She listened as he delivered his canned twenty-seven-minute stump speech. It was the economy tonight laced with support for union jobs and a plug for the steel and coal industries since he was in the Keystone state. She found herself saying the words of the speech along with him. Pausing as he did for one, two, three seconds before delivering the punch line to a joke crafted by some Ivy League speechwriter making far more than he should.
She undressed and slipped into bed. Even before she turned out the light, Jane felt the darkness closing in around her.
In the morning a White House maid would find the First Lady’s pillows slightly wet from the tears shed.
CHAPTER 27
WILLA PUT DOWN Sense and Sensibility. Not long after being brought here she’d tapped on each of the walls and detected something solid behind them. She had listened for footsteps and calculated by checking her watch that someone patrolled by every other hour. She made her own meals consisting of canned stews, eaten cold, or packaged MREs that she knew had to do with the military. They were not what she was used to but her stomach didn’t care. She drank the bottled water, munched on crackers, tried to keep warm, and used the battery-powered lantern sparingly, turning it off while she rested and trying her best not to think of things coming for her in the dark.
She would listen for the man, the tall older man. She had learned to recognize his walk. She liked him better than the others who would come by with water, cans of food and clean clothes, and new batteries for her lantern. They never spoke, never made eye contact, and yet she was afraid of them. Afraid their silence would be replaced with sudden anger.
She had tried to speak to them at first, but now she didn’t. Instead, she tried to become invisible when they arrived. And she would let out a relieved breath when they locked the door behind them.
She looked at her watch. The footsteps had just come by. She had time now. Two hours free. She gripped the lantern and walked over to the door. She tapped on it lightly. Waited. Tapped. Waited.
“Hello?” she said. “Um, I think there’s like a really big fire in here.”
No answer.
She set the lantern down and from her pocket pulled out the pen that Quarry had given her. Or rather she pulled out the pen’s clasp. It had the required ninety-degree-angled hook on the end. Next she took out a long piece of metal with a triangular-shaped bump on the end. She’d fashioned it from one of the canned stew tops she’d opened. She’d taken the circle of metal and painstakingly cut it in half using the heavy lantern to hold it against the table while employing the sharp edge of another can top to cut away at the metal. Then, like a rug, she’d rolled the remains of the top into a long cylinder and then hammered the end of it into the required shape.
She studied the lock, trying to mentally coax back her lock-picking skills. Two years ago they had visited the First Family at a hundred-year-old coastal home in South Carolina that wealthy friends of the president had lent them for a two-week summer holiday. Colleen Dutton, who was then only five, had locked herself in the bathroom. The terrified girl had screamed and pounded on the old door and pulled on its antiquated lock, but to no avail. Then a Secret Service agent had come to the rescue, using a paper clip to pick the lock and setting Colleen free in under ten seconds.
Willa had held her inconsolable sister for hours after the episode. Later, she’d been worried that Colleen would accidentally lock herself in the bathroom when they got back home, so she’d asked the agent to teach her how to pick a lock. He had and had also shown her the difference between an ordinary lock and a dead bolt. Dead bolts were harder, requiring greater skill and two different tools, and that’s what she was faced with here.
Hanging the lantern handle over the doorknob so her work area would be lit, Willa inserted the pen clasp, which served as her tension tool, into the bottom of the lock’s opening. She turned it as if she were manipulating a key in a lock, applying enough pressure to keep the interior lock pins from falling back into place. She slid the pick tool into the upper part of the lock using her other hand. She was applying so much force that a bead of sweat appeared on her forehead despite the chill of the room. She pushed up with the pick, trying to rake the pins into their sheer alignment. Once her hand slipped and the tension tool came loose.
She reinserted it and tried again. She had practiced this many times at home, but found that she could never tell how long it would take her. She wasn’t an expert and lacked the feel of the pins’ touch against the pick. It could be minutes or hours. She prayed it was the former.
Willa froze as she heard footsteps coming toward her. She angled her wrist up and checked her watch. Only twenty minutes had passed. Was the man coming to see her? The old man who talked softly and yet she could sense the danger, the anger he possessed. No, it wasn’t his tread. It was one of the other men. She pulled the pick and tension tool out and was starting to flee back to her cot when the footsteps receded. She waited a bit more, just to be sure.
The tools went back in and her concentration redoubled. Now she could feel the pins glancing off the pick. One by one she lifted them to the sheer line, all the while holding the tension tool so rigidly that her forearm and wrist started to ache.
The last pin fell into place and she pulled the pick out and turned the tension tool like a key. The dead bolt vanished into the door. She drew a deep breath and mouthed a prayer. Turning the lantern down to its lowest level, she listened intently and then swung the door open.
Willa waited a few moments and then slowly moved out into the darkness.
CHAPTER 28
SEAN SIPPED HIS COFFEE and watched the gate of the condo building through his camera’s zoom lens. It was in the mid-eighties in Jacksonville and he’d taken off his jacket and thrown it on the passenger seat of his Avis rental and ha
d the air cranked up. The parking lot of the condo building was in full view behind a fence of imposingly scrolled wrought iron.
A minute later he sat up and put the car in gear. His target had just walked out the sliding glass front doors and taken a moment to slide on her Maui Jims against the bright sun. He noted that she was loaded for bear in a pleated miniskirt, high heels, bare, tanned legs, and a tank-top blouse that showed off cleavage so deep a man could easily get lost.
She pointed her key fob, there was the ubiquitous chirp, and she climbed in her car. The combination of the low chassis of her Mercedes convertible and a sneaky breeze caused her skirt to lift enough to where the slim line of the white thong underneath was momentarily revealed along with her tanned upper thigh. She smacked a button on the console and the metal top mechanically hinged up and slid back into its receptacle.
Her car whipped through the automatic gates and sped off with the ocean gusts sending her hair straight back. The sight would’ve made a lovely car commercial for the Germans. Sean eased after her.
Her first two stops were dry cleaning pick up and a pharmacy run. Maybe birth control pills, thought Sean as he watched from the opposite curb.
He just had to smile though because the woman knew how to work it. Wherever she walked—and the lady definitely knew how to walk —men gawked. When she climbed in and out of her car, the woman seemed to do so in slow motion, displaying for an astonishingly long moment in time all the things that made men sweat at night and fantasize during the day. And when she slowed all the men seemed to slow with her. And then they would finally freeze in place until the tanned legs, perfect butt, and titillating cleavage disappeared in a Mercedes-Benz burst of power.
Her next destination, an exclusive residential neighborhood, was more promising. Sean watched her pull into the driveway of a magnificent and beautiful stucco and red tile house with palm trees out front. Using his zoom lens on the camera, Sean was able to see the person who answered the door. The gent was tall, distinguished, with thick graying hair and dressed in slacks and a polo shirt with a blue blazer.
Sean snapped several shots of them before they went into the house.
Sean noticed the mail truck working its way down the street. After it deposited the mail in the mailbox of the house, he waited until the truck had turned the corner before driving his car over to the box, flipping open the lid, and checking the mail there.