“Did he come here very often?” I asked, looking around the small, very organized infirmary.

“Sometimes. Pretty much anywhere he could find a quiet corner. I call kids like him free agents. You go into any school at lunchtime, and I guarantee you’ll find a few in the nurse’s office, or hanging around the librarian’s desk, or in guidance. Actually, you should talk to Pam Fitzhugh over there. If you haven’t already. She knows both the Coyles as well as anyone.”

I was lucky to get a few minutes with Ms. Fitzhugh, as it turned out. She and the other guidance staff had been seeing kids for crisis counseling nonstop since the first day.

“Were Ethan or Zoe under any particular stress that you know about?” I asked her. “In the days before, weeks before?”

“No more than usual,” she said. “But that’s all relative, isn’t it? It’s not easy being the president’s children, or any celebrity’s, really, and they both put a lot of pressure on themselves. In different ways.”

“Different, how?” I asked.

“Well, let’s just say Zoe spends a lot of energy trying not to be the perfect First Daughter everyone expects her to be. And Ethan’s kind of the opposite. He gets an A-minus, and all he sees is that minus.”

She laughed softly, but in a melancholy way, as if she were remembering something one of them had done at some point. Maybe also wondering, like everyone else, if she was ever going to see Ethan and Zoe again.

“Those poor kids,” she said. “God, those poor, poor kids. I wish somebody could help them.”

Yes, so did I.

SECRETARY OF STATE Martin Cho’s Motorcade was running behind schedule, as usual. He’d kept the House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairs waiting most of the morning, and now he was almost an hour late for the Saudi ambassador.

“Call the office, tell them we’re on our way,” Cho said to the aide sitting across from him in the short Mercedes limo. Her name was Melissa Brandt. She was a recent Harvard grad and young for the job, but promising. Also maybe a little naïve.

“Mr. Secretary, they’ve been notified by the scheduling office already. I called them —”

“Just do it again, please, Melissa,” he said. “Make sure the ambassador knows we’re thinking of him. That’s important to them. They’re sensitive people. The ambassador has been pampered all his life.”

“Yes, sir,” the aide answered.

Crisis talks had been quietly taking place between the two countries for several days now. With the president indisposed, as he was, it was up to the secretary to put in the face time on this one. So far, it had been a dour affair. The pre-9/11 days of arm-in-arm policy making with the Kingdom seemed like a quaint bit of history now.

As Melissa Brandt pulled up the State Department on her phone, she craned her neck to see outside and check their progress up Constitution Avenue.