’s a shoe-in! It’s a dead certainty! Seabiscuit was a rank outsider by comparison!” –
“Actually, Steve, I think you’ll find that Seabiscuit was – ”
“Be quiet when I’m talking. Unless you’re groveling for mercy or telling me that you’re going to withdraw that withdrawal of your nomination, don’t make any noise at all, until I finish speaking…”
“I’m sorry that you’re angry but, as I told you on the phone, I don’t want to get into Congress on the coat tails of being kidnapped. I don’t want to get in on a sympathy vote…”
“The Democratic Party you are meant to be supporting doesn’t care how you get into Congress, Seaborn, it just cares that you do!”
Toby and Josh arrived breathlessly at the doorway of Sam’s room to find Steven Wynn stomping up and down in the confined space, throwing his arms into the air, and ranting about the chance that Sam was throwing away, the harm he was doing his party, how he was never going to get another nomination in any district anywhere, ever, and that Steven Wynn was going to personally make sure that he was dismembered very slowly with a wire coat hanger if he didn’t withdraw the withdrawal of his nomination right now.
At close range and in full spate, Wynn was actually rather magnificent. He was also extremely tall, broad shouldered, and menacing. Sitting up in his hospital bed, Sam looked a lot smaller than Josh remembered, and very bruised. Although he was sticking to his guns as far as his argument went, there was something conciliatory in his body language that looked half self-preservation and half sheer muscle memory.
Josh cleared his throat and said tentatively: “I don’t think you’re actually allowed to talk to Sam like that. I mean, not just because he’s supposed to be your political candidate and you’re supposed to be…respectful and stuff, but because he’s in the hospital…”
“You’re running for Congress, Seaborn,” Wynn ignored Josh to intone ominously, looming over Sam in a way that made him slide an inch further down the bed.
“Have you seen how much I’m ahead in the polls?” Sam said rapidly. “How much campaigning did I do when I was in that cellar? None. So, it has nothing to do with people agreeing with my message or being won over by my rhetoric or…”
Wynn slammed his hands down on the pillow on each side of Sam’s head. “I don’t care why you’re up, I just care that you are. You’re running, do you understand me? You’re running in this damned race and you’re winning or, so help me, I am going to take you out to a very dark, very lonely place, where I will – ”
Sam flinched as Wynn loomed over him. “Steve, if you’d just listen, I’m sure you’ll understand why…”
“A very dark, very lonely place where I swear no one on Earth will be able to hear your screams even though there will be many of those, oh dear, yes….”
“I don’t think you should threaten him like that, or that threatening him like that is in any way legal….” Toby’s voice trailed off a little at the end as Wynn fixed him with a look over his shoulder that would have made even Lionel Tribbey think twice.
Wynn gave Josh and Toby a look of withering contempt. “I know you two just want him back in the White House where he can be your pet lawyer and trained speech monkey, but I am getting him into Congress, and anyone who tries to stop me getting him into Congress is going to turn into one of those awkward puzzles for coroners where they have to fit all the body parts back in the correct order!”
Toby looked at Josh. “You could be right about the wet towels thing.”
Josh thought he was definitely right about the wet towels thing; the way Sam’s body was scooting down the bed to get away from Wynn it was definitely expecting its homework to get thrown into a puddle any minute, and was downright flinching in readiness of a Chinese burn.
Despite the way he was now almost horizontal, Sam said with a stubborn determination that was either brave or foolhardy – Josh had not yet decided which: “You can yell all you like, Steve, I’ve made my decision.”
“Well, you can unmake it again or else you can find out what your insides look like when you’re turned inside out.”
“That’s – coercion,” Josh offered feebly.
“This is a cozy chat amongst friends,” Wynn retorted through gritted teeth. “This is a walk on the beach, a stroll in the park. You haven’t seen me angry yet.”
Sam sunk even lower in the bed. “I’m not getting elected because I was kidnapped,” he repeated defiantly, but he looked anxious when Wynn leaned over him all the same.
“You know what your trouble is, Seaborn?” Wynn demanded. “You weren’t beaten up enough in High School. I made a good start with you in middle school and I thought I’d got you back on track at Princeton, but, no, you had those few years where no one was teaching you to do as you’re damned well told and this is the result.”
“Bobby Zane did actually – ” Sam began a little feebly.
“Bobby Zane is a pussy!” Wynn snapped back. “And I’m calling him to tell him that the second I make you see the error of your ways.”
