An Encounter in Atlanta | Page 5

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 to view himself as every woman's dream come true.
He also seemed to have an unyielding curiosity about Mandi, which was actually quite understandable. When Gary had added her to the operation roster, he'd waited until the last possible minute to do so, dropping her in as a standalone with little or no explanation to anyone.
Mandi didn't 'liaison' with the teams or team leaders. She hadn't attended even one of the briefings and her introduction had been so brief and uninformative that some of the team honchos -- leery of working with unknowns -- had been more than a little pissed at the time.
While she was pleasant enough when someone happened to encounter her, she didn't work or socialize with people from any of the teams. For the most part -- even if they weren't exactly accepting of the terms -- everybody seemed to get used to the arrangement, but not Frank Stearns.
His inability to find out anything at all about Mandi through channels seemed to bug the hell out of him. When official queries failed, he'd resorted to overt friendliness, inviting her to lunches, dinners, and even a party, and he seemed to take her continuous refusals as some sort of personal challenge.
"Well, hi, there, gorgeous!" said Stearns. "I'm