by Laura Hayden
“Wait until you see tomorrow’s tie. Kev made it himself. It’s great.” With a smile of paternal pride, he added, “I may have spawned a future candidate for Project Runway. He’s redirecting that overwhelming need to spray-paint graffiti on every available surface into much more acceptable avenues.”
“Good for him. I know you’re relieved.”
Emily had already started her circuit around the room, greeting the staff; then she reached Dozier, still seated.
She patted him on the shoulder with obvious affection. “Didn’t your momma ever tell you to stand when a lady enters the room, young man?”
He bobbed his white head. “She did indeed and she’d be rolling in her grave if she could see me now. I’m sorry, Madam President, but I’m just a little stove up this morning. If you’ll forgive an old man his frailties . . .”
She gave him an indulgent smile. “Consider yourself forgiven.” She stood beside his chair, her hand remaining on his shoulder and turned to address the room. “Now, if you all don’t mind, let’s get this meeting started.”
They took their seats and the waitstaff quickly brought in breakfast, served family style. Emily had mentioned to Kate that she liked the more informal atmosphere that was generated when people were passing around heaping platters of food. It brought out hidden personality quirks—who held the platter for the next person, who took too much, who took too little, and so forth.
Burl had seated himself at the corner of the table next to Dozier, who sat at the end. When the platter slipped from the old man’s hands, Burl caught it before its contents spilled.
“Are you okay, sir?”
Dozier’s gaze was somewhat fixed. His face was pale and waxy-looking.
“N-no, son.” He seemed to have trouble catching his breath. “I’m not feeling that good.”
At that moment, Dozier slumped over to the left and would have tumbled from his chair had Burl not dropped the platter and reached for the man instead.
“Give me some help,” Burl grunted as he lowered Dozier to the floor. “I think he’s having a heart attack!”
THE ROOM EXPLODED IN MOVEMENT. Burl Bochner and Harold Morelli pushed back chairs to make more room on the floor for Dozier. Kate tried to get around the tangle of chairs and people in her way.
Burl loosened the old man’s collar and tie and began to feel around for his pulse while Morelli bent down and listened to Dozier’s chest.
“I don’t hear a heartbeat.”
Burl looked up with a stricken face. “I can’t find a pulse.”
Morelli immediately began chest compressions. An ashen-faced Francesca Reardon fumbled for her cell phone, ostensibly to dial 911, but Kate waved away her efforts. She picked up the phone next to the door in order to call in a level B code blue medical alert, which would indicate that someone other than the president required emergency medical treatment. Before she could get the words out, a Secret Service agent burst into the room, alerted by the commotion.
She grabbed his arm to stop him. “The president is fine. It’s Dozier Marsh. We think he’s having a heart attack. Get the doctor up here. Pronto.”
Thanks to the intricate web of security, Kate knew the message would be instantly relayed directly to the doctor’s office, which was only a couple hundred feet away on the ground floor of the White House residence.
A few precious moments later, Dr. Peter Crockett and two medical technicians arrived at a dead run. Between them, they carried a medical kit, a portable defibrillator, and a small tank of oxygen.
The advisers backed up and out of the room, trying to allow the doctor and his team the maximum space to maneuver. But curiosity and concern kept them close by in the corridor, where they knotted together, trying to get a glimpse of the situation without making themselves appear like vultures.
In just a matter of moments, a team of paramedics arrived with a gurney. Less than five minutes later, they loaded Dozier up.
Crockett stepped aside to allow the paramedics and the gurney to pass. The usually robust-looking Dozier looked years older, with gray, pinched features. However, he did seem somewhat aware of his location and the situation.
As he was carried past Emily, he reached out and touched her hand. She fell into step alongside the gurney, his hand in hers. Kate stayed a few steps behind. When they slowed to negotiate the first turn in the hallway, she took the opportunity to lean down and whisper, “Don’t you die on me, old man. We’ve got too much work to do yet.”
He managed a wink despite the oxygen mask.
“Ma’am?” The paramedic seemed at a loss for words. Exactly how did you inform the president of the United States that she was holding up their progress?
Kate stepped up and patted Emily and Dozier’s clasped hands. Then, with the utmost care, she extricated Emily from his weak grasp.
“They’re taking him to Bethesda, and you know what good care they’ll give him there,” she said to Emily. Well-versed in literally dozens of contingency plans, Kate even knew which of five different routes the ambulance would likely take to the Bethesda naval hospital.
Emily betrayed far more emotion than Kate expected. In any given situation, Emily was usually the picture of calmness and control, the true marks of leadership, but Dozier’s serious problem obviously rattled her. She looked at the procession as it moved down the hallway, then turned to Dr. Crockett, wearing an anguished expression.
“You’ll go with him, right, Pete?”
The doctor looked conflicted as if he didn’t quite know what to say. Kate relieved him of that duty.
“He can’t, M,” she said softly. “He has to stay here. With you.”
Emily bristled. “I’m not the one having a heart attack. Dozier is.”
