An Encounter in Atlanta | Page 9

camera."
Someone said, "Then you can catch the six o'clock news, just like everybody else, man. This isn't evidence, it's news."
Glancing at him, Cade said, "She grabbed a taxi and took off with it. I'm calling that grand theft auto. That makes this camera evidence, so you can show me what's in it or you can spend the weekend in jail."
A guy behind the knight whined, "That's bullshit, man! She saved the goddamned hotel and everybody in it. They're saying she was killed in the explosion and nowyou're saying you're gonna call her acar thief?! "
"Only if your friend, here, doesn't cooperate."
The knight stood tall and said, "This is a four hundred dollar digital camera. I can't give you a tape and there's no way in hell you're getting this camera."
Sighing, Cade said, "Look, I don't want your camera and I don't want to arrest anybody." Leaning close, he growled, "I just want to see the damned pictures. It's been over half an hour since the blast, so I figure you've either made a copy on a computer or you're selling the only copy, which would make you one truly stupid fuck. Which is it?"
The knight stiffened briefly at that, but he realized that he could either cooperate or spend his DragonCon weekend in a jail cell.
"Yeah. I made a copy on my laptop," he said. "In case the news guys ripped us off."
"They won't," said Cade. "That's not how they work. You'll sell them a copy and make me a copy on my laptop and nobody will go to jail. Good enough?"
"You won't try to sell your copy?"
Raising his right hand, Cade said, "I swear I won't sell them or put them up for the public on the internet. Now decide -- and I meanright now -- whether you're going to make me a copy or make me arrest you."
The woman asked, "Jeremy, how are you going to make another copy on his computer? You have to have the camera software installed on the laptop."
"No sweat," said Cade. "I have a null cable. We'll hook the lappies up and send the pics to my box."
And so it was. Cade accompanied Jeremy and his little group to the WNN offices, who -- after seeing the camera's contents on the tiny flip-out screen -- sent someone to buy a camera like Jeremy's in order to get the software needed to transfer and remove the pictures from the camera.
The news honcho coughed up several thousand dollars when Jeremy swore there were no other copies -- a lie he'd have told anyway to keep his own copies -- and the group returned to the hotel.
Half an hour later, Cade had a copy of all the pictures. He sat at the desk in his fourth-floor room and studied each picture in turn as he cleaned his Glock and replaced the rounds he'd fired, then he chose three of the best pictures to print.
Cropping away everything but the woman's face, he printed the pictures as full-page images and studied her some more over a cup of instant coffee.
Even as Cade had examined the smaller pictures on the laptop's screen, he'd begun to feel certain that -- somewhere, at some time -- he'd either seen the woman before or seen someone who could damned near be her twin.
Holding a full-page blowup of her face made things come together in his mind. In 1996, he'd made a TDY visit to Nellis AFB with Captain Margaret Adams of Air Force Intelligence.
On the last weekend of the visit, she'd wanted to check out downtown Las Vegas. Some time during that Saturday night he'd seen the woman in the picture, but something about her was different. Her hair? Maybe she hadn't been a blonde.
Using his art program, Cade darkened her hair a few shades, then darkened it some more. There was still something not quite right. Had she been wearing glasses? No, he didn't think so. Something else. Colored contacts, maybe.
Laptops and hard drives are like any other machines; they'll usually break down only at the worst possible times. Cade couldn't burn a backup CD on the lappie, so he decided to take other precautions against losing the pictures.
Using the room's phone line, he signed onto the internet and opened an account at a free web host as 'ABC Products', created a directory for the pictures on the server, made a picture-list web page and titled it 'productimages', and sent everything up to the site. He then made a dummy index page that said, 'Under Construction' and contained no links.
After adding a 'no robots' text file to the root directory to keep search engines out of the website, he tested the pages by viewing a couple of the sequentially-numbered pictures.
It occurred to Cade that -- once WNN used the pictures on