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Charlie shrugged. �All I know is that it�s green, looks like a wheat grass shake, and the wait-staff at Georgetowne Station usually refuse to order them for her.�
Rolling his eyes, Bartlet waved Charlie out of the office to round up the remains of his Senior Staff. Though he was something of a busybody, Bartlet was learning that whenever he tried to find something out about the lives of his staffers he ended up alternatively confused, amused, and infuriated, all things that took up more time than he had to spare at that moment.
While he waited for Leo, Josh, Sam, and Toby to arrive, Bartlet reread the slim file that Nancy had left with him. There wasn�t much in there, most of the scant number of pages showing nothing more thrilling than basic research that anyone could do on the internet in a few minutes, certainly not anything like what he was accustomed to coming out of the Situation Room. Travel outline for Hoynes� trip, statistics on the building itself, a few details on the area, and a brief summery of the Secret Service protection that had been added to the Vice President�s detail while he was travelling.
Josh was the first to arrive, followed almost immediately by Sam and Toby. Leo was the last to appear, his suit rumpled in a way that Bartlet hadn�t seen it since the days of booze and pills and Leo passing out on a couch heedless of his Savant Row suit that was being tortured by its wearer. There were no jokes, no banter, and no CJ; though Bartlet supposed that the last wasn�t all that odd seeing as many Oval Office meetings didn�t include the Press Secretary, whether for reasons of job description or maintaining her level of deniability. He wondered how whoever was going to stand behind the podium in CJ�s place would explain the fact that she wasn�t there during what amounted to a major crisis. Then, as quickly as the thought had come to Bartlet�s mind, it vanished because he had long ago stopped worrying about things like that; that was why he had a staff, after all.
�The consensus in the Sit Room is that we hold back, quash any press leaks, and wait for them to make the first move. I don�t like it, but it�s the right thing to do at this moment so that�s what we�re going to do,� Bartlet said without preamble. �Sam, you sat with them,� he said, nodding his head in the general direction of the Situation Room. �Is there anything Nancy didn�t tell me that I should know?�
Feeling a little like he was being asked to rat out the kid who beat up the first graders at recess�a role he had been stuck with far too often in the early years of grade school, the teachers feeling that he was popular enough to not have to worry about the playground equivalent to retribution and unobtrusive enough that any bullies wouldn�t notice the lanky kid who was earnest in every sense of the word and who, after the bully had moved on to other scared little kids, had been known to make sure that the target had enough for milk or juice at lunch to go with their peanut-butter and jelly sandwich and carrot sticks or whatever they had in their little cubby hole in the coat room inside their classroom door�Sam shifted his weight awkwardly before finally shrugging.
�They�re frustrated, sir. The instinct for most of them was to go in with some kind of stealth� military, CIA� wetworks kind of thing, I guess, but the CIA director refused to act in the situation without a direct order from this office,� Sam said, his eyes flitting from the Resolute desk to the seal on the floor before turning to the President himself.