The Orphan Uprising (The Orphan Trilogy, #3) (3 page)

Drugged to the eyeballs with medication the doctor had prescribed, Nine was in no position to argue. He felt woozy and couldn’t focus long on any one thing. Every time his thoughts turned to Francis, other thoughts and memories intruded, pushing his son’s abduction to the back of his mind.

Isabelle took over. The Frenchwoman knew, for the moment, she had to be the strong one. For so long she’d relied on her Sebastian to make the hard decisions. Now it was her turn.

First, she had to give a statement to one of the gendarmes charged with investigating Francis’ abduction and Luang’s murder. The gendarme seemed as bewildered by it all as Isabelle felt, which didn’t inspire her with confidence. Next, she gave an interview to a persistent reporter from the local newspaper in the hope that the resultant publicity could lead to a sighting of her missing son.

Finally, armed with a small carton of drugs for the patient, Isabelle drove Nine to their home on the settlement’s outskirts. There, she put him to bed. He was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

Then she ran outside and into a nearby palm grove. Near collapse, she raised her head to the sky and screamed. It was a long, heartfelt scream – a scream of anger, frustration and fear. Fear that she may never see her son again.

#

Isabelle spent the next few hours hosting a stream of concerned friends and well-wishers who commiserated with her and offered their love and support. Many of them were mothers, like her, who could relate to the loss of a child. They kept coming and going until well after dark.

Finally, toward midnight, an exhausted Isabelle made it to bed. She slept fitfully, waking to check on Nine every so often and worrying about Francis.

#

Nine woke to find Isabelle asleep in a bedside chair. How long she’d been there, he could only guess. Her tear-stained face told him she’d been crying in her sleep. The early morning sun streamed through a gap in the curtains, casting a golden glow over the bed. Everything seemed peaceful.

For a moment, the still groggy Nine remembered none of the previous day’s terrible events. Then it all came flooding back to him: the abduction, the murder, the heart attack. He sat bolt upright. “Francis!”

Isabelle awoke, startled. “What is it?”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.” Nine was already dressing.

Isabelle tried to force him back to bed. “The doctor said- -”

“Forget what the doctor said,” Nine snapped. “I have to find our son.”

Isabelle was momentarily taken aback by Nine’s cold manner. She hadn’t seen this side of him since he abducted her in Paris while on the run from Omega five years earlier.

Now fully dressed, Nine gently but firmly sat his wife down on the edge of the bed then sat beside her. “I need you to listen very carefully, Isabelle.” He stared hard into her eyes.

For a second Isabelle almost didn’t recognize Nine. He had his game face on now. The loving husband and father had been displaced by the ruthless, dispassionate operative she once knew.

Nine continued, “Who took Francis, and why, I can only guess. I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete.” He spoke almost in a monotone voice, as if reciting a script. In a way he was. Nine was falling back on his years of training to become an elite operative with the Omega Agency. In his mind’s eye he could see his old mentor, Special Agent Tommy Kentbridge, lecturing him and the other orphan-operatives on what to do in just such a situation; he could almost hear him speaking.
For every problem, there’s a solution
. Nine just hoped that was true.

Isabelle went to interrupt, but thought better of it.

“I have to act now. The longer I wait the less chance we have of finding him.”

“Oh Sebastian, what are we going to do?” Isabelle collapsed sobbing into his arms.

Nine caressed her, but his mind remained detached and on the problem at hand. A plan was beginning to form. He held Isabelle out at arm’s length. “Whoever it was who took Francis will have spirited him out of the islands.”

Isabelle looked mortified. She hadn’t considered that her beloved son could have been taken away from the Marquesas Islands.

Nine continued, “I suspect they’ve taken him to the States.”

“America? But why? And who are they?” She hesitated for a moment. “It’s Omega, isn’t it?”

Nine sighed.
She’s reached the same conclusion I have
. He stood up. “I don’t have any proof, but yes it could only be Omega.”

Isabelle became hysterical. She’d witnessed first hand the agency’s ruthlessness. The thought of Francis being in Omega’s hands terrified her. Nine tried to calm her, but she screamed over top of him. “We must tell the authorities it’s Omega!”

