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

and reached in to retrieve a leather bag he’d stored there. Then he returned to the main room and dropped the bag on top of the stretcher. Kneeling down, he unzipped the bag and inspected its contents.
    The contents included more falsified passports and disguise aids, plus maps, a pen-torch, first-aid kit, flick-knife, and a Glock 18 machine pistol with ammunition. There was also a wad of hundred dollar bills. Satisfied everything was as he’d left it, Nine returned the items to the bag before changing out of his clothes and dispensing with his clergyman’s collar.
    Stripped down to his undershorts, he removed the black kit he wore strapped around his chest. It contained mini-dispensers of cosmetics and other disguise-aids. As an active operative, it had been an indispensable part of his modus operandi, allowing him to literally change guises on the run. The contents of such kits had helped save his life more than once. He never dreamed he’d have cause to use them again.
    After showering, he adopted the guise of a bespectacled tourist complete with a false moustache, Hawaiian shirt and fake suntan. Nine then returned to the rental car he’d left parked nearby and began driving south toward Saint Clair County. As the miles passed, he could think of nothing else except the wife and son he’d been separated from.
    #
    While Nine was driving toward Naylor’s residence, Omega orphan-operative Twenty Three entered an afterhours medical center in downtown Papeete, in Tahiti. He approached the duty nurse in reception and showed her a recent photo of a pregnant Isabelle. Speaking fluent French, he asked if she’d seen anyone resembling Isabelle. The nurse assured him she hadn’t.
    Undeterred, the operative left the center and drove to Papeete’s public hospital. Entering the hospital’s maternity ward, he asked the male duty nurse if he’d seen anyone resembling the pregnant woman in the photo. The nurse laughed, pointing out that the ward’s patrons were all pregnant woman, so, yes he had seen someone resembling her.
    Twenty Three wasn’t amused. He strongly advised the nurse to study the photo closely. Something about the visitor unsettled the nurse so he studied the woman in the photo. Still he didn’t recognize Isabelle. Twenty Three cursed and marched from the ward.
    The operative was beginning to feel frustrated. He’d shown Isabelle’s photo to scores of people and not one had recognized her. Not for the first time that night he questioned what was so damned important about the woman, or her baby for that matter. Naylor had told him he wanted mother and baby, alive, but he hadn’t said why.
    Twenty Three lamented the fact that this is what his life had come to. He knew any half-trained private eye could do what he’d been tasked with. Yet here he was, an elite operative with perhaps thirty kills to his name, and he’d been relegated to working all day and night to find some pregnant woman.
     

 
    12
    An urgent after-hours board meeting Andrew Naylor had called for was taking place at Omega HQ in south-west Illinois. Every chair around the large table in the agency’s boardroom was occupied except for one – Marcia Wilson’s. However, the CIA Director was still present courtesy of a live holographic video feed from her office in Langley, Virginia. Her life-size image was so lifelike it was as though she was there in the flesh.
    At the head of the table, Naylor rose to speak. He paused theatrically for a moment to ensure he had the attention of everyone present. The twelve people who made up his audience included all of Omega’s directors as well as Doctor Andrews, the only non-director present. “We all know why we are here,” he said without preamble.
    The directors nodded. They had all been well briefed before the meeting. Among them were Omega’s remaining four founding members. Besides Naylor, they included billionaire Fletcher Von Pein, pharmaceutical magnate Lincoln Claver and computer software