MARSHA GRAY IS back at the front door of the sad-looking apartment complex where Sally Grissom lives. She’s taking a gamble, but she’s all right with that. Her whole life has been one big gamble, and sometimes it’s almost exhilarating.
She takes about thirty seconds to use a small transmitter on the keypad, overriding the signal and disabling the lock.
Done.
Into the entryway, up three flights of stairs. There’s a smell here, of being poor and desperate, and it’s a mixture of urine, cooking grease, and moist trash. It brings back a load of memories of growing up in rural Wyoming. The night wind that would cut through the cracks and fissures in their mobile home. The blocks of government-issued cheese. Having one pair of much-patched dungarees to wear, day in and day out.
Now she has on a Comcast jacket and baseball cap, pulled down low, with a heavy utility belt hanging around her slim waist. Like wearing a burka in some areas of the world makes you invisible, wearing a working-class outfit like this accomplishes the same thing.
On the third floor now, moving quietly and rapidly to the target door. A quick untraceable phone call to the apartment management—identifying herself as a credit union rep doing a background check on Sally Grissom—had gotten her the correct apartment.
There. Marsha scoots down, notices the Block doorknob and lock. Impressive stuff. That Secret Service agent knows her way around home protection.
“But this mama’s no meth head,” she whispers, and after a few moments of tugging and pulling with locksmith’s tools, the door is unlocked. Marsha slowly opens it, and she notes a chain lock up near the top.
Well, there you go.
Looks heavy and functional, but Marsha knows better.
From her supposed Comcast utility belt, she quickly removes a rubber band and a length of adhesive tape. She eyeballs the door opening and sees a kitchen, nothing else. Good. She slides her right hand into the gap and wraps the rubber band around the chain, draws it back out to the hallway, and securely fastens the other end to the tape.
Marsha carefully extends her hand back into the apartment, stretches the rubber band as far as she can, and tapes it to the door. With that done, she brings her hand in, slowly closes the door, and—
Hears a slight tinkle. With the door closing, the stretched rubber band—held in place by the tape—slides the chain free. Marsha opens the door slightly, tugs the taped chain loose, and takes two steps into the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
Not bad.
She’s just successfully broken into the apartment of a senior Secret Service agent.
Time to get to work.
In the kitchen she smells cooked bacon, and there’s a twinge of envy there, of being part of a family that would actually get together to share a breakfast, that actually cared about one another. Marsha shakes off that feeling and notes a living room to the left, and a hallway in front of her. The television is on, the volume turned up.
With the chain lock in place and a television playing, it’s clear someone’s home.
Marsha pauses, waiting to see if anyone is going to appear, demanding to know why and how she got in. If she’s very lucky, she’ll explain that the door was unlocked and as an eager Comcast employee, she had knocked and then let herself in upon hearing someone say “Enter.”
Nobody appears.
She slowly makes her way to the living room.
Someone’s on the ratty-looking brown couch.
Marsha takes a slow, quiet, deep breath to calm everything down.
A young girl is stretched out on the couch, watching the screen. About ten or eleven, slim, very pretty, with long blond hair, a light-blue comforter over her. Despite the fact she’s watching television, she’s also plugged in to a video game on her iPad, and the girl—no doubt the daughter of the senior Secret Service agent—has earbuds in.
Which explains why Marsha’s entry has gone unnoticed.
Then a thought punches into her.
What’s her overriding goal?
To keep an eye on the Secret Service agent and disrupt where necessary, causing an opportunity to take care of the First Lady.
The young girl on the couch is moving her gaze from the television to her iPad, back and forth. She takes the earbuds out and examines them, like they’ve suddenly stopped working.
Instead of leaving the surveillance devices behind as planned…well, here’s an opportunity, stretched out on the couch, where Marsha could take direct and violent action and truly disrupt the Secret Service agent’s investigation.
Why not?
The girl shifts her position on the couch, and her head moves in Marsha’s direction.