The Toymaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning.
    Kaplan made the call. “All teams, go, go, go.”
     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
     
     
    Hajjah Palace
    Hajjah, Yemen
     
    I SABELLA HUNT’S HEAD didn’t just hurt, it debilitated her. Contusions on her forehead and the back of her head felt like a vise had been placed on her ears and her skull slowly crushed. With the pulsing of each heartbeat, the pain intensified.
    She scanned the room, even with blurry vision she could tell she was in a holding cell of some kind. Metal bars mounted in the single window were caked with dust and dirt that matched the brown glass. A rough-hewn wooden door directly opposite the window had a four-inch square peephole—a peephole   someone opened and closed every few minutes, checking to see if she had regained consciousness. Not yet, she needed time to think of a way to escape.
    Dry, stale dust caked her tongue and throat. She could feel the dehydration, her body longing for a drink of water. She’d been in this country too long. The dry, arid desert had taken its toll. She coughed.
    The peephole opened and a man brought some food and a tin cup with a few swallows of liquid. Both were horrid, but she didn’t care. Isabella was disoriented, her head throbbed and vision blurred so she reaasoned food would help. She ate and drank, but it made her drowsy and sluggish.
    She still didn’t know what had gone wrong. One minute she was doing her job—assistant to a shipping magnate in the port city of Aden—sitting in her office updating an export contract, when a man she’d never seen before rushed through the door, grabbed, and hit her. She fell onto the desk face first and smashed her forehead against the computer monitor. When she tried to stand, something smacked the back of her head and the office went black.
    Had she blown her cover? More importantly, when would Bentley send someone after her?
    She knew he would. Sooner or later. She hoped it would be Kaplan. They’d worked together on her last two missions. Both times posing as a couple. The first time as vacationers in Italy, they consulted a man named Vincent Corsaletti, a man who was known for his powerful connections. Vinny, as he preferred to be called, helped them locate an escaped prisoner from Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention camp. Corsaletti was a Sicilian information broker.
    With Corsaletti’s help, Hunt and Kaplan assisted Italian authorities in raiding the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan and apprehending an al Qaeda facilitator who worked for Yemen’s Political Security Organization and responsible for shuttling terrorists around the globe.
    Their second mission together sent them to Tripoli, Libya, posing as a newlywed couple and potential customers for a Libyan shipping company. Corsaletti informed them the owner had ties to Ian Collins. They attempted to extract information from the owner to help them locate and apprehend the assassin known as Shamrock. The owner disavowed any connection to Collins, refusing to discuss the matter any further. Hunt and Kaplan were escorted out and they were left at a dead end.
    She thought of the mission often, it had been different than the others. For her, it was special. A turning point in their friendship. Her thoughts were interrupted when the outside bolt on the huge door swung open. The black void that appeared outside the open door disappeared when two large men stormed into the room. The larger man picked her up, placed her in a wooden chair, and held her down while the second man grabbed her arms and pulled them behind the chair.
    She recognized the feel of flex cuffs being slipped around her wrists and kicked the larger man in the groin. His grip relaxed causing the chair to tip onto its back legs. The man in back lost his grip on her hands. Free of the flex cuffs, she leapt forward, head butting the first man in the gut, knocking him to the floor.
    She spun around to take a punch at the other man when she felt the sting in the back. Every muscle in her