And The World Stood Still

by:SheilaVR

Character(s): Jed & Co.
Category(s): General
Rating: TEEN
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is actually intended, but no threat of same will stop me from fantasizing about "The West Wing" anyway...
Summary: The President demonstrates that alcohol and motorcades do not mix.
Author's Note:I wrote this shortly before we heard any details about the first season finale episode. So, for all intents and purposes, humor me and pretend that "What Kind of Day Has It Been" never took place.

The day passed very slowly, even for government...

It took Josh most of that day to track down the four people he *normally* worked closest with - not because the White House was so labyrinthine (which it was) but because he absolutely had to contact them without their new partners' awareness. To accomplish this involved drafting half of the lower staff echelon into messenger service and organizing them to spell each other off on covert surveillance so that it didn't look like any one person was waiting around for a chance to share information with certain people and not with certain others.

The Vice-President's employees would naturally know most of the tricks to this peculiar trade called politics, but they couldn't know most of the thirteen hundred employees all around them. So Josh gave a note to Donna, who gave it to Jeffery, who slipped it to Sam when passing him in the hall, who ducked out of sight to scribble his reply. Sam then handed it off to Ginger, who gave it to Bonnie, who waited around as long as she dared before giving it to Andrew, who eventually gave it to Carol, who finally managed to smuggle it to Toby. All of this orchestrated through only a few whispered words and significant glances. It was a measure of desperation rather than trust that brought Danny Concannon into the conspiracy, but it reaped rich dividends: he found CJ and Mandy in the same room, with Robert, who did not know yet to suspect this particular reporter. And about said reporter the *real* Press Secretary made no move to enlighten the *acting* Press Secretary. Working together without a word in advance, Danny and CJ kept Robert's attention focused while Mandy added her own two cents to that paper, and then Mandy joined Danny in covering for CJ in the same fashion.

There was a basic standard that such important and public figures rarely discussed business out of the office, since even the most private places could be compromised when state secrets were concerned. Then again, if this quintet was observed getting together anywhere inside or outside the White House, unaccompanied, by any of their veritable shadows from that *other* office (or any affiliate, for that matter), suspicions would skyrocket and with justification. So four of them carried out a pretense of wrapping for the night, in some cases leaving with their "apprentices", and headed straight home like good civil servants. Leo had already departed by that point, no doubt under watchful eyes; Hoynes drew things out as long as he could before being limoed away in presidential splendor.

Ages later, Donna stuck her head into Josh's office. "Josh?"

Slumped in his chair, he rolled his head sideways from the boring TV newscast. His eyes were heavier than usual. "Is this stupid vigil finally over?"

She nodded, smiling. "The last of the enemy has retreated from the field."

"Hallelujah." He rubbed a hand over his face in weariness. "Which means that you are hereby officially relieved of duty. Go on, beat it."

"How gracious of you." Long used to his attitudes, Donna left with alacrity before he could change his mind.

Groaning from the effort, Josh stretched for his phone and dialed out. When the other party answered, he had only two words to pass along: "They're gone."

Within another thirty minutes the other senior four, now in civvies, had signed themselves back in. Sam was last, and for good reason: he brought the supper. Predictably.

"One of these days I swear I'm going to retire from this," he complained as he plopped a huge pizza and a bag of soft drinks on the table.

"Oh, we can't let our resident expert do *that*," Mandy assured him pleasantly.

Josh locked the door to the meditation closet (it was really too small to be classified as a room, the five of them almost literally rubbing shoulders around its diminutive table) and plunked himself gracelessly into the last vacant chair. With his tie half-undone, two shirt buttons open and both sleeves sloppily rolled up, he met the evening's casual dress code as well as anyone else. "This is the first time I've relaxed all day."

"Ditto," Sam concurred, partitioning the pepperoni. "I had to lay off the coffee; it was making me too jittery."

