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 47 ^th . 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 principals. 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 was 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 everbefore 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 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 innocence 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 47 ^th 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 47 ^th .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 47 ^th . 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 principals. 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 of 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 phoning 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 47 ^th , that means he's stuck with having to run in the California 47 ^th 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 47 ^th 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 principals 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 47 ^th 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 like 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 Big Macs 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 beautiful 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 Josh 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 was 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 fry 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, 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 th