The Orphan Uprising (The Orphan Trilogy, #3) by James Morcan, Lance Morcan

the hotel in Papeete.
    Naylor was certain that Isabelle was still in Tahiti, and had ordered Twenty Three to find her. She would give him leverage if Nine caught up with him or otherwise caused problems. Naylor knew the best disguise in the world wouldn’t hide Isabelle’s pregnant state and she’d be spotted if she tried to fly anywhere as Omega had eyes at all the airports.
    The Omega boss was also certain Nine was coming for him. Nine would know that he had ordered Francis’ abduction and therefore would assume he knew where the boy was being taken. In anticipation of that, Naylor had turned his castle-like mansion in rural Illinois’ Saint Clair County into a veritable Fort Knox and was guarded around the clock by handpicked Omega operatives. He traveled with an armed escort to and from his place of work at Omega’s nearby underground headquarters, and made sure he was never alone.
    In the past twenty-four hours, the Omega boss had come round to the idea that Nine should be terminated at the first opportunity. While Naylor remained nervous about the inevitable scrutiny he and Omega would be subjected to if and when the Black Forest lab documentation was released, he’d realized that Nine, alive, presented a greater risk. The bottom line was the evidence had been destroyed and the allegations could never be proven.
    As for Francis, he’d been delivered safely to another of Omega’s underground medical labs the previous day after a full physical assessment by Doctor Andrews. The doctor had given the boy the all-clear, confirming he was in good health and, more to the point, a perfect candidate for the experimentation that awaited him.
    Yawning, Naylor’s thoughts turned to bed, or more accurately they turned to what awaited him there. He’d been burning the midnight oil in his den. Despite the late hour, it was hot and humid. Sweat rolled down his brow and he dabbed at it with a handkerchief. Not for the first time that day, he cursed Illinois’ summers. They were long and hot. Naylor was already looking forward to the fall, and it wasn’t even mid-summer yet.
    Before retiring, he made a quick call to the cell phone of one of the three operatives he knew were currently on duty either inside or outside his home. “Leroy, this is Naylor,” he said into the phone. “Everything alright?”
    “Yessir,” the answer came back loud and clear.
    “Good. I’m turning in.” Naylor hung up then hurried upstairs. Long-since divorced, he was anxious to entertain the latest piece of skirt to have taken his fancy – a sultry, teenage, Asian hooker who had been chauffeured to Naylor’s home earlier by another long-suffering Omega staffer.
    An excited Naylor found the hooker stretched out and near-naked on his bed. A whirring overhead ceiling fan did little to ease the humidity. Both Naylor and his young companion were sweating and they hadn’t even done anything yet. As he threw off his dressing gown and prepared to join the hooker between the sheets, he found himself thinking about Seventeen.
    Later, after a frenzied bout of lovemaking aided in no small way by the Viagra pills Naylor took religiously, he found he was still thinking about Seventeen. It hit him like a bombshell: he still lusted after the former orphan-operative with the blonde hair and icy blue eyes. He vowed to do something about that.
    #
    The female CIA agent didn’t give the portly clergyman a second glance as he entered the Arrivals Lounge in the company of other travelers at Chicago’s Midway Airport. If she’d known the clergyman was the man she was looking out for, she would have taken a little more interest.
    Nine had adopted his latest guise after arriving in Los Angeles from Honolulu. A believer in never using the same disguise twice, he’d forsaken his elderly gent’s guise for that of a middle-aged clergyman for the flight to Chicago.
    Safely past the CIA agent whom Nine had spotted the minute he entered the Arrivals Lounge, the former