"Oh, is *that* what was wrong," Toby wisecracked dryly. Still, he too lightened up in a relief shared by all that they didn't have to guard their every word and movement in this company, here, now. He'd even left *his* tie at home.

"Hey!" Mandy sat up suddenly, attracting attention at once. They'd all become far too accustomed to tension over the last seventy-two hours. "What if one of these hotshots thinks to check the sign-in sheets? They'll know we were all here together!"

"Well, so much for not fostering the *Us Against Them* scenario," Toby observed even more dryly, starting on his slice.

"You've been watching too many spy movies, kid," Josh suggested in that patronizing tone he did so well around her. Their romantic history might have had something to do with honing it. "Those records are for security eyes only. If Hoynes is so schizoid that he has to go to the Security Council and impound the White House access logs just to see if we *might* be chatting behind his back after quitting time, then I'd say we'll finally have solid grounds for wondering if *he's* got brain damage."

The lot of them traded amused glances. *If only...*

"Anyway, Hoynes & Co. were promised an invitation to any briefing Leo calls. Who, of course, has been under their observation all day. This one is *my* initiative." Josh exhaled. "I gotta tell you, I will be *so* glad when life gets back to normal. I don't go in much for this leadership thing."

Mandy couldn't resist a comeback. "Yeah, it's not keeping with your reputation."

Josh looked too tired to fight just now. "*Anyway*, I can always spread the blame around by saying you guys talked me into it."

Sam nodded amiably as he sat down with his own fifth of dinner. "Always glad to share the recriminations."

"I knew I could count on you."

"Hey, any new info about the President?"

All attention focused at once, humor forgotten.

"Not since this morning," Josh admitted.

Toby sighed. "What is the man waiting for? He's been home a day and a half already." He ignored the resulting snickers. "Can we get this over with? Bad enough that I have to spend the day around you characters; I really don't want to ruin my evening as well."

"We aim to please." Josh popped the tab on a soda can. "May I say that I'm gaining a new respect for hotel managers. I spent hours trying to place the balance of our new boarders where they'd be the hell out of our way without it looking like we *wanted* them the hell out of our way."

"One of your many questionable talents," Mandy assured him coyly.

"*You* try striking a balance between scattering them like so many land-mines all over the place, or else concentrating them like a nucleus of dissension in one spot. Either way, they just keep turning up everywhere you look. I'm tempted to draw a comparison with mushrooms: ugly and useless." He helped himself to a second cheese-dripping wedge. "So, did anyone *else* have an interesting day they'd like to talk about?" He did have the grace to ask before taking a bite and filling his mouth beyond coherence.

"*Interesting* doesn't *begin* to cover it," CJ said with velvet hardness, the first time she'd spoken since her arrival. "I feel like I'm training my own replacement."

"Seconded," Sam put in, scrubbing a napkin across his palms.

"I had to stand beside my own desk and listen to *his* advice. I introduced him at the press conference and then just stood to one side while he stumbled through it. I don't know which of us the cameras watched more." She threw down her well-gnawed crust remnant in frustration. And then nodded reluctantly. "But I'll say this much: Robert was reasonably decent about it *most* of the time. He might make a passable Press Secretary in the end."

Mandy looked less sarcastic and more thoughtful. "So if it does come to that, at least he's been trained right, huh?"

CJ wasn't smiling at all. "Damned right." She knocked back her diet cola as though wishing it was something a lot stronger.

"That's the proper spirit, people," Josh said, sounding a bit *too* much like the chairman of the board.

"But not the prevailing one," Toby ground out. Of the five, he was always the last to really kick back. "How Hoynes could bring himself to read a speech written by his own staff is further endorsement of his low standards and lower scruples. This guy Franco is even worse with punctuation than Sam."

"The listeners can't *tell*," Mandy said in as close to a pacifying tone as she was capable, before Sam could retaliate. Although she still spared him a smirk.

