The Toymaker (18 page)

She heard his voice again. “Isabella.”

She felt herself being lifted off the cot. “Isabella. I’ve got you now. You’re safe.”

This was no dream, this was real.

It
was
Gregg Kaplan.

CHAPTER 33

K
APLAN SEARCHED THE dungeon-like room with his Maglite until the beam of light found the cot. Isabella Hunt was curled in the fetal position. A pit grew in his stomach as he rushed to her.

“Isabella. I’m here.” He said. “You’re safe.”

He brushed her matted, blood-dried hair away from her face. “Isabella? Can you hear me? It’s Gregg.”

“Gregg, she’s been drugged.” Jake said. “We need to get her back to the gliders. It’ll be light in less than an hour and we need to be as far away from here as we can.”

Kaplan scooped her up in his arms, resting her head against his shoulder. “It’ll be okay now.”

“Gregg?” she whispered. “Is it really you? You came for me?”

“It’s really me, here to take you home.”

“I’ll arrange the scene,” Jake said. “Make it look like she overpowered the guard and escaped through a window.”

Isabella groaned as Kaplan lifted her into his arms. “How are you going to do that?” he asked.

“I have an idea. Just go. Get Isabella to the glider. I’ll be a couple of minutes behind you.” Jake ran down the corridor and out of sight.

Kaplan carried Hunt down the same bloody steps. Baraka was waiting for him at the landing, still holding pressure to her wound.

“Is woman okay?” Baraka asked.

“She’s been beaten and sedated.” Kaplan said. “But she’ll live. How’s your neck?”

“Bleeding almost stop.” She said. “Must take woman to small airplane. Baraka is fine. Have friends in Hajjah, can hide there.”

Kaplan carried Hunt out of the Palace and down the winding walkway. At the bottom of the second switchback, Kaplan turned left toward the gliders.

Baraka stopped. “I go now. Good luck, Mr. Kaplan.”

Kaplan stopped. “Thank you, Baraka, for everything. We couldn’t have done it without your help. You have avenged your family.”

The woman hurried out of sight.

With Isabella in his arms, Kaplan ran all the way to the gliders. He found Wiley waiting, the equipment already stowed in the aircraft for their trip to the Red Sea.

“Because of weight distribution she must ride with you.” Wiley said. “Where’s Jake?”

“Jake said he was fixing the scene to look like an escape. How? I don’t know.”

“He’d better hurry or his ass gets left behind.” Wiley said. “Besides, he’s wasting time.”

“Gregg.” A tear rolled down Hunt’s cheek.

Wiley looked at Kaplan. “Be careful.”

“I’ll be fine.” Kaplan slipped Hunt into her seat and strapped on her harness. “We’ll be fine.”

† † †

Jake found a metal tray full of untouched food near the entrance to Hunt’s prison cell. He grabbed the tray and flung food on the floor of her room. He ran back to where the dead man lay and smashed the tray against the side of the man’s head—hard enough to break open the dead man’s flesh. Then he ran back to the prison room and tossed the tray on the floor. He needed to make it look like Hunt escaped rather than being rescued.

Metal utensils were on a nearly table so Jake grabbed a knife, smeared it in the man’s blood, and dropped it by the puddle of blood. Next he picked up the dead guard and tossed his body down the stairwell. Now he needed to fake an escape by Isabella.

He moved through each corridor, opening and closing doors until he found what he was looking for. Curled on the floor in a utility closet was a rope. He couldn’t have planned it any better.

He forced open a window, tied off one end of the rope to a column inside the room, and tossed the rope out the window. He turned to leave then realized he should ensure authenticity.

He grabbed the rope and climbed out the window and lowered himself toward the ground. He met the end of the rope ten feet above the ground. No way down but drop. He let go of the rope and fell.

The hard ground sent shockwaves through his legs. His knees buckled as he hit the ground.
Get up.
The pain radiated along his spine until his head throbbed.
Get up. Shake it off.

His headset crackled, then Wiley's voice. "Jake, get down here or get left behind."

He pushed himself up using the wall for balance. He bent over, hands on knees, took three deep breaths, and ran. "On my way."

