The Ninth Orphan (8 page)

Isabelle switched off the light and climbed in between the sheets. Sleep came quickly.

#

While Isabelle slept, Nine remained outside the apartment complex on Rue de Rome. He’d seen her bedroom light go off and knew it was time. Apart from exterior security lights and the occasional street light, the entire complex was in darkness. Light rain began to fall as he continued to look up at Isabelle’s apartment. He pulled his black coat up over his head to protect the heavy make-up that formed his Russian guise.

The fugitive agent shook his head as he considered the bad luck that had forced him to return here. He wished the ebony woman hadn’t photographed him the previous day. If she hadn’t, she could have carried on living her life as before, but fate had intervened and, unbeknown to her, she’d become caught up in a dark and ruthless underworld she probably didn’t even know existed.

Nine would have given anything to be able to turn back the clock. He now had to deal with the innocent woman who had become a major threat to his mission.

There was no doubt in his mind that Kentbridge and the other Omega operatives would be using all intelligence resources at their disposal and would eventually connect Isabelle with himself.

He also knew that once they tracked her down, which they most assuredly would, they would interrogate her until she told them everything she knew about him. Unfortunately, that would include the crucial piece of information she’d unwittingly discovered when his airline ticket
fell from
his pocket: his intended destination after he dropped out of the espionage game once and for all.

Nine couldn’t allow that to happen. His all-important hideaway in remote French Polynesia represented his one chance for freedom.

Earlier that day, he had accessed the report Isabelle had filed at the local police station by hacking into police records online. Isabelle hadn’t reported seeing her assailant’s airline ticket, but Nine was certain she had noted his Marquesas
Islands
destination. Leaving that information inside her head for his fellow Omegans to pry out of her was a chance he couldn’t take.

There was only one solution. It wasn’t going to be pretty. The very thought of it prompted Nine to break out in a sweat. His skin was starting to itch, too. He'd experienced these symptoms increasingly of late. Nine knew they were stress-related.

Rain continued to fall as he broke into the apartment complex. A few minutes later, after deftly disabling Isabelle’s newly-installed security alarm, he was inside her apartment. The light from the streetlights outside negated the need to use his pen-torch.

Nine felt decidedly uncomfortable to be in the same apartment in which he had assaulted Isabelle just over twenty four hours earlier. He looked around at the photos, the fridge and other familiar objects. His eyes scanned the nearby bookshelf and once again locked onto the copy of the classic American novel,
The Catcher in the Rye
.

He also studied the exact spot on the floor where he had interrogated Isabelle. The memory of her reading his misplaced airline ticket was all too vivid.

Nine stood motionless when he noticed a self-portrait photo of the exotic Frenchwoman on the wall. His mind was in turmoil as he inspected her gorgeous, yet slightly melancholy face. If he was going to terminate her, this was the perfect time. There were no other options.
Providing his scheduled rendezvous with the Chinese MSS agent went as planned, he was due to fly
out to the Marquesas Islands the next evening.

There was no point in delaying. If he left Isabelle alive for Kentbridge and the other Omega operatives to interrogate, his safe haven in the South Pacific would no longer be a secret. He knew he may never get another chance like this to disappear and if he didn’t terminate Isabelle right now he might as well just blow his own brains out.

Still Nine hesitated.
C’mon you pussy,
he chastised himself.
Just do the deed then you’re home and hosed. You’ve killed over a hundred people in your life. What’s one more? You’re going straight to hell anyway, so just pull the trigger and you’re a free man.

He turned his face away from the self-portrait of Isabelle and tried to picture her as just another target he needed to terminate.
It’s nothing. Just do it. Innocent people die every day. This woman doesn’t deserve to die, but at least she has lived a life. You’ve never lived at all.
Nine’s resolve hardened.
It’s a necessary evil. Just pull the trigger.

Casting out all doubts from his mind, he reached for the pistol he carried in his coat pocket. From another pocket he withdrew a silencer which he screwed on to the end of the weapon. Without hesitation, he tip-toed to Isabelle’s bedroom door and quietly opened it. He moved soundlessly, like a Ninja.

From the now open doorway, he could hear faint rhythmic breathing that indicated Isabelle was asleep. He was relieved to find his intended victim was alone.

Light from a streetlamp seeped through a gap in the curtains, revealing Isabelle was lying on her side. Her perfectly-shaped face was visible in the faint light.

In three short strides Nine was beside the bed. As he stood over Isabelle, with his pistol aimed at her head, he noticed a framed photograph of a group of young children. It appeared to have been taken at a kindergarten. As Isabelle wasn’t in the photo, Nine assumed she must have taken it. The innocent faces of the children caused him to hesitate.

His previous doubts began to resurface. He found he was sweating and his hands trembled. The normally super-cool operative froze when Isabelle suddenly rolled over in her sleep. Nine found his eyes drawn back to the photo on the wall.

Inexplicably, he began to shake. Emotions that he was normally able to keep a lid on started to well up inside him. Before Nine knew it, he was crying. Tears streamed down his face. He worried something terrible was happening to him, but couldn’t quite make sense of it. He felt as though he was falling into a black hole.

A million thoughts coursed through his mind at breakneck speed. He tried to control them, but couldn’t. Images from his past flashed in and out of his memory like small brain explosions. Images he thought he’d expunged from his mind forever.

