Free Madam President by Nicolle Wallace Page A

used.
    “Nothing is open before five.” She tried to make eye contact with him in her mirror, but he was focusing intently on holding her pile of black suits off his lap as he jotted notes in a spiral notebook. She’d been meaning to stop at the cleaner’s for weeks.
    “Do you want me to pull over and put that stuff in the trunk?”
    “No, I’m fine. Will any of the other senior staff be there when we arrive?”
    “Probably not, but I’m supposed to meet with Craig to go over the final line-by-line for the day,” she said, glancing in the rearview mirror again to get a better look at her questioner. He looked twenty years old.
    “Are you an intern?” she asked.
    “No, ma’am.”
    He’d called her ma’am. She sighed and shook her head slightly. It served her right for asking. She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive, except to answer the twenty-year-old’s questions. Dale thought about how thankful she was that Craig was her boss. At least they could laugh about this at the end of the day. Dale knew exactly what he’d say. “The things we do for love of country and Charlotte Kramer,” he’d joke. She smiled thinking about it as she pulled into the entrance on E Street and flashed her hard pass. The guard greeted her with a nod and waved her onto the pad where the canine unit would examine her car for explosives. When the dogs were satisfied, the large steelgate would disappear into the ground, and Dale would be free to drive slowly toward the next gate. She cherished the lengthy process and treated it as her last moment of peace before the workday commenced.
    “Ma’am? Excuse me?”
    “Yes?”
    “Who is allowed to park in there?” The producer was pointing at West Executive Drive, the strip of coveted parking spots between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building that separated the most senior advisors from the rest of the presidential staffers. Dale had pulled up to the third and final entrance and was waiting for the large wrought-iron gates to swing open.
    “Only assistants to the president may park in here,” she replied. His face didn’t register any comprehension, so she explained the White House hierarchy that allowed her one of the best parking spots on the White House complex.
    “Assistants to the president are the most senior staffers. They have what we refer to as walk-in privileges. That means that they can walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. I mean, most of us call ahead. It’s not like we just barge into the Oval Office.” Dale laughed. She was afraid she sounded like a jerk.
    Dale heard the alert on her phone that signified a new text message had come through. Relieved by the distraction, she fished her iPhone out of her giant bag. Dale smiled as she read Craig’s message. “They lit my block with stadium lights to film me walking from my front door to the SUV. You owe me many drinks,” he wrote.
    She quickly typed back: “I’m driving in with Doogie Howser. Don’t complain.”
    Craig shared her sense of humor, and the two of them were often described by other members of the White House senior staff as being “in cahoots” on matters large and small. And while they often sat together on long flights and at staff dinners and meetings, their relationship was purely platonic. Craig was gay. He was only partly out of the closet, but it was not enough to quell suspicions from some corners of oblivious Washington about his relationship with Dale. Privately, they laughed about the knowing winks from congressmenand members of Charlotte’s cabinet who suspected that the two were an item. Dale wished Craig would come out more publicly, but it was something he wasn’t ready to do.
    As she pulled into her regular parking spot, she thought about how wrong the reporters had been about Craig’s role in the Tara Meyers scandal. A couple of the most aggressive investigative reporters had sniffed around months earlier about whether he had played a role in