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personal history, the selection showed that the president was still shrewd enough to place a candidate’s qualifications ahead of her own preferences. If nothing else, the selection of Dale as her official mouthpiece projected bigness, which had always been Charlotte’s strong suit as a politician. Melanie had served two of Charlotte’s predecessors from the podium as White House press secretary. She still thought it was the most important White House post, other than chief of staff.
    She picked up her BlackBerry and typed back: “All set,” to Dale. No one could accuse Melanie of not being a team player. She couldn’t think of anyone else in Charlotte’s Cabinet who would have tolerated the beating that her reputation had taken the year before when someone deep inside the West Wing had run a whisper campaign blaming Melanie for leaks about the mental condition of Charlotte’s then vice president, Tara Meyers. Charlotte had placed Meyers on the ticket as her running mate during her reelection campaign a year and a half earlier to shake up the race. She transformed the political landscape by plucking a Democrat out of relative obscurity and running on the first-ever unity ticket, where a president is a member of one political party and the vice president is from the other. While the bipartisan experiment was celebrated as the first truly postpartisan move by a modern president, Charlotte’s political advisors had hastily selected an unvetted and untested politician in Tara Meyers. Tara had suffered a mental breakdown soon after she was sworn in and had resigned in disgrace less than a year later.
    From the moment Melanie had first met Tara, she had warned the president about her lack of experience and deficient knowledge base. As the vice president’s gaffes went from being seen as minorembarrassments for the White House to a serious indictment of the president’s judgment, Melanie had grown increasingly concerned.
    But she had not been the source of any leaked information. She’d never spoken to anyone other than the president about Tara. Melanie had considered resigning when the rumors about her alleged disloyalty started showing up in the papers. Brian had persuaded her to stay in the job she loved, and the Pentagon was a world away from the gravitational pull at the West Wing. Charlotte had eventually made several public statements of support for Melanie and even urged her to stay on for the duration of her second term in an interview. Charlotte’s backing had quieted the sniping, but the real leaker had never been outed.
    Now Melanie pulled out her briefing materials one last time. These trips were always built around meetings with the foreign leaders, but Melanie came for the visits with the troops. They were the reason she was still in government at all. She’d promised Brian that she wouldn’t travel around Iraq now that she was pregnant, but she planned to spend as much time with the troops inside the green zone as she could. When she was satisfied that she had committed all of their names and faces to memory, she stood and walked into her first meeting.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Dale
    P ut down that BlackBerry and eat something, or I’m going to make a scene that you’ll have to read about in Politico tomorrow,” Warren warned.
    Dale flashed him a horrified glare and then finished typing her e-mail as quickly as her fingers would press the keys. She hit send and then shoved the device into her purse. “There. I’m done.”
    Warren took the purse out of her lap and put it on the ground next to him.
    “Take it easy with that bag. It cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.” He moved it from the floor to the empty chair next to him. Dale heard her phone ringing.
    “Whoever it is can wait a few minutes. I’m going to leave it on this chair for fifteen minutes so you can eat something and tell me about your day, and then I will give it back to you.”
    “Five minutes,” she countered.
    “Ten.”
    Dale