When Jake reached the gliders, Kaplan had just finished strapping Hunt into her seat. “How is she?”

“She’ll be fine.” Kaplan said. “Now can we get out of here?”

Wiley got in the glider and activated his customized avionics and instrumentation. “Jake, get in and let's go.”

“Gregg, after you clear the edge.” Wiley said. “Climb out at sixty knots on a heading of 2-6-0. We’ll be right behind you.”

“Roger that.” Kaplan’s voice in Jake’s headset.

Jake activated his night vision goggles just in time to see Kaplan’s glider cross over the edge of the cliff and out of sight below. Two seconds later the glider reappeared in a climbing right hand turn.

Jake felt Wiley accelerate their glider toward the edge of the cliff, his specialized electric motors totally silent. The glider crossed the edge of the cliff, a split second of weightlessness, and then the downward G-force pull of the climb. Wiley banked the glider to the right until rolling out on the same heading he gave Kaplan.

Jake took a deep breath. “We might just make it after all.”

“We’re not out of the woods, yet.” Wiley said. “That was the easy part. The hard part is still to come.”

CHAPTER 34

Mosque de Trappes

Trappes, France

3:00 a.m.

H
ASHIM KHAN WOKE up early from a restless night. Something he’d heard the day before troubled him. Something the imam had casually mentioned when he was reading a Paris newspaper.

He left the solace of his private room and returned to the room where the imam had been reading. He looked at the table where the imam read the paper. But now the table was bare. He checked around the room and finally found what he was looking for in the trash receptacle.

Khan spread the tabloid across the table, leafing through it page-by-page, searching for something, the details of which he couldn’t remember. Then he discovered what had troubled him, a small sidebar article. The planned closure of one of his targets, the closure planned on the day of the attack. It was too late to change targets—he needed another option. Only one came to mind.

The five men he’d picked for this mission were young, naïve, and scared. He’d given them seven days to prepare. Seven days to make their peace. Seven days to live. They’d accepted their mission with pride. They accepted their fate.

But in seven days the target would be inaccessible. He needed to move up the date of the attacks. The young men were ready. They would do their job. He would tell them later that the time frame had changed.

Today they could cleanse.

Today they could shave.

Tomorrow they would die.

† † †

The gliders flew in tandem, Kaplan and Hunt in the lead, Wiley and Jake in the rear. The useful life of Wiley’s custom-made batteries was forty-five minutes. In order to gain maximum altitude with the time available, Wiley said best rate of climb was required until the low battery warning light came on. The eastern sky was waking up behind them, slowly illuminating the flight ahead. Soon the sun would show the way. The NVGs had already been turned off and stowed away. Twilight was giving way to daylight.

Something had bothered Jake about Wiley’s reluctance to use deadly force on all of the men at Hajjah Palace. It made no sense to leave witnesses—witnesses that had seen them—had seen Baraka.

“Mr. Wiley, what about the men at the palace? They know we were there. Rescued Isabella. They’ll go after Baraka. They’ll kill her.”

“Relax, Jake. I’ve got it covered.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, how?”

“Ever heard of a smart bomb?”

“Sure, but—no way.” Jake said.

“In exactly ten minutes, a smart bomb will strike the Hajjah Palace. Any evidence of our presence will evaporate and no one will be the wiser.”

“Dammit. Don’t you think you should’ve shared that information?”

“You didn’t need to know.”

“So, all that work I just did, arranging the rooms, jumping out the window—”

“All for naught, Jake.”

“Great.” Jake could sense the old man was grinning at his expense.

Jake looked down at the barren terrain. The mountains were almost behind them. In the far distance he could barely trace the outline of the Red Sea shoreline. They’d traveled twenty-five miles in total silence and climbed to an altitude of 12,000 feet when the
LOW BATTERY
light turned on. Time to retract the propeller and glide. He hoped their altitude was high enough.

“My battery light just came on.” Kaplan broke the silence. “Time to retract.”

“Ours too.” Jake watched Wiley shut down the electric motor and retract the propeller. The engine slowly lowered itself back down into the tail of the glider.