Kate exchanged glances with Dr. Crockett, wishing she could have time to explain Emily’s sudden outburst. Maybe he could read between the lines and realize that Emily had a deep-rooted fear of losing yet another father figure. Even if this time it would be due to far less violent means, the loss would be just as palpable.
“Don’t worry,” Crockett said, his earnest expression forged from having made many assurances to many families, presidential or otherwise. “He’ll be in the best possible hands on his way there and even more so after he arrives. I’ll stay on the radio with them the entire way.”
“But—”
“It’s their job. And they’re going to do it better without me crowding their workspace.”
Emily stiffened. “Then I’ll go there too.” She turned to the Secret Service agent hovering at her elbow. “Arrange for transportation. A motorcade, whatever.”
“No.” It was Kate’s turn to object.
Emily whirled around, ready to exert the necessary authority to get what she wanted, now. But she stopped short when her angry but distressed gaze met Kate’s.
“You’d be in the way,” Kate said softly. At Emily’s crestfallen expression, Kate corrected herself. “Not you, but your position. Your security needs. They’d have to spend precious time and manpower making sure you were safe. You’d be an unintentional disruption, and we both know it wouldn’t be good for Dozier for their resources to be split. He needs their undivided attention.”
Emily stared down the hallway, where the paramedics were disappearing around the next corner as they headed for the West Wing exit.
“At least let me see him out.”
“Sure.”
They started down the hallway, their procession gathering members as they followed. Fearing things would turn into a circus, Kate cut their convoy short with a silent gesture, and all but the security detail stayed behind.
Take them to the Oval Office, she mouthed to her deputy, Constance MacAvoy, who nodded and immediately headed down the hall to shoo the advisers into the office to wait. Connie was a new team member but an old friend who had worked with Emily during her years as the governor of Virginia. Connie was neither wowed nor cowed by people of authority, having learned to stand toe-to-toe with Emily an
d come away with all her fingers and toes intact.
Most of the time.
Assured that Connie would have everything in hand, Kate quickened her pace so she could catch up with Emily, Dozier, and the paramedics. They remained just inside the doorway as Dozier was packed into the ambulance. Kate knew her task now would be to help the president refocus, and the best way to do that was to toss her right back into the mountain of work awaiting the two of them.
As soon as the ambulance pulled away from the White House, the sirens wailing, Emily heaved a sigh and took a few steps down the corridor before stopping.
“You think he’ll be okay?”
Kate nodded. “He’s tough. And as far as I know, he’s never had any heart trouble before. No prior damage is probably a good thing.”
Emily’s shoulders slumped. “That’s right. You don’t know. This isn’t his first attack. Remember back a couple of years? when he took that cruise?”
Kate searched her memory, vaguely recalling that Dozier had been talked into taking a pleasure cruise to South America. But she didn’t remember him having any trouble during his voyage.
“He never made the ship. He spent those two weeks in a Miami hospital instead. Everybody thought he was off, enjoying a trip, so he never said anything to anybody.”
“No one but you.”
Emily managed a wry grin. “He knew I’d find out. I always do.”
They passed by the dining room doorway and saw that, while they’d been gone, the staff had returned the furniture to their rightful positions, removed the cold food, and reset the table for breakfast again. They continued into the corridor outside of the Oval Office and into the office itself. There, they discovered Connie had made sure the remaining advisers had been served coffee and juice while waiting in anticipation of resuming their breakfast meeting.
When Emily and Kate entered the room, the advisers broke from their small clumps and turned their collective attention to Emily, asking for news of their fallen comrade.
She showed them her best fearless-leader face, now firmly set in place. “The paramedics are taking Dozier to Bethesda, and I have all the confidence in the world that the doctors there will do an excellent job in treating him. If anyone can get him back on his feet, it’ll be the staff there at the naval hospital.”
The responses were somewhat generically hopeful, as if none of them were terribly certain that an eighty-two-year-old man who drank and smoked too much would bounce back quite so easily.
No one wanted to contradict their president.
But Kate knew Emily’s resolute statement was less a matter of trying to convince the others and more of trying to convince herself that he would recover.
Emily gestured in the direction of the dining room. “Shall we try breakfast again?”
Food was the last thing Kate wanted at the moment, but she realized the importance of returning to the status quo. As much as everyone might be tempted to slow down, if not suspend business for the sake of one man, it simply wasn’t feasible. It was imperative to trigger Emily’s ability to compartmentalize the situation and return her attention to the day’s multitude of tasks at hand, the first of which was drafting, then vetting, a statement that Harold would deliver to the press corps concerning Dozier’s medical condition. It took only moments for the statement to be drawn up and okayed. Harold excused himself and headed for the Press Briefing Room on the north side of the building.
Everyone knew that it took only a whisper to stir up the hornet’s nest called the White House press corps. A rapid response from them would prevent undue speculation and short-circuit rumor. Once delivered, the statement concerning Dozier would hit the wire services and Internet news feeds in nanoseconds.
The advisers remained understandably quiet as they filed into the dining room and took their seats. Once the waitstaff delivered the platters of food to the table, Emily seemed somewhat at a loss for words. Then she said something that Kate had never heard her utter before.