“I’m not running…” Sam swallowed nervously.
Josh hurried forward. “And you can’t make him,” he said bravely.
“No.” Toby stood next to him. “You can’t.”
Josh murmured to Toby: “I feel one of us should be adding a ‘so there’ at some point.”
“I feel one of us should be carrying a weapon of some kind,” Toby whispered back. “Or at least wearing protective clothing. Possibly a bullet proof vest…”
Wynn shoved Josh and Toby out of the way. “When I want input from the White House, I’ll ask for it. Which will be never, by the way.” He loomed back over Sam. “Listen to me, Seaborn, you stupid, stubborn little sonofabitch, you are going to…”
“Don’t you dare talk to him like that!”
Josh and Toby both jumped at the furious venom in that voice and turned around to find CJ striding into the room in heels that took her up to Wynn’s height, rage in her eyes and quivering through her long-legged body. She prodded Wynn hard in the chest with her finger, and he did take an automatic step backwards. “Don’t you ever and I mean ever raise your voice to him again, do you hear me?”
Wynn took another step back, trying to bluster: “He’s throwing away his – ”
“And it’s his decision, and Sam is an adult who gets to make his own decisions, and – guess what? – you don’t get to yell at him about it – ever. He decided he wanted to run and you got allocated by the DNC to help him, well, now he’s not running, your services are no longer required, so back off and get the hell out of his hospital room or I’m going to call the First Lady, who, in case you might have forgotten, has a medical degree. That means she knows how to do very, very painful things to you with very, very sharp objects. And don’t think Donna Moss and Amy Gardner and I won’t be holding you down for her, because we most certainly will.”
Wynn blanched a little and took another step backwards. “It’s not just his own career, it’s the best chance the party has of ever winning the California 47th…”
CJ took another step forward, fixing him with a gimlet eye, much in the manner that a mongoose would stare down a snake. “And he nearly died and we don’t care about the California 47th right now. We don’t care about Congress either. So, go away and leave him alone or I swear Very Bad Things will happen to you.”
Wynn backed up towards the door, flashing Sam a last look of exasperation. “You’re a bad Democrat, Seaborn, and ungrateful, and unprofessional and…”
“Out!” CJ ordered imperiously.
Wynn left the room, then hesitated in the corridor and came back in. “I’m glad you’re not dead, you little wash out,” he muttered, apparently more embarrassed at being nice than being intimidated by CJ, and then backed out and hurried off.
CJ turned on Josh and Toby in disbelief. “You were just standing there letting that guy yell at Sam?”
“We were honing our counter-arguments,” Toby returned.
“You were letting him yell at Sam?”
“He’s bigger than us,” Josh muttered.
“Also, we were honing,” Toby insisted. “I almost had the perfect answer to his position when you came in and made reasoned debate redundant by your yelling and issuing of threats.”
“Talking of which – ‘Very Bad Things’?” Josh looked at her in disbelief. “That’s the best you could come up with?”
“Did it get rid of him or not?”
Josh had to reluctantly accede that Steven Wynn did indeed appear to have gone, and that he had, it was true, been here and been yelling until her appearance.
“So, shut up then,” CJ suggested. She sat next to Sam’s bedside and felt his forehead anxiously. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, Sam,” Josh smirked. “Are you okay or did the Bad Man upset you?”
CJ just looked at Josh over her shoulder. “Do you actually want to know how a stiletto feels when it’s rammed up your ass or would you like to go and fetch me some coffee?”
“And I’m on my way to the coffee dispenser, apparently,” Josh murmured.
“And I’m coming with you,” Toby added firmly.
As they escaped from the room, CJ was still feeling Sam’s brow, presumably to see if it was fevered, and adjusting his covers maternally.
Toby looked back at the woman with pride. “She is rather magnificent on occasion.”
Josh grinned. “She really is.” He caught Toby’s arm and held him back. “Wait…”
“For what?”
“To make sure Steve Wynn isn’t still around. We both know CJ would dismember anyone who laid a finger on Sam’s shiny little head. I’m not so sure she’d do it for us, and he may know that too.”
“Good point.” They both waited in the corridor, looking as the second hand of their watches swept around the dial, before tentatively heading in the direction of the coffee machine; safe in the knowledge that while CJ was in Sam’s room he was better protected than by a tigress who considered him one of her cubs.
***