“No!” Nine could feel his patience running out. The last thing he needed now was a hysterical wife trying to run the show. He knew the job ahead of him would be difficult enough without that. “Omega doesn’t even officially exist, Isabelle.”

“But- -”

Cutting her off he said, “Remember, Omega is above the police, the FBI, the CIA, even the President. And it has eyes and ears everywhere. If I lodged an official complaint with any of the law enforcement authorities, I’d be apprehended and handed over to the agency before I could blink.”

“But they’ll kill Francis!”

“No they won’t!” Nine had to shout to make himself heard. Not wanting to precipitate another heart attack, he forced himself to calm down. “If they wanted to kill him, they’d have done that already,” he said quietly. He reminded Isabelle of the lengths the two men had gone to, to abduct their son. “Those weren’t the actions of people out to kill him.”

That got through to Isabelle. She calmed herself down enough to take a breath. “I’m sorry. You’re right of course.”

“No, it’s me who should be sorry. If I hadn’t once been part of Omega, we wouldn’t be in this terrible situation.”
He kissed her forehead.

“What will you do?”

“I have to get to the States. I can’t explain every detail to you, my darling. What I need is for you to trust me. Can you do that?”

Isabelle nodded. In such matters, she trusted him implicitly.

“Good. Get dressed and packed. You’re coming with me to Papeete.” Nine considered it likely the floatplane had flown to Tahiti. That was within its flight range whereas mainland USA, and even Hawaii, was well beyond it. But that wasn’t why he was going to Papeete. He had something to do in the Tahitian capital before continuing to America.

Isabelle sprang into action. She dressed quickly then began packing. As she packed, memories of what Omega had done to her, and her deceased parents, replayed over and over in her mind. Her living nightmare was worsening by the minute.

4

While Isabelle finished packing, Nine walked down steps leading to the bungalow’s basement. There, behind a false wall panel, he retrieved a variety of items he’d stored for just such an emergency. They included disguise-aids such as a fake moustache, cosmetics, hair dyes, contact lenses and facial prosthetics. He scooped these up and placed them inside a long black makeup kit designed to be strapped to his chest. Other items included several falsified passports he’d acquired during and since his days as an active Omega operative.

Nine returned to the bedroom upstairs and found Isabelle sobbing uncontrollably as she studied a framed photograph of Francis. Nine took her in his arms and held her tight. Gradually, Isabelle’s sobbing subsided. “You okay?” he asked somewhat lamely.

“What do you think?”

Nine had no answer. He could see his wife was beside herself with worry, but he was now in operational mode and his mindset was such he had no time for histrionics. “Did you speak to the police yesterday?”

Pulling herself together, Isabelle nodded. “Yes, I spoke to the local gendarme and to a reporter from the paper.” She described in detail what she’d told the gendarme.

Nine then phoned the gendarmes’ office. After two attempts, he got hold of the same gendarme who had interviewed Isabelle the previous day. Within minutes he learned the local authorities hadn’t a clue who had abducted Francis. Nor had there been any sightings of the floatplane since local fishermen had reported seeing it depart Taiohae Bay soon after Francis’ abduction.

Nine quickly relayed his description of the plane to the gendarme and asked him to alert the Tahitian authorities of its likely arrival there. The gendarme assured him that had already been done. He and his colleagues had also concluded that Tahiti was the plane’s likely destination. If they were right, Francis and his abductors had long since reached Tahiti and, in all probability, were already in or on their way to way to America – or wherever it was he was bound.

#

Nine and Isabelle caught a mid-day flight to Papeete. She used the two-hour flight to catch up on lost sleep while he used the time to try to make sense of the recent events and also plan his next steps.

Fighting against the tiredness that threatened to overwhelm him – a side-effect of the cocktail of drugs the doctor had prescribed – Nine reviewed what he knew and what he suspected. He knew professionals had abducted his son for he came from their world and recognized the signs; he knew they’d targeted Francis for they sought him out amongst all the other children; and he knew they’d taken him away in the floatplane.