Amidst all the confusion, Nine realized he could be having a nervous breakdown. Alarmed by the feelings that welled up from deep inside him, he tip-toed out of the bedroom as quietly as he’d entered.

12

S
till weeping, Nine closed Isabelle’s bedroom door and shuffled, zombie-like, through the apartment. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he entered the dining room and sat down at the table. He remained there, in the semi-dark, completely still except for his hands which trembled violently. The stress symptoms he’d experienced outside returned with a vengeance. He
was perspiring profusely and
his skin now itched more than ever.
A rash was beginning to form on his cheek.

Nine still couldn’t work out exactly what was happening to him. The realization he was experiencing some sort of meltdown was frightening. Having had total control over his emotions for as long as he could remember, this sudden loss of control was akin to a nightmare. Added to this was the knowledge he’d failed to terminate Isabelle – the one person who knew his intended destination and who stood between him and freedom.

Nine instinctively knew he could not kill the woman now. Somehow he’d lost his resolve. The ability to terminate someone, without emotion, had deserted him at the most crucial juncture in his life. Because of this, he slowly came to understand that his days were numbered. The gold-for-freedom plan now seemed
doomed
.

He became even more despondent.
You
’
re just one man,
he reminded himself.
One lone orphan
.
What made you think you could ever escape from Omega?

He recalled the time when, as a twelve-year-old, he
’
d briefly escaped from the Pedemont Orphanage.
Tommy hunted you down then and he
’
s gonna hunt you down again
.
He hesitated.
Tommy
.
Just thinking of Kentbridge brought so much emotion to the surface. Teacher, protector and mentor to the orphans since birth, Kentbridge was the one who, in Nine
’
s opinion, had betrayed him the most.

Nine looked longingly at the pistol he held. Slowly, he raised it. His arm felt heavy, as if it were weighed down. Shaking, he released the safety and held the pistol to his head. His finger tightened around the trigger. He stayed like that, frozen, for several minutes.

As he debated whether to pull the trigger, Nine remembered the ruby necklace around his neck. With his other hand, he removed the necklace and stared at the ruby. Once again, painful memories from his youth came flooding back. All the old feelings of abandonment and loneliness resurfaced and threatened to sweep him away.

* * *

Growing up in the Pedemont Orphanage, a nondescript facility tucked away in Chicago’s inauspicious suburb of Riverdale, was no ordinary childhood. For Nine and the other children, there was no such thing as just doing things for fun. Everything had a purpose. That purpose was to accommodate the ultimate agenda of the Omega Agency.

Nine and the others were taught to be entirely self-sufficient. Relying on anyone else was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Without even the minimal level of support provided in the worst orphanages, the twenty three Pedemont orphans had to be friends, siblings and sometimes even parents to each other. As a result, they became a very tight-knit group.

Tommy Kentbridge, who kept an emotional distance between himself and the orphans, was the closest they had to a real parent. As head of The Pedemont Project, Kentbridge’s sole mission was to train them to become the ultimate spies. The senior agent designed an integrated education program that gave his charges all the tools required to master the multi-faceted, complex profession of espionage.

It was a case of nature and nurture with the orphans. Nature, in that Omega had selected perfect genes for them before their births. Nurture, in that Kentbridge was always pushing them to be the best they could be. As soon as they could walk and talk, he gave them activities designed to open up as many neural pathways in their brains as possible.

With the help of virtual reality and biofeedback technologies, the orphans were taught how to guide their minds to reach certain brain frequencies – like Alpha, Theta and Delta – at will. The purpose of slipping into these particular frequencies was to allow the right brain to take over, as opposed to the left-brained consciousness dominant in most people. Whenever the orphans needed to access their higher intelligences, they would enter a daydream and simply
intuit
the answers. That way, they could bypass thinking, and just
know
. Within the Omega family, intuition was favored over logical thought patterns.

Wanting his charges to be able to take on various guises, and to become one with the people they were pretending to be, Kentbridge had them study the great character actors of film and theatre. He also taught the orphans the Method style of acting, stemming from Stanislavski’s teachings, as well as traditional British stage techniques incorporating vocal dexterity, body projection, foreign accents and make-up.

To increase their physical prowess, the orphans were taught the
martial art
Teleiotes, which was an invention of
Kentbridge
’
s. Derived from the Greek word
telos
, meaning to make perfect and to accomplish, it was a combination of all the Oriental martial arts as well as Western fighting arts like boxing, fencing and wrestling. Kentbridge and the other Omegans considered
Teleiotes
to be the ultimate martial art.

Speed reading was another subject in this radical education program. In fact, it wasn’t so much speed reading as mind photography – a technique where the practitioner taps into the brain’s innate photographic memory.

The orphans were taught how to use their eyes and open their peripheral vision to mentally photograph the page of a book, magazine or newspaper at the rate of a page per second. Then they’d consciously recall every detail as if they’d read the material at normal, everyday reading speed. Tens of thousands of books, on all manner of subjects, were sent to the Pedemont Orphanage to keep up with the children’s prolific reading habits.

Even at night, their education continued through hypnopædia, or sleep learning. Audio courses played through headphones into their subconscious minds while they slept.

The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields. Whether they were studying the sciences, languages, international finance, politics, the arts or martial arts, they would not stop until they’d achieved complete mastery of that subject. Kentbridge himself had encyclopedic
knowledge about almost everything
, and expected nothing less from his orphans.