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 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 th