Who ya gonna call?

Sunlight was shimmering on the Potomac under a clear blue sky--at least, that's what the Assistant Deputy Administrator for Anti-Fecklessness vaguely recalled from his train ride into the city before chaining himself to his State Department desk several hours earlier. He had tried to warn the Secretary of State that forcing senior Foreign Service officers to serve in Iraq against their will would not be worth the grief it would cause, but the Secretary was off enjoying her Sunday while he was sitting here dealing with the grief it had caused. Spread across his desk in lowest-to-highest degrees of uppityness lay printouts of several blog entries, letters-to-editor, and media interviews concerning the angry denunciations that diplomats were being sentenced to death by their own government. (If you had done your job right, we would have had more than enough volunteers to serve at the U.S. embassy in Iraq.) Her words continued to ring in his ears. (They're safe as long as Blackwater is guarding the embassy.) He bit his lip and resisted an urge to telephone his girlfriend, who would probably just tell him to quit his stupid job instead of boosting his confidence. (The soldiers can't do their job without more political support.) She wanted more puppeteers in Baghdad--even the CIA officers no longer wanted to pose as Foreign Service officers there. He gulped down the last of his Red Bull and turned back to his computer to write the easier memo first--how to deal with Rice's subpoena in the AIPAC espionage case.

Not too far away, Condoleezza Rice was staring out her Watergate window at the shimmering Potomac, petting Pippin and talking on her secure line to Prince and Prowling's AIPAC lobbyist, former Senator Evermore Breadman. He reassured her that they still had plenty of time to deal with the criminal subpoena, and there was no way that the judge would force her to testify about--

SSSSSSSSSSSSS. Several miles north, Charles Wu was sitting on his balcony enjoying the fine fall weather and listening through headphones to the transmitter implanted in Rice's Persian cat. "DAMN!" It was supposed to be an interference-proof transmitter, but every now and then it got tripped up. "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS....I'll call you tomorrow. Have a good night!" He missed the whole thing! He took his empty cocktail tumbler and hurled it to the pavement below just to hear the sound of the glass breaking. He took a deep breath and continued listening....Sometimes she talked out loud after she finished her phone calls.

"What do you think, Pippin? Do I need to go back and see Cedric, or should I call up Spook Samuelson?" Pippin dropped her battery-operated rat daintily to the floor and looked up quizzically. "Spook it is!" The next thing Wu heard was silence as Pippin jumped off Rice's lap and headed to a sunnier spot in the other room. Rice stayed in the growing shadow, watching for a few minutes as the sun begin to set, then made another call. Outside her window, five starlings sat quietly on the Watergate ledge listening to Rice as Ardua watched from the river below.

A few miles east, President Bush muted the football game to take a phone call about his Attorney General nominee. He hated it when Senators called on Sunday afternoons. "Cinnabonner! Good to hear from you!" He fumbled through the papers on the end table looking for his talking points but could not find them. "He's a valiant soul, a truth warrior, with...after the...I can confide in the soundness there he's got." The game went to a commercial, and Bush looked out the window at the starlings sitting on the ledge. He could not see out into the gathering darkness, but Regina and Ferguson could see him in the lit-up East Wing family room. They paused for a moment to look up at Bush and the ghosts hovering in the family room with him, then Bridge called them back to have one more jump in the leaf pile that would get composted tomorrow. Bridge then announced it was dark and time to go inside for supper with their mother. He looked up uneasily at the ghosts, wondering why the President still could not feel them after all these years.