The long days were standard in the White House and they all knew it. Often the days came where he'd be barely in bed, barely saw the kids and barely communicated with his wife, when he got some sort of a call. Prescott burned right out, and Bill had to cover, but it was also the Chief of Staff's job to coordinate what was going on, and it was a constant grind. The press secretary got reporters, but Mike got the Hill, which was, like State and like the Press Office, a constant exercise in diplomacy and communication. You did not just fob off the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, you had to brief the guy or you had to get the right staff to do it. Odds were, you had to prepare for that meeting.

And you had to prepare the President, when necessary, which was always right now. 

This wasn't to spare the workload of AJ, this was to keep the workload and responsibility from crushing one person, the President, entirely. He wasn't taking it easy either. The grind was a constant flow of emails on every device he owned, so that he was never free of them. If he was in his little office in the West Wing, he was hammering away at a cheap plastic keyboard through emails that demanded responses, flagging them or forwarding them. The Eisenhower Matrix was a good weapon; four quadrants and an axis for two categories: "Important/Not Important" and "Urgent/Not Urgent." If not on his actual computer, he had a laptop, a tablet, and a cell phone, and had taken to carrying a small fabric keyboard for the tablet. He learned that it was faster to handle texts on that thing by keyboard than trying to screw around with a touchscreen. The volume was immense.

Part of his hell was that the Important and Urgent was a practically limitless list. But there was also a talented staff to delegate to. They barely kept him afloat.

"Some of the people on the Hill are not happy with the idea that Sweden currently holds the best understanding of the Probe, but that's a pretty bold request even from the Russians, Bill," he said with a wan smile to match the understating tone. Mike Gerard didn't look rumpled, but he looked like he was running on all cylinders and conserving his energy. 

He understood the position though; the Russians were concerned about their ability to hold onto their prestige in a world where their geographic rivals, the EU, seemed positioned to dominate through their much more robust research and scientific establishment. That wasn't to say the Russians weren't without resources, but they were afraid of sucking hind teat. Oil stocks were not looking well, not with a renewed and invigorated debate about Earth's energy resources, an argument Mike was particularly aware of given his work when he was a Senator. The break for the sweeping energy bill he sponsored came about after a solid several months of haggling and cajoling senators and getting AJ Shepard on his side. 

He wasn't necessarily a policymaker, but he was most certainly an advisor to the president, and the Chief of Staff served at the President's pleasure. It was also worth noting that the role was whatever the President wanted it to be. He kept the Russia comment down to that observation about the mood on the Hill. 

Over coffee, AJ and he both noted that from the information they had alone of the probe's separation and the departure of a piece of it, that there was an energy technology out there well beyond the power that could be harnessed by terrestrial technology, and that information leaking out created economic shockwaves that drove interest rates down as a stability measure. Russia clearly felt they had a good position now, but it would dwindle over time. Thus the request, and all its potential disruption and fallout. Nothing was easy, that was for granted.

Things were hairy. And that didn't even bring in the part about someone attempting a cyber-warfare attack on certain parts of their infrastructure, Bangladesh's crisis in the wake of a series of attacks or that they had a domestic terrorism threat barely held in check. 

The President did arrive momentarily later, preceded by Secret Service agents that established the security in the room and ushered the man in. Andrew James "AJ" Shepard was a former federal prosecutor and looked the part, dark suit and a striped tie, along with the conservative sort of solid shirt that said, "I work with the FBI." Presidents and politicians in general didn't really go for unusual suits, to the point where Barack Obama once drew comment for wearing a tan suit on a hot day. But, perhaps owing to the internal nature of where they were, the man was wearing a pair of boat shoes, which was wholly inconsistent with his political image of a no-nonsense western lawyer gone senator that had a gift of concise, sometimes terse, communication. He had a tendency, like Robert McNamara, to wear wire-framed glasses that produced that sort of steely effect. He'd been a good trial lawyer once, but he also put them on or put in contacts as the situation demanded.

He worked hard to erase Harvard from his public image, because that was part of being a Republican. But the comfortable, even slightly ratty, footwear gave him away in private. It was almost a signal for Mike; it meant that they wouldn't be photographing any element of this meeting. There were a bunch of laptops, cords, tablets, phones, coffee cups, notebooks, folders, binders, stacks of paper and so forth on the table, marked in various ways. The reports might have taken hours to compile, prepared by the deputies in the room to brief the principals. The idea was to summarize and support as best possible without wasting time.

"Good morning everyone," the president nodded to the room as he stepped to the head of the table, eschewing the podium that was set up in the Situation Room. He was used to using a courtroom voice if necessary, "We have a lot on our plates, so let's wade into it. Bill, Russia. You indicated by email that they want us to freeze out the EU. Brienne, I was hoping for your input first."