An Encounter in Atlanta | Page 4

at the group and seemed to realize that this was his middle-management chance to achieve some favorable and potentially useful self-publicity. He nodded and stepped behind the counter to draw Cade a coffee as he called the attendant over.
"Yes, Mr. D'Angelo?" asked the attendant.
Handing the coffee to Cade, D'Angelo said, "Go ahead and open back up, Manuel. Free coffee for anybody who's supposed to be in here until the cops are gone."
"Yes, sir," said Manuel.
"Could I have an extra coffee?" asked Cade.
Manuel drew another coffee and handed it to him. Cade thanked him and headed for the stairs to the street. The rent-a-cop was standing by the body, as requested.
He said, "You're the guy who told me to watch the body."
Cade handed him the extra coffee and said, "Yup, sure am. Here, I brought you a coffee."
Someone aimed a camera toward them and Cade turned to face the cop -- Davies, by his nametag -- as the camera flashed. He kicked the gun that had fallen into the bushes over by the body and toed it under a fold in the coat.
"Should you be moving the evidence around like that?" asked Davies.
"So tell 'em I kicked it. I just came down here to get your name and badge number for the record and secure the scene."
Shrugging as he looked around, Cade said, "Now the scene is secure, I have my info, and you have your coffee. Just stay put until the cops get here."
Davies almost choked on his first sip of coffee.
He glanced down at the body, then stared at Cade as he asked, "But... You mean you aren't a cop?!"
"Never said I was," said Cade. "I've just been working with them today. See you later."
As Cade turned to go, the guard said, "Hey, wait. Is there any word about the blonde? The woman who, uh... who flew off... with the car?"
"I haven't heard anything."
Glancing up at the sky, Davies said, "God, I hope she wasn't still hanging onto that car when it blew. I was looking right at it, but it was too far up... Do you think she...?"
"No idea," said Cade. "Later."
With that, he headed back up the steps and into the hotel, where he gave Davies' info to Avery and refilled his coffee cup, then sat down in a corner of the cafe with an incident report form to wait for Lieutenant Bain.



Chapter Two
Mandi Steele had landed behind a support column in the drive-through of the Rivage Hotel, then stepped out to briefly join a group of costumed conventioneers on their way up the walkway ramp.
As she neared the taxi at the front of the line, she spun the two-foot piece of pvc tubing she'd found behind the column like a baton. Letting it escape her grasp in the direction of the taxi gave her a pretext for going through the motions of pretending to look for it as she studied the car.
The paint was new, but the car wasn't. It was full of luggage and rode so low that it must have had a ton of extra weight aboard. No normal luggage would weigh that much.
Mandi pretended to search for her missing baton beneath the taxi's rear. She discovered that the inner side of the fender was solid, not hollow. A pinch of the clay-like plastique came away between her fingers and she let it fall under the car before retrieving the bit of pipe and standing up.
In the rearview mirror, the driver's eyes were focused on her legs. Mandi saw that he was none other than Ahmed Mussafi, a 'suspected' terrorist whose face had graced several of the wanted posters she'd studied before she'd left Las Vegas.
The anonymous tip to 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