That was the extent of what he knew. There were still so many unanswered questions.
Why has Omega come back for me now after so many years? Why did they take Francis and not me? What do they hope to gain?

“A drink, sir?”

Nine’s thoughts were interrupted by an airline hostess pushing a drinks trolley along the aisle. He ordered a strong black coffee, hoping that would help keep him awake.

Once served, he turned his attention to his next step. Something told him he needed to contact his old nemesis Andrew Naylor, the head of the Omega Agency.
If Omega’s involved, he’ll know about it
. After all, the Pedemont Project and the twenty-three orphan-operatives who had evolved out of that groundbreaking experiment was Naylor’s brainchild.

Thinking of Naylor reminded Nine how much he hated the man. He blamed him personally for the years he spent as a prisoner of Chicago’s Pedemont Orphanage, being trained to become an elite operative; he also blamed him for the deaths of his mother, Annette Hannar, Isabelle’s parents, and his childhood sweetheart, Helen Katsarakis, whose only crime was that she had befriended him.

Nine thought back to his last sighting of Naylor. That had been at the off-limits Bilderberg conference at Saint Michael’s Mount, in Cornwall, just before he’d gotten off the grid. It turned out Naylor was also a senior Bilderberger.

On that occasion, Nine had convinced Naylor he knew all about the Omega Agency’s horrific scientific experiments on children at a secret medical laboratory, or orphanage, in Germany’s Black Forest. He’d produced graphic photographs to back up what he was saying, and advised that copies of those, together with other incriminating documents, had been left with attorneys in Berlin and London. That had given him the leverage he needed to escape Omega’s clutches. He’d warned Naylor that his attorneys had been instructed to release the documents to the media should anything untoward ever happen to himself or Isabelle. Naylor had been only too happy to agree to his terms.

What has changed in the last five years?

Nine couldn’t imagine what had so emboldened Naylor that he’d suddenly be prepared to risk everything he and Omega had worked so long and hard to achieve. Naylor had always been paranoid about protecting the agency’s secrecy. While the former orphan-operative had the option of contacting his attorneys and ordering the release of the incriminating documents, he realized that wouldn’t leave him with any leverage when he confronted Naylor over the whereabouts of his son. Worse, he’d almost certainly never see Francis again.

It gradually dawned on Nine that Francis’ abduction could somehow be connected to the Black Forest orphanage or one of the other underground medical labs Omega was rumored to be operating elsewhere in the world. Whilst with Omega, Nine had heard the rumors that the agency was conducting illegal scientific experiments on genetically enhanced children at various isolated labs. He’d seen it for himself in Germany, and didn’t doubt for a minute there could be others.

Nine shuddered at the thought of Francis ending up in such a place. He tried to dispel the memories of the grotesque and zombie-like children he’d seen at the Black Forest orphanage. The memories persisted.
Why Francis?
Connecting the dots, he knew it would be common knowledge within Omega that his son shared some of his unique genes. As far as he knew, he was the only one of the Pedemont orphans who had a child.

He kept coming back to the same conclusion: if Omega had become aware of Francis’ existence, they’d abducted him for some scientific experiment.
Please God, no
. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Finally succumbing to his tiredness, Nine fell asleep only to be immediately wakened by an announcement over the intercom that the plane would soon be landing in Papeete.

5

After Taiohae, the main street of Tahiti’s capital Papeete always seemed more like Paris’s iconic
Avenue des Champs-Elysees
to Nine and Isabelle. Tourists and locals competed for space as they paraded up and down the busy street. The cab that the pair traveled in even had to negotiate a minor traffic jam as they were ferried from Faa'a International Airport to their hotel.

While Nine was desperate to fly to America to begin his search for Francis, he had some urgent matters to attend to first. His first priority was to ascertain what the Tahitian authorities were doing, if anything, about Francis’ abduction and whether they had received any reported sightings of him or the floatplane.

A phone call to the offices of both the French National Police and the Gendarmerie confirmed there had been no sightings of Francis or the plane, and until there was they were powerless to act.

Ending the call, Nine pocketed his cell phone. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Isabelle who had been hanging on to every word, choosing instead to look out the cab’s rear window at the sights of Papeete.