Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear Read Online Free PDF

a school-yard lesson about picking on someone his size. But there were too many other people around, easily a dozen or more, most of them this guy’s size or close to it, and most wearing holsters on their hips or under their arms. Some were unloading long, low crates from the back of a truck, others were wheeling the crates over to the hangar building. Gabriel might have been able to take any one of them, maybe two—but all at once? With nothing but his bare hands? There was bravery and then there was idiocy.
    But he had to do something. He watched Sheba’s captor carry her into the hangar, and through the open bay doors Gabriel saw him drag her up the rear ramp of a cargo plane—the same place all the crates were being loaded. He tried to get a glimpse of the plane’s registration, but no luck—there were numbers on the tail, but nothing to indicate what country it might have come from or been heading to.
    He crept closer, keeping the body of the larger of the two trucks between him and the workers still busily unloading and moving the cargo. Through the hangar doors, he heard a pair of voices in conversation, one nasal and high-pitched, the other a lifelong smoker’s rasp. Both had an accent, one he’d heard plenty of in recent weeks.
    “You did well, Andras,” the smoker said, pronouncing the name the Hungarian way, with a soft “s”: AHN-drahsh. “Mr. DeGroet will be pleased to get her back.”
    “Someone should cut the bitch’s nails,” Andras said. His was the nasal whine. “You see this? You see what she did to me?”
    “Poor baby,” the smoker said. “A scratch.”
    “It’s three scratches, and you wouldn’t find it so funny if it was your face. She nearly took my eye out.”
    “What do you want for it, Andras, some iodine? Or maybe hazard pay?”
    Andras grumbled. “And why not hazard pay? That’s not a bad idea.”
    “Well, then,” the smoker said, “you go ahead and bring it up with Mr. DeGroet when we land, why don’t you? He’ll probably be glad to entertain your request.”
    “He should be,” Andras said.
    “But do be prepared,” the smoker said, “if I am incorrect and he is not glad—if, say, he is in a bad mood because his plans have been delayed this long—in that case you realize he will kill you just for suggesting such a thing. You do know that, don’t you?”
    “Ah, go to hell,” Andras said, but his voice lacked conviction.
    “Maybe he’ll use you for practice, the way he did with Janos. Cut you to ribbons. With his saber, perhaps. It has always been his favorite.”
    Andras said nothing.
    “Or,” the smoker continued, “you could take the pay you were promised, go buy yourself a bottle and a girl, and keep your goddamn mouth shut. Mind you, it’s up to you which you do—I’m just saying you could do that. It’s your choice.”
    “You’re a real bastard, Karoly, you know that?”
    “Oh, yes,” Karoly said. “I know that—and as long as you don’t forget it, we’ll get along fine.”
    Gabriel moved away from the wall of the hangar, where he’d been standing, his ear pressed to the metal. They were taking her back to DeGroet—back to Hungary, presumably, though probably not to the castle, not now that Gabriel had infiltrated it once. Hungary wasn’t a big country, relatively speaking, but it was big enough that one woman could quite easily be made to vanish. There was only one way to be sure that couldn’t happen—and that was to stay with her. But how…?
    He waited until the crew working on unloading the truck wheeled the next crate down the short metal ramp in back. There was one man still inside, Gabriel saw, seated on a folding chair; behind the wheel, in the truck’s cab, there’d been one more. But that was all—temporarily the other men were all engaged in steering the bulky crates over to the hangar and onto the plane. That evened up the odds a bit, at least.
    Gabriel walked casually up the ramp, gave a two-fingered wave to the