Chapter eighteen

After my little dramatic flare I turned towards the green smear that was underneath the chandelier and saw something quite alarming, the puddle of green goo was starting to quiver and move. For a second I thought it was going to pull itself back together and we would have to fight round two. If that happened our bacons would probably be toast because I doubt the chandelier trick would work a second time, but thankfully it was just the Atelli fragment leaving its host causing the body to revert back into its human form, or in this case bits and pieces of meat floating in a puddle of blood. It was quite disgusting , especially for the fake Mikailov and Mike who had been splashed by the stuff when the Atelli got crushed. For some mysterious reason(my powers) I had escaped from the incident completely clean so I didn't suffer the same fate.

Just like last time when the fragment was completely free of the body , I quickly used my power to crush the defenseless Atelli fragment before it could flee. Since the fragment was invisible nobody even noticed that I did anything. They just saw the green smear turn into a red smear.

"Alrighty then, I believe that concludes my business here for today," I took out a card and gave it to the closest of Mikailov's goons, "Here is my number , it's secure but I'm sure your people will verify that. Well it has been one hell of a party , very entertaining but I have places to go and things to do so goodnight everybody. This has been fun, let's do it again."

Before anybody could recover from their shock I picked up one of the files on the nearest table and walked right out the door. I took out my cellphone and started to dial Kazimir ,"Hello Kazimir? I'm okay , everything went swimmingly. I have the information you wanted and I am on my way, I'll be there in about half an hour," as I was walking towards the lobby I spotted the curvy hotel employee from before still packed into her tight dress," Kazimir make that two and a half hours, there is a big pile up in front of me and it could take hours for the authorities to move the wrecked cars. Bye now, see you later." I quickly hung up and approached the curvaceous beauty , maybe I could convince her to show me to the women's restroom.

We didn't even make it that far, three minutes later we were in a utility closet nearby and as to what we were doing, I don't kiss and tell. But what I can say was that the makeup that Kazimir used was very smear resistant and that I enjoyed the tramp stamp of my favorite cartoon character, Wing: the magic penguin, that Tanya(that was her name) had on her lower back.

Nearly three hours later we both left the utility closet adjusting our dresses and hair, thankfully I didn't have much hair to mess up. Tanya programmed her number into my cellphone and walked away. I went to the parking lot, wary that someone would stop me but it seems that everybody had left while I was having my little stress relief session. I retrieved my coat , my guns and my car and drove all the way home.

I entered the secret bunker and there I found Kazimir taking a nap on one of his judo mats and Sergei watching something on one of the mainframe's screens. Kazimir immediately woke up and started grilling me on what had happened. I told him everything that I could remember without leaving anything out.

"So let me get this straight, instead of doing what I told you to do ,which was to talk to nobody unless you needed to , the first thing you did was threaten a notorious serial killer, followed by talking about information you should be pretending you did not have with a guy in a mask that was claiming to be the legendary Mike and you topped that off with scaring the Mikailov double in front of everybody and followed that up by killing one of the Atelli using a chandelier, did I miss anything."

"Hey, it wasn't that bad. Nobody died and I got to kill an Atelli, that's a win win situation in my book. "

Kazimir opened his moth ,closed it then opened it again. Finally he just shook his head and went out of the bunker without saying another word.

I dragged a chair next to Sergei and sat down. When I looked at the screen he was looking at I saw that he was watching reruns of Wing: the magical penguin. He paused it and turned to me.

"What took you so long? I checked the internet , there were no pileups on any of the roads you would have taken."

When I remembered what I had been doing to be so late I couldn't stop a grin from creeping on my face.

"Let's just say I was watching Wing as well."