An Encounter in Atlanta | Page 5

Gary's office about a suicide attack had been gospel, after all. Now;
how to neutralize this situation? How to handle the driver, who likely had some kind of a
detonator close at hand?
To a typical Middle-Eastern man, just about any visible female flesh would hold his eyes
like a magnet. Pretending to adjust her uniform, Mandi tugged her skirt and brushed
imaginary dirt from her breasts. Her motions guided his eyes over her body as she
pretended to continue past the car on her way up the ramp.
As she came even with his window, Mandi took advantage of the fact that his eyes were
firmly locked on her breasts, snapping a punch at the side of his head that knocked him
cold as it sent him across the seat.
She let the punch become a grab for the gearshift, took the car out of 'drive' and into
'neutral', then she went to the rear of the car, grabbed the bumper, and began hauling the
car down the ramp to the street.

The first order of business was to get the car a safe distance away from everything and
everyone. In the heart of downtown Atlanta, that could only mean going up.
At the bottom of the ramp, traffic prevented her from dragging the car into the street, so
Mandi pulled it onto the broad sidewalk. She jumped over the car to the front of it, lifted
the front of the car, got a firm grip on the strongest part of the frame, and powered
upward.
Remembering what Gary had said about possible watchers who might set off any
explosives, Mandi nonetheless kept her speed barely subsonic to avoid damage to nearby
buildings.
Almost exactly twelve seconds into Mandi's upward dash, Mohammed Jamal's dying
efforts succeeded. In a split-second, nearly eighteen hundred pounds of plastique
converted to energy, essentially vaporizing much of the Crown Victoria and shredding
the rest of it.
Even for someone like Mandi, it was a bit much. While the blast couldn't destroy her, it
hit her like a huge fist, knocking her spinning for several miles before she could clear her
head enough to regain control of herself.
She had no idea where she was until she looked around and saw the cloud of smoke from
the explosion hovering above downtown Atlanta. Distance made the smoke cloud appear
no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, and Mandi began to realize just how powerful
the explosion had been as she guesstimated that it had thrown her five or six miles.
Flying back toward downtown, Mandi realized with a mental sigh that there was no way
that she'd be able to remain a mysterious semi-myth after today.
Someone might even have had the presence of mind to take her picture while she was in
the hotel's drive-through. Damn. It would probably be a shot of her reaching under the car
for the pvc tube. Wouldn't a close-up of her butt look great on the six o'clock news?
Glancing around as she landed in the stairwell alcove where she'd left her mundane
clothes, she saw that some of the nearby buildings were missing some of their windows.
Any damage would have been from debris, thought Mandi. The blast had occurred almost
two miles up, so the shockwave wouldn't have done it.
Retrieving a cell phone from her purse, Mandi tapped in an Atlanta number given to her
for the mission.
A woman answered with, "Zero-eight-two-six."
"Angel here."
"Go, Angel."

"Do you have anything else for me?"
"Not a thing. John says 'good job' and you're on standby."
"Thank you."
The woman said, "You're welcome. Enjoy your stay in Atlanta," then she disconnected.
With water from a small puddle near the entrance, Mandi managed to clean most of the
explosion's residue from her arms and legs. Using her makeup mirror, she cleaned her
face and applied a bit of makeup, then she changed clothes and rechecked herself.
Judging her appearance normal enough, Mandi removed the flattened soft drink can that
had kept the roof door from latching and headed down to the forty-second floor.
She cracked the stairwell door slightly and saw that a few people were waiting for the
elevator across the hall. Two minutes later, they were gone and the hall was empty.
Mandi stepped out, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and headed for the room that had
been issued to her for the mission.
Frank Stearns of the NIA stepped out of room 423 and a big grin formed on his face
when he saw Mandi. Mandi, on the other hand, sighed and thought, 'Oh, damn.'
Stearns wasn't as bad as some men. He genuinely didn't seem have any reservations about
working with women, for instance. He did, however, have an overbearing personality and
seemed