Jake watched as Kaplan lowered his damaged motor. It moved down and stopped. Up a little, then back down and stopped. Jake knew Kaplan was working the mechanism as far down into the fuselage as possible to reduce drag. Jake checked his GPS unit, Kaplan would need his glider as drag-free as possible because they still had fifty miles to travel.

“What did you mean when you said the hard part was yet to come?” Jake asked. “Aren’t we going to make it to the rendezvous point?”

“Unless we get spotted and shot down,” Wiley said. “We’ll make it to the drop. It’s just I’ve never ditched a glider before and we very well might have to put down in the Red Sea.”

† † †

Kaplan worked the electric motor as deep into the well as he could before the battery was fully drained. The noise stirred Hunt from her drugged state with a jerk.

“Isabella? Are you awake?”

“Gregg? It wasn’t a dream? You did come after me.”

“Yes I did.” Kaplan said. “But I had help. Jake is with me—and the old man he’s working for now.”

Kaplan explained about the mission in Australia and the trouble Jake caused by shooting Mustaff Bin Yasir. Senator Richard Boden was breathing down Bentley’s neck so the director sent Kaplan to Yemen and physically delivered Jake to El Paso, leaving him with the old man.

“What does the old man do?” She asked.

“I’m not real sure, something with radio frequencies and microwave signals. He’s got a gadget for everything it seems.” Kaplan turned his head around and smiled at Hunt. “If it weren’t for him, we’d never have been able to rescue you. He planned this whole mission.”

“I was afraid I’d never see you again.” Hunt said. “I don’t know how long I was in that place. I started losing track of time. I stopped eating and drinking. I figured they were drugging me. Then a man would ask me questions and hit me.”

Kaplan heard Hunt sobbing. “You’re safe now, Isabella.”

“I never saw him.” She sniffled. “All I know is his breath was like…like…road kill. The stench was nauseating.”

“There were five men in that building, Jake killed the one guarding your room.” Kaplan noticed the outline of the Red Sea becoming more distinct as the first beams of sunlight illuminated the glider’s cockpit. “Jake made it look like you overpowered him and escaped while the others were asleep. They’re as good as dead when their handler finds out you’re gone.”

“Are we talking about the same Jake I know?” Hunt asked. “That doesn’t sound like him at all.”

“No kidding.” Kaplan smiled to himself. “I didn’t think I could ever work with Jake again, but in just two days, Wiley has changed him. Wiley has some sort of control on him. Helped him move past his anger. And the funny thing is, I don’t think Jake has realized it yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s more in control. He takes the lead without being told and instinctively knows what to do. And it hasn’t even been a week since he blew Yasir’s head off.”

Kaplan deliberately omitted the details of Jake’s loss of control when he accused Jake of being just like Laurence O’Rourke. Details that Isabella Hunt didn’t need to know. Details no one needed to know. That incident was between Kaplan and Jake. One day Kaplan would make Jake apologize or he would make Jake pay—no one points a gun at him without consequences.

“Gregg.” Wiley’s voice. “I need you to pull up and to the right. Let me take the lead then you can fall in behind me.”

“Roger that.” Kaplan eased back on the stick and turned slightly to the right. The glider’s speed slowed as it gained altitude. To his left he watched Wiley ease the glider underneath his wing and out in the lead.
The old man was good.

Kaplan lowered the nose and maneuvered his glider behind Wiley and Jake, keeping no more than about a fifty-foot distance.

A sudden flash from behind caught his attention. “What the hell was that?”

Wiley’s voice came over the headset. “Smart bomb just leveled the palace. The main reason I was in a hurry to get us out of there.”

“What about Baraka? The rest of the village?”

“Relax, Mr. Kaplan. Best thing about a smart bomb is that it only takes out the intended target. The worst thing that happened to the rest of the village was being abruptly awakened from their slumber. Any trace of our extraction has evaporated. And in al Qaeda’s eyes, so has Ms Hunt.”

Kaplan had to admit it, the old man had thought of everything.

“By the way, how’s she doing?” Wiley asked.

Kaplan turned around and noticed Hunt’s eyes blinking. “She’s fading in and out, but she’ll be fine when the effects wear off. She needs medical attention, though.”