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Aprile’s stance on issues. More accurately, their attacks were on the administration itself, with Aprile suffering the fallout, as if he had engineered every issue and problem.
    Claire Coyne, recently hired as press secretary for the campaign, huddled with an assistant in one of six offices comprising the suite. The remaining five offices were occupied by other staffers, each convinced that his or her role in Aprile’s drive for the White House was the crucial one, that his or her insight into the electorate’s psyche was the most pertinent and most valuable; failure to heed their admonitions was to ensure defeat. Embrace them and victory was in hand. They didn’t express this in so many words, certainly not to Joe Aprile, but they believed it in their hearts, which was less important than the cognitive reasoning of more senior staff members, whose pacemakers were the polls.
    Chris Hedras conferred with the campaign’s finance chairman, Philip Hentoff, a New York investment banker, who looked older than he really was thanks to prematurely graying hair and a perpetual expression of disagreement. He’d been wooed into a leave of absence from his firm to handle things financial for the Aprile campaign, having heard the siren call of power and responded to it. He already had money. Power was the logical next acquisition in his hierarchy of needs, as psychologist Abraham Maslow might have explained.
    The largest of the offices was the campaign’s boiler room, where a dozen phones stood at attention on two sturdy folding tables. This was where calls soliciting money for Aprile’s coffers were routinely made: “We know you’ve supported the administration in the past and wouldn’t want to see the country be derailed by a new administration. Joe Aprile knows you, knows what you need. It’s imperative he be the next president, but he needs your financial support. He’s counting on you andother Americans with your values and vision to put it on the line. And believe me, he won’t forget that you stood up for him and his vision of a strong and prosperous America.”
    Aprile had put out the word that he was not about to become ensnared in the sort of imbroglios that had dogged previous administrations. There would be no fund-raising calls from federal offices, especially the White House. Members of the administration, and certainly those working directly for the vice president, made the daily trek from the White House to the Watergate to make solicitations. “The vice president is obsessed with this,” members of Aprile’s staff were lectured on a daily basis. “Break the rule, even once, and you’re gone.”
    Mac Smith sat in another office with a policy advisor and two of the campaign’s speechwriters. He listened quietly as the writers argued over a line Aprile was to use in his remarks that evening. It seemed to Mac that the differences between the two versions were so minor it wasn’t worth debate. Pride of authorship was, at best, quaint where the ghostwriting of political speeches was concerned. Still, Mackensie Smith, who considered himself politically astute, at least to the extent that few things surprised him, was aware that the wrong word in a speech, or even the right word interpreted the wrong way, could have serious negative impact in the media the following day. He stayed out of it.
    The writers were still arguing over the line when the vice president arrived, flanked by his usual contingent of Secret Service agents. With him was his appointments secretary, an advisor on domestic policy, and a deputy chief of staff to the president who’d been promoted afterChris Hedras relinquished his official White House duties to take hands-on control of the Aprile campaign.
    Wresting Hedras from the president’s staff had not been easy. Negotiations had gone on for months, with the president adamantly refusing to lend Hedras to his veep’s run for the White House. But he eventually acquiesced when Aprile made