An Encounter in Atlanta Part 2

"I'll bet that trick impresses the h.e.l.l out of some women."

Shrugging, Cade said, "The only women who've ever seen me do that could probably do it, too, LT, so I kind of doubt it. Are you through counting my bullets?"

Nodding, she handed him the magazine and asked, "Did you have one in the chamber as well as a full magazine?"

As he thumbed the loose round into the top of the magazine, Cade said, "Yup.

One up the spout."

He put the magazine back in the Glock and thumbed the slide release to close it, then put the gun back in its holster.

Bain said, "Thank you," and sipped her coffee again before sighingly saying, "I'm sorry, Mr. Cade, but you and your people were dropped on us from out of the blue. I simply don't know you well enough to just take your word for some things."

Shrugging again, Cade said, "No problem. Someone once said, 'Trust, but verify'. It's a good policy. Now answer a question for me, please."

"If I can."

"Who was the woman who flew off with the car?"

"I can't tell you that." Heading off his next question, she quickly added, "I don't know who she is. Or was, I'm afraid. She was apparently dropped on us, too."

"Apparently?"

With a curt nod, she said, "I hate to admit it, but she was a complete surprise to the Atlanta PD."

Cade met her gaze for a moment, decided that if she wasn't telling him the truth, it wasn't worth pus.h.i.+ng, and said, "I've seen tabloid reports of two superwomen and didn't really believe in either one of them until today. One is supposed to hang out in or around California and the other has been reported mostly around Las Vegas."

"That's what I've heard, too. I made a request for info as soon as I heard what happened. Before I got out of the comm center, word had come down that I was not to ask again."

Avery came to the table and said, "Lieutenant Bain, we're going to need you in a few minutes."

"Okay, I'll be right there," she said, then as Avery nodded and walked away, she said, "Mr. Cade, my office doesn't seem to have your contact info."

"My boss knows where to find me."

Bain gazed at Cade thoughtfully for a moment, then stood up and picked up her purse as she said, "In that case, I'll go see what Avery and Dolman have for me."

Her eyes flicked to the unfinished report on the table.

"I'll give that to Avery," said Cade.

He sat back down as she walked away, but he didn't take his eyes off her.

Great legs. Tall, brunette, and generally a fine example of womanhood. As she pa.s.sed the coffee bar her head turned slightly and Cade saw her looking back at him in the mirror-finish of the coffee machine.

He gave her a nod that said, 'Yeah, lady. I'm looking.'

Bain held his reflected gaze for a moment, then moved on to join the other cops. Cade returned to finis.h.i.+ng the police report and -- after rereading it twice -- judged it finished about fifteen minutes later.

Cade signed it and presented it to Avery, then pulled his DragonCon 'registered guest' badge out of his jacket pocket, clipped it to his collar, and headed into the hotel to see if this year's convention was still underway after all the excitement.

In the second-floor con suite, it seemed that a number of other people were wondering the same thing. They filled the con suite practically wall-to-wall as Cade squeezed in and looked around.

No answers there; Cade left the con suite and headed for the registration ballroom on the first floor, taking the cell phone he'd been issued out of his pocket and dialing the Atlanta number he'd been given for the mission.

A woman answered with, "Zero-eight-two-six."

"Dragonfly here."

"Go, Dragonfly."

"I filed a police report. Nothing to add. Am I offline?"

"Yes. John says 'good job' and you're on standby."

"Okay, thanks."

"You're welcome. Enjoy your stay in Atlanta."

She disconnected. Cade slipped the phone back in his pocket as he approached the elevators. As usual, there was a herd of people waiting. Some began chanting in unison as if that would somehow make the right elevator light come on.

"Down, down; we wanna go down!"

As he waited, Cade's mind returned to the moment that the blonde had dragged the car out of the hotel's driveway. A Crown Vic's roof came almost even with his shoulders. She'd been tall enough to easily see over it, so that made her between five-seven and five-ten.

And her legs. By G.o.d, she'd had magnificent legs. Even from across the street, he'd seen that she'd had the long, solid legs of a fitness diva.

How had she happened to be on hand to deal with the car bomb? He'd never seen or heard any reports of flying blondes in Atlanta. Chances were she'd been on tap just like more than half of the other people he'd met during this operation. That would make it likely that she'd been in town at least a few days, stashed somewhere as an ace in the hole.

It had to have been one h.e.l.l of an explosion up there. Cade wondered if she'd still been hanging onto the car when it blew. Yeah, probably. She couldn't very well let go of it. d.a.m.n.

Motion in the lobby below caught his eye; the guy who'd been taking pictures in the street was cradling the camera and leading a small herd of people through the dense throng of conventioneers, heading toward the front doors of the hotel.