Toby shot her a look of disgust. "Is there a unified determination in these halls against striving for quality? Anything worth doing is worth doing right. And that's only a prelude to the actual content. No excellence of grammar could help there. It's inconceivable that he hasn't been laughed right out of office before this."

Josh endeavored to bring the topic back on track. "What's your personal take on their basic attitudes?"

Sam offered his two cents. "Before today I'd have said you couldn't find anyone more arrogant than Mandy - " She whirled on him and he hastily regrouped. "I mean - than Hoynes himself. But his staffers are getting just as bad as he is. Although I did reap a lot of personal pleasure at the prevalent confusion. It's *fun* messing with people's preconceptions this way. They've been knocked completely off-kilter by us actually being nice to them rather than fighting every inch."

"If nothing else, we just might be teaching them some manners," said Toby, not that he thought it likely. "That'll be a miracle in itself."

"And maybe they'll have a little more respect for what we go through around here," CJ wondered just a bit hopefully.

"And *maybe* Hoynes will stop wishing that the President takes a turn for the worse," Sam countered with cutting disbelief.

Josh snorted. "Not in our lifetime. In the interim, keep those crib notes up to date and out of sight. Here's hoping we can use them someday." Several snickers agreed with him. "And be sure to include any *other* ripples in the water that you happen across. If someone else around here thinks he, she, it or they can take advantage of the President's incapacitation, we'd better find out before the President or Hoynes does." He seemed to be settling into his leadership role rather well after all.

Mandy rose and stretched her cramped neck muscles. "*I'd* like to take advantage of it by wishing that *Hoynes* took a turn for the worse."

CJ grinned at that. "If anything should happen to our VP anytime soon, I promise never to mention this conversation to the police."

"Wait a minute!" Again, Mandy's sudden urgency riveted all eyes. "Speaking of police, we've been assuming all this time that the limo wreck was a simple accident. Do you suppose it's just possible that Hoynes *arranged* it? I mean, surely he'd be *able* to, and who in this world could possibly have a better motive?"

Silent disbelief greeted her. And Mandy did not take disbelief in her ideas calmly.

"I'm serious! The car driver could have been in on it from the start. After all, it's a minor miracle the President survived at all."

Four heads turned to each other. Weighing her words carefully.

"You've *got* to cut back on those mysteries of yours," CJ advised at last in a tolerant voice.

Mandy just folded her arms and glared.

"As if we need any further reasons not to trust Hoynes right now," Toby said blandly.

"Besides," Sam contributed, "the Secret Service must be on it. If they don't look at *him* first, there's something big-time wrong with their training methods."

Mandy fumed. "It's a perfectly valid theory -!"

"You can put away your magnifying glass, Jessica Fletcher," Josh told her. "We're not paying you to look for suspects."

"Problem-solving sharpens the mind," she stated through gritted teeth. "Something *you* could do well to remember."

Josh opened his mouth to retort, but CJ cut him off at the pass. "Can we *possibly* leave this argument for tomorrow? *Thank* you."

The others stood as well. "Well, one war council down," Toby summarized wearily. "Any guesses how many this is going to take before we can drive the invaders off our turf?"

"The fewer, the better." Sam gathered up the garbage from supper. "If we're going to keep our powwows quiet, I can't submit any of these receipts."

Josh came about at the last moment before anyone could open the closet door. "Oh, one more thing: Leo has a message for you-all."

Mandy winced at his butchered attempt at a Southern drawl. "No one's accent is *that* bad."

Toby's eyebrows rose noticeably. "Congratulations, Josh. You have finally been promoted to the Internal Courier Service."

"I prefer to think of myself as a field officer carrying orders from the colonel, thanks." The Deputy Chief of Staff cleared his throat. "Quote: At the appointed time, the senior staff is to hang back and let the lower ranks have a go. Unquote."

Four faces frowned at each other.

"Translation?" CJ asked first.

Josh shrugged. "No idea. But no doubt it'll make sense eventually, when the right moment comes - which I'm betting will be too late to do us much good."

*****

Chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

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