Hunted Read Online Free PDF

Absolutely. Even if her heart had started to beat a little faster, and her stomach had twisted itself into a knot.
    That was normal, the result of adrenaline. That meant she was on her game.
    She was a pro. Lives depended on what she did next. And what she was going to do next was exactly what she had been trained to do: her job.
    Which was, first of all, to establish contact. Get Ware on the phone.
    “We got a line inside?” she asked Dixon.

CHAPTER THREE
    O N THE MONITOR, Caroline watched Ware’s expression change as he registered the sound of the ringing phone. He stretched to punch a button on the instrument, which rested on the massive mahogany desk located at the far end of the room. To do that he used a single finger because, she noticed, both his hands were full—the right one with what looked to be his service weapon and the left one with—a dead man’s switch? She couldn’t be sure. Ware’s leanly muscled, six-foot-two-inch frame had been perched, foot swinging, on a corner of that desk until he heard the phone. As he moved to answer it, his crow-black hair gleamed in the light of a chandelier hanging above the desk. Unlike Dixon, he didn’t appear to be sweating, but his swarthy-skinned, chiseled-featured face was set in tense lines. Like the majority of the guests, he wore a tux. She guessed that was how he had managed to gain entry into the party, to which it was almost certain he had not been invited, because this storiedbash was strictly for the rich and influential, and Ware was neither. Whatever, the elegant tux elevated his killer good looks to a whole new level of hot. Beneath the carelessly buttoned jacket, she saw no sign of a suicide vest. Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t in possession of a bomb, just that he didn’t appear to be wearing it.
    “Asshole,” she heard her father say clearly, and realized that with one push of a finger Ware had put the phone on his end on speaker. Her phone was not on speaker, and would not be. Specially designed for use in hostage situations, the receiver she was holding was equipped with a button that you had to depress before you spoke into it if you wanted whoever was on the other end to be able to hear you. Otherwise, the handset did not transmit sound, which was the point. In hostage situations, there was generally too much going on in the Mobile Command Unit that the perp didn’t need to hear.
    “Shut the hell up,” Ware replied almost amiably as he straightened to nuzzle the back of Martin Wallace’s leonine head with his pistol. “Or I’ll shut you up.”
    A muscle twitched in her father’s cheek, which Caroline knew from experience meant that he was absolutely furious, but he didn’t say anything else. No surprise there: contrary to his genial, glad-handing exterior, he was at heart cold and calculating, the opposite of rash. He would bide his time, wait for his opportunity, and strike back hard. Visibly on edge, he was seated in a leather-upholstered accent chair that looked like it was one of a pair designed to face the desk. It had been moved so that it was now directly in front of Ware, facing the room. Caroline recognized the self-control her father was exercising in the set of hisshoulders and the thinness of his mouth. Ware’s hand holding the pistol now rested negligently on the rolled leather back of that chair. The pistol’s mouth was just a couple of inches short of the base of her father’s skull. His wrists, she saw, were secured with zip ties to the chair’s arms. A pair of bungee cords around his waist held him fastened in place. There was a bruise on his chin, and a small cut under one eye that had started to scab over. From the reddened scrape along Ware’s left cheekbone and the cut at the corner of his mouth, she surmised that her father, a bull of a man who at fifty-seven still took pride in his physical prowess, had put up a fight.
    Only the injuries didn’t look like they had happened within, say, the last hour or