Spurred to action for yet-unclear reasons, Cade glanced around for a way through the crowd by the elevators, but he realized that backtracking to the stairs near the con suite would cost him too much time. He looked over the rail at the lobby below.

The fountain below the balcony was the only area clear of people. Swinging his legs over the balcony rail and letting himself dangle at the bottom of the rail, Cade dropped perhaps seven feet into six inches of water.

Amid cries of "Jesus!" and "Holy s.h.i.+t!", he clambered out of the fountain and bored through the crowd after the knight and his entourage, nearing them just before they'd reached the sidewalk at the end of the hotel's carport.

"You! The knight!" yelled Cade.

The knight and most of his group stopped immediately. They saw Cade, soaked to the knees, running toward them.

One woman shrieked, "He's got a gun!" and pointed when she saw Cade's shoulder holster, but someone else laughed and said, "So do all the stormtroopers, Sandy. I don't know who he's supposed to be from what movie, though."

Cade hauled out his wallet and flashed his Atlanta PD Auxiliary Services ID as he came to a halt and said, "I'm not a character from a movie. The gun's real."

Turning to the knight, he said, "You were taking pictures in the street before the explosion. Did you get any closeups of the blonde who took the car?"

"Hey, man!" said the knight, "What I got in this camera's worth some money!

I've already called World News Net..."

"Yeah, fine," interrupted Cade. "WNN can wait. I need to see what you've got in that 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 bulls.h.i.+t, man! She saved the G.o.dd.a.m.ned hotel and everybody in it. They're saying she was killed in the explosion and now you're saying you're gonna call her a car 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.ned 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 f.u.c.k. 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 n.o.body 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 mean right 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 d.a.m.ned 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gla.s.ses? 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 t.i.tled 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 the news -- both Jeremy and WNN would be questioned at length, and Cade's involvement would be discovered.

In order to wipe away all traces of his recent web activities, Cade moved the laptop's 'cookie' files and cache files to a temporary directory, then rebooted to DOS and deleted that directory and all the 'index.dat' and history files using 'wipe.exe', which overwrote files with garbage code before deleting them.

He then backed up his 'favorites' list, uninstalled and reinstalled the browser so it would look as if he'd had to fix problems with the program, and very briefly visited several common websites to create new cache and history files.

When the coffee was gone, Cade checked his watch, put the computer away, and put his thoughts and speculations about the woman on a mental shelf as he brushed his teeth, put on a clean s.h.i.+rt, and tossed his convention guides in his backpack.

He had less than an hour to get to the first of four writer's conferences listed in the program guide -- a discussion about 'Women of Science Fiction' -- and he wanted to stop in the dealer's room on the way.

Chapter Four

The door to room 422 opened as Mandi neared it and a tall guy in jeans, cowboy boots, and a green Army field jacket stepped out. He pulled the door shut with a glance in her direction that turned into a rather long look, then he hefted his black backpack and followed her toward the elevators.

He had to be close to fifty; Mandi wondered which team he was with, and in what capacity. All the rooms from 420 to 430 had been reserved as a block to centralize personnel, so he had to be some kind of a cop or fed. Or a liaison?

Pressing the 'down' b.u.t.ton, she heard -- no, she 'felt' -- the man come to stand quietly a few feet behind her. Very quietly, she added after a few moments. Almost unnaturally quietly.

There was no rubbing of fabric or scuffing of his boots on the carpet. No s.h.i.+fting of his backpack or even the soft creak of old boot leather as weight s.h.i.+fted from one leg to the other. The guy was an embodiment of silence.

Mandi had to actually focus her hearing a bit to be sure he was breathing, and she found it mildly unnerving that anyone could stand so silently for so long.

Another few moments pa.s.sed before she turned and grinningly said with a raised eyebrow, "Just checking to see if you're really back there. You're very quiet."

He nodded slightly and returned her grin. When she'd turned, his eyes hadn't been on her b.u.t.t or her legs, as she'd expected. They'd been on her hair or shoulders, because they'd met her eyes instantly. Mandi found that odd, too.

The guy seemed to study her face as he said, "Yeah, I guess I am kind of quiet sometimes. That's a nice outfit, milady. It doesn't scream 'look at me!', but it can't very easily be ignored, either."

'Milady'? Who calls a woman 'milady' these days? Mandi accepted his compliment as given and saw his eyes drop to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Correction; to her badge, which hung from one of her tiny demi-lapels. Her eyes fell to his badge in return.

"Mandi Steele," he read, extending his hand. "Hi, Mandi. I'm Ed Cade."

His eyes returned to hers as she shook his hand and said, "So I see. Nice to meet you. Why's the name block on your badge light blue?"

"I'm registered as a guest author. Artists get a different color -- light green, I think. Staff types get red or yellow."

She glanced at his badge again, then asked, "Are you staying on this floor?