“Uh . . . Kate, do you think you could say a prayer or something?” She hesitated for a second, then added, “For Dozier?”
Kate’s spirits soared upward at what she considered to be a colossal moment in time—Emily asking for help and support through prayer with an air of sincerity that Kate had never seen before. This was no contrivance for propriety’s sake, but a real request, reflecting a kernel of faith that Kate always hoped rested at the center of Emily’s soul.
Before Kate made any response, she sent up her own quick prayer, asking for the right words to help wedge open the crack that was evidently forming in Emily’s hard resolve against most things religious. Such a task required a keen hand and sharp eye and just the right tools from God.
Help me to help Emily, she prayed silently.
The advisers all bowed their heads, and a moment later, Emily did too.
The words came effortlessly to Kate, obviously given to her in answer to her request.
“Lord, we’d like to thank you for this opportunity to come together and join our voices, our energies, our thoughts, and our prayers. Please be with our friend and colleague Dozier Marsh, who has just fallen ill. Be with the doctors and nurses who are and will be seeing him. Give them wisdom in treating him and patience in caring for him. Help us to keep him in our hearts and our prayers. As for the duties that lie before us today and in the coming days, please grant us the courage to help lead this great nation to the best of our abilities. Help us to learn from those who came before us so that we can make this world better for those who come after us. We ask you to turn our sorrows into joys and our weaknesses into strengths through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
Amens echoed around the room, including a clear, strong response from Emily.
A new sense of lightness filled Kate’s heart. She couldn’t help but feel buoyed by the hope that her efforts to become a better beacon had finally worked and Emily was starting to see the light on her own. As much as Kate had faith in God’s bigger plans, she’d still worried that she failed to serve him well enough to help those plans come to fruition. She didn’t want to believe it might have taken a potential calamity such as Dozier’s illness to crack Emily’s hardened conscience. Nonetheless, she raised her own quick prayer, thanking the Lord for finding a way to extract some potential benefit from such an unfortunate situation.
The advisers all settled down to breakfast once again, but Kate’s attempts to eat failed. The earlier excitement had soured her stomach so much so that she asked for and received hot tea instead of her usual morning coffee. The only solid food she felt she could handle at the moment was toast.
The morning agenda went by quickly, as if nobody really wanted to raise any unnecessary points to keep them at the table longer than they had to. Kate suspected that the others, like her, couldn’t quite shake the image of a gray-faced Dozier slumping over in his chair. She studiously avoided looking at his empty seat, which had been moved to the corner of the room and the table set for one less than before.
Even the temporary removal of his place seemed so poignant and sad. . . .
Kate shook herself mentally. Potential personal tragedies aside, the country still needed running, and its leadership still had their duties to tackle. After finishing their agenda and their meals, the advisers filed out quickly, all scattering down the corridors to their respective offices, probably ready to recount their eyewitness accounts of Dozier’s attack to their office staff.
The spread of information would be a welcome replacement for idle speculation. Even in the White House, rumors had a way of amplifying, just like in any other workplace, despite the existence of official statements.
One of Kate’s lesser-known responsibilities was to make sure that unfounded, unsupported rumors didn’t escape into the atmosphere beyond the building. But in almost any given situation, it was like trying to stuff air back into a punctured balloon. At least Harold’s press briefing would help stem the tide of misinformation with a quick statement of f
act—from an eyewitness, no less.
Kate spent the rest of the morning in meetings but, like Emily, insisted on and received updates of Dozier’s condition every half hour. The paramedics had stabilized him during the brief trip to the naval hospital, and Dr. Crockett had arranged for an impressive cardiac team to be already assembled by the time Dozier arrived.
As unfortunate as it had been that the immediate past president had had some heart problems, it did mean that the hospital responsible for his primary treatment had an experienced and renowned surgical team ready at the White House’s beck and call.
By lunchtime, they received news that after a battery of tests, the doctors had determined that Dozier had a 75 percent blockage and would have to undergo quadruple bypass surgery. Said surgery was scheduled for early the next morning.
In dealing with his office, Kate learned that Dozier’s only real family consisted of an estranged son who lived and worked in Japan. Although Dozier’s longtime secretary, Dorothy, had been able to track down the son and inform him of his father’s health issues, John Fitzgerald Marsh stated that he regretted he’d be unable to return to the U.S. in time for his father’s surgery.
Dorothy was dabbing at her eyes when she stood at the door to Kate’s office. “Do you have a minute, Ms. Rosen?”
“For you? Absolutely.” Kate stood, greeted the woman with a hug, and then ushered her to a seat, closing the door behind her.
“I just can’t believe that Jack won’t come to be with his father,” she complained, continuing to sniff into a wad of tissues. “A son should be with his father at a time like this. I don’t understand what his problem is.”
For as along as Kate had known Dozier, he’d never mentioned the existence of a son more than a handful of times. It’d been mostly in passing, but never with a sense of pride that a father might use when speaking of his son the successful businessman. And yes, as far as Kate knew, Jack Marsh was just that—a highly successful businessman with no overt vices nor any arrest record or other such aspect that his father might not want brought up in casual conversation.